Too little, too late
TOO.
What a pleasing little word!
But have you noticed that to
all intents and purposes it appears to have decided to let us manage as
best we can without it – unless, that is, we are complaining that
something is too big, too small, too soon or too late?
What I mean is, you are not liable to find it being
used to mean also or as well – except, I have noticed, in
one special circumstance.
There is one small group of citizens who like to give
too a frequent spot of exercise; who do not intend to let it die
of neglect; who say too surprisingly often.
Yes, I mean the missionaries from the Met. And by the
Met, I mean the Meteorological Office, not New Scotland Yard. I mean the
people who pop up on television to bring news of the weather – and their
loyalty to too is quite touching.
Admittedly, I have not made a serious study of
too. I cannot tell you what is the average number of times per
forecast that too trips off the expert tongues, but I would think
it must be one or, er, two.
Nor have I ascertained why they have adopted too
as the sound that signifies confirmation that we are indeed being
regaled by the weather forecast, rather than the traffic report. But I
do think it is interesting that forecasters as a class appear to be the
only group who utter it unfailingly every day. It is they who have
caused me to consider too and perhaps wonder why the rest of us
seem intent on ignoring it.
After all, when we discuss the weather – and
let's face it, we have been known to do so – nobody catches us saying
too. And I think that's a shame – but somehow it would not seem to
fit into a grumble.
It is, after all, a nice little word; a little word
that suddenly pops up at the end of a sentence to urge us not to forget
what has immediately preceded it, but which does so in a sort of cheeky
chirrup and with unexceptionable good grace.
I can't think why it has taken me so long to appreciate it so briefly.
John Slim
A bit of acronym aggro
IT was the otherwise
estimable Terry Wogan who inadvertently alerted me to the realisation
that acronym
is a much-misunderstood little word.
Some time back, as I have
mentioned before, he revealed in a heavyweight Sunday newspaper that he
thinks QE is an acronym. It isn't. It's called Initials. Unfortunately,
nobody employed on the newspaper knew any better than our Tel, who was
thus left to fly free and disconcert me with this manifestation of his
misunderstanding.
Alas, he is not alone in his misapprehension.
The human race at large seems unaware that initials
have to be rather special to be an acronym – special, in that they may
be readily seen to form a word. As it happens, our beautiful English
language is remarkably short of acronyms – to the extent that it's
surprising that anybody ever felt the need to invent a word for them,
never mind tell the world what an acronym is.
The only acronym I can think of is PLUTO, which
arrived in the Second World War and meant Pipeline Under The Ocean. As
far as I can see, though I am sure I must be wrong, there is not another
one – and even PLUTO strikes me as being on a bit of a sticky wicket,
open to cricketing consternation because it is liable to be given out on
the grounds that it is not a word as such, but a proper noun and the
name of the flop-eared hound created by Walt Disney in 1930.
Nevertheless, every so often, one newspaper or
another, written by people who have made words their profession and are
in danger of being thought to know something about them, makes it clear
that its employees share their ignorance with the Blessed Sir Terry.
QE wasn't an acronym when it appeared in the
Sunday Telegraph and it never has been. The New Collins Concise
Dictionary – specifically, my copy of it, which alarms me by
pointing out that it was published in 1984 – says an acronym is a word
formed from the initial letters of a group of words, and I cannot fault
its judgment.
But then, as an example, it offers UNESCO – which is
not a word and no more an acronym than I am.
A year or so back, moreover, one newspaper paraded
its own thoughtless certainty on the subject by describing a football
match between Queens Park Rangers (QPR) and West Bromwich Albion (WBA)
as the battle of the acronyms. It wasn't. If it was anything, it was an
initial encounter.
Meanwhile, I learn from Hall Green Little Theatre's
website, under the heading Acronym Finder, that “HGLT
stands for Hall Green Little Theatre (UK). This definition appears very
rarely.”
Whether or not HGLT is a definition, rather than just a label, remains open to question – and however rarely it appears, there is little doubt that it should not be filed under Acronym Finder. HGLT could not turn itself into an acronym if it stayed up nights working at it.
John Slim
Postscript to privilege
IT'S been a privilege: this life I've led –
and, at least for the time being, am still leading. And it's all
because, for reasons which have long vanished in the mists of time, I
announced at the age of 14 that I wanted to be a journalist.
First hack in the family, son of a schoolmaster,
grandson of a woollen mill owner – what on earth could have prompted me
to seek admittance to what were at the time the highly-populated ranks
of the world of newspapers?
I realise that nobody is agog to get down to the whys
and wherefores, and it's just as well, really, because I have no idea.
Well, yes, I liked writing, which is what everybody
says before embarking on the unpredictable pathway of papers, people and
hold-the-front-page.
As it happened, in all the 40 years I was involved
full time in newspapers, I never heard anybody seeking to hold the front
page. As far as I know, back in the days when I was helping The
Birmingham Post to ensure that the West Midlands was adequately
supplied with yesterday's news and tomorrow's fish-and-chips paper,
great events came and went – Aberfan is the one that always comes to
mind – without unduly disrupting the hot-metal routine of the linotype
operators, the page-makers and the rest of the lads in the works,
although there were times when a special extra edition was produced.
But as I say, I can no more suggest why I wanted to
be involved in a world of which I knew nothing than I can imagine why
somebody else decides to be a professional boxer – than whom, surely,
the only man more in need of psychiatric help is the amateur who is
happy to have his head knocked off for nothing.
By the way, irrespective of what hand Fate may choose
to play, this latest squitter is not intended to be a fond farewell.
There's not a drum roll or an ave atque vale in sight. But, to
coin a phrase, I've started, so I'll finish
It's just that I thought I might enjoy reminding
myself of some of the joys that journalism has brought me. And by joys I
am not thinking of events, like the time I was told off to go gliding,
go-karting and speedboat racing in the course of one wildly unlikely
afternoon, nor of sitting in Westminster Abbey for the ceremonial
celebration of a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
No, for me it's always been people – national
personalities or ordinary people, their jobs, their hobbies, their
achievements, their thoughts on life. People like Alf Tabb, of
Kidderminster, who committed his flat cap and stringy frame to riding
absurd little bicycles that he made himself and who gave me a
demonstration, 60-odd years ago, on a model with four-inch wheels while
his purposeful pedalling brought his knees up past his chin; people like
Enoch Powell, erstwhile MP for Wolverhampton South-West, back in 1968,
straight after his “River of Blood” speech; people like Muhammad Ali,
whose leather-fisted career had finally caught up with him and who kept
going to sleep on me.
I don't pursue people any more. These are slipper
days. If it snows, it can get on with it, because I don't have to go
anywhere. But it's nice, sometimes, to remember the madcap times of
never quite knowing what the day would bring.
And even nicer, just to let the day get on with it
and count me out.
John Slim
Prompt service
HAVING pursued
thespians, professional and amateur, across their boards since 1968, I
now realise that I cannot recall ever hearing a prompt in a professional
production. Perhaps I have selective deafness, I don't know. Even so, 44
years without having been aware of a muffled hiss from the wings is not
bad going.
Never having been inspired to strut whatever stuff I
may possess since I was The Wind as a mixed infant 74 years ago – when
my only line was “Whooo!” and it was supposed to make the flowers
grow – I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be up there
on stage and find that the old brain cell has taken unforeseen leave of
absence.
It is surely Death-where-is-thy-sting time. An
audience ready to revel in your every utterance, and you can't find one.
But these crises do crop up from time to time in
amateur productions.
Not that amateurs are averse to circumnavigating a
prompt if at all possible. Denise Phillips, an actress who was already a
stalwart of Sutton Coldfield's Highbury Players before I first saw her –
as Belinda in Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings in 1984 –
did her best to avert a crisis.
She was sitting at a table that was supporting a
china tea service when a man standing opposite her lost track of his
lines. I don't know what had escaped him, but Denise did her best to
help him by looking up at him and then down at the teacups a couple of
times.
It was to no avail. He said later that he thought she
was telling him his flies were undone.
There are prompts of which I have a special memory.
There was one for a player who dried when high on scaffolding during an
autumnal outdoor production at the Swan Theatre,
There was also the unfortunate citizen who was alone
on stage and offering a soliloquy. He, too, lost his way and was clearly
wishing that he could have been swallowed by the nearest trapdoor. From
the wings came the sibilant response to his unspoken SOS: “I can't
seem to remember. . .”
I cannot have been the only one in the audience to
have thought, “How extraordinarily true.”
Keith Gascoigne, erstwhile colleague and former
business editor of The Birmingham Post, remembers a man whom he
recalls as a hoary old-style stand-and-deliver bit player at
“If he dried, he would seize the nearest character
and whisper urgently: ‘But soft; here comes the noble Duke. Couch
we awhile and mark' – meanwhile leading him towards the prompt corner.
“The basis of his device was that there's usually a
noble Duke in the any of Bill's plays.
“Voice from the back: ‘What about the Roman
plays...?' Me: ‘Some people are too clever for
their own good'.”
This, it seems, was one of the favourite anecdotes of
the late Michie Fraser, who was MD of Lawson Trout Publicity in the
1940s and 1950s and had a lifelong interest in theatre – he wrote the
history of Birmingham's Alexandra Theatre, many decades before, having
grown many years older, it became New.
A prompt is – or should be – the end of a crisis. Subtle or otherwise, it ensures that the show will go on – even if it does knock a year or two off the life expectancy of the person who has been waiting to receive it.
John Slim
Perhaps I'll get a life later
I AM the reason my wife, whose judgment I
customarily respect because I know my place in the scheme of things,
calls me Peter.
It is spelled PITA and is short for Pain in the Arse.
Usually, it is because my television set upsets me
with presenters or news scriptwriters who have yet to master their
native tongue. I shout at it.
On the other hand, when my daily newspaper prods my
etymological susceptibilities, I surrender to dark and silent despair.
Just a few days ago, its theatre columnist, clearly
not knowing that the past tense of fit is fitted, made it
clear that he “thought it fit her to a tee.”
In the same issue, another television columnist
reported that “neither Grant nor Hoult will reprise their role.” For
their, read his. I was also informed that a family from hell
was making life miserable for their neighbours.
I haven't had so much excitement since, in the same
journal some months ago, Terry Wogan revealed that he thought QE –
shorthand for the liner – was an acronym. It isn't, Terry, it's
initials. An acronym, as I have pointed out before, is a bunch of
initials that make a word – a circumstance that makes it very hard to
think of an acronym.
PLUTO – Pipeline Under The Ocean – is the only
acronym I can think of, and even then it depends on whether PLUTO can be
regarded as a word, rather than the name of a Disney dog and a proper
noun.
Meanwhile, it is interesting that this one-off
example actually has, all to itself in acronym, a word whose job
is to denote its solitary status. I wonder who decided that this was
necessary.
And I am bemused by the way in which led is
frequently revealed as lead in the press and is worth acclaiming
as the only three-letter word that so many professionals can't spell.
My wife does not like my brooding silences any more
than she approves of my explosions of disbelief that these same
professionals, for whom words are their job, should insist on revealing
that they are not fit for purpose.
As I have said before, I know that I ought to get a life while I still have one. All the same, I think it's nice to know I care
John Slim
That man of wayward words
ALL these years, I have never written a
syllable about the Rev William Archibald Spooner. He was born in 1844
and we never quite overlapped, because he died a few months before I
arrived as the potential heir to the family overdraft.
But in all conscience, I
should have
acknowledged him long before now. After all, he was the sort of person
in whom I am particularly interested, because he was a man of words.
He was, moreover, a very special man of words
– because he was for ever getting them wrapped around his neck, not to
say his dog collar. He lives on as the source of spoonerisms and is
credited, as warden of New College, Oxford, with causing inadvertent
surprise and delight by addressing students, in a reference to Queen
Victoria, with a cry of “Three cheers for our queer old dean!”
It was he who wanted to know whether it was
kisstomary to cuss the bride and who described the Lord as a shoving
leopard.
For him, a well-oiled bicycle became a well-boiled
icicle, and he is credited with having berated a student by saying, “You
have hissed all my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm.
Please leave Oxford on the next town drain.”
All of which helps to explain why, when I found that
I now had Harpic in the kitchen, I could not help thinking of the Rev
and his etymological eccentricities.
My Harpic, I must make clear, is Harpic in nothing
like the packaging of the original toilet cleaner, invented in the 1920s
by Mr Harry Pickup, of Scarborough. My 21st-Century version
bears no resemblance to your bog standard tin as I remember it – a
Harpic tin on which, I am sort of sure, was a bright yellow sun,
surrounded by pointed yellow rays like isosceles triangles.
Nor is this a tin that is circular and about nine
inches tall and containing gritty bits designed to reinforce your bog
brush when you have steeled yourself to confront the only seat in the
bathroom and pulverise the porcelain.
No, this is Harpic packaged to face the 21st
Century, Harpic that is designed to be squirted from a white plastic
container – and it brings the aforesaid William Archibald to mind
because the container bears the legend, White and Shine.
Here, clearly, is etymological ensnarement in
waiting. What, I wondered, would William have made of that – and, of
course, there is only one answer.
The man who found a student holding a match, and accused him of fighting a liar in the quadrangle, would surely not have failed to add another arrow to his armoury.
John Slim
Going sadly, in search of a life
SORRY, but we're back to acronyms – only,
however, to report confirmation of my suspicion that a high percentage
of people who work with words don't have any idea what an acronym is.
I have previously expressed my
dismay that there should be this gap in their knowledge of the very
tools of their trade – prompted by my discovery that Sir Terry Wogan, no
less, was happy to reveal, in a Sunday newspaper, his belief that
QE is an acronym, and
that a newspaper was blithely calling a football match between West
Bromwich Albion (WBA) and Queens Park Rangers (QPR) the battle of the
acronyms.
Who ARE these people? They labour under the delusion
that any old bunch of initials is an acronym. And which newspaper are we
talking about, more in sorrow and disbelief than in anger? All is about
to be revealed.
Speaking people-wise, you are in no doubt that the
ignoramus in our midst is the aforementioned and otherwise admirable
knight of the realm, the wondrous Wogan, because I have just named him –
as in fact I did last time that acronyms were preoccupying me. And it
was the Sunday Telegraph that was happy to let him reveal his
clearly unrepentant wrong-headedness – and the Daily Mail was the
journal that came injudiciously to judgment about football
abbreviations.
Sadly, it is now all too clear that the Daily Mail
does not examine our corner of cyberspace – because the Daily
Mail has been at it again.
One of its columnists – and I shall spare his blushes
until he produces another explosion of ignorance – has been holding
forth on a book called It's Complicated: The Social Lives of
Networked Teens. And he asserts that it “includes some acronyms you
might not have heard of.”
What he means is that we will find between its covers
some random sets of initials.
One of them is POS, meaning “parent over
shoulder.” Another is NMJCU, which stands for “nothing much, just
chilling, you?” I don't know what that means, even though I now know
what NMJCU is claimed to represent. And his final prize example
is CWYL (“Chat with you later”).
These are not acronyms. They are letter clutters. And
this is nonsense being perpetrated by a professional.
Who ARE these people? I don't mean that. No, I mean I
know who this one is, but I can't think how he has progressed so far in
his journalistic career without having strayed deep enough into the
ambit of acronyms to have discovered what an acronym is.
I am appalled; ashamed on his behalf. I blush on
behalf of my profession – though I am beginning to think that my
profession largely knows no better.
Yes, I know: get a life. I must try.
John Slim
An Englishman's gnome
A GLANCE into anybody's
garden will confirm the theory that the native British horticulturist
consists of two sharply-defined species. These are the pro-gnomes and
the no-gnomes, and all the sales talk and psychology in the world will
get you nowhere if you hope to work a quick conversion job across a
representative of either type.
The reason is that garden gnomes, whether they come
in concrete or quick-wipe plastic, do not allow you to adopt an attitude
of don't-care neutrality.
You are either all for them, and brighten visibly
every time they catch your eye as they peer from between the phlox and
the philodendron; or you pale at the mere prospect of ever allowing one
to get inside your gate. What you don't do, when pressed for your
opinion, is sit on the fence. Not even if it is an up-to-the-minute
ranch-style garden fence in steel-reinforced plastic.
And although gnome-knockers are legion, there are
also many millions of people for whom the garden just would not be the
same place without its built-in diminutive in a bright red hat.
It is from among the pro-gnomes that one must hope to
learn the answer to any enquiry about where the appeal lies. Ask them
what's in a gnome, and prepare to wonder at the range of replies.
Perhaps they think he imbues the herbaceous border
with an air of gentle timelessness as he draws imperturbably on his
plastic pipe. Perhaps they like to watch his swing acknowledging every
uninterested breeze. Perhaps they find inspiration in that fragile foot,
with its non-start hint of non-stop energy as it pushes on its four-inch
spade, meaningfully, uselessly and for ever.
But whatever their particular reason for relying on
gnomes to give their garden the touch of individuality that makes it
indistinguishable from most of the other gardens in the street, the
overriding reason seems to be the same. A gnome about the place, they
argue, invests the shifting seasonal scene with a placid permanence –
like, for instance, the outcrop of weather-worn sandstone beneath the
aubrietia on the rockery, only friendlier. Beyond question, an
Englishman's gnome is his castle of content.
One can imagine, therefore the nice line in
consternation that must have bounced across the breakfast tables in
Bournemouth on the day that 70 households woke up to the realisation
that overnight they had been made gnomeless. Enterprising young men had
made off with a fair-sized random sample of the local gnomery, with
scarcely a thought for the havoc they were wreaking among the
heartstrings of the Hampshire fanciers they left behind.
It would have been understandable if the impromptu
identification parade – for which, without having involved the local
constabulary, the gnomes obligingly lined up on the town hall steps and
an insurance office lawn – had failed to convince the disconcerted
gnome-owners that there was a funny side to the crime wave after all.
On the other hand, the outsider could have been forgiven for wondering if it were really all that vital for each gnome to be restored to the actual garden that had lost it. To the uninitiated, a gnome is a gnome is a gnome – quite apart from also being an elf, a dwarf or a pixie – and one might well be considered to be an adequate substitute for another.
After all, it is not as if they come in particular
shapes for particular kinds of people. There is not an old people's
gnome, any more than there is a gnome for unmarried mothers.
Indeed, the little people as a class seem to have
such an inherent interchangeability that there could be a quick fortune
in store for the person who organises the first reliable swap-a-gnome
arrangement on a nationwide basis.
At a pinch, it could take in ornamental rabbits,
stony cherubs and outsize spotted toadstools, as well as the big-eared
midgets who would be its essence.
One of these bright mornings, we may well find that
dear old trail-blazing Britain can suddenly boast a National Elf
Service.
John Slim
Let's look at the world outside
SIT up at the back, there! Time for a change!
I can't help thinking that I have pushed your
patience far too far in welding my witterings – 219 thus far – more or
less exclusively all this time to the world of entertainment, and more
specifically, theatre.
