TOP MAN

The sad news that Network, the finest of all companies issuing vintage TV on DVD, has gone into liquidation is a double blow to anyone who finds intelligent grownup television drama from half-a-century ago preferable to today’s often pitiful excuse. Firstly, the other companies that competed with Network in its early days, such as Acorn and Simply Media, appear to have completely abandoned the DVD/Blu Ray market, meaning Network was virtually operating in a field of one that has few potential operators to fill its shoes; and secondly, Network’s eagerness to keep releasing physical product meant it was a superior option to those that have succumbed to the dubious advances of streaming, a system vulnerable to the vagaries of pop cultural fashions, and one that can edit or remove content without the consent of the subscriber if the puritanical arbiters of permissible material suddenly declare it ‘problematic’. The timing of Network’s tragic collapse was also strangely ironic for me personally, as the very evening I heard the news I’d just finished watching perhaps what could be called an archetypal Network box-set release, ‘Man at the Top’.

The wonderful thing about Network was that it not only released remastered versions of programmes that have survived in the public consciousness as classics via regular screenings on repeat channels, but also put out series that were popular in their day yet have barely been seen since, thus failing to stretch their reputations beyond their initial audience. ‘Man at the Top’ was one such series; produced by Thames between 1970 and 1972, ‘Man at the Top’ continued the life and times of Joe Lampton, the cocksure character created by John Braine in his 1957 novel, ‘Room at the Top’. When the book was filmed a couple of years after its incendiary publication, its literary impact was replicated on the big screen, lighting the blue touch paper for the ‘kitchen sink’ era that gave the British film industry a kick up the backside. Lampton was played with swaggering charisma by Laurence Harvey in the movie, but the roots of the cinematic social realism that ‘Room at the Top’ inspired lay in the theatre, primarily with John Osborne’s groundbreaking play, ‘Look Back in Anger’ in 1956. In a canny piece of casting, when Joe Lampton’s adventures were updated for the early 70s small screen, he was played by Kenneth Haigh, who had brought the eloquent antihero Jimmy Porter to life onstage in the original Royal Court production of Osborne’s play.

Joe Lampton is a beneficiary of post-war educational improvements and the social mobility that followed them, a working-class northern lad who took advantage of the opportunities available to him and transcended the limited horizons that had kept his parents tied to their humble origins. Brash, bullish and bright, once the ambitious Lampton can see this tantalising career path laid out before him, he seizes every chance he gets with a ravenous ruthlessness that mirrors the avaricious arrogance of the local self-made men who run the town – the councillors, mill-owners, and all the usual cigar-smoking Masonic movers and shakers; Lampton is desperate to get what they’ve got and he sets about it with little care for who he tramples over to get there – including women. Despite being involved with the older wife of a colleague, he also courts the boss’s naive young daughter Susan; the predictable outcome of that pre-pill period is a shotgun marriage that secures Lampton’s lofty place in the family firm. For many, that would be job done; but Lampton’s ambition stretches beyond the north; Yorkshire isn’t big enough for him.

When we rejoin Joe Lampton in 1970, he’s a high-flying management consultant, prowling the concrete jungle of the capital’s sky-scraping office blocks; he drives a flash motor, resides in the Surrey stockbroker belt, and is 16 years into a static marriage whose vows he doesn’t exactly honour. The odour of executive success proves to be an irresistible aphrodisiac to seemingly every woman he comes into contact with and I swiftly lost track of all the ones he beds throughout the series, most of whom are familiar faces from the 70s TV rep company such as Stephanie Beacham, Katy Manning, Ann Lynn and Janet Key. Joe Lampton is a fascinating character because he’s such a bastard, yet Kenneth Haigh gives us an utterly believable and honest portrayal of a man of his generation, background and class – warts and all. Whenever his long-suffering wife Susan (played with sympathetic weariness by Zena Walker) attracts male attention or appears to take a shine to a member of the opposite sex, Lampton reverts to caveman mode and all-but drags her back home by her hair. Yes, one didn’t have to dig too deep beneath the sophisticated veneer of the moustachioed waistcoat-wearing businessman-about-town of the era to reveal the uncouth backstreet ruffian with his arse hanging out of his pants; indeed, a semi-regular character played by Colin Welland (a coarse old school-friend from Lampton’s hometown) proves the one thing money cannot buy is class. Yet Lampton, by contrast, seems far more able to conceal his provincial shortcomings when mixing with the high and mighty.

Yes, Joe Lampton is a bastard; but he’s in an environment where he’s surrounded by bastards, many of whom were born with advantages he never had. This fact is made all the more stark when we encounter a character such as the one played in a memorable episode by Michael Bates, a good man married to a philandering, spendthrift wife he inexplicably worships; the character ends up as a casualty of the system when she leaves him for his best friend; he dies by his own hand because he lacks the clinical streak necessary to survive and prosper in the world he finds himself in. So, despite ourselves, we can’t help rooting for Joe Lampton because whenever he experiences a fall from grace, it’s usually been caused by an even more unlikeable, self-serving, amoral brute who puts personal gain in business above and beyond every other concern. The message is pretty clear that nice guys don’t make it all the way to the top. And once at the top, Joe Lampton soon comes into contact with the equally callous cold fish of hereditary privilege, something that finally impresses his overbearing, self-important, self-made-man of a father-in-law, Abe Brown.

To opportunists like Abe Brown, his son-in-law’s rise is a chance to feather his own nest, and he and Lampton’s aristocratic patron push him into running for Parliament. Lampton sacrifices the chance of genuine love rather than another one-night stand to pursue this aim and then walks away from it at the eleventh hour, belatedly realising the gold in the pot isn’t enough after all. The series ends on an uncertain note, though Kenneth Haigh’s portrayal of Joe Lampton received one final outing in a 1973 movie that followed the second series. Haigh is the only actor from the TV series to feature and although the film is an interesting extended episode, it doesn’t quite hit the same heights. Nevertheless, the fact the movie was included on the box-set of the series was a classic Network move; no other company would have bothered to complete the set like that. But Network always made sure its releases were of the best quality, not only picture-wise, but all the extras, the accompanying booklets, and even the original transmission dates printed on the flipside of the DVD sleeve. Nothing was left out; the company knew its niche audience and went out of its way to give it what it wanted.

I counted 66 Network releases amongst my DVDs just before penning this paragraph, and chances are there are a few more I overlooked. They range from children’s shows to grownup telly to movies and documentaries. The variety Network offered was never less than impressive, and one wonders now how many neglected series they may well have excavated in the future will henceforth remain locked away in vaults for good. Even streaming sites tend to stick to the obvious vintage shows that have been repeated to death; Network could always take you by surprise with what it exhumed, and it’ll be missed.

© The Editor

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WOMAN’S WORK

The unconvincing argument for the tiresome trend of replacing iconic male characters with inferior female substitutes – whether that be a particular Jedi, a specific Timelord, or the non-binary individual at the helm of the USS Enterprise – rests upon a lack of ‘representation’ in the past. According to this jaded narrative, there were no leading women fronting movies or TV shows before Year Zero was initiated and therefore the guys have to be castrated to balance the books; the fictional heroes whose adventures kept more than one generation entranced were male, yet they were apparently pale and stale, a heinous situation that necessitated gender reassignment surgery. Let’s just conveniently ignore the ‘women’s pictures’ that kept Hollywood ticking over in the 1940s and propelled the likes of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck to superstardom, eh? Well, not only has this approach proven disastrous in terms of box-office receipts and small-screen viewing figures, but it’s also a dishonest act of cultural revisionism, dismissing pioneers that placed an authentically strong female character at the centre of attention.

All TV before the glorious advent of inclusivity and diversity was male, pale and stale? What about one of the first great US sitcoms, ‘I Love Lucy’ (1951-57) and one of the most enduring, ‘Bewitched’ (1964-72)? And not forgetting Mary Tyler Moore, who progressed from playing Dick Van Dyke’s wife to starring as a single career woman in her own show from 1970 to 1977, spawning two spinoffs also fronted by strong female characters, ‘Rhoda’ (1974-78) and ‘Phyllis’ (1975-77). In drama, nothing but strong female characters could be found in London Weekend’s prison series, ‘Within These Walls’ (1971-78), which inspired an entertaining Aussie equivalent that was a late-night cult amongst Poms suffering from insomnia in the early 90s, ‘Prisoner: Cell Block H’. Cop shows, the bread-and-butter of 70s American TV, gave us Angie Dickinson in ‘Police Woman’ (1974-78), followed later by ‘Cagney and Lacey’ (1982-88); on this side of the pond we had the uniformed branch of the Force in the shape of ‘Juliet Bravo’ (1980-85) as well as CID with Jill Gascoine in ‘The Gentle Touch’ (1980-84) – a spinoff from which was ‘C.A.T.S. Eyes’ (1985-87), starring a trio of female characters.

