Lockdown Library

“‘So, Inspector, you can see, the only person who could have done all these murders is the man sitting over there’. So saying, Johnny Oxford pointed his finger at…’Men are you skinny? Do you have sand kicked in your face?’ Wait a minute, that’s not right! There’s a page missing! The last page is missing!” – From The Missing Page by Ray Galton & Alan Simpson

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favourite episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour is The Missing Page. Having borrowed Lady Don’t Fall Backwards by Darcy Sarto from his local library, Hancock is incensed to find that the last page is missing…or so he thinks. It turns out that the author died before finishing the book, which has been published without a last page (hence it skips to the Charles Atlas advert). Frustrated by his experience, Hancock abandons books and the library in favour of a new hobby, the gramophone, which would have suited him now, what with the libraries being closed.

 

The announcement last week (23^rd June 2020) that lockdown restrictions are being eased from 4^th July means that libraries can re-open from that date. Whether they do so or not, and what services they will provide will depend on local councils. Some libraries have been offering limited services during lockdown, legislation having allowed “digital library services and those where orders are taken electronically, by telephone or by post (for example no-contact Home Library Services)” and it has been the digital services that I have been using.

 

I have never been much of a library user, but I have borrowed more books during lockdown (three) than I had during the previous forty years. I rejoined the local library last year after several decades away, and started browsing the website to see what ebooks were available. Like millions of other people, I have mostly read books on my Kindle for the last twelve years, and even if it had been possible to go and borrow a physical book from my local library, I would still have preferred to borrow an ebook.

 

Borrowing an ebook ought to be pretty straightforward; download the library’s app on a phone or tablet, find a book, download it and read it. Not quite. There are four apps used by my local library; BorrowBox, Libby, RBdigital, and Overdrive: as yet I’ve not worked out why there are four, but there are. I’d guess that the reason is that different apps offer different functionality and different user experiences, and that no one app delivers all of the required services. This may be due to licencing issues, file formats, system compatibilities and the usual fact that as new services and functionality come along, it’s sometimes easier for developers to come up with a new app rather than trying to shoehorn it into an existing one.

 

For instance, in addition to books, RBdigital has a wide range of magazines and comics that can be borrowed (696 magazine titles, and 1,508 comics, ranging from The Economist to Spiderman). But a book that I have borrowed using the library website, and read using Overdrive, does not return any result when searched for on RBdigital. The magazines that are on RBdigital are not on the other apps, nor the library website. It’s slightly frustrating, and the part of me that used to test things like this for a living has an urge to start writing some test scripts to get to the bottom of which app does what. Fortunately, I have managed to supress that urge!

 

When lockdown started, I decided that I did not want to read books with a contemporary setting, but rather historical stuff, or books set in a slightly off-kilter version of today; escapism rather than gritty realism. I mostly read books on my Kindle, but a friend lent me three paperbacks back in March, which I have read in the last few weeks (well, two of them; one - With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynn Truss - proved to be too over-written, too annoying, and too cliched for me to be able to plough through it). Of the others, Ben Elton’s The First Casualty was hugely enjoyable, if a little predictable in places.

 

One book that I bought and read on my Kindle was Dissolution, the only book in the Shardlake series by CJ Sansom that I had not yet read. Dissolution is the first in the series, and Shardlake was markedly different compared with later books, in which his character had clearly and realistically aged and evolved.

 

Then I remembered another series of stories, one or two of which I had read years ago, about the slightly oddball detectives Bryant & May, of whom Christopher Fowler has written fifteen novels. Deciding to start with Bryant & May’s first case, I bought and read Full Dark House, but having decided to read some more in the series, it occurred to me that rather than buy, why not borrow? The second book in the series – The Water Room – was not available to borrow from the library (just like physical books, there’s a finite number of copies of ebooks, defined by the number of licences purchased by the library, I assume), so I skipped to the third, Seventy-Seven Clocks.

 

I wanted to borrow The Second Sleep by Robert Harris because I’d read some reviews and been intrigued. The reviews were mixed – disappointment with the ending being the main criticism – but I’ve generally enjoyed Harris’s books in the past (Fatherland is a masterpiece, for example) and wanted to make up my own mind. Sadly, the library’s copy was out, so I bought it on my Kindle, and thoroughly enjoyed it, although I’d agree with those who thought that the ending was a bit of a let-down. What did surprise me was that in none of the reviews that I’d read did anyone acknowledge the debt it clearly owes to Walter M Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz.