There is, however, and let us not deceive ourselves,
another world; a world that is not grounded in greasepaint; a real
world; a world of people who are not required to pretend that they are
other people, while improbable correctness decrees that actresses have
somehow suddenly become actors.
When did all these evangelists of the unlikely have
their heads checked, by the way? When did they abandon their brains? Was
there mass certification?
It's no laughing matter. We have been sitting back
and allowing the politically imperfect to take us in their grip. As with
life in general, we are now afraid, if not of our own shadows, certainly
of imaginary toes that are waiting to be stepped on. We should be
ashamed of ourselves.
So, in a bold bid to shake off our shackles, I plan
to look at The World Outside, to remind ourselves that there is reality
beyond the backcloth and that it might be fun to go fetch sometimes.
Ask any terrier.
This is all the more important, now that the
wonderful world created by the imagination of talented playwrights may
be in danger of being polarised by self-inflicted and preposterous
propriety. Don't dare cast a black actress – sorry, actor – as a maid in
a historical tale set in
Such presumption! As a deeply Scottish friend from
Greenock used to say, when the pair of us were so nobly serving the late
King George VI as National Servicemen in his Royal Air Force, What
d'ye think ye're on, yer fairther's yacht?
But the time will surely come when theatre's
self-inflicted absurdities are called to account; when all the world
continues to be a stage, but when there's just a suspicion of sense
about the place.
I realise that it is too late to stem the tide of
political correctness. But wouldn't it be good if the flag-carriers for
the extraordinary could be persuaded to pause, be it never so
briefly, and ascertain just where they are in the ever-spreading oceans
of absurdity in which they are expecting the rest of us to swim?
It would be too much to expect them to laugh at what
they found – but even so, a small stint of self-discovery would not do
them any harm.
John Slim
Suddenly, I'm V-aware
IS it my imagination, or are V-signs becoming
fewer by the day?
It has just occurred to me that it seems a long time
since I clocked my last callow youth offering one, either to a
television camera or – heaven forfend – as an impertinent
personal salute for my own delectation.
Not that I pine particularly. I don't feel left out.
All the same, there must be many things that could employ idle fingers
more profitably. (As a matter of fact, I don't remember that any young
man – and as far as I can gather, naughty fingers were generally
attached to young men – has ever actually picked me out as a citizen who
deserves so startling a salutation).
I have been prompted into V-awareness by Virgin
Holidays. More specifically, by its advertisement featuring an
attractive young lady with a 1950s hairstyle, who is hiding what
purports to be her naked form as she kneels behind a big red balloon.
It's not a balloon really, just a computerised red circle that's
announcing Las Vegas on sale, and in any case, she's not naked
because she's wearing what I understand are technically known as Heels.
The Heels add a touch of je ne sais quoi but I
don't know what it is.
But I stray. Moreover, I stray before I've even
mentioned that in the small print at the bottom, on line 3, I am subject
to a non-fundable booking fee. Sir Richard Branson – known, with
overdone familiarity in Private Eye as Beardie – could probably
tell me what a non-fundable booking fee is, but I have no idea.
Non-Re-fundable springs to mind as a
possible option, meaning I would pay it to Virgin and Virgin would not
pay it back. Otherwise, all I can assume is that perhaps somebody else
is not allowed to pay my booking fee.
But I shall have to pursue the NFBF, along with any
other BF, another day, because at the moment it is V that is teasing me.
This is because, until January 31, Virgin is offering
me two holidays, The Venetian and The Palazzo, for £789 and £899,
respectively. Each holiday, it announces, is “5V, 3 NTS”.
Now even though I'm not much of a holiday chap I
think I can guess that three nights are involved – but what are these 5V
with which I am threatened? Can they possibly be five virgins? And if
so, does Virgin not know that I am a no-hoper in my ninth decade for
whom the aforesaid 5V would simply have to pine?
In any case, there's another little mystery, in line
4 in the small print at the bottom, I learn that “all the flights and
flight-inclusive holidays featured are financially protected by the ATOL
scheme.” And in line 6 I am told that “all the flight (sic)
and flight-inclusive holidays featured are financially protected by the
ATOL scheme.”
Virgin obviously knows that I have memory problems and I am grateful for its solicitude. Nevertheless, I shall try to remember what 5V are if it tells me.
John Slim
Lost in the labyrinth of
language
LANGUAGE is our most
reliable means of making ourselves misunderstood – so I suppose we
should make every effort to try to keep up with its whims.
When America was in its most
recent election frenzy, I took time in front of the television to wonder
why its natives cannot cope with the letter T unless it is involved in
actually beginning a word – after which, however, they fall apart if the
word goes on to include another T or two, like
Twidder.
An upfront T holds no qualms for the average
God-fearing American. When he is confronted by an internal T, as in
Twitter, however, it is a different story. That is when D comes into
its own
While awaiting the election results, I sat fascinated
at hearing references to indicador, supporders, voded and
thirdy thousand – by people who were perfectly at home with
technology, today and typical. Not for the first time, I was
reminded of Professor Higgins, speaking of English in My Fair Lady,
saying, “In America, they haven't used it for years.”
I caught a BBC programme fronted by Jane Hill, who
was described a couple of times as “the explainer.” I was all set to say
that I hoped that the Oxford English Dictionary was adequately
represented among the audience of the night, to ensure that this latest
step forward for English as we know it may be assured of its place in a
future OED edition – but then, demonstrating the caution that has become
a byword among my nearest and dearest, I decided to look it up anyway.
And yes, there it was – tacked with explainable
on to the end of the definition of explain, though admittedly
without being, er, explained in its own right. And here am I, teetering
though my ninth decade without coming within sniffing distance of it
until now. It was a giant step for me, if not for mankind.
On the same evening, I had cause to shout at my
television when it renewed its habitual practice of referring to “The
Reverend”, without according the cleric in question the dignity of his
surname. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case on such occasions, it
was a drama in which there was a parson about the place, clearly written
by a playwright who does not know that although it is correct to call a
cleric The Reverend Smith, Jones or Robinson at the first mention and
preferably with his first name¸ after that he becomes Mister. And yet
again, a director didn't know, either.
Then there was cause to wonder why Midsummer
Murders, with its title all in capitals, had its first S as big as
its initial M – but then failed to give its second M a similar ranking.
I also heard the police losing a syllable and being described as the
pleece.
I was, however, consoled to a degree when it was
suddenly borne in upon me that Mr Oliver and Ms Smith – Jamie and Delia
to their followers, two revered cooks who so often seem to manage very
nicely without a surname – rely on five-letter first names with the same
three vowels. What a culinary coincidence!
My night was not wasted.
John Slim
Flags of convenience
SAY what you like, life in the smallest room
isn't half the life it used to be. When well-meaning experts began to
streamline our sanitary arrangements, they also began to chip away their
charm.
There was always something friendly, if somewhat
ominous, about the half-hundredweight of rusting tank that poised so
self-sufficiently above the only seat in the place; something
essentially virile about the clangorous prelude to its every outpouring
There used to be a sensation of challenging the
unknown every time it was necessary to get to grips with its chain. You
could never be sure whether you would have to pull and pause or pull and
flee. All that was certain was that if you did not look lively you would
fall victim to a swinging rubber cosh, venomously plunging and jerking
on the end of its leash and transparently inspired with lethal intent.
For its every visitor, this was life with a sparkle;
a constant pitting of wits against a worthy adversary. But today, for
most people, the need to approach the plumbing promises nothing of the
sort. The old awesome roar has been replaced by a mincing, murmurous
apology of a sound – a genteel, discreet response to the call to action.
Not that you could really expect anything full-blooded from the genteel,
discreet devices with which we are now equipped to make the call.
The lavatory cistern has been liberated from its ball
and chain and fitted with footling little handles or bashful little
buttons; and the cistern itself has become a mere simper of a receptacle
in clinical porcelain or quick-wipe plastic.
It is no longer the personable, unpredictable piece
of ironmongery that worked only when it wanted to and was implacably
independent of the wishes of its clientele. It no longer ignores you,
fights you or frightens you. It has, moreover, lowered itself to our
level. No longer does it look down on us from a precarious perch that
seemed to suggest that a cataclysmal crowning was a cast-iron certainty
for anyone who had the temerity to claim its throne.
OLD WARRIOR
What it amounts to is that the water closet, that
dignified old warrior, has been robbed of its character and cut down to
size. Even the smallest room, the kingdom where its authority can never
be replaced, has become incalculably smaller at the hands of matchbox
architects and pocket-handkerchief planners. It is a sign of the times,
and one that seems to defy a ready remedy.
For those who care about such things, it is a
sobering thought that millions of young people have no idea that things
were ever any different from the cosy convenience to which they are
accustomed today. They know nothing of cisterns that stuck or of
cracked wooden seats that were apt to nip your comfort in the bud.
For those of us who do know, and who recall the
passing of our pristine arrangement with nostalgia if not regret, the
only link with what has gone lies in the fact that the manufacturers of
mod cons, like the people who produced their rudimentary predecessors,
are apt to put a name in the pan.
For some time now, I have been a student of the
lavatory label. I would not go so far as to suggest that I could produce
a plain man's guide to the subject, let alone a Loo's Who's Who,
but at least I am interested enough to know where I stand – as a matter
of fact, I am an Almido man – and to notice when the opportunity arises,
the names that serve my friends and fellow citizens.
I have found the legendary Griffin, the nautical
Benbow; Straight Back, who is militarily inclined and who sounds more of
a nuisance than a convenience; the forbidding Phantom, the triumphant
Victor. I have found Exe, who wishes to remain anonymous; and Superex,
who takes it to ridiculous extremes.
From time to time, my researches have been carried
out at second-hand, by the not-so-simple expedient of asking people if
they could tell me what theirs was called. Always it is a question that
goes over pretty big.
I immediately find myself on the defensive, aware of
being eyed either with ill-concealed alarm or with a sympathy that has a
habit of being unnecessarily overplayed. Inevitably, I have to explain
why I need to know, and it always seems a long and difficult story.
This vicarious pursuit of gems to rejoice over has
revealed the interesting discovery that most people have either never
noticed that theirs has got a name, or else have never somehow got round
to reading it. It has also turned up unexpected information like the
fact that at
But sleuthing at second-hand has none of the
excitement of the chase proper; none of the hard-won satisfaction of the
search for titles in their own setting, be they part of a palatial
suite or in a draughty shed with a leaking tin roof.
Life isn't what it was.
John Slim
Beliefs with bells on
PERMISSIVE age or not, religion remains unforgettably among us. It finds its way into the Press and onto the television with an implacability that is utterly impressive. Every day, in one way or another, it is a topical topic. Viewed from within, it is the Good News; viewed from without, it is the hard news. And, like it or not, you get it.
The fourth Earl of Chesterfield, who informed his
godson that religion was by no means a proper subject in mixed company,
would raise a stately eyebrow or two if he could see what changes a mere
couple of centuries have wrought. And heaven knows, to coin a phrase,
there is plenty of religion to claim the attention of the Great British
Public; plenty going on outside those harmonious hopes of the Anglicans
and the Methodists which received such a slap in the faith a few years
back.
Its guises down the years have included
Congregational, Christian Science and Latter Day Saints. It is
Spiritualist, Seventh Day Adventist and Swedenborgian. It is many things
to many men. To the country parson, it is dry rot in the floorboards,
death-watch beetle in the belfry and preaching to the converted.
To the doorstep missionary, it is preaching to the
unconverted, not to say Let us prey. To the blushing bride, it is
a morning of aisle-altar-hymn followed by a lifetime of I'll alter
him.
To the harassed housewife, religion is what arrives
at the front door and makes the beans boil dry. To the four-wheel
Christian, it is something to be suffered three times: by pram for his
baptism, by taxi for his wedding and by hearse for his funeral.
Religion has churches and chapels; synagogues,
citadels and kingdom halls. It has district superintendents, divisional
commanders, diocesan missionaries. It has rectors, ministers, vicars and
pastors. It has moderators, councils of elders, synods, head overseers
and the Holy Father.
Men live for it, fight for it, kill for it, die for
it. They build barricades for it and they love their neighbours as
themselves. Religion is generally considered to be Sunday's child but it
gets to be briefly more acceptable at Christmas.
In its time, it has been Elim, Apostolic, Unitarian
and New Covenant Pentecostal; Christadelphian, Full Gospel and
Evangelical Free. It is beliefs with bells on.
It is Sunday Mass in spite of the weather; it is
rolling over and going to sleep again because it's raining. It is High
and Low and hoping to find the middle way. It is a Roman Catholic
relaxation on abstinence, which meant that Friday no longer has to be
one man's meat and another man's poisson.
It is for and against contraception. It has grave
misgivings about abortion as a way of taking the foetus off your weight.
It contains the Church Orthodox (or established) and the Church Bizarre
(or jumble sale).
Religion is Friends and Brethren. The Friends are
Quakers; the Brethren are
Religion is money for the church roof. It is planned
giving, covenant schemes and a surreptitious button in the offertory
box. It has been disguised as Baptist, Presbyterian and Salvation Army.
For some, it is fire and brimstone, faith and
charity, fear and authority. For others, it is singing the hymns, saying
the prayers and sucking up to the vicar.
It manifests itself in group worship and in solitary
meditation; as a joyful choral noise and as the silence of one man alone
with his God.
It is humility on its knees in a quiet and darkened room; it is pride in a new hat, arriving late to a reserved pew in a well-attended church. It has mixed feelings on mixed marriages and it is divided on divorce.
But it is united in offering benefits that are out of
this world, on the principle of pay now and live later. It is widely
regarded as the most reliable route from here to eternity.
Perhaps the papers should tell us even more about it
than they do.
John Slim
Bring on the baby
cheeses
ONE of the curiosities of the English
language is that it's hard to find much mirth in mis-hearings. So hard,
in fact that it has taken me eight decades to find a second one.
The first came many years ago, when I propped myself
up in bed on one elbow, looked out of the window, saw brilliant morning
sunshine as a backdrop to trees that were swaying in half a gale, and,
with my back to my wife, spoke.
“Nice day”, I said. “Bit rough.”
Four little words, four little syllables. As a
speech, it somehow failed to match the Gettysburg Address. Nevertheless,
it roused my wife with unexpected efficiency from her early-morning
coma. She shot out of her slumbers, sat up and addressed me in bemused
consternation.
“What!? What did you say!?”
“Nice day”, I said. “Bit rough.”
At this, she collapsed back onto the pillow, evincing
an air of relief that I have to admit I found most gratifying.
“Oh”, she said. “I thought you said, ‘I'm not
staying. I've had enough'.”
My, how we laughed! But since then, I have waited in
vain for any similar example of failing eardrums that has managed to be
funny. That is, until now.
My morning newspaper has just regaled me with a
seasonal snippet concerning a mixed infant, aged five, who returned home
from school and reported, “We've been learning about Urgent Mary and the
baby cheeses.” Wonderful! My day was made before I had even thought
about breakfast.
Less pleasing at this time of the year, however, is
the insistence of far too many greetings cards on wishing me a merry
Christmas. I'm sure their heart is in the right place, but I just don't
like merry. For me, it is for ever associated with getting
merry, conjuring up an image of citizens who have imbibed, not
wisely but too well, and are rolling, noses a-glow, around the bar.
It is not to be compared to the benediction, “Happy
Christmas”, with which it runs in parallel without ever threatening to
overtake it in the popularity stakes as an amiable salutation. I have
never heard anybody actually saying “Merry Christmas” to anybody. Unless
it is on the cards, it's a non-starter – which makes me wonder how it
came to become so prominent in the postman's burden in the first place.
Compared to? Going back a paragraph, I have
now unexpectedly reminded myself that our broadcasters, as a class,
appear united in their insistence on saying compared to, rather
than compared with. They don't know that to compare to is to
liken to, and that to compare with is to contrast with.
These are people for whom words are their job but who
have somehow never got to make them work properly. Even the
ever-amiable Terry Wogan has revealed in all innocence that he thinks
QE – short for a ship – is an acronym. It's not, Terry, it's
initials.
This is all very distressing for a citizen of
susceptibilities. I must cheer up. Pass me the baby cheeses.
John Slim
Stop messing
with the clergy
WHEN newspapers write of clergymen, they
get into an unholy mess, partly because they allow themselves to be
misguided by our pals beyond The Pond.
If television dramas are any guide, any American
confronted by a cleric calls him – or her – Reverend. And, sure enough,
playwrights on this side of the Atlantic now unfailingly come up with
“Reverend Jones” or, worse still, plain “The Reverend.” As ever, they
bleat unquestioningly to America's misguided tune.
So do broadcasters involved in news reports.
Why? We usually know that we are confronted by a man
– or woman – of the cloth. We don't need to have “The Reverend”
repeatedly and mistakenly unwrapped thereafter.
If he is Catholic or High Anglican, a simple Father
will suffice for the male of the species. I remain uncertain whether
Mother will do for the distaff side, as she could be thereby mistaken
for the boss lady in a convent.
I am moved to murmur by a double-page spread in a
London newspaper that caused me to shoot into startled disbelief when
faced with shapely legs, a shortish black skirt and a stylish £480 black
leather jacket. I could cope with all that. But then it disgorged a
superfluity of words among which it called the lady who had caught its
eye “Rev Hitchiner” – 17 times.
Dreadful! Terribly transatlantic! There's a lovely
little pronoun called she which would have at least relieved us of some
of the remorseless repetition. Or she could have been correctly called “Ms
Hitchiner” from time to time to ease the strain.
Ms, of course is the catch-all label that has come
into vogue for when we don't know if a woman is married or not, causing
us to shy away from proclaiming her as a Miss or a Mrs.
The article told us in the second line of its first
paragraph that her name is Sally – so there was no reason why it could
not have missed out a Ms or two and called her Sally Hitchiner, or even
just plain Sally, just occasionally. Variety is the spice of life.
But no. Rev Hitchiner she had to be. The Rev
Hitchiner, though still wrong, would have sounded slightly less American
and therefore a bit better, though far from perfect. Don't these people
understand that Rev is preferably preceded by the definite article and
needs to be followed by a first name?
Where did they get their journalistic training, if
any?
It's another example of standards going down the pan, following recent instances of things like QE being called acronyms – by Sir Terry Wogan, no less – when they are simply initials. Doesn't anybody know anything any more?
John Slim
Can I ask you something?
NOW
there's
a question!
If man evolved from monkeys and
apes, why do we still have monkeys and apes?
Fortunately, it's a question to which I know the
answer. It's I'm blowed if I know.
Equally fortunately, I find I am suddenly awash with
similar questions. Praise be to the Internet and even more so to the
friend who has ensured that I am in on the tsunami of bewilderment that
is presumably sweeping
Yes, I now have nearly three dozen questions, all of
them alarmingly logical, all of them bespeaking man's endless battle
with the alarmingly logical world that they represent. Not for the first
time, I realise that I am totally inadequate.
If I went to a bookshop and asked where the self-help
section was, should I be surprised to be assured that if anybody told
me, it would defeat the purpose?