The villains got a look in with Lynda La Plante’s ‘Widows’ (1983-85), whilst much earlier, ‘Take Three Girls’ had the notable distinction of being BBC1’s first foray into colour drama in 1969 as it focused on a trio of independent young women making their way in Swinging London. The more familiar female profession of nursing had been featured in the BBC’s hospital soap, ‘Angels’ (1975-83) – nothing to do, of course, with ‘Charlie’s Angels’ (1976-81) or those other popular slices of escapist feminine fantasy, ‘The Bionic Woman’ (1976-78) and ‘Wonder Woman’ (1975-79). And all of this was long before ‘Prime Suspect’ supposedly smashed the glass ceiling. Indeed, when the amount of archive series starring strong leading female characters is stacked-up, it’s evident those who propagate the ‘lack of representation’ myth either suffer from amnesia or are in wilful denial of what preceded them in the dark ages that supposedly reigned until they arrogantly took credit for going where no woman had allegedly gone before. Even the Law, a subject that gave us one of television’s great male characters in the portly shape of Leo McKern as ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, saw a woman beat Horace to it by a good seven years.

‘Justice’ was a legal drama produced by Yorkshire Television from 1971 to 1974, one that had its roots in a one-off play that aired in 1969. It proved to be a career reboot for one of Britain’s leading movie actresses of wartime and immediate post-war cinema, the magisterial Margaret Lockwood (along with her trademark beauty spot), and though unfairly overlooked today, the series was genuinely groundbreaking and comes across as a compelling example of ‘grownup’ TV via the series’ current repeat run courtesy of Talking Pictures TV. Like the best of its era, ‘Justice’ doesn’t interpret ‘grownup’ TV in the way broadcasters do in our enlightened age, where after-the-watershed dramas are essentially – in terms of plot, dialogue and characterisation – glorified daytime soaps where everyone says ‘fuck’ a lot. ‘Justice’ saw Lockwood play Harriet Peterson, a gay divorcee who managed to achieve a Law degree despite her ex-husband’s imprisonment.

The series initially covered her progress as a barrister in ‘the North Country’ before she eventually attracted enough attention to warrant an invite from a top London chambers, which she accepted. Once established in the capital, Harriet was under the watchful eye of Head of Chambers, Sir John Gallagher – played with memorably witty pomposity by Philip Stone, who is perhaps better known for playing Malcolm McDowell’s beleaguered father in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Despite operating in a male-dominated environment that leaves her conduct far more scrutinised than any of her male colleagues, Harriet is involved in a ‘scandalous’ relationship with GP Dr Ian Moody, a relationship untroubled by matrimony; whilst this doesn’t seem especially unusual today, it was certainly brave territory to traverse in the early 70s. Incidentally, Moody was played by John Stone (no relation to Philip), who was Lockwood’s real-life (unmarried) partner. Dr Moody and his do-gooder charity work with ex-cons represent an archetype of the period whose activities possess a resonance still relevant today where condescending middle-class spokesmen for the underclass are concerned; Harriet’s far more effective (not to say realistic) logic routinely expose her partner’s naivety and his emphasis on ‘feelings’, whereby a criminal is rebranded as victim to sway a sentence.

Later in the series, Anthony Valentine joins the team as an arrogant, self-important young buck; fresh from his masterly portrayal of both the ruthless aristocratic assassin Toby Meres in ‘Callan’ and a sadistic SS officer eager to save his own skin when the tide of WWII turns in ‘Colditz’, the charismatic Valentine would undoubtedly have stolen endless scenes had he not been up against such an expert old pro as Lockwood. As it is, the former star of ‘The Lady Vanishes’ and ‘The Wicked Lady’ dominates every scene she’s in, relishing the opportunity to flex her theatrical muscles in her 40s, an opportunity that television offered her when the big screen had written her off. It’s surprising – though sadly not unexpected – that Lockwood’s efforts remain largely unrecognised by a generation that imagines it invented the idea of strong female characters, but Harriet Peterson ends one series of ‘Justice’ by being elevated to Head of Chambers and the next to finally becoming a QC – and how right QC sounds rather than KC, which we now have to use following the accession of a male sovereign. I’m afraid KC still sounds like someone who should be fronting the Sunshine Band. But that’s the way they like it, apparently.

Alongside the likes of the aforementioned ‘Callan’ as well as other examples of ‘grownup’ TV from the same era such as ‘Public Eye’ and ‘Man at the Top’, ‘Justice’ is a good pointer as to how television once rated the intelligence of its audience; in the case of ‘Justice’, it evidently assumed that audience would accept a female as the leading character without concessions to her ring-fenced ‘weak and feeble’ sex. And watching such a series half-a-century later, it’s clear that it wasn’t remotely necessary for this century to symbolically hack off the dicks of all those iconic male characters and recast them as obnoxious ‘sisters’ impossible to love; we already had a rich history of strong female characters in leading roles. They didn’t play the victim, they didn’t wear their sex as a placard, and they didn’t subject the audience to tedious post-#MeToo lectures on how hard it is to be a woman in a patriarchal society; they just got on with it.

© The Editor

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DAYS THE MUSIC DIED

Sometimes footage shot for the TV news that would’ve been shoved way down the pecking order when broadcast turns out to be far more fascinating in retrospect than whatever was grabbing the headlines. Joe Public going about his business or enjoying himself can provide a greater insight into how life was lived for the majority than whatever the President or Prime Minister of the day was up to. The fashions, the vehicles, the street furniture – all offer a window to a vanished world that is nevertheless remarkably recent in the grand scheme of things; and it is realising just how much the world we look out on day-to-day has visually altered within living memory that makes such footage so compelling. YouTube has proven to be a good repository for this people’s archive, and whenever I stumble upon another addition I tend to download it and stash it away for future use in my own DIY videos. A couple of months back, I rediscovered film of punters dancing the night away at the Hammersmith Palais in the early 1970s, something I’d downloaded years before and never done anything with; this uncut reel evidently trimmed for transmission ran for the best part of 25 minutes in its raw form, and I found it so intriguing that I wondered if the old-school ballroom venue was still with us. I quickly learnt it fell beneath the wrecking ball in 2007.

Sadly, the Hammersmith Palais is not unique amongst this country’s culturally significant pleasure palaces for the proles in that it now exists only on film. With the Brixton Academy currently threatened with closure, it’s interesting that so few of these venues are regarded by developers and local councils as sites worthy of preservation, as though the fact they provided entertainment for the masses and served as epicentres of pop culture renders them completely dispensable and historically irrelevant. They’re not the Royal Opera House, therefore they don’t matter. How wrong they are. Take The Cavern, perhaps the most famous club and musical hub of the past century – yes, visit Matthews Street in Liverpool and you’ll find a venue called The Cavern; but it’s not The Cavern; it’s not the same place that acted as the maternity ward for a revolution, as the actual location where John, Paul, George and Ringo lit the blue touch paper for all of our lives was across the street from the club that now bears the Cavern name. It was demolished in 1973 to make way for a car park, long before the Rock Heritage industry existed and realised its profitable potential.

The Cavern was still primarily regarded as a Jazz club prior to the incursion of ‘Merseybeat’, with a coffee bar-cum-live venue called The Casbah previously providing The Beatles and their contemporaries with somewhere to play; this was owned and run by the mother of Pete Best and had been inspired by Soho’s 2i’s Coffee Bar, a Skiffle venue that facilitated the first wave of British rock ‘n’ rollers. The café’s handy location in London’s ‘naughty square mile’ ensured any snotty young Elvis imitator strutting his scruffy stuff could swiftly be signed-up by some Denmark Street shark and sewn into a shiny suit for a speedy transformation into an all-round entertainer. But the 2i’s was gradually usurped as the place to be once the 60s started swinging and the nature of pop acts altered; it closed in 1970, and where the 2i’s used to be is now a fish & chip restaurant, with the token plaque on the wall outside the only indication as to its past incarnation.