 

Next on my reading list is a revisit to Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, a mash-up of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. I must have read it a year or so after it first came out, as whenever I think of it I’m taken back to the staff room at Midland Bank in Gants Hill – where I started work in 1976, the year the book was published – reading it while eating a crusty cheese roll from Barton’s The Bakers that I’d bought for my lunch. Odd, how memory works.

 

Boycott!

Until protesters dumped his statue in Bristol Harbour, the name Edward Colston meant nothing to me. I now know that the man donated large sums to worthy causes in Bristol, founded two almshouses and a school, gave money to other schools, churches and hospitals, and that Bristol’s largest concert hall was named after him. I also now know that Colston – who was MP for Bristol between 1710 and 1723 – was heavily involved in the slave trade, having been Deputy Governor of the Royal African Company, which transported approximately 212,000 slaves from Africa to the Caribbean between 1662 and 1731, of whom 44,000 died en route.

 

In all, Britain transported and enslaved an estimated 3 million people from Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair apologised for Britain’s association with the slave trade: “I have said we are sorry and I say it again … [It is important] to remember what happened in the past, to condemn it and say why it was entirely unacceptable,” he said after meeting Ghana President John Agyekum Kufuor on 14 March.

 

Words are cheap, but when Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1835, the government stumped up £20million (the equivalent of more than £300billion today) in reparations. The loan that the government took out to do so was so large, it wasn’t paid off until 2015, meaning that descendants of those very slaves were paying off the government’s debt through their taxes. This would be bad enough had the reparations been paid to the slaves themselves, but they were not, they were paid to the owners, in compensation for their ‘loss.’ And the slaves themselves were not made free until 1838; during the intervening years, they continued to work without pay.

 

The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, the daubing of the word ‘Racist’ on the figure of Winston Churchill recently, and the furore over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College have been controversial. Applying today’s morals and ethics to Britain’s actions in the past is contentious, especially with regard to slavery, since the practice has existed for millennia. It pre-dates written history and was commonplace among many civilisations: Ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Akkadian Empire, Assyria, Babylonia, ancient Iran, ancient Greece, ancient India, the Roman Empire, the Arab Islamic Caliphate and Sultanate, Nubia and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, to name but a few. Britain, however was responsible for it on an industrial scale.

 

While we rightly look at historic slavery, and especially Britain’s part in it, with abhorrence, it is easy to neglect the fact that slavery exists - thrives even – in the 21^st century. According to the International Labour Organisation, over 40 million people are in some form of slavery today, and almost all of us support such slavery, no matter how unwittingly. Chocolate, which many of us consume as a treat, or from habit, is built on slavery. According to The Byline Times, a 2015 US Labour Department report revealed that more than 2 million enslaved children were engaged in dangerous labour in cocoa-growing regions, of whom 1.8 million work on the cocoa farms of Ghana and the Ivory Coast. (https://bylinetimes.com/2020/06/24/the-toxic-ingredient-in-chocolate-child-slavery/)

 

In the war against slavery, a boycott of brands such as Hershey, Nestlé, Godiva, and Mars might be more significant than removing statues and renaming things. Except boycotts rarely seem effective, especially in the short term, and quite often hit the wrong targets.

 

With the Government’s decision to further ease lockdown by allowing pubs to re-open from 4^th July, there have been calls for drinkers to boycott Wetherspoons. Before lockdown, Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin was calling for pubs to be allowed to stay open on the spurious grounds that there had “hardly been any” transmission of coronavirus in pubs. When pubs were closed on 20^th March, Martin initially said that he would not pay his staff, suggesting they go and get jobs in supermarkets instead. He also said that he would not pay suppliers for March invoices until the pubs reopened. Much public criticism followed, persuading him to reverse his decision and pay staff and suppliers.

 

Despite Martin’s change of heart, calls for a boycott of his pubs remain, but such action would likely hit Wetherspoons staff even harder than Martin himself. That tends to be how boycotts work, with the presumed ultimate goal of the action – forcing the company out of business, or at least driving down their profits – hurting workers harder than bosses and owners. And if we boycott Wetherspoons, how many other companies are there out there whose actions – historically, or more recent – mean we should boycott them? The Guardian, who were founded by John Edward Taylor on the back of profits made from the slave trade? Or Lloyds of London, or Greene King the brewers, who were both also involved in the slave trade? Or Barclays Bank, whose links with South Africa supported apartheid? Or Shell, for similar reasons? Or Hugo Boss, and Mercedes Benz for their links with Nazi Germany? Or Amazon, or Caffe Nero, who pay little or no UK tax?

