It tends to be a given that most works of fiction which imagine the future usually offer an exaggerated vision of the times in which they were written, reflecting the hopes and – more often than not – the fears of the here and now. Numerous elements of a book such as ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ become more worryingly prescient the further we travel from the Cold War nursery that inspired it, though its source material is still unmistakably 1940s Europe. Equally, whilst Anthony Burgess ingeniously kept ‘A Clockwork Orange’ relevant for each generation of teenage hoodlums by inventing slang for his gang of Droogs, their actual genesis was in the moral panic that accompanied Britain’s original adolescent bogeyman, the Teddy Boy. Trying to second-guess what will happen next involves observing the most concerning present day developments and projecting them forwards, imagining how their progress will continue along a similar path, morphing into even more horrific manifestations of their contemporary incarnation. I guess today there are several schools of thought that maintain this tradition, depending upon where one stands on the pressing issues.
For example, by now we’re accustomed to the relentless Doomsday prophesies of the more extreme wings of the climate change lobby, and their forecast rarely varies from the worst case scenario; then there’s the Covid branch of the soothsayer’s union, who only ever seem to see the virus in terms of how many bodies their fevered imaginations can picture; and, of course, there are those who envisage the control of the individual by the State moving closer to the Chinese model as our civil liberties are eroded by successive legislation cloaked in the guise of benign intervention. It goes without saying that images emerging last week of people unable to leave Guangzhou due to the Chinese authorities remotely switching their Covid digital QR passport from yellow to red ought to serve as a warning of what can happen when the individual surrenders the majority of their autonomy to the State; and it’s easy to foresee the leaders of the West pushing for the same powers in the not-too distant future. Then again, every gallows has its humour; after all, it’s hard not to laugh at the utter absence of self-awareness in a risible figure such as Justin Trudeau, declaring his solidarity with protestors in China whilst failing to discern parallels with the way he took back control from Canada’s truckers by first demonising them and then freezing their bank accounts.
If, rather than looking forward, one were to momentarily look back perhaps seven years to December 2015, the pattern of events that brought us to where we are now is easier to discern than predicting the pattern that will take us to December 2029 – even though we instinctively know the direction of that pattern will be a progressively darker one; the feeling is all-but irresistible, yet who can blame us after what we’ve been through over the past seven years? Can anyone seriously argue the world is a better place in 2022 than it was in 2015? One might even come to the conclusion that things have only got worse every year from 2015 onwards. Mind you, what’s interesting is that anticipating the next seven years as something even more awful than the last is far from being the pessimistic prognosis of a wannabe Nostradamus in the wilderness; it’s pretty much become the consensus. The future is now only sold to us as a negative, with a daily roll-call of crises-to-come that hardly make getting up in the morning something worth waiting for; it’s no great surprise so many children are terrified that the Earth will be reduced to a barren wasteland by the time they come of age. Optimism in the future no longer sells.
I think I tried to convey that in a recent post titled ‘Heart and Soul’; this was inspired by watching an old ‘day in the life’ primary coloured-portrait of London from the early 60s called ‘All That Mighty Heart’; it’s the kind of film short that sticks rose-tinted spectacles on the viewer without the viewer’s consent, yet if one can manage to avoid being seduced by the naive nostalgia the film radiates, there’s still no getting away from the fact that it oozes a wonderfully refreshing self-confident optimism in the future – optimism in better homes, better living and working conditions, better roads, better transport, better public amenities, better leisure facilities, and a better life. I suppose the era in which it was produced, long before the ambitious Utopian visions of town-planners collapsed into the rubble of Ronan Point, give it that joyous energy; a generation who had fought the War and a generation that had grown up in the shadow of it took a quick glance over their shoulders and then understandably saw the future as a better place than the past. And they believed it was within their powers to make it so. Maybe that’s why this kind of film can seem such a breath of fresh air when looked at today, a time when we’re so worn down by the MSM generating nothing but negativity when it comes to the day after tomorrow.
Okay, so we overcome one crisis; give it 24 hours and there’ll be another to keep us in a state of agitated anxiety, perennially worrying if it’ll be the next virus that kills us or if hypothermia will beat the virus to it or if the planet will burst into flames and incinerate us before we even get to cannibalism. The cost-of-living crisis is currently being marketed as though it’s the first suffered by a wide cross-section of the British public since the 1970s, though whether we are going through boom or bust there will always be people who are struggling to make ends meet, just as there are always those who are doing alright, Jack – like the landlord of Matt Hancock’s local. Yes, some did indeed have a ‘good pandemic’. Fair enough, he might have had to settle for a knighthood rather than a PPE contract in a brown paper bag, but Chris Whitty is now warning us that this winter’s annual ‘NHS in crisis’ story will consist of multiple deaths arising from all the life-saving diagnoses for cancer and other fun diseases that were sidelined by diverting resources into the likes of empty aircraft hangars called Nightingale hospitals; whose fault was that, Professor Mekon?