The increasing popularity of less ‘showbizzy’ venues than the 2i’s was epitomised by the increasing success of The Marquee, situated in the same neighbourhood on Wardour Street; unlike the 2i’s, whose Skiffle roots had led to it being viewed as a rather juvenile enterprise, the Marquee had hosted ‘grownup’ music – i.e. Jazz and R&B – when situated in its original home on Oxford Street. When it relocated to Wardour Street in 1964, The Marquee quickly established itself as one of the key stepping stones on the live music circuit, particularly for up-and-coming acts who would shortly progress to household name status. The Rolling Stones had made their live debut at the Marquee’s first home and also played the Wardour Street version, as did everyone from The Who, The Yardbirds and David Bowie to The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, to name but a tiny handful. When many of the clubs that had served as the breeding grounds for the British pop and rock scene of the 60s closed their doors in the early 70s due to the cheaper appeal of a DJ spinning discs, The Marquee remained a pivotal medium-sized music venue and continued to be so until the mid-80s. In 1988, the year I myself was photographed standing outside the Wardour Street Marquee during a whistle-stop tour around the capital’s most notable pop hot spots, the site was sold for redevelopment and the club reopened on Charing Cross Road, a location it remained at until 2001, the start of a nomadic period for the Marquee that saw it attached to various different locations until finally disappearing in 2008. The Wardour Street site is now occupied by a couple of restaurants, a cigar shop and apartments.

Most of the music venues that helped put Britain on the pop map weren’t purpose-built as such, with many undergoing several regenerations that reflected the changes in the kind of entertainment the public sought on a night out. The Wigan Casino, world-famous home of the Northern Soul scene, had been a ballroom in the Hammersmith Palais vein until its declining attendances were dramatically reversed by the introduction of all-nighters that capitalised on the regional popularity of obscure black dance music from the US. Several American Soul singers struggling to make a living at home were flown over to the UK and were pleasantly surprised to be enthusiastically received as big stars by the Northern Soul crowd; and the patrons’ passion for vintage tracks that had flopped first time round helped push a sizeable amount of them into the charts, giving a further kiss of life to down-at-heel singers who suddenly found themselves on ‘Top of the Pops’. Northern Soul was a passing fad in commercial terms, but continued to be a popular live attraction until the closure of the Wigan Casino in 1981. Nothing remains of the club now; the Grand Arcade shopping centre, an utterly forgettable retail cathedral packed with empty units, stands on the site today.

Manchester’s Hacienda had been a warehouse until Factory Records boss Tony Wilson and his label’s star band New Order converted it into a nightclub in 1982. Early attractions at the venue were something of a mixed bag, including The Smiths, Madonna (making her live UK debut), and even – on the opening night – Bernard Manning; but it was from the late 80s onwards that the club’s reputation grew as an important centre for cutting edge sounds via the Acid House scene, for which the Hacienda proved to be a Northern base. The ‘loved-up’ Ecstasy drug culture that went hand-in-hand with the music was credited with reducing football hooliganism in the city, though when harder drugs and the armed gangs that went with them began to plague the venue in the early 90s, the club’s days were numbered; ironically, drug-use at the Hacienda meant few patrons bought drinks and the venue made little money from the sale of alcohol, which is a key element of a nightclub’s income. The Hacienda finally closed in 1997 and after a period standing empty was demolished five years later. An apartment block is in its place now.

At the height of rock’s live pulling power, there were also several notable large venues that routinely held landmark concerts by the biggest draws, such as Finsbury Park’s Rainbow Theatre (closed its doors, 1982 – now an Evangelical church) and Earls Court, scene of a many a memorable big gig (closed 2014 – demolished by 2017). It’s a shame how few of the clubs and venues that gave birth to something which made a greater global impact than anything else produced in this country over the last 100 years actually remain standing and/or in use for the staging of live music. Times change, of course, and the dearth of charismatic young performers able to fill a large venue is evident at the pensioners’ away day masquerading as the Glastonbury Festival every summer; but the absence of physical evidence in the shape of these legendary locations is a sad statement on how this country views its most recent cultural legacy.

© The Editor

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HOLIDAY VIEWING

For all the talk in recent years of the UK ‘leaving Europe’, Britain’s membership of a certain European institution has nevertheless proven to be remarkably enduring, far more so than another renowned European institution – i.e. the one we opted out of in 2016 (the one that continues to be held up as both Messiah and Antichrist, depending where you stand). I’m talking about the EBU – that’s the European Broadcasting Union to those of you only aware of one European Union. Our membership of the EBU predates any economic alliance with the Continent, stretching all the way back to the early 1950s – long before satellites enabled live pictures from mainland Europe to be beamed into British living rooms, a time when we were reliant on cables buried deep under the Channel to relay the Eurovision Song Contest as it happened. In fact, we have the EBU to thank for our continuous participation in Europe’s premier kitsch event and gay night-out; had we not been one of the ‘big five’ countries making substantial financial contributions to the EBU, our woeful bottom three finishes in so many Eurovision Song Contests over the past couple of decades would’ve seen us relegated from the competition; and who over here would want to watch were we denied the edge-of-the-seat drama of seeing if the UK would manage to achieve nul-points?

Our membership of the EBU has not only kept us alive as vital participants in a tournament we will finally be hosting again this year, but continues to provides Radio 3 listeners in the post-midnight wee small hours with something soothing in the background as the station links up with other EBU member states across the Continent and broadcasts extended performances from numerous European orchestras. And anyone who was a viewer of children’s television in the 1960s and 70s felt the benefits of this enlightening post-war co-operation via various European series that were dubbed into English and seared themselves upon the subconscious memories of more than one generation. Iron Curtain cartoons such as Czechoslovakia’s ‘The Mole’ and ‘Dorothy’ were regular features of BBC1’s children’s teatime line-up 50 years ago, as was the Franco-Polish bear ‘Barnaby’ in the lunchtime ‘Watch with Mother’ slot – ‘Barnaby the bear’s my name/never call me Jack or James’; but it was the serials screened repeatedly on mornings during school holidays that left the longest-lingering legacy.

There was the disturbingly surreal Grimm-like East German fairytale, ‘The Singing Ringing Tree’, and Yugoslavia’s ‘The White Horses’ – the latter chiefly remembered courtesy of Jackie Lee’s adorable theme song; there was France’s ‘Belle and Sebastian’ and the unforgettable ‘Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ starring Robert Hoffman; and there was ‘The Flashing Blade’ (AKA ‘Le Chevalier Tempête’), another French outing that received the redubbed treatment at De Lane Lea studios in London, dependent upon a dependable cast of voice actors who made a decent living putting English words into the mouths of funny foreigners. It is the latter I’ve recently re-watched on DVD for the first time in a long time, sticking to the old formula in the process – i.e. watching one episode a day rather than the somewhat dishonest back-to-back binge-watch that rather distils the viewing ritual such serials had at the time.

‘The Flashing Blade’ is set in the 17th century, during one of the endless battles between France and Spain for Continental dominance; our hero is Frenchman the Chevalier de Recci, a dashing, swashbuckling mercenary whose lust for adventure grates as much with the more straitlaced military establishment of his home country as it does the enemy; along with his loyal sidekick Guillot, Chevalier embarks upon a death-defying mission to save an under-siege French garrison town from Spanish bombardment, and over the course of 11 episodes we follow his adventures as he outfoxes the Spanish during their illegal occupation of one of the numerous independent principalities that characterised Europe in this period. The hero is played by Robert Etcheverry whilst his suitably villainous Spanish nemesis Don Alonso is played by Mario Pilar, and the frenetically restless nature of the lead character is reflected in the breathless pace of the series, in which barely five minutes go by without a sword fight or a chase sequence. It had such an impact on me at the time that I even named my first pet goldfish after the series’ hero; and how many pets were called Chevalier in the 70s, I wonder?

‘The Flashing Blade’ had a degree of longevity beyond its Continental competitors in that it was shot in colour and therefore received its last terrestrial TV outing as late as the late 80s; considering it had originally been filmed in the late 60s, this was no mean achievement. But it still looks as though it was afforded a big budget in comparison to the studio-bound home-grown serials of the era, making full use of the period costumes and picturesque locations that give it a cinematic ambience. Once translated and edited into English, ‘The Flashing Blade’ was gifted a fantastic theme song called ‘Fight’ (one absent from the original French language series), which has a galloping rhythm perfectly suited to a series that spends so much of its time on horseback. Swiftly established as a mainstay of school holiday schedules for the best part of a decade, in the pre-VHS/DVD/streaming television era repeated broadcasts on TV were the only way to see a series more than once, and ‘The Flashing Blade’ was a beneficiary of this system. And as someone who came to it after its initial 1969 transmission, I was unaware what I’d always been led to believe was the final episode was actually the penultimate chapter.

