Given the date, I suppose some horror-themed piece is appropriate, but I’m of the wrong generation to invest much interest in Halloween. ‘Trick or Treat’ was an imported Americanism that was imported too late for it to have constituted part of my childhood, with my only awareness that such a tradition even existed back then coming via a ‘Charlie Brown’ cartoon; those early animated outings for Charles M Schultz’s creation tended to premiere around the time of prominent US holidays – Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Halloween etc. – and consequently the occasion formed the backbone of the storyline. Once we were into autumn, Mischievous Night and Bonfire Night meant far more over here than Halloween, though both seem somewhat diminished now; the one-time excitement surrounding the latter has been subdued by increasingly tighter restrictions on the sale of fireworks, whereas the former seems to have vanished altogether.
Such a consumerist cash-cow is Halloween today that the carnival is perhaps the major pre-Christmas excuse to go on a bender in fancy dress – though anyone who lives in a student neighbourhood will know it doesn’t take much to encourage that kind of activity. There are probably those – Goths, quite possibly – who take it much more seriously and no doubt mark the event by holding black mass ceremonies in graveyards at midnight, but for most it’s just another children’s festival extended into kidulthood. Obviously, the unique situation of the past eighteen months means any occasion reminiscent of what pre-pandemic life was like is desperately seized upon with even greater fervour than before, so expect social media to be awash with images of Halloween parties and piss-ups. I don’t remember anyone ever really taking photos of bonfires back in the day, and there was certainly never any photographic record of the pranks committed on Mischievous Night – which is a shame, for some of the things I can remember getting up to as a kid were worthy of being preserved as photos. Now it’s possible to document one’s entire day and share it with the world, it’s sometimes easy to forget the vast majority of experiences at one time were only recorded in memory.
Travel back maybe a century and-a-half and we arrive in the last period of history before it was possible to preserve an event in ways we take for granted today. Photography and then moving pictures revolutionised the documentation of the human experience, but just as innovative was recorded sound. I read a piece by Kierkegaard recently in which he expressed his love for Mozart; I considered the date that the renowned Danish pioneer of existentialist philosophy passed away (1855) and realised he shuffled off this mortal coil just two years before the earliest known recording of the human voice, which was made by Parisian Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. I thought about how lucky we are in the oh-so sophisticated early 21st century with how we can satisfy our craving for instant music compared to that of Kierkegaard and not just his own generation, but all the generations that had come before him.
If Kierkegaard wanted to hear a particular favourite by his favourite composer, he either had to wait until an orchestra was in town and hope the piece in question would be in their set-list, or he’d have to become accomplished enough to play it on the piano himself, and perhaps accompany a few friends who were competent on stringed instruments to the point whereby they could play said piece simply in order to hear it. Mind you, chances are he’d know enough people competent on stringed instruments to make assembling such an ensemble nowhere near as great a task as it’d be today; even roping someone in to make a vocal contribution wouldn’t be that difficult – after all, numerous adaptations of Jane Austen novels over the years have familiarised us with the fact that a post-dinner tradition was the accompanying of a pianist with a song; it was part and parcel of a social gathering in the same way that a contemporary equivalent would see the host simply sticking on some recorded music to play in the background. If this type of musical ‘turn’ was part of the middle-class evening-in for generations, the appeal of a singsong round the Joanna was no less strong lower down the class chain, and if not in the home then certainly in the local hostelry.
The presence of a piano as a commonplace item of household furniture may have long gone now, but it was still a lingering fixture during my parents’ 1950s childhoods from everything I’ve heard; the ‘public house’ upright piano was just as obligatory in the standard working-class residence as the middle-class one well into the halfway point of the 20th century, at least up until the modernist social housing revolution that created streets in the sky and dispensed with all the archaic furniture associated with the past. Being in possession of a modicum of musicianship wasn’t regarded as a novelty prior to that; I would imagine the majority of adults could bang out a tune on at least one instrument, which is maybe why the mid-50s demand for guitars from schoolboys inspired by Skiffle was treated as a natural phase by parents who forked-out the HP payments with no awareness whatsoever as to how they were acting as midwives to the cultural revolution of the 1960s by default. Today, the only children who can pick up an instrument and play it are largely those fortunate to attend a school where music lessons aren’t regarded as a luxury – and most adults probably know more people who can’t play an instrument than people who can.
With the actual playing of music one of the most accessible ways of hearing it, it’s no wonder record sales charts didn’t really capture the public imagination until the late 50s, when the sales of vinyl discs began to exceed those of sheet music for the first time. Sheet music had been a necessity for a century where those seeking to hear their favourite tunes were concerned, but the mass availability of said tunes on disc negated the need to replicate them and therefore negated the need to learn how to play them as well as the need for an instrument in the house to play them on. And almost 70 years after the first singles chart being published in the New Musical Express, we now don’t even need our music on a physical object.