Calls to boycott Wetherspoons pubs would harm staff more than owner.

 

It is probably possible to make a case for boycotting just about every major company for one reason or another. How should we choose, indeed is it morally right to choose, or is picking and choosing which to boycott as hypocritical and indefensible as being a vegetarian who shuns beef and chicken, but eats pork and lamb?

 

If there’s a more legitimate reason for avoiding Wetherspoons on 4^th July, it’s one that applies equally to every other pub in the country that intends opening on that day. In fact, there are a number of reasons, some of which would apply even if coronavirus had been completely eradicated, and the pubs were reopening exactly as they functioned before they were forced to close.

 

Reopening pubs on a Saturday, after 14 weeks of closure, is reckless, especially as the weather has been so fine and is likely to remain so. The demand for a nice cold pint is likely to far outstrip the supply of spaces in the pubs that are able to reopen (some pubs, like The Nutshell in Bury St Edmonds, which is the UK’s smallest, will not be able to meet the new restrictions and have decided that they cannot reopen). Pubs will have to limit the number of customers they can admit, and unlike supermarkets, where there is a constant stream of customers leaving, those waiting outside will have their patience tested while they wait for a ‘one-in, one-out’ policy to free up a space for them.

 

The Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds will not be opening on 4th July.

Even without the restrictions with which they will reopen, going to a pub on 4^th July may not be the most relaxing or enjoyable of experiences. Police recognise that Saturdays are when they are more likely to be called to pubs to deal with incidents of disorder than any other day of the week, hence the concerns raised by a number of senior police officers, including the president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths, who would have preferred a “soft launch” on a Monday or weekday. Frankly, it’s difficult to disagree.

 

Quoted in The i newspaper, Steven Alton, chief executive of the British Institute of Innkeeping, said that pubs should not have to meet stricter requirements than other businesses where people might mingle, such as clothes shops. He might have a point if Next, or Miss Selfridge, or Primark had a bar, but they don’t. Adding alcohol to an environment where people are being asked to socially distance and tolerate restrictions on how they would normally behave would be an interesting experiment under any circumstance, with coronavirus still in circulation it will redefine ‘interesting.’

Behind the Mask

On Monday 15^th June 2020, the shops began re-opening across England. For eighty-three days, shoppers had been confined to the supermarkets, DIY stores, and a few other, small, selected shops, most selling food.

Speaking the day before the re-opening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had expressed optimism, saying "People should shop, and shop with confidence but they should, of course, observe the rules on social distancing as well.”

With the prospect of the doors to Primark, Sports Direct, TK Maxx, and Debenhams et al re-opening, queues inevitably formed. Just as inevitably, many other people took to social media to huff, puff, and generally tut-tut at the queueing shoppers.

An orderly queue as shoppers wait to get into Primark.

 

A less orderly queue at Nike Town

Pictures that appeared in the media and on social media suggested that the practice of social distancing was inconsistent. Shoppers queuing outside some branches of Primark seemed to be conforming, outside Nike Town, not so much. At Bicester Village, an outlet shopping centre in Oxfordshire, any pretence of social distancing seemed to have been forsaken completely.

Bicester Village: Big crowds and no social distancing prompted calls for the shopping outlet to be closed.

 

In pictures from Monday, some shoppers are seen wearing masks, and on the same day that the shops re-opened, the wearing of face coverings on public transport became mandatory, but – in England at least – there are no overarching rules on what sort of masks or coverings should be worn, or where, although there are suggestions. When I have been to the supermarket – I’ve rarely been to any other type of shop since lockdown – I’ve seen people wearing the whole gamut of coverings, from home-made coverings clearly fashioned from an old t-shirt to masks that wouldn’t look out of place paired with a full Hazmat suit. So far, I’ve not worn a mask to Tesco (or anywhere else for that matter), although I’d be more than happy to if it became either mandatory or simply strongly recommended. I’m perfectly happy to wear one if I use public transport or go anywhere that requires me to as a condition of entry.