Upon purchasing the Network DVD of the series a decade or so ago, I was pleasantly surprised to discover there was a twelfth episode I’d never seen before, though on the DVD this is presented in its original French language version with English subtitles. It’s somewhat jarring to hear the authentic voices of the French actors instead of the more familiar dubbed English voiceovers – and to be deprived of the memorable theme song; but I subsequently learnt that when the dubbed version of the official final episode aired in 1969, the film was subject to constant breakdowns during transmission and even resulted in an ‘Ask Aspel’ request to see the scenes affected by the repeated break in broadcast. At some point in the 1970s, it would appear the BBC hierarchy decided the actual final episode was too problematic to air again and the series was reduced from 12 to 11 episodes thereafter. A pure stroke of serendipitous luck is that the final episode doesn’t really add anything to the overall story and follows the characters as they return home after their battles; by ending the series on 11 episodes, the breathtaking pace is retained and the postscript is rendered superfluous.

It’s easy to forget today just how essential it once was, having to tune in every morning to catch the next instalment of a serial; this was genuine ‘appointment’ television of a kind we’ve completely lost now, probably forever. The rest of the day may well have constituted climbing trees or scaling building site scaffolding as well as engaging in a ‘jumpers-for-goalposts’ cup final, but mornings were reserved for the daily diet of swashing and buckling that would provide at least half-an-hour’s inspiration for recreated sword fights once the great outdoors beckoned. ‘The Flashing Blade’ was the most endearing example of this vanished genre of viewing and is deserving of a retrospective view; the nice thing is that it really stands up, and remains an enjoyable example of just how much time, effort and money once went into children’s programming – not only the original French production, but the English language revamp (including that classic theme song). It also proves not all of Britain’s entries into Europe proved to be a damp squib, whether led by Ted Heath or by Jemini. After all, you’ve got to fight for what you want, for all that you believe…

© The Editor

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SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW

The back end of the 20th century was fortunate – at least in terms of pop cultural retrospectives – that its musical produce was received by the largest audience; in the memory, therefore, events beyond the Top 40 are often soundtracked by popular song, which can happily enter into a marriage with moments from the wider world in serendipitous synchronicity. However, a febrile era whose songs have proven to be as much of their time as they have subsequently become timeless means a DIY ‘mix-tape’ intended to represent a turbulent period of the past can just as easily speak of the paranoia, instability and uncertainty of the here and now, especially when the here and now’s equivalent has no more impact on the wider world than a ringtone. So, to compile a collection of contemporary tunes reflecting the peculiarly melancholy mid-1970s in 2023 inadvertently sources a soundtrack which says as much about our today as it does all our yesterdays. And here is my track-list…

To open with 10cc’s ‘Wall Street Shuffle’ a week after the perennially precarious banking industry experienced another of its periodical wobbles seems to kick-start the album as it means to go on. Although it deals with no specific crisis, the killer rock riff it owns masks a deliciously sardonic view of the world’s money men, a theme that would grow in its potency as Britain teetered on the brink of bankruptcy within a year or two of the song’s appearance. Track two was never a single, but it stands out as a beautifully bleak tribute to doomed lovers, David Bowie’s ‘We Are the Dead’. Included on his chart-topping 1974 LP, ‘Diamond Dogs’, the song was originally composed for the Dame’s aborted ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ musical, though it fits in with the apocalyptic ambience of the album; possessing a creeping menace that points towards the darker avenues Bowie would explore in albums to come, ‘We Are the Dead’ retains a resonance in our post-pandemic landscape.

Track three is Bryan Ferry’s radical reworking of Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’; although a defiantly upbeat cover, its lyrics contain some of Dylan’s most vividly nightmarish imagery, and needless to say, the 21st century hasn’t rendered the song irrelevant one iota. Next up is the third hit for Sparks, the icily elegant ‘Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth’. An odd choice for a single considering its stark contrast with its breathless and bombastic predecessors, this curiously unsettling ballad nevertheless continued to mark the Mael brothers out as uniquely quirky talents. Also capable of quirkiness before he became a teenybop idol, David Essex produced a string of sonically strange singles early on, with track five being the title track from the film in which Essex played a terminally-damaged rock star; ‘Stardust’ sounds like it’s coming live from an empty circus ring and is a further number that captures the hopelessness of one era crawling from the wreckage of another.

Track six is by someone else who divided his time between singing and acting, though in the case of Brian Protheroe, acting won out. A shame, in a way, as ‘Pinball’ was one of the great one-off hits of the decade – a hazy, bloodshot stroll through Soho after-hours that anyone wandering around the alienating bright lights of the big city can relate to, whatever the year. The only track that references a specific year is next – Alice Cooper’s ‘Teenage Lament ‘74’, a song that mines similar themes to the shock-rocker’s breakthrough hit, ‘Eighteen’, though the ambiguous lyrics are buried beneath one of Cooper’s brightest melodies. In contrast, a band renowned for uplifting their audience took the opposite route with track eight; Slade broke their run of top tenners when they released arguably their greatest song, ‘How Does it Feel’ as a single. The memorable opener to their unexpectedly dark biopic of a fictitious rock band, ‘Flame’, the track is a wistful, piano-driven ballad that – despite lyrics laced with hopes of a better tomorrow – cannot help but radiate a potent sadness that perhaps record-buyers didn’t want their favourite Glam Rock party act coming out with. Initially affiliated with the art school side of Glam, Be-Bop Deluxe follow Slade with Bill Nelson’s evocative portrait of parochial ennui, ‘Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape’, making the listener wonder why this band never made it bigger than everyone at the time imagined they would do.

A detour into decadence comes with The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s unforgettably filthy cover of Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’, though decadence itself is often a characteristic side-effect of societies trapped in an irreversible decline; indeed, one doesn’t have to look very far to see its presence in our own. Mind you, decadence never sounded quite so wittily perverse as it did in the hands of a man who had begun his career many years before as ‘Scotland’s Tommy Steele’. Track 11 is from The Who, a band still regarded as a yardstick for outrage in the mid-70s, despite Pete Townshend’s fears he had already bypassed the age he once hoped he’d die before he reached. ‘Imagine a Man’ is another of this compilation’s more unashamedly introspective numbers; but by articulating the sense of disenchantment pervading his generation at the time the song appeared in 1975, Townshend was continuing to be as astute an observer of the world around him as he had been ten years previously. And the song still speaks to anyone on the wrong side of 25 – as long as they’ve grown-up a bit.

Another band more celebrated for their riff-heavy rockers than the sensitive side they never shied away from, Led Zeppelin feature as track 12. With the release of double LP ‘Physical Graffiti’ in 1975, Led Zep reached heights they never quite scaled again, and ‘Ten Years Gone’ is one of the album’s highlights; a lament to lost love of a kind that continues to haunt the loser long after the event, the song shares sentiments with ‘Imagine a Man’ in the way it encapsulates mid-life awareness of a road behind that is suddenly lengthening as the road ahead shortens. Track 13 comes from a voice in the wilderness as British pop’s most prominent exile confronts his fears; John Lennon’s candidly paranoid ‘I’m Scared’ is one of his last great statements before the five-year retirement that shortly followed the release of the album on which it featured, ‘Walls and Bridges’. Stripped of the political dogma that had infected much of his immediate post-Beatles output, the song is imbued with a weary vulnerability that was the common currency of the era’s singer-songwriters.

A quartet of singer-songwriters follows ‘I’m Scared’ – John Martyn, Nick Drake, Richard Thompson (with wife Linda) and Roy Harper. All had their roots in – though swiftly transcended – the British folk revival of the 60s, and were amongst the most effective commentators on a period they looked in the face with such intense eloquence. ‘Solid Air’ is perhaps the revered composition of the combative Martyn, whilst ‘Voice from The Mountain’ by Nick Drake is another of his melancholic musings impossible to hear without joining the dots leading to Drake’s premature death not long after. ‘A Heart Needs a Home’ is a fine wine of a ballad from Richard and Linda Thompson that improves with age, whereas Roy Harper’s exquisite version of ‘North Country’ has much in common with Led Zep’s ‘Ten Years Gone’ – ‘I’m wondering if she remembers me at all’.

Harper’s vocal contribution to ‘Have a Cigar’ on Pink Floyd’s 1975 LP ‘Wish You Were Here’ is still a cause of petty resentment on the part of the ever-cheerful Roger Waters, though the album’s title track has a humane heart that has made it one of the band’s most enduring anthems. It seems a fitting piece to close this DIY compilation with – an old song that says something new to each generation that encounters it; when ongoing (not to say tedious) ‘internet issues’ and a general absence of inspiration provoke recourse to default settings, listing such tracks serves as a timely, gap-plugging interlude between heavier topics in sore need of some good tunes. Maybe these will do.