Ditto the alarming deaths of children from Strep A; the reintroduction of social interaction in the school environment is being blamed by ‘experts’, yet perhaps if the kids hadn’t been unnecessarily kept away from each other and clad in masks by paranoid parents in thrall to Project Fear, maybe their immune systems would have been sufficiently developed to resist the bacterial infection. Yes, all of these upbeat headlines skimmed from a cursory glance at our beloved news outlets at least bear a relevance to the general tone of this post; but to get back to where we were a few paragraphs ago, what’s all this about December 2015? Well, I didn’t select December 2015 as a random date; the eagle-eyed and long-term amongst you may have realised the Winegum debuted seven years ago this month as of Tuesday just gone (incidentally, this post was ready and waiting to be posted on the actual anniversary, but ongoing ‘internet issues’ prevented me from fulfilling the bloody deadline). Anyway, I struck gold beginning this enterprise when I did; from a purely writing perspective, I couldn’t have wished for a more turbulent time to be documenting and commenting on; it has certainly been a remarkably eventful period of our recent history, and I recognise good fortune when I see it.
Had the last seven years been materially comfortable, culturally static, politically stable and free from drama on both the home front and the global stage, they might not have added up to much in the way of either writing or reading. I suppose if I can put often-unpleasant personal experiences during that timespan to one side and reflect on 2015-2022 solely in terms of ‘art’, I have absolutely no complaints. Duran Duran once infamously claimed they wanted to be the band the people were dancing to when the bomb drops; well, if you’re still up for reading the Winegum Telegram in your cave as you shelter from your plague-infected friends & family, shivering in the perma-winter or sweating in the perma-summer of tomorrow’s killer climate, I’ll keep buggering on.
© The Editor
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Next year’s Eurovision being staged in Blighty by default isn’t necessarily a unique event; the tradition of one year’s winning nation hosting the following year’s Contest has been disrupted several times in the past, and the UK has stepped in to host proceedings as a substitute more than once, usually when the winning nation has found staging the contest an impossibility, the last time (until 2023) being 1974. Luxembourg had claimed the crown in 1973, but the Grand Duchy’s second consecutive win proved to be a financial bridge too far for the principality and Britain stepped in again, nominating the Brighton Dome as a venue. Of course, a certain four-piece from Sweden eventually captured the headlines with a stomping slice of sub-Glam Rock called ‘Waterloo’, and every other performance that year tends to linger in Abba’s shadow, despite the 1974 Eurovision producing a record number of UK hits. Aside from the celebrated chart-topping winner, the runner-up – Italy’s Gigliola Cinquetti with ‘Si’ – reached No.8; Holland’s third-placed entry, ‘I See a Star’ by Mouth & MacNeal, peaked at the same position; and the UK’s very own ‘Long Live Love’ made the charts at No.11; the singer of that song was Olivia Newton-John.
David Warner, Bernard Cribbins, Nichelle Nichols – they’re dropping like flies again; and in tandem with the passing of familiar famous faces whose finest performances evoke inevitable nostalgia, a purely unrelated excursion on my part has involved delving into a retro-scented environment as redolent of a disappearing world as those dearly departed characters were. Over the past month, I’ve followed a route carved-out by navvies more than 200 years ago and ended up at a landmark George Orwell immortalised in 1937, despite the fact even he arrived too late to catch the decrepit remnants of an old music-hall gag. A lengthy post-war restoration of our man-made waterways has perhaps neutered their industrial origins, yet a wooden jetty erected to assist the loading of coal onto working barges was labelled a pier as an ironic dig at a town sorely lacking in the gaudy glamour that the coastal escape routes offered the colliers whose booty the vanished edifice was once weighed down by. The fact a functional construction was jokingly compared to a seaside stalwart highlights how the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, upon which the actual Wigan Pier stood, was very much a workplace for the majority of its existence, something it’s easy to forget when one strolls beside it today.
‘Oh, I’m looking after my girlfriend’s dog again while she’s at work’; ‘I think that cat lives next-door and it keeps coming in every time I leave the backdoor open’ – just two of the excuses I routinely used when I had both a canine and feline companion when living in rented accommodation and the owner of the property turned up unannounced. Keeping quiet about one’s benefits was one thing – ‘No DHSS’ was something landlords were allowed to state in the same way they’d once infamously stated ‘No Irish, no dogs, no blacks’ – but pets were the ultimate no-no. That said, I lived in three different premises with my cat and dog and wasn’t officially entitled to have either of them whilst living there. Some landlords were more tolerant than others. A landlady I had over 20 years ago insisted on collecting the rent in person and would call every Thursday evening at the same time; but she didn’t just take the money at the door; she’d come in, sit down and natter. Throughout this weekly endurance test I’d have to make sure the cat was out and I’d ask a friend to sit in the kitchen with the dog, bribing him with treats to prevent him from barking.