If someone with multiple personalities threatens to
kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation? Should a fly without
wings be called a walk? If a turtle doesn't have a shell, is he homeless
or naked? If the police arrest a mime, do they need to tell him he has
the right to remain silent?
Among my newly-acquired armoury of word-worries,
there are two questions that have bothered me for some time: Why is
there an S in lisp, and Do infants in infancy have as
much fun as adults in adultery?
But otherwise I am presented with problems that are
all-singing, all-dancing, all new to me.
What was the best thing before sliced bread? If
you try to fail, and succeed, what have you done? Can an atheist get
insurance against acts of God?
Somebody, somewhere, has come up with all these and
many more – all matters of moment. I am awash with awestruck gratitude.
Praise the Lord for twisted minds.
John Slim
Spare me my seasonal
sparkle
NOT wishing, of course, to blow my own
trumpet, I must nevertheless mention that I have joined the glitterati.
I didn't mean to. It is simply my seasonal
acknowledgment of what happens every year at about this time. And no, I
am not talking about the glitterati who are accustomed to receive
red-carpet treatment far too often for the good of their cranial
measurements.
Not like that at all. I speak of Send-the-Cards time
– and unfortunately, the card-makers of Britain stand united in their
resolve to add a sparkle to my Christmas cards, and thereafter to me,
without consulting me and whether or not my dearest wish is to remain
sparkle-free.
ۥtis the season to be sprinkled, to be spattered with
itsy-bitsy gold dust, while releasing my pristine cards from their box,
adding a word of gratuitous good cheer and addressing their envelopes –
because a nation's card-makers, in unspoken pact, insist on stinting on
their glitter glue.
The result is that I glitter. I sparkle without
stint. So does the dining table on which I have scattered several
trees'-worth of seasonal sentiments while confessing disbelief that I am
stupid enough to have spent this much on the obligatory cards and am
about to spend a damn' sight more on posting them.
(Happy Christmas, everybody, by the way).
By the time I have finished, I also have a gold-dust
carpet. My selfish consolation is that in homes all over Britain there
are carpets now in need of a damn' good vacuuming and that I am not
alone in acquiring a glittery top-coat, all unconsulted and without the
option.
Somehow or other, I don't feel that I actually need
to be gold-dusted.
I am bumptious enough to believe that my friends are
reasonably happy with me as I am, sans sparkle. Let me not be seen as a
one-man reference to Britain's gold standard.
Please, is it possible that in years to come I may be
allowed to hang onto my customary do-nothing drabness and go
glitter-free on the last lap to the New Year? It is surely not
outrageous to suggest that card-makers who sprinkle sparkle on their
Christmas cards should at least ensure that their cards are where the
sparkle stays?
Let the cry resound: Use more glue!
John Slim
A-haunting I will go. . ?
I CLAIM no credit for
the orderly way in which my four children – youngest now 49 – took their
turn at the font. I merely report that they happened to arrive in
alphabetical order – Beverly, Gary, Heather and Jacqueline.
Despite appearances, by the way, that is one boy and
three girls – their clearly overwhelmed parents having spelled daughter
Beverly with only two Es instead of three.
That was because when she arrived in 1957 the Beverly
Sisters were loitering around the top of the pops with a distinct aura
of femininity. Asking no questions, we christened Beverly boy-style –
and I have to say that this doesn't seem too have inconvenienced her in
the slightest.
Beverly has gone on to have two children in
alphabetical order – Freya and Tom. Gary, not risking a mistake after
starting with Toby as a one-off, insists that young T will be the sole
heir to his overdraft.
Heather has adhered to age-related alphabetical
principles with Hannah, Katie and Rory. So has Jackie (who was only ever
Jacqueline when she was in trouble), with Charlotte, Freddie and George.
This is the (entirely accidental) game of the name,
but I can't help feeling that future generations of family-tree climbers
may well feel moved to quiet congratulatory applause while standing back
in amazement.
And things go back further than I have indicated,
because although my wife was an only child, I have a younger sister,
Margaret, who joined me as the second pawn in the alphabetical approach
adopted by our parents a decade or so ago.
Our parents, in similarly orderly fashion, were James
and Muriel – our father's moniker ensuring that he was Jim Slim, which I
have always explained away as a shortened version of James Slames and an
indication of a slight degree of short-sightedness at the font.
Our family is an example of the way in which coincidence can push the boat out, now that it has recovered from the shock administered by my maternal grandparents, who used my mother, Muriel, and her younger brothers Edwin and Cyril, to reverse the alphabetical approach completely – while my father, as one of nine children, hadn't a hope of being a part of an orderly name-based system anyway.
But we are now on track with an alphabetical accuracy
that is indisputable. Somehow or other, I must break it to nine
grandchildren that when the time comes for their own sleepless nights,
Tradition expects to be flaunted, not flouted.
And that those of them who ignore Tradition will have
to get used to the idea that I have come back to haunt them.
John Slim
Getting to grips with gas
IF someone were seeking
to compile a list of long words, it is highly unlikely that he would
choose gas
as a possible starter.
It is nevertheless an interesting word. Only one
syllable, only three letters, but it intrigues me.
Let's face it, while we honest rustics realise that
what our cars need to make them go is petrol, all real live nephews of
their Uncle Sam are convinced that their ability to move from A to B is
heavily dependent on gas.
Gas, they are certain, is what comes out of their
petrol pumps to appease the needs of their oversized, super-sprung motor
cars. This, presumably, is why their voracious vehicles are known as
gas-guzzlers. It is also understandable that American flatulence is
known as gas.
But I am intrigued. If gas is what an American puts
into his petrol tank and out of his backside, what does he think he is
using for his cooker? What is his alternative to oil and electricity in
the matter of home-heating?
Has he ever been moved to use the gas from his car,
or indeed from his anus? If so, was he well-pleased with the result?
In the environs of etymology, is he faced with a gas
shortage? Does he need another word? And if he does, how has he managed
so long without one? What is he using instead?
Meanwhile, should gas, as a regrettable
alternative to petrol, be sent packing? As Private Eye, that
incisive organ of satire and tell-it-like-it-is, is wont to proclaim, we
should be told.
John Slim
Putting the cats among the
legends
I LIKE black-and-white cats. They are usually
pretty, they're clean, and in my experience, which admittedly is
limited, they're characterful.
We had a black-and-white cat
once. I've told you about his exploits as a goalkeeper in charge of a
wicker wastepaper basket – Small Thoughts:
Astrophe unforgotten. He was Astrophe,
because he was our cat Astrophe, which was a bit unkind, really, because
he never did anything catastrophic Nothing remotely approaching what we
did to him when he was only a few weeks old.
That was when we created his bedroom in the coalhouse
– this was more than half a century ago, when a coalhouse was the norm,
not to say a sine qua non –because we had not got him
potty-trained. We were awakened one autumnal night by a huge bang.
That was because I had been misguided enough to give him, as a bedroom
feature, a fish-box containing ashes, in readiness for storing dahlia
tubers – and the ashes were far hotter than I had suspected.
So at about 2 am, there was this tremendous noise, prompting us to look alertly out of the window – and see flames leaping through the newly-exploded asbestos roof of the coalhouse.
Slippers a-swivel, I flicked the bedroom light switch
– and discovered that we had got a power cut. Who on earth has power
cuts at two in the morning? We do.
We also had rain, coming down sideways in the sort of
Biblical proportions that would have caused the late Noah to feel that
his
So, braving the elements, I headed for the beacon
that was blazing merrily at the bottom of the garden, while I called,
“Astrophe! Astrophe!” as softly as I could. One tries not to excite
the neighbours on these occasions.
I opened the coalhouse door, prompting a sheet of
flame to shoot out and deprive me of considerable eyebrow material. With
a fortitude to which mere words cannot hope to do justice, I pulled the
blazing fishbox out, then resumed my gentle invocation of the cat's
name, despite being reasonably confident that he must have been cooked
to a crisp.
Almost at once, from the top of the garden, Astrophe
spoke. He said, “Miaow”, which admittedly is pretty standard catspeak,
and he said it from by the back door. Once I had opened the coalhouse
door, he had clearly stayed not upon the order of his going.
So that was our black-and-white cat. And there's
another one, name unknown, who likes our garden, not for its floral
delights but because he regards it as toilet facilities that are more
spacious than those afforded by his own garden, beyond our bottom fence.
He is characterful, too – clearly undeterred by the
fact that, in an effort to keep cat Astrophe's name alive, I call this
unwanted visitor Cat's Arse Trophy and have been hurling stones at him
for three years, while paradoxically giving thanks for my failure ever
to score a direct hit.
But now I read of a third one, alleged by my national
newspaper to be called Denis. He may be Dennis, of course: I'm just not
trusting a newspaper that tells me of his unusual exploits but somehow
fails to indicate the town that is subjected to them, let alone the
street where he lives.
Anyway, Denis/Dennis is now reported to be labelled
Denis the Menace – on the grounds that he is alleged to have stolen
hundreds of items from his neighbours in the course of a crime spree
that has now lasted 18 months.
Socks, paint brushes, sponges, slippers, tea towels,
a doll, a thong and even a dog chew whose owner was presumably not about
at the time – they have all turned up at the home that the newspaper is
– presumably accidentally and without Denis's immediate welfare in mind
– keeping secret.
Clearly, black-and-white cats are liable to have
differing talents: goalkeeping, cat-burgling and indiscriminate
defecating. And these are presumably only the tip of the iceberg.
John Slim
A cable from the phoney war
MY telephone is
permanently on answerphone. It has no need to be, inasmuch as I am not
permanently away. It is just that I have been driven to subterfuge. I
seek to escape the natives of Asia.
Not all of them – just those
who have taken to ringing me up, up to half a dozen times a day,
expressing concern about my computer and offering to sort it out.
At the risk of being unsociable, I don't want them to
sort it out. It doesn't need sorting out. It is working admirably.
Fizzing like a bottle of pop.
Nevertheless, I am constantly hearing from these
ever-polite, super-solicitous citizens, whose names are usually Tom or
Jack, clearly agog to exercise their expertise on behalf of my computer
So they have finally caused me to shelter behind my
answerphone. I know it's a cowardly opt-out and a pain for the sundry
kindly friends who telephone and then have to wait while my wife's
dulcet tones tell them that she's sorry we're not available at the
moment, so will they please leave a message – but what else can we do,
short of breaking off diplomatic relations with Pakistan?
So the phone rings and we sit tight. Then there are a
few moments' silence. That's while the person at the other end is
receiving my wife's recorded apologies for being unable to lift the
receiver.
Then, nine times out of ten, instead of hearing a
friend's familiar voice, we get the continuous beep that tells us our
caller has hung up. And we rejoice because we have scored another point
in our silent but seemingly endless war against uncalled-for computer
doctors.
Moreover, we have another, as yet untested, stratagem
up our sleeves. One of these days, we will try it out. We will pick up
the receiver and promptly put it down on the table – the theory being
that as long as long as our phone is occupying our end of Mr
Pain-in-the-Proverbial's line, he will not be able to be a nuisance to
anybody else. This will be our service to our fellow-men. Please start
striking our medals now.
Not that we have any idea whether it would work if
the call is from the other side of the world. But at least it would show
that we British don't go down without a fight.
John Slim
Sky's the new amateur limit
AMATEUR theatre is
coming to a front room near you, thanks to Sky Arts' new six-part
series, Nation's Best Am Dram,
which starts at 9 pm on November 14
The series features eight amateur theatre companies
who will battle it out for the chance to be claimed to be
It's a shame that that it goes all askew with its
title.
For a start, Am Dram, quite apart from being
customarily presented as one “word” and not two, is shorthand for
amateur dramatics, which is itself a dreadful distortion of
amateur theatre.
And however good the competing companies are, with
only eight involved it is at the very least unlikely that any one of
them, even the winner, can claim to be the best that
Indeed, it is difficult to see how the title can ever
be confidently awarded, with 2,549 companies affiliated to the National
Operatic & Dramatic Association (NODA), the movement's umbrella body.
Nevertheless, this is a brave and welcome step into
the unknown for television. It will undoubtedly open the eyes of the
habitual scoffers who have never presumed to darken the doorstep of an
amateur show – even supposing, that is, that they catch the series by
mistake.
More power to Sky Arts' elbow. November 14, 9 pm. Go
find!
John Slim
FissiParous Theatre, Wirral - Roger Allam
Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group, Edinburgh - Niamh Cusack
Heath Players, Hertfordshire - Julie Graham
Regent Rep, Dorset - Jill Halfpenny
Crossmichael Drama Club, Galloway - Paterson Joseph
Tell Tale Theatre Company, Liverpool - Martin Shaw
Strathclyde Theatre Group, Glasgow - Dame Harriet Walter
Bingley Little Theatre, Bradford - Richard Wilson
Students of geography might have noticed that it is a toss up between Wirral, Liverpool, and Hertfordshire which is nearest to the Midlands, so it is the actually the nation's best excluding the Midlands . . . London . . . Wales . . . Northern Ireland . . . the West Country . . .
Having seen the Swan Theatre Amateur Company, The Nonentities, Hall Green and Sutton Arts recently, to name just a few of our affiliates, with productions which would not have looked out of place on the professional stage, I am sure there are Midland amateur companies that would have been worthy of consideration and no doubt amateur companies in Lancashire, the North East, the West Country, the Principality and so on would feel the same.
But as John says, it is a start
Time to veil the vile
I DON'T know about you – naturally – but I'm becoming fed
up of finding the man with the near-miss name, Jimmy SoVile, percolating
the pages of the London press several days a week.
Are we so proud of our most prominent paedophile that we have to
be fed the latest gleanings of this most unsavoury of citizens as if
they are on an unstoppable conveyor belt? If it goes on much longer, it
will surely provoke a Savile row.
The man was a monster; an in-yer-face fiend whose familiar smile
can only now be recognised as a lascivious leer. But still the so-called
news items keep coming, mocking us through the cigar smoke that swathes
the monster's memory.
These must be terrible times for his family. Road renaming has
taken place where it has been deemed necessary to help to cut him from
our consciousness. The ostentatious black marble gravestone has been
destroyed, I believe, by those who loved him. I feel for them.
But Jimmy Savile, Kt, Blight of the Realm, has brought more
pleasure to more people in his going than ever he did in his execrable
existence, swathed though that was in good works. We are well shut
of him.
So why are we being drip-fed the droppings he has left behind? Is
it too much to hope that those in charge of our newspapers will realise
that it's time to change the subject, to draw a veil over the vile, and
– prompted by the poet – find fresh woods and pastures new?
John Slim
Life in the slow lane
YES, there really was a
time when entertainment didn't come at the touch of a button and we
could not take our telephones everywhere we went; a time when there were
local shops and the supermarket had not been invented; when nobody had
been misguided enough to press life's accelerator pedal.
In
Bluebells and Gypsies
(History into Print, £5.95), Mary Daniels, who was a gentle,
respected colleague on The Birmingham Post
long before somebody decided to make it look less positive by losing its
definite article, the memories are eased into a painless perspective of
their long-gone era.
It's instructive: “If you see a rook on its own, it's
a crow. If you see a lot of crows together, they're rooks.” It is
envy-making mindful of a rural yesteryear, with Mary remembering the
skylarks that plummeted, still singing, from the sky to the undergrowth.
Where birds are concerned, she knows her onions. If
you hear a cuckoo after August, be certain that it is a human mimic.
But then, in 58 clear-print pages, she offers
unassuming guidance in all sorts of spheres, even easing my bewildered
brain cell into extending my mnemonic of Britain's royalty – “Willie,
Willie, Harry, Stee; /Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three” – beyond Victoria,
where it ran into the buffers when I was a mixed infant and where it has
remained ever since.
She now presents me with a further six lines, ending
with “Elizabeth Two now rules our state, /While Charles the Third just
has to wait” – which is interesting, because at some point in my
benighted past I was firmly instructed that Charles was destined to
become George VII.
JUST SAYING
Not that I'm arguing, of course – just saying.
She remembers childhood visits to Birmingham's Bull
Ring, where there were a man on a soap box who was known as Holy Jo and
a little woman selling brown paper bags and cajoling bystanders to “get
yer ‘andy carrier.”
These were wartime days, when her family remained
stoutly impervious to the poster that asked for old saucepans to be
donated for turning into Spitfires. After all, there was the saucepan
mender who came round on a mission of repair. “He would put metal
patches on the holes in them and they were surprisingly waterproof when
he had fixed them, so no Spitfires came from us.”
Other gems from the home front include a memory of
gargles made of sage and thyme, and women painting their legs with
watered-down gravy browning when stockings were either scarce or
unobtainable.
There was food rationing. There were clothing
coupons. These were the years when Lord Kitchener was resurrected to
point at me from a poster and remind me that my country needed me (aged
10).
This is a joyous little volume, poised to awaken
memories in Mary's contemporaries and prompt surprise and perhaps
disbelief in later generations. It is packed with the sort of things
that have to be written down, because if they escape the affectionate
trawl of domestic history they will be gone for ever.
Here is Mary Daniels, heroine with a safety net.
True-born Brummies will be grateful.
John Slim
Initial dissatisfaction
I HAVE become aware in recent weeks that yet
another aspect of the English language is under attack. Not
deliberate attack, from those who know what
they're doing – just accidental assaults prompted by what is clearly
long-nurtured ignorance.
Not to keep anybody in unnecessary suspense, my
concern is acronyms – because I have cause to suspect that we don't know
what they are.
Some time ago, I caught the otherwise estimable Terry
Wogan, knight of the realm, revealing in his newspaper column that he
thought that QE was an acronym. Wrong.
More recently a newspaper hailed the then-imminent
Premier League football match between “WBA” and “QPR” as the battle of
the acronyms. Wrong again.
They're called initials and they represent,
respectively, the liner Queen Elizabeth and the shin-kickers of West
Bromwich Albion and Queens Park Rangers.
Acronyms are initials, too, of course – but the
difference is that they are so clever that they turn themselves into
words. PLUTO is an acronym. It's short for Pipeline Under The Ocean –
the pipeline in question being the one from the south coast of England
to Boulogne.
Having dispensed this gem, however, I hesitate. Pluto
is also a planet and a Walt Disney dog – but is it a word? Certainly,
it's a proper noun, a name. But is a name necessarily a word? Is it to
be found in the nearest dictionary?
Well, yes, to my surprise, it is – at least in its
planet proclivities and at least in my dictionary. Though it ditches the
dog, it tells us that Pluto is the second-smallest planet and the
farthest known from the sun. [The hyphen in second-smallest is mine,
though the dictionary is surprisingly content to do without one and thus
prompt me to wonder what is the first smallest planet and how there can
be more than one smallest].
But I am still far from certain whether Pluto, being
a proper noun, should be in a dictionary, rather than an encyclopaedia.
And it is a chastening thought that some people who work with words and
depend upon them for their living have no idea what an acronym is.