It’s so easy to take for granted that when you undergo a sudden craving to listen to a specific piece of music today, you know you can access it within a minute of that craving; you can pull out a CD or LP from your own personal collection or you can go online and access it via Spotify or YouTube. Before recorded sound made all that possible, you would’ve been faced with no choice but to submit to the aforementioned means of accessing music that had always been in place for all of history up until that point. Yet even with the innovation of radio in the 1920s, playlists were still in the hands of the broadcasters; if you wanted to hear a particular favourite tune on the wireless, you’d have to write in to a programme to request it – and even then there was no guarantee they’d play it. Of course, you could go out and buy the record, but it wasn’t possible to buy every record you wanted; they could cost quite a bit, particularly LPs – hence the taping of the Sunday teatime charts onto a cassette, something that gradually evolved into a ritual for more than one generation.
As a teenager, one tended to listen to a good album or single with a dedicated intensity absent now, probably because it was the only record one could afford for a month or two and therefore it was played to death in the absence of choice. If lyrics were available, they were memorised, as was the whole package – sleeve, label and all. When you can instantly access any music you want, that level of commitment is simply not there. It ceases to be quite so valuable, and you can’t really care in quite the same way when it’s all on an iPod. Oh, well; such is progress. And I’ve no doubt Kierkegaard would’ve taken it. Not arf, pop-pickers!
© The Editor
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‘It’s not censorship when a private company decides to remove you from their platform. You don’t have an inalienable right to a Twitter account.’ So spoke the social media account of one Gary McGuiggin from a position of smug detachment in June 2020. A year or so later, in response to the 24-hour deletion of the YouTube account of ‘progressive’ left-leaning online news outlet Novara Media, the same account declared, ‘Whether or not you agree with what we publish, it shouldn’t be the whim of giant tech companies to delete us overnight with no explanation.’ Fancy that. It’s apparently okay if Talk Radio’s YT channel vanishes in the blink of an eye for daring to question the Covid consensus or if a former US President is permanently censored, what with cancel culture being a figment of the right-wing imagination and all that; but Voltaire’s oft-quoted line re freedom of speech is evoked yet again now that those for whom empathy only comes into play when their own platform is abruptly removed have felt the full force of that which they have long been in denial of. Yes, the incredible revelation that big tech is a tad too big for its boots has finally hit the left and we all have to erupt in collective outrage at the news. Pity we didn’t do so when supposedly ‘right’-leaning outlets were receiving the same treatment for months.
The awful, inescapable sensation that we’ve been trapped in one long, drawn-out year since around March 2020 was something I expressed to a friend the other week when trying to recall a recent event, unable to remember if it occurred this year or last. As someone whose memory can be uncannily precise where childhood is concerned – to the point whereby I often catch a snatch of a melody and within seconds can accurately locate not just which childhood year the song was a hit in, but the month it charted – it’s not unusual to reach a certain age and find years much closer to the here and now have a habit of blurring into each other. It’s probably due to the fewer ‘first time’ experiences one receives as more miles are accumulated on the clock, invariably sticking to recognisable routes rather than veering off into uncharted territory. Childhood, by contrast, is nothing but first time experiences, with each one making a deep impression that naturally stays with us; I suppose having them all happen in quick succession means the clarity of the period as a whole remains strong in recollection, whilst the wider gaps between such occurrences as one gets older means there’s less for memory to hang on to.
I came up with a new variation on the ‘drinking game’ concept the other day after hearing an overused entry in the Woke dictionary once again uttered on Radio 4. I call this fresh twist on the format ‘the slavery game’. One doesn’t need to have the station on all day to play this game; indeed, I heard the word ‘slavery’ within a mere fifteen minutes of listening this morning. It so got me in the mood that I almost switched the radio off and stuck ‘Brown Sugar’ on the turntable. As a song, ‘Brown Sugar’ is now half-a-century old, but the fact it takes the topically triggering subject of slavery and plays with it in a salacious manner characteristic of the turn-of-the-70s Stones means it’s fallen under the spotlight of 2021’s moral watchdogs. The moral watchdogs of 1971 were no more amused by its themes either, so it’s not as if the song hasn’t been criticised before. 50 years back, however, they were the middle-aged conservative right and found the young Stones an affront to all they held dear; their contemporary equivalents are firmly on the left, and young where the Stones are old, but their determination to take offence – especially at any art that predates their new world order – is so far-reaching that even the artists themselves cower under their power.
I’ve only ever encountered my local MP in his surgery the once; it was around six or seven years ago and I made the appointment whilst working on my book, 
As Boris takes a break, the crumb of comfort that Carrie might have packed a portable vice for his balls in her luggage doesn’t really compensate for the ongoing fall-out from the past eighteen months. Beyond the bubble the PM and the other residents of Westminster Village inhabit, the ramifications of their actions on the rest of us since the spring of 2020 continue to affect the way in which lives are led. Angry motorists physically manhandling the same middle-class sit-down protestors with too much time on their hands that the police provided tea and biscuits for are not so much manifestations of climate change denial – more an act of desperation on the part of those whose businesses were brought to their knees by the obliteration of the economy during lockdown; clinging on for dear life, the last thing they need is further disruption from activists fighting for the luxury of loft insulation. The schism between those who had a ‘good pandemic’ because their lifestyles weren’t dependent upon everything lockdown took away and those who couldn’t survive without setting foot outdoors is perhaps more glaring now than ever before. Yet, how much of this is being addressed by MPs entrusted to report on the Government handling of the pandemic in its initial stages?