‘I pms at these,’ is not perhaps a statement that will be forever enshrined in the annals of great quotes. The person who said it went by the name of shazza, whoever shazza may be. But shazza is nevertheless a notable figure to me, for his/her comment was the last to ever grace a video on my YouTube channel, the final person provoked into saying something after enjoying one of my offerings on a platform that had twelve long years of providing satirical and/or bawdy entertainment for the masses who were incapable of raising even a moderate titter at the woeful excuse for comedy that television serves-up these days. Unfortunately, the history that shazza made with this brief comment on the most recent instalment of ‘Buggernation Street’ is a history that has been erased from the books, for Sillycunt Valley’s very own Ministry of Truth has excised yours truly from the platform as of late Wednesday evening. I’m not playing the victim here, btw; I just figured you might find this story interesting.
30-odd years ago, when satellite dishes were the latest addition to the increasingly-expanding abundance of street furniture, the allure of new television channels beyond the reach of the traditional terrestrial broadcasters prompted the girl I was living with at the time to invest in just such an alternative. We ended up with Cable TV, and despite the accompanying literature boasting about all the new shows we could now access, most of its appeal for me was as a repository for the long-forgotten programmes the old television lords and masters had dispensed with years before. There wasn’t much new material on offer that I myself found capable of piquing my curiosity – bar the novelty exhibitionism of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ long before Jeremy Kyle encouraged the Great British Underclass to wash their own dirty linen in public; but the archive channels suddenly at my fingertips were a rich source of nostalgic entertainment and also (as it was still the 90s) a strain on my limited finances due to the amount of blank VHS tapes I felt compelled to buy to preserve them on.
Retracing the steps of the late, great architectural critic Ian Nairn is a tricky proposition that one has to plot carefully; take it too far and you’d end up drinking yourself to death as the man himself did at the age of 52 in 1983. His fondness for the public house, about which he wrote with such eloquent verve (especially in his classic 1966 guide to the capital, ‘Nairn’s London’), proved to be his downfall, bringing to a premature end a career that illuminated both the printed page and the television screen in the 60s and 70s. A superbly witty, poetic and passionate writer on architecture and environment, Nairn had sprung to prominence in the mid-50s with his acclaimed ‘Outrage’ edition of the ‘Architectural Review’ magazine, establishing the concept of Subtopia as a dreary development on the post-war landscape and adding his name to the list of the decade’s Angry Young Men.
Momentary escapism from a world that seems to relish serving up a fresh dish of despair and despondency to its population every passing year seems an essential panacea right now. It can be manifested in many different ways, specifically tailored to suit the unique tastes of each individual, and its position on the scale of trivia is immaterial. Whatever simple pleasure makes you happy is worth indulging in at times like these. During Lockdown Mk I and beyond, I found walking a friend’s dog once a week was the best breath of fresh air and the most unpretentious reward for a week entombed indoors on offer; and even with the present-tense pandemic receding (albeit not its long-term legacy), the latest crisis has necessitated the need for time-out, whether that be a few hours away from social media – or penning a post. Dog-sitting the same pooch that provided light relief when outdoor excursions were being rationed has become an occasional outlet of late, but the home I dog-sit in also contains another window into a world a million miles from 2022 – well, 53 years, to be precise.
So ubiquitous is he in his role as the deliverer of the pop post-mortem, one wonders who will step into the shoes of Paul Gambaccini when the veteran broadcaster shuffles off this mortal coil; within a few hours of a notable musician passing away, there’s Gambo to sum up the significance of the artist’s career on every MSM outlet. As prominent members of the 60s cultural revolution edge towards their 80s – and plenty are already there – Paul Gambaccini must be on permanent stand-by, waiting for the call and updating his pre-prepared obituaries on a daily basis. Mind you, Gambo is not the first such figure on the TV news speed-dial; different disciplines require different spokesmen. At one time, Ernie Wise appeared to be the go-to name to comment on the passing of a comedy great; as the original cast of small-screen comics began to drop like flies in the 80s and 90s, little Ern was always there to pay tribute. I used to wonder who would pay tribute to him when he died, and this was the point (there or thereabouts) when Barry Cryer filled the void. He’s performed that function admirably ever since and yet now the sad news has come that old Barry himself needs someone to sing his praises. What’s telling is that the dozens who are doing so online emanate from every comedy generation of the last half-century, for Barry Cryer’s appeal spanned those generations.
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.
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