Not everyone is happy about wearing masks, though. In Orange County, California, masks have polarised opinions to the extent that there have been protests in support of wearing them - and against wearing them.[1] Last month, Dr Nichole Quick – who was then county health office – issued an order requiring residents and visitors to Orange County to wear face coverings while in a public place, at work or visiting a business where they are unable to stay six feet apart. Dr Quick subsequently resigned after receiving threats; her replacement subsequently made the mask wearing requirement voluntary, rather than mandatory.

Opposition to wearing masks or other coverings seems principally to come in two forms. Some people claim that they are unsafe inasmuch as they reduce oxygen levels (consequently causing co2 inhalation), which must come as something of a surprise to doctors, dentists, surgeons, and other health care professionals, who have worn masks for extended periods for donkey’s years with no apparent ill effects.

There is also opposition to the wearing of face coverings or masks on the grounds that they afford no protection; the analogy that is banded about is that they are “as much use against a microscopic virus as a chain-link fence would be against mosquitoes.” This – willfully or ignorantly – misses the point about wearing face coverings or masks, which is that research suggests that masks might help keep people with COVID-19 from unknowingly spreading it, that is to say that they are as much – if not more – about protecting others from potential infection rather than the wearer. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that face coverings are worn in public where social distancing is not possible. As the saying goes, “your mask protects me, mine protects you.”

As much as there is opposition to the wearing of masks on the grounds of the ineffectiveness, there is also ideological opposition, such as that expressed by people such as Peter Hitchens, the conservative journalist and author. Hitchens has been very critical of the UK government’s response to coronavirus generally, arguing that COVID-19 is not nearly as serious to the general population as is widely believed. He has called the UK government’s lockdown policy “The Great Panic.” Regardless of what Hitchens – or anyone else – feels about the government’s response to coronavirus, the bald fact is that according to figures produced by the Office for National Statistics, by mid-May the UK had recorded 55,000 deaths in excess of the five-year average since the outbreak began.

Some of the points that Hitchens raises about coronavirus and the government’s response have some validity, some not so much. His argument that some of the statistics around coronavirus are dubious has some merit (little distinction is made between people who have died as a direct result of coronavirus and those who have had the virus but died from a different cause). The view that comparisons between the numbers of people dying in the UK and other countries are meaningless as different countries calculate their figures differently supports the government’s decision to stop publishing such comparisons, although they only did so once the UK’s death rate surpassed the other countries they were previously making comparisons with.

In a recent blog post on the Mail on Sunday site[2], Hitchens, (who believes that “the Left now controls every lever of power,” despite the fact that we have had a Conservative government for a decade, and that they significantly increased their majority in December 2019), railed against the requirement that masks be worn on public transport. Hitchens puts forward the chain-link fence versus mosquitoes argument but also objects on the grounds that they are about control of the population rather than the virus. He says, “I am fairly sure these measures, like the house arrest and sunbathing bans which came before, have another purpose. They accustom us to being told what to do. Stand there. Wait there. Don’t use cash. Don’t cross that line. They permanently change the relationship between the individual and the state.”

He goes on, “Not only can the Government now tell us where we must live and when or if we can go out… It can now even tell us what to wear.”  I presume that he raised the same arguments when wearing seat belts in cars, or wearing motorcycle crash helmets, became compulsory.

On Twitter, Hitchens posted a picture taken in an Oxford shopping centre with a comment - Stand there. Do this. Wear that. Wait here. Stay home. Now they tell us which way to walk – to which he obviously objects. One wonders how he has ever survived the experience of underground stations and airports, where one-way systems and no entry signs are commonplace; presumably he enjoys swimming against the tide.

Maybe face coverings, and especially the disposable masks that can be bought in supermarkets, are an effective measure against the transmission of the virus. Maybe they are a sinister further step in controlling the populace. There is one hazard that definitely arises from them, however, and that is litter. Keep Britain Tidy has reported a rise in Personal Protective Equipment being discarded on the streets, and I have seen masks and gloves discarded on the pavement and in car parks. In the car park at Tesco recently, I had to suggest to a woman who had dumped a pair of disposable gloves in a trolley that she had finished with that she should throw them in a bin or take them home. She did so, albeit somewhat grudgingly.

In the fullness of time we will probably be able to work out whether compulsory face-mask wearing in confined spaces such as on public transport has a positive effect on reducing transmission of the coronavirus (my guess is that it does), or whether it is required is for a more sinister reason (my guess would be that it isn’t), but whichever it is, if you do wear a mask and/or gloves, don’t be a dick, dispose of them properly.