Having dispensed my carefully-subdued sneer, I have
to confess that perhaps it doesn't matter that acronyms appear to be
unknown quantities among the citizenry – because Pluto is the only one I
can think of. Acronyms are clearly in short supply.
Small wonder, then, that there are people working on newspapers, whose very job is words, who could not define an acronym if they sat up nights working at it.
John Slim
It was as if my keyboard had become a latterday
box of tricks that turns everything into gobbledegook in an effort to
confuse the codebreakers. The wartime experts of Bletchley Park who
cracked the Germans' Enigma code and hastened the end of hostilities
might well have been delighted to have a bit of fun with sunoke siyk at
the end of another long day.
I am moved to think of the Enigma code because
I have received from LinkedIn, with whom I have never had any dealings,
a message of assurance that changing my password is simple. All I have
to do, I now realise, is commit my simple soul to my Maker and then use
the simple link that LinkedIn has provided:
https://www.linkedin.com/e/rpx/111524394/qf1P4sDUQ5SSk4W1tk4VJJNY4_MAFCJt1kfMQifGBB10HAjELmsV1Js6nJMazAjJsrRM-0f7hKe5tkijyHsV_EBh10i3mFSjDmBijS00KpMVVa3Y_YjTCKW74JJWHGi21LDCK9_UVW03hmSCChDLy5sZ8BSevmKLihlY8_DZjnM6FOEni-shyilWy3KitTM1FTN1MAfPjB3apEi21pcMKj_ez43iHTMM-H_TB5gt-WiEz7MMEO_KpsDTQrRiKpySCQQCJe0jsDbeFyyC_DYJMK-WbAKTvhE1B0iThz1ZzBfaVwi5idYnhvxezUBhQz0P1Q15hejW_YBUqjsTta-CsNjy8aB3kc5JsoMCEEWjbRbAMAEPJY16z7M5yL3Utq311hc1QoDWv4KZp2EhkpcMsNjAM03ZvrS1kvfnHQNGjR3A-8Pn-H_hmNB0KMJ0_oG67w/?hs=true&tok=0bnidij-qWpBs1
How simple can a simple link get? Even if I
manage to discover a password I have never used, which I didn't know I
possessed and without which I can't help feeling I have been managing
fairly adequately thus far, what shall I do on finding my way into
LinkedIn, the purpose of which I have yet to ascertain? And what shall I
do if I get there?
Whatever it is for, I assume it is some sort of
cyberspatial successor to real life's cold-callers – who these days, as
far as I can gather, consist largely of gentlemen with Asian voices
promising to mend my unbroken computer.
These outriders of unneeded help are the reason
why my telephone is now permanently on answerphone. When it stops
ringing, my wife and I sit through the silence that indicates that
another caller is being invited to leave us a message. Nine times out of
ten, silence is followed by the sound that means the caller has given up
on us. We have defeated yet another of our increasingly frequent and
vexatious intruders.
But this time, I gather, urgency is all. I must
deploy my Simple Link within 24 hours if I want to discover what happens
next.
The trouble is, I don't wish to know what
happens next, any more than I seek involvement with LinkedIn. I have no
desire to be deployed into the mysterious world of whatever-it-is for a
fulfilment that remains a mystery.
Sorry to be a silly old spoilsport, LinkedIn,
but I just don't want to play.
John Slim
Tale of the backsliding sheep
IN the days – on the
nights – when I was to be found reviewing up to six shows a week, I was
sometimes asked whether I had ever been tempted to tread the boards
myself.
Surely, the inference was,
seeing these constant coveys of committed thespians must have at least
lured me towards giving it a try.
But no, it never did. Even if I had ever had time to
go a-thesping on my own account, I would have spurned the opportunity. I
have never been in the position of discovering that I am expected to be
a line-learner – but the discipline that this entails, the memorising,
the need to avoid the furniture while strolling about the stage, while
stuffing me to the gunnels with admiration, have ensured that such
ambitions would never have got to the starting-blocks.
Except twice. And never in the last three-quarters of
a century.
My first theatrical outing found me wearing a
dressing-gown, with a tea towel on my head, watching my flocks by night
on behalf of the class Nativity. I did not speak. The scriptwriter had
not had his talents unduly challenged on my behalf. I was a silent
shepherd, aged five.
THE WIND
The second and final time I was entrusted with
enthralling an audience, I was seven. This time, I was a vision of pale
blue shantung with a serrated hemline and a streamer burgeoning out of
each armpit. I was The Wind. And this time, I spoke.
Well, not exactly spoke. Unless you are a poet, you
find that winds are not apt to speak. What I did was whiz onto the
stage, trailing clouds of streamers if not glory, and go “Whoooo!”
At this point, my scriptwriter shot his bolt.
It was all in aid of making The Flowers grow. The
Flowers, as I recall to the best of a faltering brain cell's uncertain
ability, were some dozen little girls, crouching in suitable
subservience on either side of my trans-stage route. They were clearly
in need of encouragement. So I went “Whoooo!”
Admittedly, it all went like a breeze. Nevertheless,
it brought down the curtain on my theatrical career and the nation was
able to concentrate on going to war.
It was not until 1984, when The Birmingham Post
colleague who had been appointed specifically to see to the needs of
the amateur stage upped-sticks and departed, that I was asked if I
would mind looking after it this week. This week stretched to my alleged
retirement, five years early in 1991 and was extended thereafter until
several years into the 21st Century, when the Post
regrettably abandoned the amateur stage to its own devices – at which
point, Behind the Arras found room for it.
Odd, really. My involvement with things theatrical
began by keeping an eye on sheep and the heavens, then led me to
dispense with the woolly ones and simply concentrate on cyberspace.
If it wasn't for the backsliding sheep, I'd have come
full circle.
John Slim
There's lots not to like
THE newspaper that has
just dropped through my letterbox gives me great encouragement
There is an article by Anstey
Spraggan – and no, I had not heard of her, either – whose daughter Lucy,
I now learn, is on The X Factor.
Anstey confides that she has made Lucy promise not
to get upset over tweets, posts or comments unless they are properly
spelled and grammatically correct.
And she reckons that this will eliminate more than 90
per cent of them.
How true!
I have lamented before that it is the oafs among us
who have the loudest voices. It is equally true – perhaps with
exceptions like the well-born youth pictured swinging on a flag at the
Cenotaph and later explaining that he didn't know what it was for – that
the twits who take to Twitter are liable to expose themselves as having
an immunity to the niceties of their native tongue.
So the stance of Anstey shines like a good deed in a
naughty world. Those who tweet, post and comment via cyberspace
habitually reveal their inability to communicate in their native tongue
without exposing themselves to the derision of the disconcerted.
They are not helped by the supine stupidity of the
outlets they use. They are allowed to supplement their shortcomings in
spelling with shorthand shockers such as ur, which I gather means
your or you are.
Thus, the loveliest language in the world continues
to be propelled ever-downwards, to the regions that are over-populated
with like, a hitherto harmless little word that is now liable to
find itself inserted far too frequently into conversational sentences
that could manage very well without it and which gain nothing from its
half-witted intrusions.
Moreover, since it is the young who are particularly
prone to saying like, it is clearly guaranteed to remain among us
long after those of us with a care for our language have drifted,
dismayed, into the hereinafter. There will be no one left to raise the
bloodied standard of Received Pronunciation and Sensible Syntax.
Like, rampantly out-of-control, is here for ever.
It has even built its own unlikable question:
What's not to like? I'm trying to tell it.
But there's nothing we can do about it – except,
perhaps, just occasionally, indicate, having viewed the evidence, that
we Don't Like.
John Slim
Scarborough is ashamed
AUGUST 8, 1974. That
was the day, decades before its definite article disappeared, that
The Birmingham Post
carried my account of my encounter with Jimmy
Savile.
Now that I have seen it again, I cannot for the life
of me think why I omitted to mention, after saying that I had caught him
in bed at the Albany Hotel, Birmingham – that he had then leapt
therefrom with the urgency of a citizen seeking refuge from a rampant
hippopotamus, his teeth clamped on his statutory large-economy-size
cigar, but stark naked.
Not to be confused, that is to say, with normal
behaviour on meeting a complete stranger for the first time.
But this was Savile being Savile, undoubtedly for my
alleged benefit, and undoubtedly being what was normal for this peculiar
citizen. Looking back, perhaps I should have seen it at least as a bit
of a hint that all was not well with him.
He said: “I can't sing. I can't dance. I can't tell
jokes. What can I do? Dunno. What's more, I don't really care
what I do.”
Thirty-eight years later, it has become all too clear
that the late Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, didn't care what he did.
I have just returned from a few days in Scarborough,
where I stayed in the Brooklands Hotel on The Esplanade – the road in
which the newly unexpectedly despicable Savile had a flat. On my return
home, I found that my daily newspaper was carrying a photograph showing
the removal, in another road, of a nameplate that said Savile View.
Scarborough is ashamed, and rightly so.
But hasn't it taken us a long time to learn the truth
about the uncivil Savile? Especially as the final two-thirds of his name
had been describing him with increasing accuracy all his life. It is
only now, after his departure to whatever was awaiting him in the
hereafter, that we have learned of the games of Sir James.
He would probably say, “'Owz about that, then?” But
would he understand if we, like all the young girls he abused for so
many years, failed to be amused?
John Slim
It's time to lose these labels
THERE are two
expressions that ought to be banned from theatre conversations.
Amateur dramatics
and Amateur operatics.
They invite contempt for the
productions to which they refer – though these are very often musicals
which are presented on the stage of a professional theatre and which
could easily be mistaken for professional shows if their casts were
about a sixth the size.
These are labels used by the thoughtless and crying
out to be consigned to the limberlost.
In the first place, amateur – which comes from
the Latin amare, the verb that means to love – simply
means that those to whom the label is attached don't get paid for their
efforts because they do it for the love of it. It nevertheless is apt to
invite contempt by those who don't know any better and who have probably
never seen an amateur production. Nevertheless, this total detachment
does not prevent them from assuming that the quality of amateur theatre
is accurately represented by the Farndale romps.
And dramatics and operatics are
thoughtless expressions – pluralized adjectives that have been turned
into nouns. They do no favours to anyone whose hobby comes under either
banner. They invite every pontificating ignoramus to assume that the
Fairy Queen is wearing the net curtains from her mum's conservatory.
But while such know-nothings have the excuse that
they probably have never seen an amateur production, no such defence can
be offered by amateur performers who invoke these same phrases – or,
indeed talk of amdram, which is shorthand for amateur
dramatics and implies a denigration of the gentle art of acting for
the love of it.
Dramatics and operatics do a crass
disservice to an admirable hobby – and when they are coupled with
amateur, they are lethal. So it's a shame that far too many amateur
thespians are among those who are apt to talk about amateur operatics
and amateur dramatics, thus underlining the undesirable and
linking themselves with the subversive slight that is so freely offered
by every uninvolved ignoramus.
Many groups who present musical theatre call
themselves operatic societies – and there again, they do themselves no
favours. They themselves know what they mean: they do musicals, not
opera. But it is the operatic bit that makes an impression on the
world outside and helps to ensure that the world outside can sometimes
conjure a vision of a night out for toffs, rather than one that offers
singable tunes and engaging stories. It keeps bums off seats and
probably deters potential recruits because they can't sing like
Katherine Jenkins.
From time to time, there is news of an operatic society that has changed its name. One such is Gloucestershire's Thornbury Musical Theatre Group, which sought a new image when it ceased to be Thornbury Amateur Operatic Society.
When it took the plunge, it explained that the
original name did not accurately convey, either to prospective members
or to possible audiences, the fact that its shows were musicals and
revues. There were also fears that the word amateur conjured a
picture of poorly painted backcloths, home-made costumes and primitive
sound and lighting equipment – to say nothing of quality-free
productions.
Interestingly, and for a reason I do not understand,
amateur is apt to feature in the names of theatre groups in the
North of England more than anywhere else. In fact it tends to be a
banner proudly borne. Everyone up there who is interested in amateur
musical theatre knows that LAOS is Leeds Amateur Operatic Society –
informally known as The Amateurs.
To each his own, of course, but from where I am
sitting Amateur simply makes for a tiresome title.
John Slim
LIKE the man in the
Bible, I was given what I have the effrontery to call a talent. It is
the ability, perhaps limited, to write something calculated to give
pleasure, pain, amusement or surprise to those who stumble across my
witterings.
It is the only talent to have
come my way, and it has managed to give me a lot of pleasure down the
long years, irrespective of what dismay it has offered to others.
I happened to say, à propos nothing in
particular, that if there were anything other than writing that I would
like to be able to do in the world of the arts, it would be to paint.
And it would. But there's no degree of urgency about it. It is an
ability I have managed without for eight decades, and empires will not
totter if I continue to manage for the next eight, by which time I may
well have found my way into a glass case at the
All I meant was that it might be something with which
to defy the long winter nights, quietly dabbling away in a corner of the
sitting-room, with one eye on the television.
So I was, perhaps reasonably, surprised when my wife
told me that I was now enrolled for Art for Beginners at the village
hall, and that the piggy-bank was funding me to the tune of £90. But who
was I to argue? In due course, I presented myself, along with ten women
and one man, with a view to having a whack at water-colouring.
I was armed with a sketch-pad that was immediately
denounced as having the wrong sort of paper, plus two small brushes, one
a bit thicker than the other – but I learned on arrival that I also
needed water and a jar to put it in. Silly me. Hadn't given it a
thought.
Fortunately, like all good village halls, this one is
armed with a tap, a sink and a supply of plastic glassware substitutes.
There was also a kindly lady who gave an encouraging pep-talk and told
us, above all, not to be afraid of the paint – even if it is
harder to block out watercolour than oils. It was time to boldly go.
We were all given a printed copy of a watercolour
landscape with a house on a hill, plus a helpful hint or two, and
invited to do our own reproductions, starting with applying a wash for
the sky.
By this time, I had begun to suspect that my little
paintbox was being asked to tackle something that was beyond its scope.
The picture that was proffered as my starting-point clearly had hues
unsuspected by my paintbox, and mixing colours in an effort to reproduce
them was quickly revealed to be a non-starter.
So my sky was a bold and violent blue that could have
been straight out of the mixed infants, except that my sky and my earth
did not have the seemingly essential ingredient of any infant's
landscape – that broad belt of white that separates them so unfailingly.
And down at the bottom of my incipient masterpiece
was my other immediate failure – the golden-brown cornfield that I could
not deter from its insistence on matching my sky for brassiness.
It was all too clear that
Since then, I paint no more, other than with rather
bigger brushes and on the garden benches.
If
John Slim
Sizzling filth. Great stuff!
I SUSPECT that I am not alone in evincing
tired disbelief every time another alleged comedian – formerly
appropriately called an alternative comedian – offers his alternative to
comedy. Surely the time should be long gone when some overpaid,
talent-free yob pollutes a nation's sitting rooms with what used to be
called gutter language.
It's not called gutter language any more, because as
far as I can gather it is now accepted as Standard English. The F word
stands for Filth, and filth, quite clearly, is flourishing. Filth has
become the standard.
This was not the case when Glengarry Glen Ross
appeared in 1984. David Mamet's play, featuring a feud between two
language-limited real-estate salesmen in Chicago, must have packed more
obscenities per line than anything within the experience of its
disbelieving audiences. It sizzled.
I caught up with it nine years ago, in 2003, by which
time it had blazed its trail of challenging terminology for almost two
decades, leaving dazed disbelief in its wake as the patrons discovered
they were taking a terrifying new step into a changing world of theatre.
It was The Nonentities, the amateur group whose home
is The Rose Theatre, Kidderminster, who led me to it. Led me? They
waited until I was sitting comfortably, then they walloped me with it.
Previous form made me odds-on to throw up my hands and turn pale and
interesting, shocked to the core.
But in fact, in tune with the rest of the
respectable, middle-class, middle-aged audience, I was riveted. One had
to be riveted in any case, with the script firing scores of deep-shock
bullets in swift succession and no time to duck – but in no time at all
it was clear that this was filth with a mission.
It was not the fail-safe patter of a sneering oaf
untouched by talent. This was life in the raw, right from the start,
with two hard-nosed characters in foul, high-decibel verbal combat. It
was making sure, right from the start, that we would have no illusion
that we had joined a visit to a day nursery. It was magnificent
gutter-speak.
This was an ambience quite foreign to its
audience and it was plain that the script was not going to ease the
pressure; equally obvious that it was the patrons who would have to
adjust their expectations.
And adjust they did – not only because they had to,
but because the verbal fusillades, although appalling, fulfilled their
responsibility of leaving no one in any doubt that this was not only the
language of hard-nosed citizens, it was something that they could escape
only by walking out of the suddenly-electrified auditorium. It was
language committed to its context – filthy and uncompromising.
I have seen Glengarry Glen Ross only once. It
has to be taken on its own terms and presented by a first-class company.
So far, it has taken me nearly two decades to fail to forget it. It's
time to look back in admiration – and to reiterate my verdict from all
those years ago.
This was a week when bad language had a job to do –
in a week that deserves a place in any future history of The Nonentities
at The Rose.
John Slim
Marred: one man's early
morning
WHAT is a reporter for?
A reporter is for reporting the news. What he or she is not for is
being the
news.
How discomfiting, therefore, for television's Andrew
Marr to open the newspaper and discover, not only that he was the news,
but that he had been photographed in a distinctly amiable embrace with
a-woman-not-his-wife at 2.30 in the morning.
This is not fair. A reporter's role is to dish the
dirt on everybody else, preferably those citizens who are so-called
celebs. It is not to fill a tabloid page with pictures of his own
generously jug-eared gum-sucking.
Mr Marr's problem is that he has risen to celebrity
status on the wings of his television job. Like other celebs, he will
therefore have to ensure that he is careful with his cuddles. Cuddling
may well continue to be an option, but from now on he must not be caught
at it – even when practising what he is reported to have described as
just a drunken clinch.
When every phone-carrying busybody is a potential
newspaper photographer, moderation in all things becomes a must. And the
unlucky Andrew possibly finds little consolation in the realisation that
future victims of our snap-happy citizenry will be spoken of, perhaps
not as completely ruined but possibly as having been distinctly Marred.
His name could progress from mere verbal status to
verbal adjective, which the late Julius Caesar would have recognised on
the instant as a gerundive. I bet our Andrew didn't realise that that
was on the cards at 2.30 one recent morning.
John Slim
Don't frighten a four-year-old
WHEN Shakespeare
mentioned the winter of our discontent, he was not thinking of
pantomimes – but right now, beyond a shadow of doubt, Britain is gearing
up for the season of badinage and it's-behind-you. Unfortunately, it is
a season that sometimes goes off the rails.
So, a plea to all panto promoters: try to remember
that this is the children's show. What's more, for many of them it will
be their first experience of theatre.
What children like is action, not words. They will
laugh their socks off at the bench that has its legs congregated at one
end, ensuring that when the man sitting at the leg end stands up, the
other one will be spilled onto the floor.