© The Editor

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LUNAR TUNES

I suppose it’s only natural that a pop cultural age in which recycling is key should find more of interest in its past than its present; the annual roll-call of reissues and anniversaries of yesteryear’s landmark releases has become a Heritage Rock hallmark that exists alongside a glut of contemporary mediocrities without a sole original idea in their heads. And as these 21st century musical magpies freely beg, borrow and steal from the giants upon whose shoulders they squat, consumers are faced with a choice: do they buy into the lame imitation or invest in the original source material? The latter may have a vintage of half-a-century or more, but as the dividing lines between then and now that once used to matter so much to each generation have been whittled away by the Spotify playlist, it seems almost irrelevant that an album like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ is 50 years old this week. It sounds as fresh today as it ever did. Just as the exquisite sonic quality of ‘Abbey Road’ has perhaps enabled that LP above all other Beatles releases to sound permanently fresh to every pair of ears that encounters it, the Floyd’s seminal 1973 release has an unprecedented aural clarity that effectively made it the first Compact Disc a decade before CDs hit the market.

Prior to ‘Dark Side’ arriving, the Floyd had made the journey from Psychedelic pioneers who’d enjoyed a fleeting brush with ‘Top of the Pops’ in 1967 to being one of the leading lights in the turn-of-the 70s hippie underground – anonymous hairy antiheroes, shunning showbiz trappings and producing dark, ambient soundscapes that were apparently ideal for rolling your own to. The band’s exhausting touring schedule helped secure their fan-base, and their gradual abandonment of the 7-inch single for the wider vistas of the LP reflected the period when all the celebrated statements produced in pop played at 33⅓. Their commercial fortunes had survived the Acid-induced breakdown, departure and mental decline of their founder Syd Barrett, eventually resulting in their first chart-topping album, ‘Atom Heart Mother’, in 1970 (yes, the one with the cow on the front cover). Like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd didn’t need to trouble the singles chart or promote their wares by placing photographs of themselves on the sleeves of their LPs. They already had a brand name that sold the music for them.

1971’s ‘Meddle’ was a great leap forward for the band, combining the extended instrumentals for which they had become renowned with a gentle melodic sensibility that was easy on the ears. Side two of the album comprised a solitary track – the dreamy, multilayered epic, ‘Echoes’; it pointed the way to the next album, a record that would elevate Pink Floyd way beyond the lingering remnants of the underground and lift them into the multi-platinum elite of global goliaths. A full year before ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ was released, they premiered it in embryonic form before an audience at London’s Rainbow Theatre, and carried on playing songs intended for the album on the road for months, honing and perfecting them. Recording of the album spanned a lengthy period from May 1972 to February 1973, sandwiched between touring commitments; and it soon became apparent that the tracks would be thematically linked, with the lyrics possessing a provocative directness that had been absent from their previous releases.

1973 was the year in which ‘Prog Rock’ peaked as the thinking man’s alternative to a mainstream pop scene dominated by Glam Rock and teenybop idols like The Osmonds and David Cassidy. ‘Dark Side’ was the year’s first significant release from an act lumbered with the tag, Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ followed in the spring, and 1973 closed with Yes’s bloated double album, ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’ at the top of the LP charts. But ‘Dark Side’ transcended the narrow confines every genre places upon its practitioners and reached audiences who wouldn’t have even heard of Genesis or Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Musically, the record straddles a unique line between impeccably slick musicianship, Musique Concrète-like sound effects, groundbreaking synthesizer experimentation, and loud guitar Rock characteristic of the period; but it never slides into self-indulgence; no instrumental break outstays its welcome and no song goes on too long. With ‘Dark Side’, Pink Floyd achieved a breathtaking balance that blended the deep artistic expression expected of serious creative types in the early 70s with accessible melodies the milkman could whistle. When the album hit record shops in March 1973, it was quickly evident the band had produced a work of art that spoke a universal language to people the world over. Every late 20th century concern that governed millions of post-war lives was condensed into its track-listing; the telling titles of some of those tracks said it all – ‘Money’, ‘Time’, and ‘Brain Damage’.

Even an era in which ‘the concept album’ was so obligatory that the term eventually became an insult never received a statement quite like ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. It upheld the notion of an LP being much more than merely a collection of unrelated songs to the point whereby picking out isolated tracks feels wrong; it’d be like watching a movie on DVD by simply going straight to favourite scenes. In many respects, it’s the antithesis of the present day habit of iPod swiping. The album has such a cohesive narrative – with each song flowing seamlessly into the next – that one always wants to experience the whole work from beginning to end, as though selecting one number by leapfrogging another would be akin to deliberately skipping a vital chapter in a novel. It may have continued the Floyd’s ability to weave hypnotic sonic tapestries that often made their albums resemble soundtracks to movies that only exist in the listener’s head, refashioning the ‘Space Rock’ elements of their earlier oeuvre via the cutting-edge technology of the 70s; but it didn’t do so by making music that was self-consciously esoteric, the kind of late-night, John Peel excursions into obscurity that would only be of interest to stoned students.

The seductive sound of the album is as melodically irresistible as any of the period’s mainstream pop masterpieces, yet its tracks are segued into one another by employing the more avant-garde process of ingenious sound effects that utilise stereo in a way few artists had done up to that point. Chiming clocks, cash registers, running footsteps, the heartbeat that both opens and closes proceedings, and most of all the disarming snatches of voices that slip in and out of the listener’s ears, create an intense, paranoid atmosphere in synch with the lyrical content. Even session singer Clare Torry’s wordless vocal contribution to ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’, recalling the impassioned, improvised screaming of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln on Max Roach’s ‘Protest’, adds to the overall picture. And, as befitting a time when album sleeves were the great visual artworks of the day, ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ has one of the most distinctive and memorable, with its simple yet effective portrait of a prism serving as a signpost for the decade.

Few albums demonstrate the old adage that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts than ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’, for the four musicians comprising Pink Floyd – Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason – drew on their individual strengths and unified them into one remarkable whole that the bitter, petty bickering of Waters and Gilmour in the decades since suggests can never be recaptured. Waters and Gilmour may not be able to be in the same room as each other today, but when they came together as musicians and communicated via their instruments half-a-century ago, something special happened that we can at least still enjoy all these years later. And 45 million punters since March 1973 have done just that.

© The Editor

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THE AGE OF DECADENCE

New Year hangovers aren’t simply physical after-effects characteristic of 1 January; 2023 so far still seems bogged-down by the headlines from last month, many of which were covered in the previous post a week ago. Lack of Winegum action has been in part due to spending a good four solid days on a new instalment of the filthily evergreen ‘Buggernation Street’, now firmly settled in its new home on my Patreon channel; but the aforementioned absence of fresh output on here can also be blamed on a general lack of inspiration arising from the news. Of course, alongside the catalogue of strike action and the annual ‘NHS on the brink’ story, the MSM has been mystifyingly in thrall to the vain, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing public therapy of a ginger whinger; as one half of a couple worthy of comparison to Posh & Becks or Peter Andre & Jordan in terms of class, the ‘spare’ has been flogging his ghost-written misery memoir across newspapers and TV channels that should know better for what feels like the entirety of 2023 to date. The tabloid quarter of Fleet Street professes to despise said twosome and routinely hammers this point home; yet it simultaneously stops at nothing to devote ludicrously disproportionate coverage to them. Both they and the MSM are engaged in an unedifying spectacle akin to watching a pair of pissheads scrapping on the pavement to get at a fiver they’ve just spotted hovering over a grate.

I don’t intend to add to the circus any more than I would write a post about the Kardashians, Amanda Holden or Carol Vorderman – other similarly uninteresting celebrities that the mainstream media appears to believe we all find endlessly fascinating. But I will just say that it was like attempting to extract blood from the proverbial stone getting my grandfather to talk about what he did during the Second World War; yet, had he claimed to have killed 25 Germans in one fell swoop, I doubt I would have believed him and may well have correctly concluded he’d probably spent six years in the Catering Corps, with his most testing time of the conflict coming when he had to feed a dozen hungry troops with just a couple of tins of Spam and a packet of powdered egg. If the stupidity of Henry Charles Albert David Windsor is such that his nauseating naval gazing blinds him to the fact that bragging about how many members of a still-active terrorist organisation he slaughtered during his stint serving granny & country isn’t necessarily wise, so be it; but that doesn’t necessarily earn him the ‘poor you’ sympathy he clearly craves from the self-indulgent victimhood of a wealthy, titled plank.