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[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-16/groups-clash-in-orange-county-over-mask-requirements

[2] https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/06/peter-hitchens-as-the-left-now-controls-every-lever-of-power-we-face-nothing-less-than-regime-change.html

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Part Five – Radio Comedy

On Sunday mornings when I was young, the radio in our house would be tuned to the BBC Light Programme, or Radio 2 as it became from 1967, for Two-Way Family Favourites. Presented by Cliff Michelmore and Jean Metcalfe, Family Favourites was a musical request programme that connected families at home in the UK with British Forces serving in West Germany and other countries overseas.

When Family Favourites ended there was an hour of comedy, with shows like The Clitheroe Kid, The Navy Lark, The Al Read Show, and Much Binding In The Marsh. 

The Much Binding cast: Left to right, Kenneth Horne, Dora Bryan, Richard Murdoch, Sam Costa, and Nicholas Parsons.

Not all of these were new shows, for instance Much Minding In The Marsh was last recorded in 1954, four years before I was even born. The Navy Lark showed remarkable longevity though, with the first episode being broadcast in March 1959, and the last in January 1976. But whether it was new or old, I lapped it up, even if some of it – and I’m particularly thinking about those Bona Performers, Julian and Sandy in Round The Horne – went completely over my rather young head.

Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams (Julian and Sandy)

At some point, my Dad ‘acquired’ a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder (I wouldn’t say that it was hooky, but certain items he brought home were either ‘won’ or ‘liberated’ rather than being bought through more orthodox channels, and this was one of them), and having carefully positioned the microphone by the radio, I would record my favourite shows, complete with background noises and muffled conversations.

We had a machine like this. Laughably, it's called 'portable.'

During the mid-1960s we ditched the reel-to-reel monstrosity in favour of a more modern cassette recorder, which had only come on the market in 1963. One of the first cassette tapes we owned, and which was bought for me by my parents, was a recording of Hancock’s Half Hour. 

The first cassette tape of Tony Hancock that I owned.

The first episodes I heard were The Reunion Party and The Missing Page; I was immediately hooked and, like so many other fans of The Lad Himself, still frequently listen to old episodes, of which The Wild Man of The Woods, and Sunday Afternoon At Home are my absolute favourites.

It is probably fair to say that the 1940s and 1950s were the golden age of radio comedy. During the 1940s, programmes like It’s That Man Again were credited with bolstering war-time morale; through the 1950s, they did a similar job of keeping the country cheerful during post-war austerity. The coming of television, and especially commercial television, which began broadcasting in 1955, could have brought about the demise of radio comedy; fortunately, it didn’t. Today we have hundreds of TV channels, including some devoted entirely to comedy, and it would be easy to believe that radio comedy is on the decline. Far from it, radio comedy is as fresh, vibrant, and varied as ever.  It is also generally streets ahead of TV comedy in terms of originality.

Having neglected it for some time, my interest in radio comedy was rekindled just after I retired in 2012. A friend of ours mentioned that he regularly went to BBC Radio recordings at Broadcasting House, and so we started applying for tickets. We were unsuccessful early on, probably due to the fact that I was only applying for shows I’d heard of, namely the most popular ones. Adopting a ‘scatter-gun’ approach proved more successful, and the first show that Val and I saw recorded was What Does The K Stand For? written by, and starring Stephen K Amos. Since then we’ve seen hundreds of shows, including Clare In The Community, Reluctant Persuaders, Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang Ups, Newsjack, The Now Show, Dead Ringers, and The Missing Hancocks to name but just a few, plus non-comedies like Brain Of Britain, Click, Word Book Club, and Counterpoint.

Radio comedy scores over TV comedy when it comes to seeing it recorded as well as when it’s broadcast. A typical evening in the Radio Theatre will see us watch two episodes of a radio sit-com being recorded back-to-back. Even with the inevitable re-takes (pickups), a half-an-hour show only takes about 45-50 minutes; a TV sit-com of similar length can run to two or three hours (or more).

Due to coronavirus, our visits to the BBC have been curtailed, but shows are still being recorded. One such is Ankle Tag, a show we have been to in the past. The third series has just begun broadcasting, and has clearly been recorded without a studio audience; the absence of laughter is quite marked.

I still regularly listen to old episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour, but of the more recent radio comedies that the BBC has broadcast, these are a few of my favourites.