They will laugh, that is, at “business” that has been
around for years. Why shouldn't they? They have never before seen the
Ugly Sister fitting into a glass slipper by means of the false leg and
dainty foot she has hidden under her voluminous skirts. They have never
seen one of the Broker's Men inviting the other to sniff the flower in
his buttonhole before causing it to squirt him with a swift water jet.
They will love this sort of thing, whatever its
vintage.
What they don't want is any sort of scripted muck,
directed at embarrassed parents who will be further discomfited when
Junior asks what THAT means.
And it is never a good idea to go overboard with the
scary stuff, either. Forty-three years ago, I was the misguided dad who
submitted his six-year-old daughter to a visit to a Christmas show
featuring a baddie in the globular form of The Plum Pudding Flea.
As soon as he made his first jump-jump-jump entrance,
accompanied by a series of boings and twangs, she greeted him with
banshee howls of unmitigated terror. And he had to make lots of
entrances, with the same effect. In the end, we had to smuggle her out
quietly and we never did catch up with the plot.
I suppose it's poetic justice that in the fullness of
time our daughter became a flustered mum with a six-year-old son whose
first pantomime featured a character so alarming that young George hid
his eyes and shrieked in genuine terror – and that was only the start of
it.
For the next fortnight, he was frightened to go to
bed. And when he got there, the curtains could not be closed in case
there was something nasty behind them. He had recurring bad dreams, and
Christmas did little to soothe him.
This should never happen. A panto is a place for the
Good Fairy and the Golden Egg, not a trial ground for a director to be,
er, clever by experimenting with an untimely, unnecessary, unthought-out
introduction to a Stephen King nightmare.
John Slim
Comforts precede curtain-up
IT is only very
rarely that I have been caught out by something unexpected on the way to
the theatre and have thus failed to arrive in time for the kick-off.,
with a succession of sotto voce
apologies to the patrons who have preceded me
into my row and have thus provided me with a superfluity of kneecaps,
past which to clamber.
I have habitually arrived in good time, ensuring that
my box of Maltesers is half-empty by curtain-up. In any case, my
timekeeping is a good thing, because in the absence of any on-stage
action I am often able to extract ample entertainment from the
conversation of the couple in the seats behind me.
I never know what they look like, let alone who they
are, because if I turned round I would ruin the little game that has so
often seen me happily through the interregnum to the start of the show.
Aforesaid little game consists of listening – without
any difficulty, because the chatterers never appear to have considered
the possibility that I might not want to hear what they are saying –
while allowing my fevered old brain cell to run riot.
Their generosity in not sparing the decibels thus
allows me to fit imagined characters – preferably, erstwhile members of
television's former Creature Comforts community – to the voices,
and thus turn what might otherwise have been an irritation into a
positive pleasure.
Do you remember the cat and the tortoise, and all the
other Plasticine people who were droll delights all those years ago? I
loved them. I was their groupie – and these days, the pleasure of any
theatre visit can still be magnified if I tune in to the dedicated
chatterers behind me.
Almost unfailingly, they remind me of the languid
man-made animals who were wont to exchange vapid thoughts about nothing
in particular, offering enormous solemnity to matters of no moment at
all.
And it matters not what accent they employ. Though it
is rarely what used to be called BBC English, before the BBC forgot how
to speak English, I don't care: they are free to proffer their thoughts
in any way at all – including Estuary English, distinguished by a
loyalty to the glottal stop that is backed to the hilt by its inability
to say glottal – and find me offering silent delight.
The beauty of this is that I am in charge. I am able
on the instant to turn my unseen entertainers into any animal of my
choice. I would not dream of turning round and thus spoiling my
imaginings. On the contrary, you are liable to find me luxuriating in a
joy which becomes even better if I close my eyes.
Unfortunately, this does bring its own problems, in
as much as I am then unable to see that a fellow kneecap-clamberer is
edging sideways towards me. But then, I have never pretended that this
is a perfect world.
John Slim
A shaggy dog walks into a bar . . . .
FORGIVE me, but I do like silly stories.
An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, and a
Welshman walked into a restaurant.
With them were an African, an Alaskan, an Albanian,
an American, an Andorran, an Argentinean, an Armenian, an Aruban, an
Australian, an Azerbaijani, a Bahaman, a Belarussian, a Belgian, a
Bolivian, a Brazilian, a Bulgarian, a Cambodian, a Canadian, a Cayman
Islander, a Chilean, a Chinese, a Colombian, a Cook Islander, a Costa
Rican, a Croatian, a Cuban, a Cypriot, a Czech, a Dane, a Dutchman,
an Ecuadorian, a German, an Egyptian, an Estonian, a Fijian, a Filipino,
a Finn, a Frenchman, a Georgian, a Greek, a Greenlander, a Guatemalan, a
Haitian, a Hawaiian, a Honduran, a Hungarian, an Italian, an Icelander,
an Indian, an Iranian, an Israeli, a Jamaican, a Japanese, a Korean, a
Latvian, a Lebanese, a Liechtensteiner, a Lithuanian, a Macedonian,
a Malaysian, a Mexican, a Micronesian, a Moldovan, a Mongolian, a
Moroccan, a New Zealander, a Norfolk Islander, a Norwegian, a Pakistani,
a Panamanian, a Peruvian, a Pole, a Portuguese, a Qatari, a Romanian, a
Russian, a Samoan, a Serb, a Singaporean, a Slovak, a Spaniard, a Sri
Lankan, a Swede, a Swiss, a Syrian, a Tajikistani, a Tongan, a Turk, a
Ugandan, a Ukrainian, a Uruguayan, an Uzbek, a Venezuelan, a Vietnamese
and a Virgin Islander, who accompanied them in alphabetical order
because they were a tidy lot.
"I'm sorry," says the maître d', after scrutinizing the group, “you can't come in here without a Thai."
John Slim
Time to sort a vowel
disorder
THE Olympics gave our old friend Rogue R a
splendidly busy time.
Every television commentator employed him whenever
possible – not intentionally, admittedly, but just every time he could
be smuggled in and sandwiched between an A and an E or joining the fun
when one A was working in tandem with another.
You know the enfant terrible I am talking
about: the one who is customarily at his liveliest when plaguing Noel
Coward comedies by references to the droring room. He gets away with it
because actors don't think and directors don't know any better. They
share a disdain for preparation that does them remarkably little credit.
(Who are these people?)
But it was the Olympics that found Rogue R finally
hitting the jackpot. It was the Olympics that introduced us to swimmer
Rebecca Radlington, heptathlete Jessica Rennis and flyweight boxer
Nicola Radams, all of them performing under assumed names because there
was a surfeit of successive vowels and the commentators couldn't cope.
I realise that English as we know and love it is
going down the pan with alarming rapidity, but perhaps the occasional
squeak of protest won't do any harm.
Yes, I know it won't do any good, either, but lost
causes need somebody to speak up for them, just occasionally.
John Slim
Tops are tops Down Under
A FRIEND with my welfare at heart has
despatched me an email containing 15 photographs of something called
Australian Sand Soccer.
Unless I have failed to grasp the right end of the
stick, the sand and the soccer have very little to do with it, except
that they specify the base on which it is played and the game where no
spectator cares if it isn't played at all.
As you would see for yourself if the pictures had not
been swallowed by cyberspace, this is clearly a salute to All Girls
Together. Two teams of six nymphets, who have remembered their smiles
and their very brief briefs but forgotten their bras, are curving
becomingly into their remarkably tight tops as they come fiercely to
grips with the need to fascinate what appears to be an almost all-male
audience.
Not that I have actually observed them in action.
These are still photographs – photographs in which nothing jiggles or
bounces and which also give cause to wonder whether these are tops that
have merely been painted on. Certainly, they require only the merest
imagination. They present the still-life drama of a contest that is
keenly fought, nipple-and-tuck.
I can't help thinking that this is the sort of thing
that Australia seems to be very good at. I have never been there, but it
does almost unfailingly convey the impression that all human life is
there and that it does, in all those wide open spaces and in a manner of
speaking, let it all hang out.
John Slim
Wossy's pwoblem – a hit in
waiting
I KNOW nothing of Jonathan Ross beyond his
public persona as an amiable
oaf who can't pronounce his surname because he's got a pwoblem with the
R.
Having said that, I do remember that he unfortunately
teamed up some years ago with the less likable Russell Brand – he of the
dark black barnet and the mad eyes – for a juvenile attack by telephone
on Andrew Sachs.
Sachs is the actor who played the long-suffering
waiter from
All of which is an unintentional diversion from Wossy,
the man with the label that was presumably given him in the first place
by unkindly associates who had noted without much effort that R was not
to be confused with his linguistic strongpoint.
I have observed before that English is a language
that is prone to defeat many of those for whom it is their native tongue
– the people who can't say integral, communal, formidable and
minuscule, for instance.
I don't know where Wossy stands in coping with this
particular foursome, but I'm sure that You Tube would welcome a sight of
him battling with inferiority, deteriorate and peroration.
Wossy's Pwoblem could be an instant hit. When
will it occur to him to give it a try?
John Slim
I'm less and less credible
I GROW ever more fascinated by the foibles of the
Internet.
Its latest manifestation finds me deeply engrossed in
a three-line email that says: “Your money followed by a long space
and then: have you receiver (sic) your $1,300.000.00us
because I travel to France but now I am back, if you receiver (more
sic) it let me know
Mr P Nwaba.”
I know nothing of Mr P Nwaba, except that he's A bawn
P backwards, let alone why he clearly knows considerably more about my
$1,300,000 euros than I do.
It is my misfortune that I have not receivered my
little nest-egg – just Mr Nwaba's single-sentence missive about it,
interrupted only by a comma that should have been a full stop.
Nevertheless, I am beginning to wonder why I am
selected for these esoteric communications.
As I have previously mentioned, I have already
receivered from the Internet all I need to know about the Association of
Truly Generously-Endowed Men. I am flattered by ATGEM's attention and
can only wonder whether Big Brother has spotted me from one of his
satellites and is too fascinated for words.
Can there really be Someone Out There who needs me,
either for my hitherto unsuspected wealth or just for my body? If he's
still looking at me, what can I do to help – given that I'm a bit short
of euros at the moment and that he might as well forget my body? In
your dreams, boy. It's a non-starter these days.
(Oh, dear. Bang goes my street cred again).
John Slim
The perils of
professionalism
IT'S a bit ironic that
in this year, of all years, we had to discover that half the nation
can't say jubilee.
I say half the nation, because
in doing so I am assuming that the rest of us fail more or less
proportionately to our broadcasters, half of whom clearly haven't a clue
and are struggling on with nobody at their elbow caring enough to
instruct them.
Give them their due, the malfunctioning professional
50 per cent do their best. It's just that they don't know when to stop.
Jubileeee!, they cry interminably, searing my eardrums and
bringing no balm whatsoever.
Calm down, dears. Its cadence matches that of
comedy. It's just that the professionals have never latched on.
Similarly, there are far too many of the broadcasting
classes who can't say communal. The nearest they can get to it is
com-you-nal, ever prone to assault the afternoon airwaves when we
are seeing somebody being given an escorted tour of a property with a
shared swimming pool.
Happily, I haven't yet caught any of them
demonstrating an inbuilt inability to say aitch. The eighth –
heighth? – letter of the alphabet seems to be content with the
sizeable proportion of non-professionals who come a cropper every time
they try to refer to it. They don't talk about aitch very often, of
course, but when they do, a territorially-ambitious aspirate gets them
every time.
And then, as I have mentioned before, there is our
shortest and surprisingly further shortened month, Febry, which Jonathan
Ross presumably knows as Febwy and which the rest of us frequently
assault without let or hindrance by deleting an R when we refer to it..
Moreover, interestingly, there's a word with only
three letters which does not have to wait for someone to fail to say it
properly – because it sees itself repeatedly spelled incorrectly in
newspapers. Led, which we might have assumed to contain few
opportunities for a cock-up, keeps coming up as lead.
You just can't trust these professionals.
John Slim
What's all this ear then?
TALKING about words we
can't say, and I'm sure I must have been at one time or another, what
about frontier?
This is a word that has two separate and distinct
lives. In everyday conversation – not that it crops up very often in
everyday conversation – there seems to be no problem. We know that if we
are crossing, say, from
And if Scotland is allowed to transmute those new
noises it is making into action, Great Britain will presumably have a
frontier of its own for no good reason and become Little Britain –
though Matt Lucas and David Walliams might have something to say about
that and wave a contract to prove it.
After all, there are already many frontiers. This is
a planet that is awash with them. It's only when we reach the last one
that we run, for no apparent reason, into trouble. We create a
problem for ourselves by shifting the emphasis when we say it.
This is the point at which a simple, God-fearing word
joins the playground of the apparently unpronounceable, like
communal, jubilee, aitch – haitch to the carefree – and
Febry, as well as defying the known limits of biology.
How can anything be the final frontEAR? How can
either of the appendages on the side of the average head be the final
one, implying that the other one is the first one and therefore that the
head in question has one ear in front of the other, not properly
aligned?
Apart from being an implicit slur upon our Maker, it
defies all known observations of the human cranium.
In referring to a final front ear they are suggesting
that there is not only a last front ear but a first front ear as well.
We're just making problems for ourselves. We're not making sense.
People who are hard of hearing may talk about their
good ear or their bad ear – though admittedly it rarely seems bad enough
to be called their dire ear – and MPs are apt to intone a sonorous
'Ear, 'ear to cover their uncertainty about whether they are going
to vote yea or nay.
But why should anyone imply that one ear is
positioned ahead of the other? The only people we should expect to do
that are those citizens who take their cue from too many Wild West
movies and insist on talking about the final one.
Let's have none of it.
John Slim
An unfortunate way with words
I DON'T mean to be distracted by the printed
word or the word as spoken by my television set. Unfortunately, the
dismay that springs from both these sources is stronger than all my good
intentions to stay schtum.
It's just that I am increasingly aware that people
aren't speaking English any more. Even English people. Nor are they
writing it. And they're getting worse.
Even though by now I am no longer surprised that the
very people who earn their living via the spoken or written word are
unable to say either February or deteriorate – two words
in which the letter R is prominent, which may be providing some sort of
a clue to their problem – I still rise to the bait of berating them,
safe in the knowledge that they won't come and hit me.
They're not very good with a U or an A, either, and
they seem to be getting worse, not to say deteriorating (because to do
so would only make them jealous). So I am plagued with such untutored
tidings as The ship sunk and I begun ,where a U has
supplanted an A, or distracted by the Birmingham insistence – again
based on the apparently irresistible U – on living in the eternal
present via I run, meaning I ran.
But it is not only in the Second City that these two
letters suffer from an unfortunate vowel disorder. I realised the other
day that the plague has spread to the so-called writers in the London
newspapers – the papers that David Hopkinson, former editor of The
Birmingham Post, refused to call nationals, in a stand confirmed
when The Times, once regarded as the paper of record, described
the Vale of Evesham as a green lung in the heart of the Black Country.
The A and U problem has now revealed itself in what,
as far as I know, is a completely new aberration. A writer in a London
paper, regaling us with a driver's inability to control a car, informed
us that the vehicle span off the road – and she did so twice in
about 250 words.
All this is in addition to the perennial problem that
media people seem to have in not knowing that there's a difference
between uninterested and disinterested. The reason is
simple, and they could get it right by reminding themselves that they
are clearly uninterested in the words that are the very tools with which
they make their living. This is either due to their built-in ineptitude
or that of their teachers. That's for them to know and us to guess at.
Either way, the future of a lovely language, alas, is
in their hands.
John Slim
Time for a muse about milk
HOW do you steal a bottle of milk?
Not you, I mean, obviously – not you, the well-known
model of rectitude, or possibly a coward at heart who recognises the
perils implicit in appropriating a pint of the white stuff from its
rightful spot on its owner's doorstep.
No, it's just the logistical difficulty of lifting
pre-prepared cow-juice from the place its predecessors have made their
own, perhaps for years unnumbered.
Do it at night, under cover of helpful darkness, and
you're going to attract the interest of any other stop-out who chances
to see you making what you intended to be a nonchalant getaway. Who goes
walkies with a bottle of milk when everyone else is either glued to the
telly or falling out of the pub? Questions will be asked.
On the other hand, he who makes his illicit move for
milk in broad daylight, probably when he is unencumbered by any other
burden, also runs the risk of being recognised as a citizen of possibly
doubtful probity. Again, it is the yet-to-be-approved status of milk as
a solitary walking companion that will be likely to elevate any passing
eyebrow.
I could be wrong, but as far as I know no one has yet
penned a drama that features The Case of the Disappearing Milk Bottle.
Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie having made their excuses and left,
there's a gap in the market that is yearning for Alan Bennett's
attention.
I discovered I was one down on my milk count on
opening the front door one recent morning with a view to offering a home
to two bottles and finding only one of them awaiting my attention.
It was thus necessary to pick up a pinta from the
little shop that's 150 yards up the road, a pesky irritation when I am
sure I could have thought of other things to do if I had applied the
brain cell – even if it was only to the matter of pondering the
practicalities of purloining a bottle from a doorstep closer to hand.
This was the train of thought to which I finally
offered myself six paragraphs ago – though aware, as I indicated, that I
should not expect any practical guidance from a pillar of society such
as your good self.
Rest easy. I do not seek to deploy you as an
accessory before the fact.
John Slim
Alas, this is funny-peculiar
WHAT do I know about children? Too little to
warrant consideration, I guess. Admittedly, there were at one time four
of them in our house, the oldest being a modest seven.
Clearly, we were in danger of being overrun by The
Little People. Something had to be done – so I did it.
I changed the milkman.
It worked. By now, the youngest is 48, still with no
more than three senior siblings – and as the years go by, I am
increasingly aware of what is euphemistically called The Generation Gap.
The latest manifestation of my inability to cope with
the younger set comes with the newspaper revelation that Humpty Dumpty,
friend from my own formative years, is now considered too much of
a handful for today's infants. He has been “sanitised.” He has been
fitted with whatever is the nursery rhyme equivalent of warning lights.
He is, it seems, an egg too far for the next generation.
This is why the English Folk Dance and Song Society
is anxious to make it clear that all the king's horses and all the
king's men, who, as we have known for years, couldn't put Humpty
together again, are now required to have “made Humpty happy again.”
The EFDSS concern follows somewhat tardily in the
wake of a government-funded song book which decided in 2009 that it was
time that What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor? should lose
any reference to alcohol and have the misbehaving matelot turned into a
grumpy pirate. Furthermore, “put him in the longboat
ۥtil he's sober” should become “do a
little jig and make him smile.”
So there we are. Somebody's looking after the
youngsters – and yet again, I have to smile one of my
pretend-I-understand ones.
After all, which youngsters are we talking about? Can
they possibly be those who made headlines in a different newspaper in
the same week – the ones who are seeing porn on TV and then putting it
into practice on even younger children?
According to the Deputy Children's Commissioner,
there is not a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being
sexually exploited, often by their peers. Abominations are therefore
becoming regarded as normal, par for the course, by the under-tens – and
all this, at a time that tries to hang on to its innocence by requiring
children to be off the stage and out of the theatre by 10 pm.
It's a funny old world, except that funny
isn't quite the right word.
John Slim
Don't let's forget about
Sunderland
CONVERSATIONS can be wonderful. They can pack
surprises that you could never have imagined if you had sat up nights
working on them.
Admittedly, most of them are unapologetically
routine, bereft of anything remotely ear-catching, not worth remembering
when they have finished. They are the sort of exchanges that most
of us have all the time.
But just occasionally, there is one that contains
perhaps just one special moment, one illuminating phrase, which impinges
instantly on the memory – without any need for its appreciative audience
to have been involved. Right now, I am still remembering and enjoying
the occasion more than 70 years ago when my grandmother, a lovely,
white-haired lady who was both blind and stone deaf, started the day by
coming into the kitchen, to greet my mother with a cheerful, “Good
morning. Is it raining?”
“Yes, pouring!” said Mum – only to discover that the
response to her mine of proffered meteorological information was, “Good
morning!” Granny's hearing aid had misfired and she was all set to start
the conversation all over again.
In eight decades, I have failed to accumulate one
single other memorable conversational moment – until now. And even now,
I cannot claim any involvement in it.
In truth, this was not a conversation. It was a young
woman's account in court of what she said to her friend, an off-duty
police officer.
“I said, ‘He's just grabbed my arse'. He said, ‘He
plays for Sunderland'. I said, ‘I don't care what he does, he's not
grabbing me like that'.”
Let joy be unconfined! The arrival into judicial
proceedings, first of Sunderland Football Club, and then of the response
it evoked, were irrefutably gems from the larger lunacy. It could have
been a moment of hilarity in a stage comedy. Indeed, if it caught the
eye of a playwright looking to tickle the risibilities, it may yet
become just that. We'll have to wait and see.
John Slim
Sloppy, with a silver lining
I AM sorry to inflict this on you, but I'm a
bit fed up. Fed up with the way that Britain's society has become so
ill-mannered, so loud – why is it that oafs always have the noisiest
voices? – and so sloppy. Why has work become a naughty word?
Why – to get to the point – are we now awash with
“poets” who would not know an iambic pentameter if it hit them where it
hurts? These are the versifiers who write a chunk of airy-fairy prose,
chop it into lines of arbitrary length and proclaim that they have
produced another poem. It doesn't rhyme, it doesn't scan. But at least
it has not involved them in any work, and has thus not damaged their
street cred.
Sadly, sloppiness is now all. Anything goes, provided
it can be read in a voice that bespeaks the awesome or portentous, and
thus gives it some imaginary virtue.
I have been aware of the slide into sloppiness for a
long time, while I have nevertheless obstinately filled the idle hour
with verses that do rhyme and that do scan and have the effrontery to
have a bit of meaning. By now, there are a hundred or so. I have never
sought to do anything with them; never gone out of my way to try to
startle posterity by bothering a publisher – but finally I have, as I
say, got a bit fed up with the way in which the gentle art of
poetry-writing has been eroded; sacrificed on the altar of idleness and
virtually buried.
Why sweat over scansion, as long as an awestruck
public thinks it's poetry? Why struggle with rhyme, when so many others
do without it and are hailed unquestioningly as Poets?
After all, rhyme and scansion don't come easily. Of
course they don't – but this used to be the very point of poetry. The
hard work that produces such hallmarks should be what attracts would-be
poets and what puts the enjoyment into creating poetry, while
nevertheless remaining largely unsuspected by the reader.
Alas, Nanny Britain ensures that while hard work in
any sphere is not actually frowned upon, there are always ways of
getting round it – and for “poets” today, the obvious way is via
chopped-up prose. No hang-ups over rhythm, no need to reckon with rhyme.
Just slop something down and whang it at 'em.
If poets had been this bright a few hundred years
back, we would never have heard of Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley and
their like. Their work, all those lovely verses that they had struggled
to produce, would probably never have been seen unless they had been
remarkably lucky. Forget the Golden Treasury: take your chance
on The Golden Shot, sort of thing. And inevitably they would
have lost out in a big way to their slap-happy challengers.
Rhyme has its limitations, of course. Anyone opting
for an evening at the theatre and discovering that the play was in
rhyme, and that the only relief from rhyme was when somebody forgot a
line, would not be agog to repeat the experience. It's the same with
rhythm – which is why, in the theatre, the irritation of poorly-crafted
verse can be assuaged by the realisation that 2½ hours of boring
perfection is not, after all, on the cards.
But theatre is theatre and poetry is poetry, and
there's no need to worry as long as they are not expected to work side
by side unchecked.
It's when poetry is pulverised for having the
temerity to stand alone that I am dismayed – and this is what happened
when, finally frustrated at the all-encompassing mediocrity of the world
of modern poetry, I decided to push a verse or two of my own in the
direction of a literary agent.
For instance, I touched the awestruck forelock and
steered Whispers towards an unsuspecting agent who might possibly
become its staging-post.
Whispers
WHISPER soft, lest still,
star-sprinkled night,
That holds its breath in magic,
silvered bowers,
Shall overhear the tenderness we
plight,
Which takes no count as minutes
merge to hours.
Whisper soft. Touch gently, in a
glow
That has a wondrous softness of its
own,
And makes believe that we, at one
below,
Have found such love as no one else
has known.
Whisper soft, for 'tis night's
quirky will
To snatch and steal away the
slightest sound,
And magnify it on an air so still
That sheltered secrets shout to all
around.
Whisper soft: enlist the
black-backed moon,
Whose velvet vault mere man can't
comprehend,
To light the face of love, for all
too soon
The loveliness of summer's night
will end.
Silly me. Doing his best to sound
sorry, the agent was at pains to point out that this was no good to him
because – wait for it – it wasn't. . . messy.
His word. He meant it actually had
the temerity to rhyme and scan and had clearly been worked upon and
cared about before it left me. And that's not what's wanted these days.
Heaven forbid! Anything goes, as long as there's no form or substance.
Otherwise, all in, run or not!
As always, there's a silver lining
– namely, that Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth & Co were able to show the
world what poetry is before slap-happy insouciance took over, to
inflict upon the rest of us the impenetrable mysteries of Messy.
John Slim
I've been flagging a bit
NEVER let it be said that when pageantry is
in prospect this lad is not going to be among those present. Not
necessarily within touching distance of the excitement, but handily
poised with a television set ready to go and the remote control awaiting
his every whim.
It is, however, only rarely that he who perambulates
past my front gate receives the slightest hint of the joys I am
receiving from the magic screen in the corner – and Jubilee Weekend was
one such occasion.
Let there be no secrets between us: among my
unsuspected depths, I am a loyalist royalist.
I may not be able to lure my larynx into a reasonable
attempt at God, Save the Queen, but no one will ever persuade me
that Her Majesty is not A Good Thing. I think she's an unassuming
wonder; mother of the nation; apparent eternity in a pleasing hat. But I
don't usually let on to the passing populace.
This time was different. I had a weekend of wallowing
in everything that my television set was offering me. I was having a
lovely time.
Perhaps I shouldn't have sighed so significantly
every time one or the other of the professionals filling my screen
revealed an inability to pronounce Jubilee. The word of the
moment was beyond their competence. Time after time, it emerged as
Jubileeee, proffered by an ignoramus who had no idea that the accent
is on the first syllable, its cadence exactly matching that of
comedy.
But I was delighted at how infrequently the national
standard was called a Union Jack, which happened only when the
occasional commentator had failed to spot that it was not flying aboard
a ship. I was also pleased at my failure until the final day to observe
among the Union Flags a flag – quite a large flag – that had been given
the distinction of being flown upside-down.
So, all things considered, I reckon the Queen
received the small-screen reportage she deserved. And as I was about to
say, he whose travels led him past my front gate was given a clear clue
to my choice of television entertainment.
An unassuming Union Flag sagged outside the front
window. On a small stick. In a window box. Alongside a geranium.
When Britain gets excited, I am with it all the way.
This is no time for secrets.
John Slim
Something for the boys, surely?
THE postman, once famed in picture-palace
celluloid for always ringing twice, is also well capable of springing a
surprise.
A recent offering that he popped through my letterbox
proclaimed, Making love often saves your life!
I remain uncertain whether it was talking about often
making love or often saving my life – but such considerations pale into
insignificance in comparison with what else it clearly felt could be
missing.
For instance, in proclaiming the virtues of what it
calls a “new, revolutionary and explosive formula”, it invokes capital
letters and says it OBLIGES my penis to become a truly inexhaustible
PISTON, proffering the postscript that all the girls are gagging for it.
It talks about growing a THIRD LEG that will get the
most blasé women – blasée, surely? – howling between my
sheets like the most shameless of nymphomaniacs; sharing my new penis
with all the ladies and preserving my prostate without even thinking
about it.
I am assured that I will become the owner of
something that is full to the brim and hard as a rock, seven days a
week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – a bit of an embarrassment, both
to me and my immediate circle, really.
It lists 14 problems from which I may be suffering,
and it helpfully adds that the list was drawn up by ATGEM (the
Association of Truly Generously Endowed Men).
It wonders whether I would like to make love to
several partners simultaneously. It does not hesitate to offer “fuller
balls” and a “competition-level penis.”
It is the most intriguing bit of correspondence to
have arrived at our house in years.
Particularly as it is addressed to my wife.
John Slim
A word with the
language-dabblers
IT was back in the
summer of 2004 that I got all excited because I thought that we British,
ever-reliable in our ability to discern the right path, even if we very
often fail to take it, had yet again demonstrated our ability to Get
Things Right.
All those years ago, the faint
light of hope had found a chink in the armour of absurdity that is
donned by the renegades who habitually insist on making a mockery of
linguistic life. At least, I thought it had.
Yes, these seven summers since, I felt encouraged
enough to think I could safely bid farewell to proven, the fad
word with which television commercials had been regaling me for months.
I was able to report that with a handful of exceptions, including an ad
about lollipops, one about eyelashes and something that involved
spelling correction incorrectly, proven had popped its
clogs.
I was madly optimistic. Seven years later, proven
is still with us. It means proved, but it takes an extra
syllable to say it. Nevertheless, I cling to the hope that one day I
shall realise that proven has breathed its last; that air-headed
television people will have found a different word to assail with their
ignorance.
It is probably too much to hope that meet up
and meet up with, both of which mean meet but have arrived
as thought-free substitutes in the heads of brain-free professionals,
will also be summarily despatched; and that sports presenters will
also discover that before is widely recognised as meaning
ahead of and again saves a syllable.
And I leave it to the dedicated language-dabblers to
tell us why on earth what used to be conditions have become
pre-conditions – as ever, at the hands of alleged professionals for whom
words are the tools of the trade they unthinkingly and repeatedly shame.
Why can't they simply stick with the linguistic
absurdities with which we have all grown up and which therefore deserve
a place in our affections? Cheap at half the price, for instance,
meaning that it would be cheap at twice the price.
And we all know that if a farmer says a cow is in
calf, he means a calf is in cow.
Moreover, I realise that if I say I have just gone
head over heels, you will shed the silent tear and ask to view the
bruises – although in fact most of us go everywhere head over heels,
with our heads a variable number of feet above our heads. It's called
walking.
No, it's not these old faithfuls but the latter-day
stupidities that move me to shout at the television. But may all
chairpersons, especially those simple souls who think they're a chair,
be humoured by being pulled up and sat on quite firmly before being led
gently away by kindly men in white coats.
I must shut up. Before I am led gently away by those
who are too indoctrinated to understand.
John Slim
Why I'm rarely going for a song
I ENTIRELY understand, every time I see a
millionaire footballer having unmistakable problems with singing the
National Anthem.
As often as not, if he is not transparently miming,
he is standing with his mouth resolutely shut. Very rarely does the
television camera dwell on a man who is clearly giving his vocal all.
I do not find this at all surprising. By and large,
professional footballers do not enjoy their nationwide exposition as
failed warblers.
They are not paid to provide a musical salute to Her
Majesty. Their job is to kick the ball into the back of the net and kick
lumps out of the opposition. Anything else is a gratuitous extra.
My heart bleeds for them at international matches. At
such times, they are not only expected to sing – they have to do it
surrounded by an immediate audience of 80,000 people while risking the
mockery of millions who are watching them in big close-up on television.
The camera pans relentlessly along the line, its
microphone geared to catch their every faltering note. All too often –
and who shall blame them? – they are obviously miming. They are miming,
in case their footling inadequacies should somehow be heard above the
sound of 80.000 people singing the National Anthem; miming, in the vain
hope that the rest of us won't suspect a thing – and all this, while
disporting themselves in big boots and silly little shorts.
Were I in their place, I would bashfully baulk at
offering my talent-free version of the official Song-Before-Hostilities
surrounded by the massed ranks of not-too-patient patrons.
LYRICAL ENDEAVOURS
But it's odd. Reticent though I know I would be,
standing on my little patch of hallowed Wembley turf, to risk the
exposure of the limitations of my larynx before the multitude, I seem
unable to shut up when I am at home. The shower is unfailingly the
launch pad for my lyrical endeavours. Equally, I inevitably hold forth
in a gratuitous bold baritone when planting a pansy or mowing the lawn.
Nevertheless, any stranger, suddenly privy to my
assault on the arpeggios, would realise that he was faced with the
alternatives of blocking his ears or choking me. I am not a songster.
There is but the slightest likelihood of my being confused with the late
Caruso – and this is why, on finding myself unpremeditatedly part of a
singing crowd, I do not chip in my three-pennyworth.
My vocal ineptitude is such that I am not even any
good at miming. And if I am very brave and actually try to nurture a
note into action, all I produce is a sort of furtive groan.
Nevertheless, I did mime, five days a week, in
morning assembly at school, and I must have performed proficiently
enough for the teacher standing at the end of my row to have been lulled
into preposterous belief in my abilities, because no questions were ever
asked. Clearly, I achieved what I believe is technically termed lip
synch.
I contributed not a sound to the morning hymn. I
mouthed with dedication, praying that the master looking along my line
from the end of the row would not suspect the slightest scintilla of my
subterfuge. To this day, I remain reliably ill-equipped to sing in
public
Fortunately, unlike England's international football
matches, assembly never concluded with a contribution from whoever was
the 1930s equivalent of Katherine Jenkins. Obviously, I would have been
no contest for her, and it was my good fortune every day to be able to
rest on my silent laurels.
PLEASING SOUND
In the world of singing, I am a know-nothing
looker-on and a hapless practitioner. I reckon to know a pleasing sound
when I hear one, but I can't tell an a cappella or accelerando from
absolute pitch and could no more rivet an audience at the Albert Hall
than pass myself off as the Duke of Edinburgh.
There are people who can sing, and do. There are
people who can sing, and don't. And there are people like me, who can't
sing but who are apt to be found at informal moments, confirming the
obvious to anyone within earshot at the drop of a hat.
My vocal inadequacies, fortunately, have never
prevented my being able to appreciate the talents of those who come into
the first of these three categories. When the late Paul Robeson cut
loose on Ol' Man River, he stopped me in my tracks.
With him in mind, I listen to the shouting screamers
and the screaming shouters who have the effrontery to pass themselves
off as singers today, and wonder how on earth they mustered the sheer
cheek to try to do so in the first place – and, of course, why no one
had the good sense to stop them as soon as they started.
They come to their chosen profession, professing to
be able to sing and presumably driven more by the lure of gold than by
any intelligent hope that the rest of us will hear them and imagine we
have stumbled across some latent talent. Susan Boyle is a blessed
exception.
FULL WARBLE
But yes, I admit it: in the face of all things
reasonable, I am consistently to be found at full warble – always
provided that my only audience is a long-suffering wife with the good
sense to keep the windows shut.
I sing in the shower. I sing when perched on the side
of the bed and changing my socks. I sing in impromptu accompaniment if
the radio or television suddenly comes up with a ditty that is more than
50 years old. As I have mentioned before, I am a Far Away Places
and Over the Hill man. Sing, Little Birdie can also rely
on me to do my best. Nevertheless, if a fellow man has the misfortune to
hear me, he will be found doing something representing feverish
desperation, with a forefinger in his ear. I am not a font of pleasing
sound.
This is something of which I am well aware and which
ensures that, despite my readiness to give forth within the privacy of
my own four walls, I am not apt to risk upsetting the susceptibilities
of the world at large – and I am sure that many of my fellow-citizens
are equally hesitant on their own account.
I understand entirely. When it comes to communal
singing, I can be counted out, no questions asked.
If I go to church and am required to praise my Maker
in song, I sing sotto voce – so sotto that even my
immediate neighbour has not a hope of hearing the funny little groan
that I have already mentioned.
And yet Maria Callas and Katherine Jenkins have never
been known to do otherwise than come out with a belter at full blast.
Their unshakable confidence fascinates me. Even if it doesn't give me a
Robeson tingle.
John Slim
Poems that rhyme
I AM not one of Nature's protesters.
Well, not a proper protester, anyway. I may occasionally be found
shouting at the television, but as far as I am concerned, any flag or
banner wishing to progress down the street will have to make its own
way.
So it has come as a bit of surprise to me that I find
I have penned what are clearly Poems of Protest. Lots of them. It was
not until I had finished them that I realised that this was a label that
fitted them precisely. Nevertheless, this is what they are.
They have turned out to be a blast at the poetry of
today. An abortive one, because nobody is going to give a damn or take
any notice. And a blast because that is what I say every time I fall
across the stuff that purports to be modern poetry.
After all, it isn't poetry, is it? If you're
fortunate, you may find a slight trace of rhythm in it, but you have not
a hope of finding much rhyme. Today's lucky old poets are not required
to strain the brain in search of cadence while they invoke the moon and
June.
No, the general idea these days is to come up with a
chunk of prose, chop it into lines of arbitrary length, and then, if
offered the opportunity, vouchsafe it in ringing tones to the awestruck
faithful.
So I'm afraid I have gone back to basics; to adopt
the basic principles of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and the boys, who
were not afraid to put a bit of elbow grease into their assorted
creations – because as far as I am concerned, the pleasure of writing
poetry is to be found in actually having to do a bit of work.
The results of my pleasure – nearly 250 of them – are
to be found at
www.poemsthatrhyme.co.uk
Incidentally, among them is what could perhaps be the
longest poem in the world to consist of only one sentence. It is a
question that contains more than 300 words but has no room for a
question mark because when it reaches what should be the end it starts
again at the beginning. Poor old sod. Get a life.
John Slim
Pudsey, the pooch who's got
it right
I AM a soft touch for
small animals. Not for big ones, although I may sometimes be found
tentatively stroking one of those extraordinarily long noses that are
sported by the average horse.
No, I do mean small ones. For a long time, my
computer had a desktop photograph of a kitten, stage left, standing on
its hind legs with its front paws in the air, surrendering to the
revolver that was pointing at it, stage right, in the hand of someone
who was otherwise not on camera. Whenever I switched on, it was AH!
time.