This has also been the week of an archetypal social media story involving a Police Force writing to a Twitter user and demanding he or she (or ‘they’) attend an interview – and presumably a ‘re-education’ lecture – concerning a Tweet that committed the apparently-blasphemous crime of criticising the prevalence of the ubiquitous rainbow flag; the fact doing so isn’t a crime in law – yet – didn’t prevent Inspector Knacker from behaving as though it is and evidently hoping the said criminal was unaware of the fact. Considering the current climate, which sometimes feels like waking up in a world you’d rather not be living in, what more opportune time to revisit the BBC’s landmark 1976 production of ‘I, Claudius’? Here is a peerless and prescient portrayal of a once-great society on the cusp of collapse into decadence and then destruction; we witness that collapse through the ruling Roman dynasty and their Mafia-like machinations to rule at all costs. Served-up as perhaps the last great television event of the era in which television was the prime medium for telling stories with intelligence, wit and panache, ‘I, Claudius’ is littered with unforgettable set-pieces, spiky dialogue and characters that linger in the collective memory almost half-a-century later.

The cast list alone of ‘I, Claudius’ demonstrates how the reputation of British TV for attracting the cream of the acting crop was at its zenith in the mid-70s: the young Derek Jacobi making his name as the stammering, shambling lead character; the malevolently mesmerising Sian Phillips as the scheming Empress Livia, arguably the most memorable bitch in television history, and a woman who will casually poison the competition to clear the path for her ungrateful son Tiberius (George Baker) to succeed her husband as Emperor; and not forgetting Brian Blessed at his booming best as Augustus. Along the way we encounter numerous then-current as well as future familiar faces such as Patrick Stewart, Ian Ogilvy, John Rhys-Davies, Stratford Johns, Bernard Hepton, Margaret Tyzack, Kevin McNally, Bernard Hill, Peter Bowles, Patricia Quinn, Norman Rossington, and even Christopher Biggins as an especially noxious Nero. But perhaps no other cast member – with the honourable exception of Sian Phillips as Livia – leaves a greater mark on the production than John Hurt as the dangerously insane Caligula.

Fresh from his breakthrough into household name territory via ‘The Naked Civil Servant’, Hurt plays the psychopathic Caesar with the correct amount of genuinely disturbing menace, yet is equally hilarious in a part that another actor could easily have tipped into melodramatic farce. Caligula’s sadistic madness and conviction he is a God merely renting a human form turns those around him into either sycophantic toadies or (as in the case of ‘Uncle Claudius’) forces them to think on their toes, watch what they say, and learn to anticipate the unpredictable whenever in the Emperor’s company – as kids hoping to avoid a beating often do when finding themselves alongside the school bully. Caligula famously promoted his horse to a senator in one of his milder expressions of lunacy, but his more deviant whims were inflicted upon Rome simply because he decreed it, however much the Romans realised he was tampering with the natural order of things by normalising all that was beyond the pale. No doubt if Caligula had added paedophilia to his depraved list of legalised perversions, he’d have reclassified paedophiles as ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ – as indeed a member of another contemporary Police Force did just a week ago.

Caligula’s inevitable downfall at the hands of assassin’s blades comes in the wake of impregnating the sister he married and then – believing himself to be Zeus – following in the God’s footsteps by cutting out the foetus and eating it. The episode that climaxes with this gory scene was originally even gorier, but BBC bosses wilted under the onslaught of outrage from Mary Whitehouse and her comrades-in-offence and censored the offending sight of Drusilla bleeding to death from her horrific wound when the series was repeated. Although the scene in question can never be restored on account of it being lost on the cutting room floor, the edited version actually works much better in that seeing Claudius’s horrified reaction as he gazes upon the carnage is brilliantly effective without needing to see something our imagination has already pictured in all its grotesque glory.

Claudius is eventually the last man standing following the murders of most of the imperial family and is proclaimed Emperor against his wishes; but being perceived as a fool for most of his life due to his physical afflictions has saved his skin and also means he is able to document the saga of his brutal clan for the benefit of future generations. More or less each episode opens and closes with the elderly Claudius almost acting as a geriatric Edgar Lustgarten introducing the latest instalment of a bloodthirsty story, the likes of which has continued to echo throughout every TV series dealing with dynastical intrigues ever since. But ‘I, Claudius’ itself is perhaps the high watermark of a period that had begun with ‘The Forsyte Saga’ a decade earlier, one in which writing, production, direction and acting overcame the limitations of a studio set and managed to manufacture a uniquely compelling halfway house between theatre and television rather than aping cinema, as the small-screen does today. We may not see that era again on TV, but I expect Caligula to return as President or Prime Minister of somewhere soon; the climate seems particularly sympathetic to him right now.

© The Editor

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SPECIAL BREW

Provincial cities often tend to define themselves more in competition with their nearest metropolitan neighbour than engaging in the futile exercise of trying to out-London London; perhaps the lengthy rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester is the most famous example, with these twin titans of 19th century industry extending their pissing contest well beyond industrial decline and into the arena of pop culture. The football field has long been an outlet for old intercity enmities, with the weighing scales of North-Western dominance sometimes falling in favour of Liverpool FC and sometimes Manchester United; elsewhere, the long shadow cast by The Beatles has always been a thorn in Manchester’s side, though post-Beatles notables like Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis have made enough inroads into the public consciousness to redress the balance, if only temporarily. Beyond the North, what of the Midlands? Birmingham and its Black Country satellites is the behemoth few have ever challenged. The Moody Blues, The Move, Slade, Black Sabbath, half of Led Zeppelin, ELO…no wonder the rest have always struggled to get a look in. However, there was a very brief period at the turn of the 80s when Coventry outshone Brum.

Divided from its overbearing neighbour by the greenbelt of the Meriden Gap, Coventry’s main claim to fame for centuries was as a renowned medieval showpiece city ala York; and then came the Blitz. Rather than demolish great swathes of a historic city centre, post-war town-planners were provided with a clean slate thanks to the Luftwaffe, and a familiar ‘concrete jungle’ facelift was gradually unveiled. The once-prosperous motor industry’s slide into stagnation by the late 70s became emblematic of Coventry’s downturn, and while high unemployment coupled with racial tensions (the city saw large immigration from Asia and the Caribbean in the 50s and 60s) may have made life hard for its citizens, these conditions also provided the perfect breeding ground for a short-lived musical revolution that put Coventry at the centre of the pop map.

The sad death of Specials frontman Terry Hall this week was received with a wave of genuine sadness from people of a certain age, those old enough to remember when his band were the most important post-Punk act in the country; not only did The Specials manage the impressive feat of achieving both critical acclaim and commercial success, but the name of the record label the band established to ensure their independence – 2 Tone – also gave its name to an entire scene that thrived around them, the first scene for kids too young for Punk. They enjoyed two chart-topping singles and maintained their credibility throughout, spurning the silly inverted snobbery of The Clash by regularly appearing on ‘Top of the Pops’ and never once being accused of the heinous crime of ‘selling out’. Moreover, with the exception of The Equals a decade earlier, The Specials were the first notable mixed-race British band to break through, successfully merging the distinctive sounds of the two musical cultures the members of the band had inherited, musical cultures that had served to bring the members together.

The black members of The Specials had been raised on a diet of Jamaican Ska imported to these shores by first-generation West Indian immigrants; but the white members of the band had received exposure too. The skinheads of the early 70s may have drifted further to the Right as the decade progressed, but Ska and Reggae constituted their original soundtrack, uniting black and white at a time when racial unrest – exacerbated by the contemporaneous emergence of the National Front – was spawning an exceedingly unpleasant climate. Punk bands like Sham 69 effectively split due to the far-Right shit-stirrers they inadvertently attracted to their gigs, and the descent of one Punk strand into the unlistenable and politically dubious ghetto called Oi! meant the invigorating marriage of recognisably black sounds with the same energy (and socially-conscious lyrical content) that had fuelled Punk was a potentially combustible mix at the end of the 70s. Happily, the melting pot produced pure gold, and the nation’s singles-buyers responded positively to the new hybrid from the second half of 1979 onwards. The Specials’ ‘Top of the Pops’ debut saw them performing ‘Gangsters’, which refitted Ska legend Prince Buster’s track ‘Al Capone’ with a distinctly cutting-edge engine; so swift was the sound’s rise up the charts that when The Specials returned to TOTP to promote their second single, ‘A Message to You, Rudy’, they were joined on the same show by another 2 Tone act, The Selecter, and a band whose debut single had also been released on the same label, Madness. It was hard not to conclude that here was a scene that was set to carry British pop into the 80s and beyond.

1980 was the real year of 2 Tone, even if – as had happened before with Psychedelia and would happen again with the New Romantics – it was all over and done with in the blink of an eye. Madness opened the first TOTP of the decade performing ‘My Girl’, and barely a month had passed before The Specials achieved their first No.1 single with ‘Too Much Too Young’, an uncompromising ditty about teenage pregnancy that limited its Radio 1 airplay. Birmingham’s The Beat were another band bearing the 2 Tone sound and they achieved several hits throughout the year, whilst Madness were already in the process of becoming a hit machine that would end up transcending and outliving the scene that bore them. But it was The Specials who remained the most interesting and intriguing act of the lot; the hit singles continued – indeed, every single the band released during their original incarnation reached the Top 10 – and they proved their value with the release of their second album, ‘More Specials’, one of those albums that grows richer the further we travel from the moment of its arrival. In fact, it was actually greeted with a degree of bewilderment at the time.

A brilliantly eclectic and adventurous shift away from the formula, ‘More Specials’ sowed the seeds of the band’s demise and exposed the different directions its creative forces were heading in. Keyboard player and founder Jerry Dammers was delving into the kind of movie soundtracks that would later provide the sampled roots of the 90s ‘Trip Hop’ scene as well as exhibiting a fondness for what would eventually be labelled ‘Lounge-core’; the rest of the band were not so enthusiastic. The Specials could have imploded there and then, right at the point when the 2 Tone craze had peaked, but they kept their cool long enough to deliver their masterpiece the following summer, bowing out with a single that rightly ranks as one of the finest slices of pop-as-social-comment ever committed to vinyl, ‘Ghost Town’.

A song such as ‘Ghost Town’ reaching No.1 right at the very moment when rioting was incinerating many of Britain’s inner cities is as retrospectively a mind-boggling occurrence as Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ providing the nation with its unlikely Xmas chart-topper in 1979; but it happened. In some respects, there was nowhere for The Specials to go after that and they finally splintered into both The Special AKA and The Fun Boy Three. Terry Hall was the frontman of the latter, dispensing with the sharp suit that had been the sartorial trademark of The Specials and allowing his cropped thatch (another trademark) to grow a little. The Fun Boy Three were TOTP regulars for a good couple of years and then they too split. Hall’s amusingly glum countenance and deadpan delivery were less visible in the charts thereafter, though he hovered on the maverick fringes for a decade or two before the inevitable Specials reunion and accompanying sell-out tours. Unlike many such enterprises, however, the reunion was regarded as something far more than just another nostalgic cash-cow for hard-up middle-aged musicians. The Specials had always been smarter than the usual music biz mentality, and they always will be.

© The Editor

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SPIRIT OF ’78

As if the past two or three years haven’t been difficult enough, yet again it’s the hospitality industry that’s being punctured by the sharp end of the latest crises. Footage of empty bars, bistros and restaurants in central London this week were mainly blamed on just one of the seemingly myriad industrial disputes of the moment, that being staged by rail workers. Naturally, this is the time of year when organised parties descend on such venues and get the festive cash tills ringing; but after being brought to its knees by lockdown and then being forced to limit its custom due to the inconvenience of social distancing regulations once reopened, hospitality is now confronted by endless cancellations and the non-appearance of impromptu punters due to the fact that commuting has been severely impacted of late. Much like the Labour Party, one almost gets the impression a union leader such as the RMT’s Mick Lynch isn’t so much concerned with improving the lot of the working man as he is with scoring political points over a government not necessarily in tune with his own worldview. That’s not to say the Conservative Party hasn’t provoked a good deal of this – far from it; but while the current stalemate produces no winners, losers are abundant – whether they be small businesses struggling to make ends meet or simply the browbeaten general public, confronted by even fewer reasons to be cheerful as the chain reaction of industrial action goes viral.

Right now, the roll-call of ongoing or imminent strikes seems to expand on a daily basis. We’re already feeling the effects of rail and postal workers withdrawing their labour at a time when we’re most dependent on it, but the Christmas & New Year schedules promise everyone from nurses to Border Force officers to bus drivers to baggage handlers to junior doctors to driving examiners to teachers to university staff and civil servants will at some point be declaring ‘Everybody out!’ 10,000 ambulance workers are also set to strike, though considering how long one has to wait for an ambulance to arrive these days, one wonders if anyone will actually notice. Of course, now we’re in December, the Royal Mail being afflicted by this virus is the one industrial dispute that is already proving to be a more effective souring of the seasonal spirit than a ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ Xmas special. Ever since the knock-down sale of the Post Office by Old Mother Cable during the Coalition years, the split between it and the Royal Mail has hardly been a roaring success, with the scandal that saw the false imprisonment and ruined reputations of hundreds of sub-postmasters during the Horizon IT affair emblematic of this centuries-old institution’s decline and fall.

As used to be the case with the music business (and remains so with the publishing industry), Christmas is the one period of the year when a public now largely content to spend its money and time online actually gets off its arse, fuelling an upsurge in productivity where Pat and his black & white cat are concerned. Therefore, it doesn’t take a genius to calculate this is the most opportune moment for postal workers to strike. Sure, when it comes to birthdays, many today prefer the instant method of issuing a meme, message or humorous image on the likes of Facebook or Twitter to mark the occasion rather than the antiquated ritual of buying a physical card and popping it in the post box; but Christmas remains the one exception to the new rule, whereby season’s greetings are still dispatched the old-fashioned way. And then there’s also the gifts requiring packaging, carried to the counter of a post office now often reduced to an appendage to a supermarket or shop or – in the case of my own ‘local’ – a library. This annual ceremony is entered into by millions up and down the country, and those millions expect their parcels to be delivered to the recipients at least before 25 December. I wonder how many of those millions saw the images from the Royal Mail’s main depot in Bristol yesterday.

The photographs highlighting a backlog of packages so immense that it has spilled beyond a building no longer big enough to house it included a shot of a fox wandering amongst the undelivered goods open to the elements; the accompanying story also suggested rats have been feasting on the overspill. Although the Royal Mail responded by claiming parcels at the depot are ‘moving very quickly through the centre and on to the next stage of their journey’, an anonymous member of staff at the Bristol Mail Centre told a different story, rubbishing an idea to cover the exposed parcels by pointing out ‘It would have to be the biggest tarpaulin in the world as everything has been ruined’; a spokesman for the Communication Workers Union said, ‘This backlog will take a month to clear…if you post a first-class letter or parcel today, hand on heart, I do not know if it will get there before Christmas Eve – that’s the truth, but it’s not what people are being told.’ Reports indicate hand-delivering cards is becoming an alternative, with trust in the Royal Mail diminishing due to the strikes; but not everyone lives within walking distance of a card’s destination. What if the recipient resides at the other end of the country – or in another country altogether?

Inevitably, images of the mountainous backlog offering urban vermin an early Christmas treat revive memories (if you’re old enough to have them) of the piles of uncollected refuse that contaminated pavements 44 years ago during what is remembered as ‘The Winter of Discontent’. For three months between November 1978 and February 1979, Britain gave every impression of falling apart at the seams with a series of private and public sector strikes bringing the country to a grinding halt. Everyone from bin-men to hauliers to NHS staff to gravediggers downed tools and took up placards to picket the workplaces they wouldn’t return to until receiving a pay rise. For several days in the run-up to Christmas, the BBC temporarily shut down, with its TV output off the air and the then-four national radio stations combining into an uneasy mix of a solitary network service; meanwhile, small screens in the Yorkshire TV region were blacked-out for the entirety of the festive season. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ was the Sun’s headline response to PM Jim Callaghan accusing the press of being parochial as he came into the cold from a summit meeting with other world leaders in the Caribbean, a costly moment of misjudgement on a par with Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ comment over 30 years later.

The swingeing measures of Callaghan’s Labour Government to combat spiralling inflation had exasperated the Party’s natural allies in the unions and, in turn, the actions of the unions alienated vast swathes of the electorate with time running out on a Parliament that had been in session since October 1974. Having been denied the right to vote by Callaghan’s decision to abandon an autumn Election, when that Election eventually arrived in the spring, memories of the winter were still fresh and the public instead took a gamble on Mrs Thatcher. Labour wouldn’t be in office again for 18 years. Compared to the bleak chaos of 1978/79, current events appear lightweight – at least for the moment. But this certainly feels like the most severely the public have been tested by industrial turmoil since that period, coming as it does hot on the heels of an endless run of doom ‘n’ gloom designed to sap the spirit.