The two encounters may have been 30 years apart, but I count myself lucky to have met two presenters of ‘Play School’ and ‘Play Away’. Johnny Ball I stumbled upon whilst he was filming something on the street in the late 1980s and Julie Stevens I chatted to at one of the vintage TV events the Kaleidoscope organisation used to stage in a Stourbridge hotel. The pair often presented the BBC’s pre-school mainstay together and regularly formed part of the gang on the show’s slightly more grownup – albeit considerably sillier – sibling. As with the classic ‘Blue Peter’ line-up, the surrogate aunts and uncles who appeared on ‘Play School’ and ‘Play Away’ still radiate nostalgic hues whenever they’re recalled by anyone whose formative years were spent being babysat by them. Their association with a unique, womb-like security that life rarely returns to once we graduate from the nursery means they will always claim a special shelf in the memory bank. The likes of Brian Cant and Derek Griffiths are in possession of legendary status for those of a certain age, and the exotic folk singer Toni Arthur even managed to stir something in the little boys watching that none of them were prepared for at such a tender age. As an adult, meeting anyone who played their part in weaving these dreams is a real privilege, one of those rare opportunities to simply say ‘thank you’.
With its recurring habit of remaking foreign films – albeit usually ones produced in a foreign language – Hollywood sometimes attempts to eliminate all traces of the original movie for fear it will steal the remake’s thunder. In 1944 MGM was so determined its version of Patrick Hamilton’s stage play ‘Gaslight’ would be regarded as the motion picture version that it attempted to erase the existing prints of the 1940 British adaptation, even wanting to incinerate the negative. Happily, it didn’t succeed and the first film survives as a wonderfully atmospheric example of old-school British cinema shot entirely on a studio set that cleverly recreates a middle-class Victorian street; it reimagines a London square in the late 19th century with the same aesthetic inventiveness as David Lean reimagined the city’s slums in his take on ‘Oliver Twist’. The film stars Anton Walbrook as a sadistic controlling husband convincing his emotionally fragile wife she’s losing her mind, and is an enjoyable melodrama that nevertheless has some genuinely dark moments. Memorably claustrophobic as the virtually imprisoned wife played by Diana Wyngard becomes riddled with doubts about her sanity, it appears to be the source of a term now routinely used online, gaslighting.
as excelled in the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot discipline of late, we shouldn’t forget the Tories are just as expert at this particular event. Whereas Labour’s vote-winning idea of reclaiming the Red Wall is to embroil itself in a Lewis Carroll-like nonsensical strain of Identity Politics (guaranteed to woo Brenda of Bristol back to the fold), the Conservative Party cannot help itself from alienating the members of the electorate it borrowed in 2019 by reverting to type, pedalling an outdated Home Counties view of the vulnerable as a drain on the nation’s resources. They don’t need to do it anymore, for they’re no longer dependent on the patronage of the Murdoch Empire to secure them a majority; yet the default position remains falling back on archaic assumptions that the prejudices of the traditional Tory shires must be catered to at all costs. Following in the clumsy footsteps of Iain Duncan Smith, another beneficiary of inherited wealth by the name of Jacob Rees-Mogg has enhanced his reputation as ‘Minister for the 18th century’ at the party’s annual conference with a casual dismissal of the needs of those who always stood to lose the most from the aftermath of the past year and-a-half.
As someone who can now perhaps be regarded as the founding mother of modern cancel culture, Mary Whitehouse cast her net far and wide in the 1970s after springing to prominence as the high priestess of provincial opposition to the Swinging 60s. If what was known as The Establishment did its utmost to stem the tide of permissiveness and moral decay by using its in-bred influence to target pop aristocracy with drug busts that promised prison sentences, Whitehouse represented the middle-class, conservative voice of sanity for the W.I. backbone of traditional Great British values centred around deference, the Church of England and the Queen. Once established as a household name with clout, Whitehouse tackled pornography, X certificate cinema, the theatre, gay rights et al; anything she perceived as a threat to her worldview fell under her outraged gaze and she embarked on a fresh campaign to ban it. Either allied with fellow moral crusaders like Lord Longford and Malcolm Muggeridge under the Festival of Light banner or working as head of her National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, Mary Whitehouse’s ravenous appetite for stamping out liberal decadence eventually meant her disapproval became a badge of honour for those she pursued. One of the UK’s leading ‘girlie magazines’ was even amusingly named after her.
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