But yes, they do have to be small, utterly innocent,
and supremely confident that the great big world revolves around them.
Though I fell for Uggie, the Jack Russell who had
Hollywood at his feet with The Artist, I have been impervious to
the charms of four-footed chums who have tended to be large economy size.
Lassie, the rough collie who, so many years ago, in what seemed so many
films, was prone to Come Home, failed to stir my paternal instincts.
Trigger the Wonder Horse never remotely threatened to enter the
reckoning.
But now, along comes Pudsey. He swept all before him
on Britain's Got Talent, earned his owner, 17-year old Ashleigh
Butler, half a million pounds and is now reportedly destined to follow
Uggie to Hollywood. Yes, Pudsey, to coin a phrase, pushed my buttons.
He is small, white, hairy and utterly amiable. What is sad is that although he responds with a tail-wagging flurry to the applause he so clearly deserves, he can't possibly understand what makes people think he is something special. He whizzes through a collapsible tunnel, walks on his hind legs, rolls over, rides piggy-back on Ashleigh, and seeks nothing in return but a sausage sandwich.
As far as he is concerned, he is just
a mix of border collie, bichon frise and Chinese crested
powderpuff cross and is simply enjoying himself.
And isn't he lucky? He has no forebodings about a
future that contains no applause. In designing performing animals,
Nature is more caring than in creating, say, comedians. I interviewed
the likes of Mike Yarwood, Morecambe and Wise, Les Dawson, Spike
Milligan and a string of other funnymen at the height of their careers.
Every one of them was aware that it couldn't last; that the blue skies
would not necessarily continue to be round the corner.
And a sausage sandwich.
John Slim
And it's goodbye from me
THE late Dudley Moore, at his piano keyboard,
came strangulated to the task of assuring us that now was the time to
say goodbye. The Two Ronnies used to make their farewells on the basis
of, “So it's goodbye from me,” “And it's goodbye from him.”
To which I can add only that as far as reviewing
theatre is concerned, it is goodbye from me as well. The brain cell is
not at its best. I teeter with increasing uncertainty into the foothills
of my ninth decade, newly emerging from a transient ischaemic attack –
TIA to its intimates.
A TIA always takes its unfortunate victim unawares
and in my case I had driven quite normally, six miles to Redditch on a
coldish Friday night, to collect my wife from a choral concert – only,
upon hitting this mini metropolis and national assemblage of
roundabouts, to have had no idea what I was doing there.
A TIA takes no prisoners. A soupçon of silt in
the bloodstream floats happily into the brain, cuts off the oxygen
supply and leaves the owner away with the fairies.
I have now taken a month off from driving, awaiting
any further developments. There have not been any, but nevertheless I
have at least made a contribution to achieving an ideal world for my
fellow motorists by reaching for my slippers and staying put. If I plan
to drive in future, solicitous spouse is intent on becoming my co-pilot,
ready to guide me as necessary.
It's either this or implanting a chip in my neck and
subpoenaing a satellite.
Naturally, I cannot expect her to become a groupie of
the amateur stage, especially at those rare times when it happens to be
straying from its customary pleasing standards. So reviews is orf.
I was launched into contemplating the vagaries of
unpaid thespianism by the then, and now sadly late, features editor of
The Birmingham Post in 1984. That was when the man who had been
taken on specifically to concentrate on its unpredictable world decided
to leave. I was asked to “look after it this week.”
Twenty-eight years later, 20 years after early failed
retirement, I have still been looking after it this week.
But moderation in all things. No more, if greeted at
the door by a group's front-of-house representative who asks if I have
come to do a review, will I reply, “Well, yes. I don't go anywhere for
pleasure.”
No more, when – unforgivably – further asked by the
aforesaid f.o.h.r. whether I have enjoyed my evening, will I smile
palely and swallow hard before emerging from something god-awful and do
my best to record the delights of the scenery.
Happily, the god-awful has been a rare experience. In
28 years, the amateur stage has moved up several notches. Many times, I
have seen it the equal of quality professionalism.
But now it is time to stay home at night and keep out
of the way of my fellow motorists. I shall miss my theatre friends –
some of them, very good friends. I thank them for a concern which
sometimes went beyond the call of duty. I am thinking here particularly
of a visit to Highbury Little Theatre, when I stayed in my seat for the
interval because I had just had a hip replacement – and found one such
friend making his way up the auditorium steps with a cup of tea for me.
But the time has come. This is the end of a road on which I arrived by
accident and which has given me so many hours of pleasure.
Small Thoughts, however, will remain as long
as I can continue to find my way upstairs to the computer, so I
apologise that this is not going to be the clean break for which
discriminating readers have surely been hoping.
Sorry about that. See you when Fate decrees. Small
Thoughts will struggle on. As Kayser Bondor used to say in the
1950s, always look for the label.
John Slim
Just pass me the pretty bottle
BRITAIN'S best
after-dinner speaker is Gyles Brandreth – who also just happens to know
who is Britain's most efficient raffle-ticket buyer – always provided
that efficiency is equated with sales resistance.
He names John Major, former Prime Minister – and
reveals him, moreover, as the man least likely to win a raffle – because
although he carries a pocketful of tickets, they are invariably out of
date.
It seems that the revelation came in the Commons tea
room. That was when Mr Major pulled five strips of different coloured
tickets from a jacket pocket before explaining that if he proffers a
quick flash of this delicate paperwork after entering a hall, the
privileged handful of officials and ticket-floggers who see it are apt
to assume that he has already bought them and thus exclude him from
their endeavours.
And it's true: he has already bought them –
but it was possibly quite a long time ago. The ever-buoyant Mr Brandreth
relates that raffle tickets came up for consideration when he raised the
matter of the Major routine during the J M premiership.
“There and then, he fished into his top left jacket
pocket and there were five strips of different coloured tickets. He
said, ‘As you arrive, pull out your tickets and they think: “Oh, that
nice Mr Major, he's already bought his tickets”.'
Moreover, that nice Mr Major saved his punch-line to
the end. That was when he said that he had bought the tickets in 1982.
The most fun I have had with a raffle came when I had
given a talk to a Townswomen's Guild group and was invited to draw the
raffle. I did as instructed – and drew my own ticket out of the hat. I
explained that I couldn't possibly award myself first prize, so I drew
again – and out came another of my tickets.
Again, I played the bashful bridesmaid, and again I
drew another ticket – only to confirm that for the third time I was
still destined to be the winner. Not to prolong this tale of
unaccustomed triumph, let me confess that I drew a fourth ticket – and
again I had to admit that I was the reluctant owner of the counterfoil.
In the end, a forceful Madam President insisted that
I had to carry off at least a representative sample of my spoils. It was
time to take my leave with something that was pink and liquid in a fancy
bottle.
There are occasions when I know that I am beaten.
John Slim
Hurray – it's Dinner time!
I HAVE already waxed
lyrical on discovering that The Nonentities were going to include
Don't Dress for Dinner,
the Marc Camoletti farce, as part of their season's programme.
But now, with its first night
almost upon us and without an apology in sight, here I go again.
The action pivots around two friends, Robert and
Bernard, in a plot that features a wife who is temporarily off the scene
– and a Parisian mistress. It will be in talented hands at The Rose
Theatre, Kidderminster, from April 16-21, and I have no doubt at all
that it will offer undiluted joy.
Certainly, that was what I found on the only other
occasion I have seen it, when Sutton Arts Theatre made a superb job of
presenting it, and I have no doubt that the result will be similar when
The Nonentities give it their undivided attention.
My only regret is that in 28 years of chasing
amateurs across their boards, my opportunities to see it have been so
limited.
Can it be that it appears too daunting? After all,
farce is a fearsome challenge, far more alarming than your average
thriller or domestic drama. If it is not presented with utter precision,
its helter-skelter progress is reduced to an embarrassing limp, with an
audience consulting its watches amid a cacophony of coughing.
And I'm not sticking my neck out at all when I say
there will be no such problems this time around.
I have seen it only once – a Sutton Arts Theatre
production – but I have no hesitation in pronouncing this Marc Camoletti
romp an uninhibited joy.
John Slim
Of tender love and pregnant fish
IT IS a long time since I've been called a twerp. Not that I haven't deserved to be: it's just that it's gone out of fashion as a term of innocuous derision.
So much out of fashion
that although my version of The New Collins
Concise Dictionary (1985 vintage) confides
that a twerp is a silly, weak-minded or contemptible person, my
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
(1983, with a Publisher's Note dated 1972) has never heard of it.
Twerp is
démodé.
Or is it? Google tells me that a twerp is
insignificant, contemptible, presumptuous, ridiculous.
I have always considered twerp to be a sort of
affectionate put-down, to rank with the moment, half a century ago, when
a colleague greeted me with, “What-ho, you mouldy old heap of
parrot-droppings.”
Like all my contemporaries, I was assured that I was
a twerp in about 1945. And, of course, I gave as good as I got. I was a
twerp surrounded by twerps.
But I never did manage to confirm the definition that
claimed that a twerp is a pregnant fish. And, probably like all my
contemporaries, I would never have believed, 66 years later, that 50
people had called somebody else a twerp via cyberspace in the space of
six hours.
But see how Twitter replenishes the gaps in our
education. There was the evidence! “u better not slobber on my face
2nite twerp.”
Sometimes, it's clearly
Get-off-the-fence-and-say-what-you-mean time, as with “sometimes i
really just want to smack the shit out of my twerp of a brother.”
Sometimes, we are privy to moments of expectancy,
tension and high drama – as from “chiiscake”, who confides to the world
at large: “At the dentist with the twerp...if he doesn't bite her we all
get cake!”
Sometimes, it's political, like this presumably
transatlantic one: “Labor's vision is for a world without borders, all
obedient to some twerp in Europe, the same twerps who are presently
screwing the globe.”
“The highlight of my day will have been clicking
'unlike' on Justin Bieber. . . that little twerp pisses me off.”
“lol ya how funny :) lil twerp I bigger then the both
of us now haha! I freakin loved getting those sand crabs, damn time flys.”
There's also refreshing honesty following unflinching
research: “Oxford tells me a twerp is a 'silly or annoying person',
that's me. My grandmother used to tell me I was a 'naughty twerp', must
be really bad. LOL”
As all this is the product of more than enough years
of free education, it is encouraging to see that another enquiring mind
has joined in: “Twitterers that tweet are tweeps. So what constitutes a
twit or twerp?” Alas, I did not stay glued long enough to see an answer.
But I draw encouragement from that touchingly
romantic reminder: “u better not slobber on my face 2nite twerp.”
While tender love is still in the air, can all be
lost?
John Slim
Great hopes from little
Ayckbourns don't grow
IS this a first? To find a director
registering dismay at the prospect of Alan Ayckbourn coming his way, I
mean.
John Healey's cri de coeur stems from
Bedroom Farce and the realisation that he will be guiding Moorpool
Players through it “once again.” The result will be seen at Moorpool
Hall, Harborne, from May 16-19.
Meanwhile, however, John confesses that for the
second time in as many years his ambition to stage This Happy Breed
has been thwarted by a shortage of men – and, he says, a shortage of
energy on his part to go out and find them.
He attributes this second factor as being possibly
due to his entry at the end of last year into his eighth decade. He says
this was something he wanted to keep quiet about but without going into
details he reveals that it was marked “rather appropriately and somewhat
embarrassingly” by friends, during the interval of a performance of R C
Sheriff's Journey's End at Coventry's Belgrade.
He says: “Whilst I've not yet reached my journey's
end, I doubt whether I will ever fulfil a burning ambition to stage
Sheriff's great play. I've been staging that wonderful ending in my mind
for the last 25 years – and that, I fear, is where it will stay.”
Bedroom Farce, therefore, represents
excitement's peak – but it is clear that he does not really despair of
finding some more, even now.
“There remains a possibility that there will be an
act of violence by me upon one or two actors who after many weeks are
still on books”, he says. “But of course, that will be hushed up.”
I am sure that his forebodings will prove to be
unfounded. But wouldn't it be a touch ironic if he were to be unkindly
battered by one of the books?
John Slim
Time to kick the furniture
I SUPPPOSE I began
losing a bit of faith in the intelligence of amateur theatre when I
discovered the first society chairman who had become a chair.
From that day, many years ago now, to this, I have never received an
explanation for his transmogrification.
All I know, with ever-increasing bewilderment, is
that his misfortune has spread – until now, whenever you percolate
through to the heights of an amateur theatre group, you are liable to
find you are in the furniture department.
Everywhere in thespian-land you can now find men and
women who aspire to be a chair.
Folk who declare they're a chair
Are alarmingly less and less rare.
Yet in leg-counts they score
Only two and not four,
With the pair that are there rarely square.
Yes, they have invented the two-legged chair, as
nonsensical in its yet-to-be-attained reality as it is in our
imagination. What is the matter with these people?
I can only assume it's something to do with feminism,
driven forward by women who curl up at the edges at the masculinity of
chairman but are nevertheless prone to insist that they are
actors.
It is the paradoxical manifestation of the
politically correct by the pointedly imperfect.
Clearly, these are women who have no idea which way
they are going. In fact, they don't know whether they are coming or
going.
Nevertheless, these are “actors” who would rather be
a chair than a chairman. However, pausing only to be actors of course,
they are otherwise impelled to renounce all things male, at any price.
Heaven knows what they think of mankind. If their influence
grows, I suppose the day will come when we are all subsumed into
personkind – at least until the sisterhood realises that there are
three very masculine letters slap bang in the middle.
Some years ago, a London newspaper got as far as
revealing that its style book contained a page on which this occurred:
With political correctness on the march, a
disbelieving director told me that he could not possibly cast an
excellent black member of his company as a maid because of the affront
it would cause to politically correct history-benders.
Never mind that in America there was a
well-established tendency for maids to be black, we're also bothered
these days by deluded militants who are even trying to airbrush the
Holocaust – by and large, the all-sapient noise-makers who weren't even
on the planet when the Holocaust happened and who can therefore give
imagination its head without let, hindrance or bothering their brain..
In such a context, a director's forebodings about
casting a black maid are apt to, er, pale into insignificance.
Nevertheless, if black housemaids, like the Holocaust, are supposed to
have become invisible, it's time to say enough is enough.
Henry Ford may well have insisted that history is
bunk, but there is no need for us to support his worst suspicions.
John Slim
Living it large at Mudeford
Spit
YES, we do like to be beside the seaside – but do we like to be there sufficiently to buy a wooden beach-hut just 13ft by 12ft? For £126,000?
With a further £2,500 a year
ground rent because somebody else presumably owns the bit of beach that
it sits on at Mudeford Spit, near Christchurch, Dorset? (And how did
that happen?)
Undoubtedly, somebody, somewhere, is totally
enamoured, which is why it recently went on offer to the world at large
– and may, indeed, already have become somebody else's bargain of the
year.
It became a bargain, moreover, accessible only by a
small ferry, a long walk or a “Noddy” train – with neither the ferry nor
the train running on weekdays in the winter and your feet standing in as
transport without the option.
So it's pretty remote and it's doing its best to be
inaccessible – although it seems that the estate agents who are looking
to its future say that it is its remoteness that makes both the hut and
its surroundings as desirable as the rest of us can only imagine they
must be.
Especially as it does not have a toilet and it shares
a shower block. Its water comes from a standpipe and it has not extended
itself to offer central heating, which means it is especially Spartan
from November to February.
On the other hand, if up to four people decide to
spurn both the comforts of home and of neighbouring hotels, it offers
them a gas cooker and a gas-powered fridge, and its roof sports solar
panels to keep anybody beneath it in touch with newfangled excitements
like electricity. And at least you can sit there and look at the Isle of
Wight and try to forget that your hut is bright yellow.
Many, many years ago, I saw a play that was set on a
beach. Whether or not it sported a wooden hut is a detail that has
disappeared in the mists of time – but if it did, then I have to say
that a pretend beach hut viewed from about six rows back in a
comfortable auditorium is just about as far as I fancy going
Nevertheless, the offer for a real one was there and I'm sure it was a lure that proved irresistible to somebody with £126,000-plus to spare and the possibility of being an Englishman whose castle is a wooden hut if the weather warms up. We are a wonderful people.
John Slim
Put a sock in it, my dear
WHENEVER, in my
absence, my wife tells friends about my special relationship with socks,
I learn that they respond with joy uninhibited and whoops of disbelief.
Well, perhaps not, but it is clear that they are
delighted to have been let in on what they obviously regard as my silly
little secret.
I have never been present at one of these moments of
enlightenment, but I don't care. In the matter of ankle-wear, I
habitually take a decisive step to ensure that I am never one sock short
of a warm foot.
This is me, being practical – a circumstance so rare
in any other of my life's sundry little spheres that I have no intention
of abandoning it. Indeed, I am at a loss to understand why, instead of
being mocked by my fellow-men, I am not hailed as a help to hosiery and
a suspender-like support for socks in general.
I had noticed, you see, that my socks have a will of
their own. They began, with bewildering frequency, going into the
washing machine two-by-two, but coming out with their numbers down to
half-strength.
There appeared to be no way to discover how one or
other of any pair was able to achieve this intriguing but irritating
disappearing trick, so I had to abandon any pretence of an investigation
and resort instead to trying to put a stop to it.
Enter the safety pin.
It is the safety pin that reduces my detractors to
genial good cheer – and gratitude that they have been allowed to hear
how I have cracked a problem from which nobody else seems to suffer.
They do, nevertheless, think it hilarious.
My solution is simple and has proved to be 100 per
cent effective. Safety pin in one hand and a pair of socks in the other,
I harpoon the knitwear with one sharp thrust before clipping two socks
into captivity. Done!
True, this means that I can now lose two socks
instead of one, but nevertheless it makes me feel very efficient and
quite ridiculously happy. I am a man on top of inanimate objects. I am
showing them who's boss.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why, on being
allowed to catch up with the news of my startling efficiency, every
successive small audience has collapsed into gales of merriment.
Suddenly, I am its built-in eccentric.
I must ask my wife to curb the urge to spread the
news of my prowess. Er, yes, to put a sock in it.
John Slim
Come the new Dawns
A BOTTOM is a singular
thing. Singular, that is, strange; and singular in that nobody has more
than one of it.
But it has only just occurred
to me that while a bottom is a bottom, the average bottom is habitually
squeezed into a wide variety of enclosures, every one of them with its
own distinguishing name. There's a singular plurality of
bottom-wrappings.
There are trousers, slacks and shorts. . .
There are breeches, jodhpurs, pants and knickers. . .
There are panties and smalls. . .
There are kecks (to quote a usually-reliable Scouse
informant) and leggings. . .
There are briefs. . .
. . . and probably many more, but I am by no means as well prepared as my man from Liverpool for any discussion of fashion's what's what below the waistline.
And in any case, all this is distracting me from my
intended theme, which is not so much today's accepted apparel as the
occasional rear-view enormity that it is supposed to cover.