After one Christmas that was all-but cancelled and then one which was given the green light at the eleventh hour, the prospect of returning to pre-pandemic festivities was deemed by some as the antidote to recent trials; yet now even that prospect is in peril courtesy of union moves that ultimately prove counterproductive in garnering public support, however much most agree on the uselessness of this Government and the unfair distribution of wealth on its watch. The blame game is naturally in full swing, but although there remains a niggling suspicion that the excessive coverage given to the cost-of-living crisis is in part another offshoot of the Project Fear narrative, the impact of real strikes on real lives is indisputable, not to mention making those lives even more boring than they already are.

© The Editor

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FESTIVE FEAR

Amazingly, it seems there are still people out there excitedly awaiting the unveiling of the festive schedules on the mainstream TV channels, as though the DVD box-set or streaming sites cease to exist on at midnight on 24 December, and for the duration of Christmas Day the only option for visual entertainment will be to watch the seasonal special of a BBC1 or ITV show nobody wants to watch the rest of the year. Even as far back as the late 80s, the one-time dominance of television to provide the masses with their yuletide viewing habits was being eroded by the gift-wrapped live comedy video, which would be shoved into the VCR instead of sitting through an over-familiar Bond movie or second-guessing which character would top themselves on the Xmas ‘Eastenders’. Television’s unchallenged power to monopolise leisure time on 25 December was broken long before the novelty of a Christmas Day terrestrial film premiere was rendered redundant by multiple means of seeing said movie months in advance of BBC1 getting hold of it. In a way, I suspect broadcasters are more aware of this than they let on, which is probably why they put so little effort into their Christmas output now than they used to; why waste time and money making festive telly people might want to watch when the people are planning their own personal schedules?

Like most unburdened by ‘family get-togethers’, I myself have the luxury of not having to take anyone else’s taste into account; I could watch ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ at 2.00 in the afternoon on Christmas Day if I wanted to. I don’t, but that’s not the point. Instead, I’ll no doubt dip into those neglected gems from the TV archive that the BBC will only trot out occasionally; indeed, what better way to feel seasonal without opting for the obvious than revisiting the fondly-recalled ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ series that annually aired on or around Xmas Eve from 1971 to 1978? An author whose low-key spine-chillers always appear best served by the small screen, M.R. James provided this series with the stories that comprised the first five entries, beginning with ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ in 1971; with its characteristically creepy Victorian setting, the chills are masterfully achieved on a shoestring budget, and though this psychological horror starring Robert Hardy as an Archdeacon tormented by voices and glimpses of imagined spectres in the shadows was intended as a one-off, it prompted a follow-up the following Christmas and swiftly established a tradition that spanned seven years.

There’d been successful televisual attempts to illustrate James’s talent for unsettling the reader prior to the start of this series; in 1968, Jonathan Miller directed an especially nightmarish adaptation of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ in which Michael Horden’s twitchy academic suffers uncomfortably realistic nightmares during a spell on vacation in coastal Suffolk. It followed a familiar James path of placing pompous clergymen and dons in positions of peril, confronted by the consequences of their hubris when up against supernatural forces. ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (as it was re-titled) made enough of an impact at the time to warrant further James adaptations, though by the time ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ appeared, television had grown out of its monochrome roots and director of all-but one of the BBC Ghost Stories, Lawrence Gordon Clark, made full use of colour location filming in East Anglia to visualise James’s written words. Perhaps the finest example of this came with his second outing, 1972’s ‘A Warning to the Curious’, in which Peter Vaughan stars as an amateur archaeologist in search of the lost crown of the Saxon kingdoms; against all odds, he discovers it, though he bargains without the presence of the crown’s guardian, an out-of-focus figure who pursues Vaughan’s character even when he is convinced enough of the trophy’s curse to return it to its burial place. It remains a uniquely eerie 50 minutes that hasn’t lost its ability to unnerve.

By the time of the third entry in the series, ‘Lost Hearts’, the annual Ghost Story was in danger of becoming as much of a Christmas tradition as the Xmas Day ‘Top of the Pops’ or ‘The Morecambe and Wise Show’ – albeit an alternative sedative to the usual festive cheer, reconnecting with a gleefully disturbing Victorian and Edwardian sensibility which had been lost in the wholesome Americanisation of the season that had become the norm by the late 20th century. 1974’s ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ returned to recognisable M.R. James territory by featuring Michael Bryant as a smug medieval scholar looking for the lost fortune of a disgraced cleric; when he finds it, the ramifications of his avarice reduce him to a gibbering victim of his own superior attitude towards the unknown. The following year’s ‘The Ash Tree’ delves even deeper into pagan superstition, recalling the witch-hunts of the 17th century and evoking primal arachnophobia with the mutant ‘spiders’ lurking in the tree of the title. However, by 1976 the M.R. James adaptations were deemed worn-out and the series then turned to a short story by Charles Dickens, ‘The Signalman’.

An early outing for the now-veteran TV adaptor of classic fiction Andrew Davies, ‘The Signalman’ features Denholm Elliott as the title character who recounts a bloody train crash on the line outside his signal-box to an unnamed traveller, an event that continues to haunt him in his solitary exile from society. The fact the original story was penned a year after Dickens himself survived similar carnage on a train travelling through Staplehurst in Kent is probably no coincidence, but it certainly taps into the nightmares that remained with the author until his premature death on the fifth anniversary of the incident in 1870. The television adaptation of ‘The Signalman’ bears the same psychological tropes that opened the series with ‘The Stalls of Barchester’ five years previously, and is – along with ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘The Treasure of Abbott Thomas’ – perhaps the most effectively chilling of all the entries in the series.

In 1977, the series received something of a contemporary makeover by dispensing with adaptations of classic authors and commissioning a newly-written story set in the present day, ‘Stigma’; although this tale, starring the dependable Peter Bowles, has its moments by calling upon the same pagan myths that fuelled ‘The Ash Tree’, a key element of the series is lost by relocating events to the here and now, and the trend was carried over into the following year’s ‘The Ice House’, the final Ghost Story of the 70s run. Bar the odd repeat screening, the tradition was discontinued for several decades until BBC4 decided to revive the series during the period when the channel was producing daring drama the mainstream channels had largely abandoned. 2005’s adaptation of a previously-untouched M.R. James story, ‘A View from a Hill’, managed to retain the creepiness of the 1970s adaptations as well as adding a slicker look and feel that made the revival more than merely a nostalgic rehash. It worked well enough to lead to another James adaptation the year after (‘Number 13’) and the series has continued off and on ever since. A new instalment is scheduled for this year, hot on the heels of last year’s ‘The Mezzotint’, and all (bar one) have been derived from the works of the master, M.R. James.

Post-lockdown, the ongoing ‘things can only get worse’ mood of the nation has led to an annual ‘Oh, well – let’s just enjoy Christmas’ attitude that obscures the fact that, for many, this is a time of year when detachment from one’s fellow man is intensified by an overemphasis on convivial group gatherings that not everyone is party to. The likes of ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ serves as a much-needed antidote to such facile clichés and any addition to a series that now stretches back half-a-century is a welcome – not to say rare – contribution from mainstream broadcasters that acknowledges the needs of viewers for more than a Christmas ‘Strictly’ special to lure them away from online attractions. Long may it continue.

VICTOR LEWIS-SMITH (1957-2022)

A shadowy, near-mythical figure whose brilliantly offensive and near-the-knuckle manipulations of archive TV illuminated late-night Channel 4 back in the days when the station had balls, Victor Lewis-Smith was also renowned as a witty, sardonic journalist for publications as varied as the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and Private Eye. His death at the age of 65 will probably pass most people by, but his pioneering prank calls (which were unremittingly amusing, if deliciously beyond the pale) paved the way for the likes of Ali G; I particularly recall his call to Hughie Green in the late 90s, when he asked the one-time ‘Opportunity Knocks’ host if he’d ever f***ed Lena Zavaroni, which provoked laughter from Green rather than apoplexy. His call to Michael Winner was even better; if Lewis-Smith’s ‘TV Offal’ series is still available on YT, track it down; it also features the Gay Daleks. Say no more. The Winegum salutes you as a master satirist, sir.

© The Editor

Website: https://www.johnnymonroe.co.uk/

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