Double Science – Ben Willbond and Justin Edwards star as Colin Jackson (‘no relation’) and Kenneth Farley-Pittman, chemistry teachers at a sixth-form college whose rather unorthodox approach to teaching is upset by the arrival of a new head of department, Alison Hatton, played by Rebecca Front. Sadly, only six episodes of this really rather excellent series were ever made.

Ben Willbond and Justin Edwards as their Double Science characters

Tom Wrigglesworth’s Hang Ups – Sheffield-born Tom now lives in London, but his parents still live in South Yorkshire and Hang Ups chronicles his weekly phone calls home. As with all of the best observational comedy, the humour here is just one slightly absurd step away from reality, so much so that on occasions (such as returning a faulty domestic appliance to the Ideal Home Show), Val and I have wondered if Tom Wrigglesworth hasn’t been observing us for material.

Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully – A small Buckinghamshire village is invaded by aliens who form the advance party of a planned invasion of the whole planet. Some of the villagers resist the invaders, some accept them, while Ulijabaan, the leader of the aliens, gradually becomes assimilated into English village life.

Clare In The Community – As someone who has worked in social services, Val found this series about the right-on, control freak social worker Clare Barker, played by Sally Phillips, especially funny. The strength of the series is the range of characters, with au pair Nali (Nina Conti) my favourite. In some episodes, Clare has an Australian team leader called Libby, played by Sarah Kendall, which brings me to…

Sarah Kendall’s Australian Trilogy – Val and I have been lucky enough to see all six episodes of this show being recorded (there have been two series). The very first episode – A Day In October, the story of the miracle of George Peach – is perhaps the finest, funniest, saddest, most moving show I have ever had the privilege of seeing; I would have paid good money to see it. All three episodes of the second series were recorded in a single Saturday evening at the Radio Theatre, throughout which we were absolutely spellbound. Sarah Kendall is not a household name; she really ought to be.

Ångström – “Adapted from the bestselling Ångström Trilogy by Martin English, writing as Bjorgen Swedenssonsson,” or so the trailer says. This absurd, surreal, hilarious parody of Scandi-noir stars Matthew Holness as Knut Ångström, a brooding, alcoholic, maverick Swedish detective trying to solve a baffling murder (in which no one may actually have died). Lots of snow, lots of brooding, lots of laughs.

The BBC may have its faults, but its comedy output is a joy, and the BBC Sounds app is chock full of it. I wouldn’t be without it.

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Part Four – Gigs

A calendar notification popped up on my phone last Friday: “Yes at the Royal Albert Hall, 8pm” it said, to which I could only mutter under my breath, “No, Springwatch on BBC2 in my living room.”

 

Yes at The London Palladium in 2018

Recent years have been something of a golden era for me in terms of going to see live music, and in 2019 I saw 35 bands or artists in 23 shows, ranging from opera, through BBC orchestral performances, to major rock bands, at venues as diverse as The Royal Opera House, Temple Church, Boston Music Rooms, and the Hammersmith Apollo. This year has been somewhat different so far, and sadly it’s unlikely to change much.

 

Before the coronavirus pandemic that sent us into lockdown and caused the closure of the clubs, concert halls, and theatres that I would otherwise have been visiting, I managed to see Joe Stilgoe and The Guildhall Studio Orchestra performing songs from the movies in January, and in February, Alice’s Adventures Underground at The Royal Opera House. Joe Stilgoe (some of you may recall his father, Richard, who is probably best known for performing comic songs on Nationwide and That’s Life!) was very entertaining; Alice’s Adventures, not so much.

 

Joe Stilgoe 

I should have seen Lifesigns in Southend in mid-March, but although there were then no restrictions yet in place, the threat of the pandemic was such that I decided to err on the side of caution and stayed at home.

 

Lifesigns at Resonate, 2018

Since then, gigs involving Fish, and Doris Brendel, Jump, Fischer-Z, Yes, and Roger Hodgson have been cancelled completely or rescheduled for later this year or in 2021, although I’m doubtful that those that have been moved for later in 2020 will take place. I’m supposed to see Steven Wilson in September, Cosmograf, Sparks, and Level 42 in October, Steve Hackett, and Genesis in November, and IQ, and Lonely Robot in December – I would be surprised if these go ahead, and not sure how comfortable I’d be about attending even if they do.