Both sexes can be demonstrably big on backsides, but
somehow it is the frail and gentle sex that most reliably catches the
bemused eye. It galumphs along the high street, pursued by a
lifting-bumping-grinding action that is clearly intended to defy
description.
Not that it needs describing. There can be few
citizens who have not at some time found themselves following it along
the pavement – and, I hope, shedding the tear of silent sympathy for an
owner whom it is otherwise all too easy to mock.
I am not mocking. As one who has lately fallen
unexpectedly prone, at any hour, to an apparently unstoppable
susceptibility to the strawberry jam sandwich, I am in no position to
point the accusing finger as I await the day when indulgence catches up.
It is just that it has occurred to me that although
large-economy-size backsides come both male and female, it is
customarily those belonging to the gentle sex that are both more
eye-catching and more common. Somehow, we mere males do not seem to be
as well-equipped to reproduce the ponderous inevitability of large
ladies in motion – particularly when their choice of leg-wear is doing
them no favours.
They are far too apt to encase their lower quarters
in leggings, which produce a horizontal demarcation line between their
shuddering glutinus maximus and the tree-trunk thighs that are
required somehow to support it. There's a sort of hypnotic
counter-rotating implacability about them.
These are ladies who are underlining their problem,
as if they are ladies who don't care.
Perhaps they don't. But perhaps, if they do, they
will seek inspiration from the bubbly-indefatigable and stones-shedding
Dawn French, actress and comedienne who is suddenly not so comely
because she did care. And probably not so suddenly, either. She's
clearly been working hard for a long time.
I don't suppose she was thinking of inspiring
anybody, but I'm sure she must have done. Only time will tell. Only time
can produce the hour-glass figure – which, thanks to the impish words
that are always in charge of us, cannot help being a waist of time.
John Slim
Is it nearly knee-knee time?
I SEE that a well-known
watering-hole of the intelligentsia, the House of Commons Strangers'
Bar, was the venue for a fracas involving three gentlemen who are
customarily handily placed to enjoy its amenities.
One of them agreed in court
that he had butted the other two.
Except that, this is not how the newspapers saw it.
The tale in the London press is that he head-butted them, as if
readers cannot be trusted to work out for themselves what was the
favoured instrument of a butt-style attack.
Where did this particular example of lamentable
linguistics come from? Who started it?
Your average unassuming goat, long recognised for its
tendency to deploy its head when upset beyond endurance, is perfectly
happy just to butt. It trusts us to work out that on such occasions it
is the head that is to the fore. But for no good reason, when homo
sapiens goes head-to-head, he head-butts.
It is time to fear that there may be far-reaching
developments of this intriguing trend.
Meanwhile, the gentleman who had drunk a bottle of
red wine before making himself a violent nuisance has been described in
the London press as having “nutted” two Conservatives. He has now
embarked on a 12-month community punishment, been barred from all pubs
for three months, banned from travelling abroad other than on
Parliamentary business and ordered to pay a £3,000 fine and £1,400 in
compensation to his victims.
In the wake of his tsunami of excitement, the rest of
us are left to assume that anyone who “nuts” someone else is presumably
and obviously a nutter.
John Slim
Dictionaries? Words fail
me
WELL, there's a
surprise! Terry Wogan, knight of the realm, professional Irishman
and amiability to his fingertips, thinks that QE is an acronym.
Moreover, he is not keeping
this unexpected credo
to himself. He has clearly been harbouring it for years, but now he has
suddenly shared his secret with the masses.
He therefore joins the dozens of Britain's
journalists, for whom words are their job, who are similarly so positive
in revealing their sureness in uncertainty. Oh, the shame of it.
The problem is that they have all somehow got it into
their heads that any group of initials is an acronym. Perhaps they
learned it at school from a teacher who also did not know what an
acronym is – who cn say? But in any case, it is a bit of an eye-opener
to discover that the witty-wise Sir Terry is with them all the way.
He bestowed the title on QE, which, in the course of
his weekly column in a Sunday newspaper, he said “used to be known as an
acronym for a cruise ship.” The newspaper, a respected heavyweight, has
clearly been economising on sub-editors and therefore had no one to
protect him from himself, even if the missing sub-editors had happened
to know what an acronym is – and I'm afraid that would be a long shot
these days.
Alas, whisper it not, QE has never been an acronym
for anything. QE is just plain old initials – two-thirds of the sign-off
line I used to see, as a bemused 14-year-old, at the end of a geometry
theorem short form for Quod erat demonstrandum, – and all the
special pleading in the world won't get it promotion.
The wartime Pipe Line Under the Ocean is an acronym,
PLUTO to its mates – though I suppose that the particularly pernickety
could have problems with this, on the grounds that Pluto is a name,
rather than a plain old ornery word.
The same applies to LAOS, which means the Leeds
Amateur Operatic Society for people in a hurry who are unconcerned with
Asia. Still, it's the best I can come up with at the moment. These
things have not yet been found to grow on trees. Apples yes, acronyms
no.
But it's odd, this collective uncertainty about
language, our most important means of communication.
And how deep does the malaise go? My venerable but
strangely undated edition of The New Collins Concise Dictionary
says that an acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a
group of words – which is all fine and dandy. But then it cites UNESCO,
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, as
an example – when, alas, UNESCO is not a word.
Clearly , while some of its
readers do not know what an acronym is, Collins does not know what a
word is – any more than the rest of us know what words
mean, let alone how to pronounce them.
Moreover, while Collins cannot recognise a non-word
when it sees one, the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
had never heard of acronym when it was published in 1983. With one giant
stride for mankind, it leaps from achronychal to acrook,
which have both just been underlined in red because my computer has
never heard of them either.
As far as pronunciation is concerned, the most
insistent evidence of problems in 2012 will inevitably be jubilee,
which is all Her Majesty's fault, because she has spent 60 years
building up to it. Its accent is on the first syllable, giving it
a cadence that matches comedy, but generally speaking our
broadcasters and betters – and they are generally speaking –
insist on jubiLEE, and there's nothing remotely comedic in that.
Integral is always liable to defeat them as
well, rather like REEsearch, which represents their insistent
grovelling to America – where, as Lerner and Loewe perceptively point
out in My Fair Lady, nobody has used English for years.
Inevitably, I suppose, lexicographers will eventually
bow their collective beans to the weight of popular ignorance, and
dictionaries will start ignoring excesses of this kind and wave them on
their way. Dictionaries are supposed to help us, to instruct us. When
did pandering become the vogue?
I suppose it could all be part of Nanny State's
over-arching insistence on looking after us unnecessarily. I reckon it's
time to call a halt.
John Slim
Challenging times for Wossy
WELL, hooray! We've
survived February, the month that so many people can't pronounce, and
we're almost on the home straight to Jubilee (the event that so many
people can't pronounce).
February, for many people, is Febry. And it has
passed, yet again, without my discovering how Jonathan Ross (“Wossy”)
tackles it. All these years! Perhaps he never says it, because he
suffers from rhotacism, defined as the idiosyncratic pronunciation of R,
which means he can't manage to put the label on his misfortune, either.
Many people fail to say February because they give it
one R instead of two and make it Febry. Wossy has never been known to
give even one R to anything, so he really hasn't a hope with a month
that doubles the challenge.
Meanwhile, I have never heard him tackle Jubilee,
which on the evidence to date threatens to be the year's most
insurmountable word for broadcasters as a class. Many of them just can't
get their larynxes round it. (And the alternative plural of larynx
is larynges, by the way. Not many people know that,
and I've only just found out).
It's getting jubilee's accent right that's
their problem, although it should be straightforward enough. Its rhythm
is the same as comedy, with the stress on its first syllable, but
our betters at the Beeb are apt to ignore the first one, skip lightly
over the middle one and give us an inexplicable EEE! for the
third. What are they playing at, these people for whom words are their
job?
It's wouldn't-pay-ۥem-in-washers
time again.
They are also liable to be caught at full throttle in
teenspeak, saying like I said. It isn't like they said, any more
than it's like a Volkswagen. As a rule, it's precisely what they
said, as they could have made clear by substituting as for what
has become a grossly overused and misused word. Like is a
teenage tack-on when they can't think what to say but can't stop
talking.
And I recently caught another ignoramus who was going
“to lay prostrate to Angelina Jolie's Cleopatra.” He meant he was going
to lie, meaning lie down rather than fib about it – but lie is
another word that's being hounded into extinction while we try to lay
prostrate faster than a hen can lay an egg.
Sorry. I'm getting carried away again. I shall shut
up before I'm carried away.
John Slim
Hair–
gone today, remembered yesterday
I READ with interest
and a sudden spark of memory that the national tour of
Hair
has been called off.
The prime mover in the
reasoning that has led to the fact that
Hair will not be moving at all is our old
enemy – Money. Money, that is, or the lack of it.
Hair's latest venture, starring Gareth Gates,
was due to open at the Liverpool Empire in April and continue around the
country until the middle of July. Alas, not any more it isn't. The
producers have filed for bankruptcy. Hair may be Hair
today but it will certainly be gone tomorrow.
“The producers of the tour of Hair have filed
for bankruptcy and cancelled the tour.” Fifteen words have scuppered a
revival and reminded me of the problems I encountered while trying to
see the show, sometime back in the 1960s.
That was the period when I was spending my days doing
my bit in the then pristine emporium of the Birmingham Post & Mail in
Colmore Circus, and my evenings, very frequently, casting an eye on
theatre productions around the region
So it came about that I was destined to see Hair
at Wolverhampton's Grand Theatre. I don't know what year it was, but the
date was April 3, which I have managed to remember because it was a
now-distant wedding anniversary. I was destined to watch it with my
wife, who was travelling to
It was, alas, Best-Laid-Plans time; a time for mice and men to stand back while the world demonstrated that it is ever-liable to gang aft agley. Alas, it was not yet time for the mobile phone.
TENDER MERCIES
So it came about that at some point on the M6 I was
to be found entrusting myself and my car to the tender mercies of the
RAC, having availed myself of a telephone on the hard shoulder and
persuaded that admirable organisation not only to find me and my
suddenly immobile car but to get a message to the theatre for my wife,
who was going to be found waiting, all unsuspecting, in the dress
circle.
Long story cut short and all that: I eventually
subsided into my seat ten minutes before the final curtain and destined
immediately thereafter to telephone a review from the kiosk which is
probably no longer just outside the theatre.
Desperate times, desperate measures. On reaching the
sanctuary of my seat, I whispered a vital question to the young woman
who had been awaiting my arrival ever since she had received the message
to say that it was not imminent.
“What's it like?” I hissed.
“Bloody awful”, she replied. (She couldn't hiss
back, because she was short of sibilants, but I got her drift).
Her assessment, coupled with my own ten minutes'
viewing, was the basis on which I telephoned the 250 words for which
next morning's Post was impatiently agog.
I think that was quite a feat. Can't think why I
haven't told anybody until now.
John Slim
A note on the nether
regions
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 day.
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
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, 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?)
And 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 thus 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 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. So 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 that
of their outer coverings, should have any place onstage. Then there
might just be the chance, if their owner happened to have afforded them
the opportunity to peep out of their vertical window, that perhaps 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 – not necessarily onstage – in these enlightened days, and turned
up knickerless or whatever is the male equivalent.
That would really give the director cause for
talk at the, er, debriefing.
Incidentally, when I mentioned the director making
himself useful just now, my know-it-all computer rebuked me by
underlining himself, to make sure I knew I had made an unseemly
mistake. So, just to confirm that it was being as stupid as it seemed to
be, I replaced himself with themselves. – and saw it
accepted without question.
The director, singular, was required to be burdened
with a plural pronoun. I know it's an everyday error on radio,
television and in common speech, but I want no part of it. Honest!
John Slim
The importance of the
reporter
WHY do so many of Britain's diminishing breed
of paper-printed journals precede an interview by indicating that the
reporter is more important than the subject of the interview?
A recent magazine cover proclaimed that a woman
journalist talks to Jilly Cooper. Inside, clearly facing an
understandable lack of faith in what is left of my memory, I was again
informed that the same woman talks to Jilly Cooper.
In both cases, my appetite would have been rather
more whetted if I had discovered that it was Jilly Cooper who was doing
the talking. Apart
But no, I was up against the daily aberration of journalistic self-importance – and to make things worse, the interview itself was a total turn-off. Question, answer, question, answer.
No indication that the journalist might have been
This was an opportunity thrown away. What a shame.
I think we should be told.
John Slim
Back to back to backwards
IT is only fairly
recently that I have been aware of people saying
back to back
when they mean either successive
or in
succession.
Why do they do these things?
I know that we have a living language, but at least
the changes we inflict upon it ought to be important, rather than
inexplicable. This one is the latest irritant to have leapt at me,
mainly from my television set, mainly from football commentators. It
does not represent progress. This is back to back to backwards.
Unnecessary. Absurd.
And anyway, how can things be in succession if they
are back to back? If you're back to back, neither follows the other. You
move in opposite directions. Why don't commentators understand? What's
their problem?
All right, I know we say that a cow is in calf when
we mean that a calf is in cow, but why do we say more importantly
when we are comparing what we are about to say with what we have just
said – and when what we should say is more important? More
important, that is, than what we have just said.
It's an adjective, not an adverb. It's an adjective
describing something that is about to come. But no, the in thing these
days for the overpaid ignoramuses on television and radio is to say
more importantly.
The occasional playwright does it as well, and
hapless actors voice it for him. These people add two incorrect letters
onto important, almost as if this makes the word, and by
inference themselves, more important.
It's one of the odder aberrations they inflict on the
rest of us.
And when I just said comparing and followed it
with with, that was because I was underlining the difference
between two things. That's what the with means – but time after
time we hear compare to when a speaker tries to express just such
a difference.
Compare to means liken to, as
Shakespeare knew when he asked, Shall I compare thee to a summer's
day? Compare with means contrast with. It's quite different,
quite straightforward and quite simple, but again it appears to be
beyond our broadcasting betters.
A more recent nonsense is with regards to.
With regards to? With regards to whom? Auntie Jane?
What are they on about? It is only comparatively
recently that somebody first tacked an S onto regard in this
particular phrase, but now there are increasing legions of language-manglers
at it.
With regards to is already a well-established
ploy in the world of letter-writing. It's a letter-writing sign-off that
speaks of affection for a third party and it does it concisely and very
well. What it does not mean is that another subject is about to come up
for consideration, which is the meaning of with regard to, which
it is now being so determinedly made to usurp.
I hope somebody finds another name for English when
we've destroyed it.
John Slim
Amateur: say it with pride
THERE'S a theatre word
that should particularly interest a lexicographer.
Amateur.
It has such disparate meanings.
The pleasant meaning is
applied to someone who performs without payment. The not-so-pleasant
version is apt to be spoken with ill-disguised contempt, either by
theatregoers who would not dream of darkening the doorstep of an
amateur production or by a professional who considers himself to be
beyond and far above such a label and is trying to forget that that is
how he started.
These are the lofty lip-curlers who for no good reason other than ignorance have self-elevated to higher climes. The professional amnesiac should be ashamed of himself.
Even if he went to drama school, he probably also did
a stint in which village hall productions were the order of the day and
they taught him a lot if he was intelligent enough to assimilate it.
Representing the other wing of the attack upon
amateurs is the theatregoer who is accustomed only to plush seats. He
has probably never seen an amateur production, let alone taken part in
one; never seen loyal group members tidying away the chairs at the
closing of the curtains. He has no idea of the heights to which amateurs
can soar, nor of the impressive sound and lighting effects that
frequently accompany their ventures.
His contempt may be likened to the tale that
Shakespeare would have recognised as being told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury and signifying nothing. He squawks the squawk but has
never walked the walk; never bought a ticket at the temporary box
office, let alone participated in an amateur production.
His ignorance ensures that he has no idea that
there are still places where being an amateur is rightly a matter of
pride. As far as I have been able to ascertain, they are largely in the
North of England where amateur groups do not hesitate to include the
word in their name. Leeds Amateur Operatic Society is one of them.
Its productions at the West Yorkshire Playhouse have a quality that
explains why amateur is worn as a badge of honour.
Its members don't give a damn that amateur
invests their group with an acronym that has overtones of south-east
Even so, wherever amateur is invoked, its
frequent effect is to lengthen the label – unnecessarily. Most patrons
know that they are seeing an amateur production, and there is a
requirement – admittedly, largely ignored – that publicity should
include the words an amateur production.
Not necessary. Though classification may be rather
more difficult with a large-scale amateur production in a big theatre, a
village hall audience knows all too well that those who are entertaining
it are not being paid for their pains – quite apart from the
circumstance of having friends in the cast and being invited to buy
raffle tickets in the foyer.
There is plenty of room for pride in being an
amateur. Long may this continue. There is also plenty of reason for
ensuring that the scoffers are shown the error of their ways – by being
dragged screaming, if necessary, to one of the many productions which
every year underline the quality that is taken for granted by those who
are not stupid enough to condemn without sampling.
John Slim
A busy time for teeth and axes
MODERN music stirs
little response in me, apart from the intermittent moment when I am
moved to wonder why it contains so little that is in any danger of being
described as musical.
I am the one who is wont to wander about the house,
appalling my wife with my individual but not-very-tuneful renderings of
Slow Boat to China and Right, Said Fred. This, I should
explain, is the same wife who is unable to resist the temptation
to urge me to try to forget Over the Hill and Faraway Places.
So two of Worcestershire's theatres were in with a
pretty good chance of persuading me to sit up and take notice when I
realised that they are about to begin luring the patrons with reminders
of what was going on in the1960s and1980s.
On Thursday, March 1, the Forum Theatre, Malvern,
presents The Tremeloes, Herman's Hermits, The Union Gap and
The Dreamers – they who were originally led by the late Freddie Garrity
– in an evening labelled The Sensational 60s Experience.
And a week later, on March 8, Worcester's Swan
Theatre comes up with a spot of non-musical nostalgia in the form of
Phil Cool. Remember the man with the rubber face? The man who, in the
1980s, changed in an instant from Bill Clinton to George Bush to Tony
Blair to Gordon Brown to Bugs Bunny?
One of his impressionist successors, Alistair
McGowan, says it was seeing Cool that prompted him to do impressions.
Another, Jon Culshaw, is grateful that he made him miss his A-level
homework.
Sadly, although Cool must clearly be credited with
unplanned involvement in encouraging Messrs Culshaw and McG to fly the
impressionist flag, he himself is no longer seen on television – and he
reckons it is because he is now in his mid-sixties and realises he must
be up against the ageism for which the BBC is famed and repeatedly
reviled.
I know that nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I
also realise that I am not the only viewer who is glad that axe-grinding
and the gnashing of teeth will never go out of fashion – because they
are needed more than ever, now that television so often prompts the
feeling that it has no intention of showing how successfully bygone
glories compare with the often fleeting triumphs of latter-day
wonderkids.
John Slim
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.