Doris Brendel

 

If I’m honest, I’m probably missing going to gigs more than I’m missing going to football matches. I’ve seen some great shows in recent years [1] with stand-outs including such diverse acts as Steven Wilson, Steely Dan, David Byrne, Chic, and Steve Hackett. I’ve seen few that have disappointed apart from one rather amateurish performance of Tubular Bells (not to be confused with the magnificent Tubular Bells For Two), a slightly underwhelming show from Blue Oyster Cult, and The Flower Kings, about whom I was somewhat indifferent. Oh, and a couple of operas (Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel, and the previously mentioned Alice) that really did nothing for me.

The brilliant Tubular Bells For Two 

 

David Byrne. Picture: Getty Images

There was a time when I would go to see a band and would want to know all of the material they would perform; these days, not so much, largely because many of the bands that I have seen in recent years have produced many more albums than I have had the opportunity to listen to. For instance, I saw Marillion last year, despite having heard only a handful of the fourteen albums they have released since Fish left in 1988, and enjoyed the songs that were new to me just as much as the ones I knew. Likewise, Gary Numan; the last album of his I bought was Telekon in 1980, but I thoroughly enjoyed his more recent material when I saw him.

 

Gary Numan

Then there are the support acts, the good, the bad and the indifferent. I once saw Bryan Ferry completely outshone by his support act, Londonbeat; I saw Dire Straits (who were excellent), supported by the wonderful Fischer-Z; I saw Doris Brendel support Fish and was so impressed that I now go to see her as much as I do to see him when they play gigs together. Seeing a band I’ve not heard of, and thoroughly enjoying them, is one of the things that makes going to shows so rewarding; Harry Payne (who supported Marillion last year), was one such.  And when I went to The Stone Free Festival at The O2 a couple of years ago, principally to see the Anderson, Rabin, and Wakeman version of Yes, I was blown away by Roger Hodgson, not that I was unfamiliar with his work with Supertramp, but I had rather taken him for granted. There are some support acts that are at the opposite end of the spectrum; we’ll draw a veil over them.

 

Roger Hodgson at the Royal Albert Hall, 2019

As a rule of thumb, the bigger the artist, the bigger the venue. The bigger the artist, the harder it can be to get tickets; the bigger the venue, the further from the stage you’re likely to be, the more you’ll have to pay for the ticket and refreshments, and the bigger the queue for the toilets. More and more, I’m happier in smaller venues like the Islington Assembly Hall, The O2 Islington, or Dingwalls, venues where it’s mostly standing and you can get closer to the stage. The Hammersmith Apollo remains near the top of my list of favourite venues; The O2 at Greenwich is near the bottom, but it has to be tolerated to see the big names. Likewise, Wembley Arena, which has the added disadvantage of being so time-consuming to get home from.

 

After over forty years of going to gigs, it’s nigh-on impossible to give a definitive list of the best I’ve been to and the criteria are something of a moving target, but here are some that I’ll never forget, including one (David Byrne), of which the NME said, “may just be the best live show of all time”:

• Ian Dury and the Blockheads – Hammersmith Odeon – 1979
• Genesis – Earls Court -1977
• David Byrne – The O2 – 2018
• Tubular Bells For Two – Union Chapel – 2017
• Big Big Train – The Anvil, Basingstoke – 2018
• Porcupine Tree – Indigo at The O2 - 2008
• Steely Dan – Wembley Arena – 2019
• Frost* - Dingwalls – 2017
• Steve Hackett – Hammersmith Apollo -2019

I’d like to think that the best gig I’ll ever see is one I’ve not been to yet. When – or indeed if – that happens, I’ll let you know.

 

 

 

[1] See posts under The Prog Blog

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Part Three – Books

After much internal debate, I managed to come up with a list of eight albums that I would take on Desert Island Discs, and a handful of films that I would consider to be my favourites. They were easier lists to compile than the books that I would regard as my top five, ten, or even fifty.

These days I don’t seem to be able to read books at the rate I used to. There was a time when I would get through one or even more a week – on one holiday in the Maldives, I managed six in just under a fortnight – these days I’m down to about one a month, although there are exceptions.

One reason may be that novels seem to be getting longer. Where once 250 pages might have been considered a decent length, it now appears that most have barely blown the dust off the story at that stage, with 500 pages seeming to be the norm. I find this somewhat challenging at times; all too often I’ll race through the first 200 pages of a novel and then stall for a further couple of hundred that seem no more than padding before reaching the denouement, which itself gets dragged out for a further 100 pages or so.

I’m looking forward to Robert Galbraith’s new novel in the Cormoran Strike series, Troubled Blood, which is to be published in September 2020, but the hardback is slated to come in at over 900 pages; the story is going to have to be pretty damn good if I’m going to wade through a book that long.

Like most people, my taste in books has changed over the years. From The Famous Five, and Jennings as a child, though Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, Alistair McLean, and Frederick Forsyth as staples; through science-fiction, courtroom dramas, murder mysteries, thrillers, and steampunk, I’ve gone through many phases and authors, but there are a few books that I cherish, and some that I have read and re-read with never diminishing pleasure. At present I’m steering clear of the more dystopian type of books – I have a couple lined up that at present I’m saving for happier days – in favour of more escapist stories.

The War of The Worlds by HG Wells is by any definition, a classic. It has been the inspiration for TV and movie adaptations (although I’m still waiting for a faithful, Victorian-set version, the BBC’s offering last year was a grave disappointment). It’s a relatively short book and the plot is everything – the characters are fairly non-descript (we learn little of them other than their professions) – but it’s a more subtle book than it appears at first glance, with its commentary on evolution, British colonialism, and potential invasion of Britain.

Around the time I first read The War of The Worlds, I dipped my toe into more modern science-fiction with Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Niven’s Known Space universe comprises a consistent environment for his stories in which man co-exists with other, alien species, of which two travel to the artificial megastructure, the Ringworld, along with the human, Louis Wu. This spawned a series of sequels and prequels, but this is the original and best. A number of Niven’s later novels featured too much science and too little fiction; this gets the balance right.

Philip K Dick is one of science fiction’s most filmed authors. Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and The Adjustment Bureau are among the films that have been inspired by Dick’s writings, Electric Dreams was a highly successful TV series based on some of his stories and most recently there was Amazon’s brilliant series, The Man In The High Castle. Having recently watched that series, I reread the book, which despite the alternative history theme, is one of the most mainstream novels that Dick wrote. Of all his novels, my favourite is Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, the story of TV chat-show host Jason Taverner, who wakes up one morning to find himself in a world where no one knows him and his TV show does not exist. As with many of Dick’s works, Flow My Tears, which is set in a USA that has become a totalitarian, police state, following a civil war, deals with identity, what being human means, and the possibility of alternative realities. 

Few books warrant repeated rereading as much as The Diary of A Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith. The book describes the largely mundane daily events in the lives of a London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son Lupin, and their friends. Pooter is a literary forebear of Victor Meldrew or Captain Mainwaring; he’s a bit pompous, being over imbued with a sense of his own importance, he’s a bit of a social climber, but things often go wrong for him. 

In a similar vein, Augustus Carp, Esq., By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man, depicts someone lacking any sort of self-awareness; pompous, practically useless but endowed with a belief that he is brilliant in all his endeavours. Originally published anonymously, Augustus Carp was written by Harley Street doctor Henry Howarth Bashford, I would recommend it to anyone who has read and enjoyed Charles Pooter’s adventures.

It is always rewarding to read a book, recommend it to someone, and then see them share the enthusiasm that one has for it. Two such books that I have suggested to my wife are The Crimson Petal and The White, and The Magpie Murders. Michel Faber’s Crimson Petal revolves around William Rackham and two very dissimilar women, his wife Agnes and the prostitute, Sugar. It’s a wonderfully written, thoroughly absorbing story that is rarely a comfortable read but is very rewarding.

he Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz features a novel within a novel, as a book editor reads one of her author’s latest manuscripts, about a very Agatha Christie-like detective, and finds a real murder mystery entwined within its pages. It’s really very clever and enormous fun.

I am often drawn to so-called weird fiction; Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, and China Mieville’s The City and The City for instance. Iain Banks’ Walking On Glass is in part, weird, but Banks is (or sadly, was, as he died in 2013) otherwise a writer I have struggled with. His mainstream novels, written as Iain Banks are eminently readable, however of his science-fiction stories (written as Iain M Banks), I lapped up The Player of Games, but the struggled miserably with his subsequent sci-fi tomes and had to give up on the last one I attempted (and I cannot even recall which one it was), so impenetrable (and boring) was it.

These days I like to read solely for pleasure; I've given up any pretence of reading much that is literary or high-brow except occasionally. Frankly, life’s too short to read dull books, so in addition to the above, my reading centres on what I enjoy, such as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, the Shardlake novels of CJ Sansom, and Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels.