March 2024 – Blood and Porridge

March 31, 2024April 6, 2024

Cinematic heroines 2: Sheila Keith

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

Every year, March is designated ‘Women in Horror Month’. This is when fans of horror fiction, cinema, television, comics, games, etc., are encouraged “to learn about and showcase the underrepresented work of women in the horror industries. Whether they are on the screen, behind the scenes, or contributing in their other various artistic ways, it is clear that women love, appreciate, and contribute to the horror genre.”

As an occasional writer of horror fiction, and just before the month ends, here’s my contribution. I pay tribute to a lady who, during a unique run of movies, did much to give me nightmares – or indeed, frightmares – during my impressionable youth.

Scottish actress Sheila Keith had a remarkable dual career. Though not a household name, she was certainly a familiar face – with a familiar, haughty, often-disapproving voice – to a couple of generations of British TV viewers. This was because of her appearances as prim ladies of a certain age, frequently nuns, or aristocrats with double-barrelled names, in cosy situation comedies like The Liver Birds (1969-78), Some Mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973-78), Rings on their Fingers (1978-80), Bless Me Father (1978-81), Agony (1979-81), The Other ‘Arf (1980-84), Never The Twain (1981-91), A Fine Romance (1981-84) and The Brittas Empire (1991-97).

On top of that, she put in time in ITV’s long-running but much-derided soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), where she played cook Betty Cornet, toiling in the Crossroads Motel kitchen for 31 episodes in 1967. Poor Betty perished when workmen extending the motel’s premises accidently uncovered and set off a World War II bomb.

The second, less conventional strand of Keith’s resumé came from her involvement in a series of movies made by British director Pete Walker. Having started off making sex-comedies like 1969’s School for Sex and 1970’s Cool It Carol!, Walker hit his stride making horror movies during the 1970s, with Keith as a regular collaborator. A combination of exploitation cinema and social commentary, these were memorably grim – serving up (for the time) disturbingly graphic violence, attacking institutions like the judiciary and the Catholic church, and generally showing how depressingly grotty life was in 1970s Britain. And Keith’s performances, as ladies doing unspeakable things whilst maintaining the veneer of snootiness that’d served her well in her TV sitcom work, made the films even more memorable.

The first Keith-Walker collaboration was 1974’s House of Whipcord (1974), wherein a young woman called Ann-Marie (Penny Irving) suffers some spectacularly bad luck. Firstly, she discovers that a nude photograph of her has been put on public display. Then the nice young man who befriends her (Robert Tayman, who’d recently played the villain in the 1971 Hammer horror flick Vampire Circus), and takes her to his country estate to escape the scandal, turns out to be a ‘honey-trap‘. His parents are a demented anti-permissive-society campaigner called Margaret Wakehurst (Barbara Markham) and a reactionary, but now blind and senile judge called Justice Bailey (Patrick Barr). They’ve turned the country house into a secret, illegal prison where women they deem to have ‘fallen’ are brutally punished. And Ann-Marie, they’ve decided, has fallen.

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

The remainder of the film is basically a race against time, with Ann-Marie’s friends (Ray Brooks and Ann Michelle) trying to track her down and rescue her, before her repeated attempts to escape the prison incur the ultimate penalty – execution. You might not want to bet your life savings on there being a happy ending.

Though not the lead villainess, Keith is memorable as Walker, one of Wakehurst and Bailey’s prison wardens. Walker may not be doing the job just for the money and from a misguided sense of justice — seeing the young inmates flogged seems to turn her on. Meanwhile, the other Walker, Pete, and his scriptwriter David McGillivray make it clear who their target is in a sarcastic opening-credits statement: “This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment…” They may have had in mind the Nationwide Festival of Light, in vogue at the time, described by Wikipedia as a ‘grassroots movement formed by British Christians concerned about the rise of the permissive society and social changes in English society by the late 1960s’ and whose supporters included Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard and the inevitable Mary Whitehouse.

A year later, Keith got a bigger role in House of Mortal Sin (1975), which this time took a swipe at organised religion and the Catholic church in particular. This had a slightly starrier cast too. Stephanie Beacham and Susan Penhaligon play Vanessa and Jenny, sisters who, through their friendship with a well-meaning young priest (Norman Eshley, later to find fame as snobby neighbour Jeffrey Fourmile in the 1976-79 TV sitcom George and Mildred), unwittingly enter the orbit of the deranged Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp). Not only is Meldrum a stalker who’s soon targeting Jenny, but he’s a homicidal maniac who uses some appropriately ecclesiastical methods to murder people – bludgeoning them with incense-burners, feeding them poisonous communion wafers, throttling them with rosary beads.

Keith plays Meldrum’s housekeeper Miss Brabazon, who turns a blind eye – literally a blind eye, because she’s missing one – to the old monster’s crimes due to her love for him. She has responsibility for looking after Meldrum’s extremely elderly and ailing mother, and particularly gruelling are the scenes where she abuses her charge, blaming her for making her son enter the priesthood and a lifetime of celibacy. Again, don’t expect a happy ending.

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Columbia Pictures

However, it’s the film Keith made for Walker between the two Houses, Whipcord and Mortal Sin, that saw her at her terrifying best. In Frightmare (1974), she plays Dorothy Yates, a character who spends the film shifting gears between being a confused, pathetic, middle-aged housewife and a demented brain-eating cannibal. In the late 1950s Dorothy and her husband Edmund (Rupert Davies) were placed in an asylum after a string of murders – though innocent, such was Edmund’s love for Dorothy that he allowed himself to be incarcerated alongside her. Dorothy’s last 1950s victim, incidentally, is played by Andrew Sachs, soon to become a star as Manuel, John Cleese’s Spanish waiter / punchbag in Fawlty Towers (1975-79).

Released from the mental institution in the mid-1970s, the couple become a headache for Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage. She has to supply her father and stepmum, who’ve holed up in a remote farmhouse, with parcels of sheep’s brains in an attempt to satisfy Dorothy’s cravings. Also, she’s keen to keep her tearaway half-sister Debbie (Kim Butcher), Edmund and Dorothy’s daughter, away from her parents for obvious reasons. Things don’t work out well. Dorothy is soon demanding brains of the human variety, lures people into her parlour (full of chintzy ornaments and cups of tea) for Tarot card readings, kills them and eats them. Meanwhile, there are disturbing signs that her cannibalistic urges may be running in the family.

Frightmare climaxes with some nasty stuff involving a Black-and-Decker drill, but nothing quite compares to the image of Dorothy that assails Jackie during a dream – her mad stepmother stalks up to her, white-faced and grinning, chewing brains from a red-soaked parcel, blood oozing down her chin. In its less sensational, buttoned-up way, Frightmare is the English Home Counties’ answer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was released the same year.

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Lone Star Pictures

Walker cast her in two later horror movies, 1978’s The Comeback and 1982’s House of the Long Shadows, but neither was to the standard of their earlier work. The Comeback has an interesting idea – an elderly couple (one of whom is Keith) take gruesome revenge on a faded rock star whom they believe induced their daughter to commit suicide. Confronting the rocker at the end, Keith admonishes him in a hate-filled voice for his decadence, his depravity and even his ‘foul contortions’ onstage. This would have worked if the rock star had been played by someone properly decadent like Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop but, laughably, he’s played by Jack Jones, housewives’ favourite and singer of the Love Boat theme (1977). Jones’s performance was likened by one critic to that of a ‘hibernating bear’.

Some of the other casting is distracting too. Jones’s manager is played by David Doyle, who at the time was a regular in the popular American TV show Charlie’s Angels (1976-81) – wow, I thought the moment he appeared, it’s Bosley! Meanwhile, in the role of Keith’s husband is Bill Owen, famous in Britain for playing the wellie-wearing, ferret-loving Compo in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine, which ran from 1973 to 2010 and became the longest-running TV sitcom in the world. Just to round out the weirdness of The Comeback’s cast, Jack Jones, Bosley and Compo are joined by Pamela Stephenson, soon to hit it big as a comedienne in the BBC’s satirical sketch-show Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-82).

You couldn’t nitpick about the cast of House of the Long Shadows, the last of Keith and Walker’s movies and, indeed, the last film Walker made. For horror fans, it’s awesome – horror legends Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and (from an earlier period of macabre cinema) John Carradine. Long Shadows tells the story of a hotshot young author (Desi Arnaz Jr) who makes a bet with his publisher (Richard Todd) that he can write a novel in 24 hours in a suitably-inspiring environment – a creepy, deserted mansion house in Wales. However, Arnaz Jr soon discovers that the mansion isn’t deserted at all. It’s still home to a decrepit lord (Carradine) and his sons (Price and Cushing) and daughter (Keith). Complicating matters is Lee as a pompous businessman, turning up to declare his intention to buy the property, and then the revelation that there’s a madman on the loose, killing the house’s occupants one by one.

House of the Long Shadows is a disappointment, which is hardly a surprise considering the disparate elements involved in its making. Price, Lee and Cushing had become stars in the 1950s and 1960s working for studios like Hammer Films and American International Pictures, making films that were colourful, gothic-horror costume-dramas – for example, instalments in the studios’ Dracula, Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe series. Made later, in the 1970s, Walker’s brutal, contemporary-set horror films were obviously a reaction against these. Similarly, his scriptwriter here, Michael Armstrong, had directed gory films like The Haunted House of Horror (1969) and Mark of the Devil (1970), which definitely weren’t of the gothic fairy-tale school either. Armstrong’s script, though, was based on a very old novel and play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, both from 1913. And the producers were none other than Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of that very 1980s-esque outfit, Cannon Films. Thus, the stars, the director and scriptwriter, the source material and the producers belonged to wildly-different eras. Long Shadows unsurprisingly doesn’t gel.

© Cannon Film Distributors

It doesn’t help that Armstrong’s script ends with a couple of twists that don’t so much amaze the audience with their cleverness as make them groan at their corniness. But still, it’s a pleasure to see Price, Lee, Cushing and Carradine together, and Keith has fun playing an eccentric who fancies herself as a singer, even though she’s painfully tone-deaf. Small wonder she’s eventually done in with a length of piano wire.

Thereafter, Keith’s film appearances were few, although she turned up in the 1986 John Cleese movie Clockwise. She also kept busy into the 1990s with TV appearances. Fittingly, her last role – three years before her death in 2004 – was in an episode of the 2001 spoof anthology show Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible, written by Graham Duff and Steve Coogan and designed as an affectionate piss-take of old British horror movies from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Though handsomely staged, it wasn’t particularly good. However, it was nice to see Keith appear in an episode called And Now the Fearing…, playing a gypsy woman who crosses swords with an architect (Alexander Armstrong) who wants to clear her encampment to make way for a new development. Keith, predictably, draws on some old gypsy magic and has fun turning the tables on the smug, smarmy Armstrong.

The actresses who found fame in British horror movies tended to be of the young, sexy, ‘starlet’ variety – Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro, Linda Hayden and so on. Sheila Keith was already in her fifties when she arrived on the scene and didn’t have youth or sexiness on her side. Rather, splendidly playing a succession of harridans who were psychotic, sadistic, embittered and / or pitiful, she represented grey power. With power tools.

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

March 27, 2024March 29, 2024

It’s Timmy time

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now. Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us. Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen. The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock… The soundtrack was unnervingly silent… And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping. We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film. I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie. So, what did I think of it? Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning. In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor. Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1. As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy. And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative. I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping. For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager. But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

© New English Library

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis. There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events. Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing. Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives. Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again. While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long. He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform. Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

© HandMade Films / Python (Monty) Pictures

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed. As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention. They head for Arrakis… And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced. Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control. How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery. It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether. The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly. He just pops up all-of-a-sudden. I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle. Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis. These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one. I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens. But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2. Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen. Gurney would be right to distrust her.

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1). Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers. Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2. In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters. In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems. Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave. In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2. The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!” Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness. And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens. The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise. Even their fireworks look dark and perverted. And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film. (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast. That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck. But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre). For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die. Yes, I know. It’s sad that I notice these things.

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

March 11, 2024March 11, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

© BBC

We’re nearing the end of the 2024 Six Nations rugby championship and my mental health feels more kicked around than the ball in the matches. Up until the Saturday just past, the two teams I support, Ireland and Scotland, had been doing well and I was entertaining hopes that the championship would conclude with them at the top of the table. But what a difference a Saturday afternoon makes. Ireland got beaten by England, the team nobody wants to get beaten by. Against all expectations, Scotland lost to Italy, the team regarded as the one in the championship ‘making up the numbers’ and who usually finish bottom.

Anyhow, aside from the anguish… The championship reminds me yet again of how much I miss being able to watch an international rugby match and at the same time listen to the knowledgeable and dulcet tones of Bill McLaren.

Although McLaren, who died in 2010 at the age of 86, worked as late as 2002, it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that he was indisputably the voice of British rugby union. This was an era when sport, if you weren’t at the live event itself, was viewable only on a handful of terrestrial TV channels. It was common for one channel to have a monopoly on broadcasting one sport and, by extension, for one commentator to have a monopoly on talking about that sport. Hence, in my youth, it was almost impossible to see horse racing without hearing the posh but eerily robotic tones of Peter O’Sullivan, or boxing without hearing the excitable Harry Carpenter, or Formula One without hearing the gaffe-prone Murray Walker, or rugby league without hearing the indescribable-sounding Eddie Waring. McLaren fulfilled this role in the world of rugby union and for me was the best sports commentator of the lot, though I’m undoubtedly biased. Rugby has always been my favourite team sport. Plus McLaren came from Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the region where I spent many of my formative years.

There were three reasons for McLaren’s greatness. Firstly, he knew his stuff. I remember watching a McLaren-commentated game on a pub TV in Aberdeen sometime in the 1980s. I was in the company of my good friend, the late Finlay McLean, and at one point, Finlay turned around to me and marvelled, “He’s just steeped in the game, isn’t he?”

When a try was scored, McLaren didn’t just tell you the name of the player who’d crossed the line. No, he’d also observe how the player was the great-great-nephew of the man who’d kicked the winning points in the legendary Hawick-Galashiels derby of 1937, or a direct descendent of the tight-head prop with the great Western Province team that’d dominated South Africa’s Currie Cup in the 1890s. It wouldn’t have surprised you if he’d identified the player’s granny as the stylist responsible for grooming the mutton-chop sideburns of J.P.R. Williams, which were rugby’s main contribution to fashion in the 1970s. McLaren seemed to know everything about rugby.

His knowledge was encyclopaedic, but this was backed by a conscientious and professional attitude to research. I read somewhere that when preparing for a game, he’d cover a full sheet of foolscap with notes about each player. This meant that in the commentator’s box he was constantly shuffling around some 30 sheets of paper.

Secondly, although he was a Scotsman and often commentated on games involving the Scottish rugby team, he was never biased. On the contrary, he always applauded good rugby, no matter who was playing it and even if Scotland was on the receiving end of it. McLaren’s neutrality was especially admirable when you compared him with the international football commentators on the BBC at the time (and indeed still now), who seemed incapable of narrating an England World Cup match without speculating every second minute about whether ‘we’ could win the World Cup just like ‘we’ won it back in 1966.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, his commentaries were laden with poetry. McLaren had an amusing, fanciful, frequently wonderful talent with language. Admittedly, he could be a tad unflattering in the turn of phrase he used to describe the over-sized players on the field. English prop Colin Smart – famous for getting stomach-pumped after drinking a bottle of aftershave as a post-match lark – consisted of ‘considerable acreage’; English captain and lock Bill Beaumont looked ‘like someone who enjoys his food’; Welsh forwards Scott and Craig Quinnell were ‘two well-nourished individuals’; Scottish flanker Finlay Calder had ‘hands like dinner plates’; and Calder’s gangly fellow-Scot Doddie Weir was ‘the lamppost of the line-out.’ As for the legendary and frankly massive New Zealand flanker Jonah Lomu, running into him was like ‘trying to tackle a snooker table’.

© BBC

He had a fondness to likening players to animals. They might behave like ‘a demented ferret’ or a ‘bag of weasels’ of a ‘raging bull with a bad head’ or ‘a whirling tsetse fly’ or ‘a runaway giraffe’ or ‘a slippery salmon’. The Scottish scrum-half Roy Laidlaw (whose nephew Greig captained Scotland for seven years up until 2019) was as elusive as ‘a baggy up a Borders burn’ – a baggy being, to quote the Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘a species of large minnow.’ Unsurprisingly for a Borders man, Scotticisms were common in his delivery. Rugby balls were likened to ‘three pounds of haggis’, the famously square-shouldered Scottish skipper Peter Brown was like ‘a coo kicking over a milk pail’ and an injured player sitting dejectedly at the side of the field whilst sucking on a mint was at least ‘enjoying his sweetie.’

When it came to describing the turbulent passions and physical violence often unleashed on the pitch, McLaren was amusingly euphemistic. Cheating was frequently described as ‘jiggery-pokery’ and punch-ups were dismissed as ‘a bit of argy-bargy’. I remember when fists started flying in the middle of one scrum, he commented: “It’s getting a bit unceremonious in that front row.” And when Scottish centre Jim Renwick – whom McLaren had coached as a schoolboy – missed a kick and was caught by the camera mouthing the F-word, McLaren diplomatically remarked that he was ‘muttering a few naughty Hawick words.’

Some of his sayings became catchphrases. When a player prepared to kick a conversion and half the stadium made disparaging noises in the hope of distracting him and making him fluff it, McLaren would invariably remark: “There’s some ill-mannered whistling.” And when a conversion-kick made it between the posts despite being taken from a torturous angle, he’d declare: “It’s high enough, it’s long enough and it’s straight enough!”

Aware that in the Borders towns local players who’d made it onto the national team were seen as heroes, he’d often serenade the scorer of a Scottish try with the lines, “And they’ll be dancing on the streets of…” or “And they’ll be drinking his health in…” – Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Melrose, Selkirk, wherever – “…tonight!” As an honorary Borderer, I’d say they were more likely to be drinking his health than dancing in the streets.

McLaren’s manner and delivery were immensely relaxed and comforting, but his early life had been no bed of roses. As a young World War II serviceman, he had to endure the Battle of Monte Cassino, of which one eyewitness said, “The men were so tired that it was a living death. They had come from such a depth of weariness that I wondered if they would quite be able to make the return to the lives and thoughts they had known.’ McLaren himself described Monte Cassino as a ‘vision of hell on earth.’

After the war, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, which put a prompt end to any hopes he had of becoming a rugby internationalist. TB was then considered incurable and he wasn’t expected to survive, but he and four fellow sufferers agreed to be guinea pigs for the trials of a new drug, streptomycin. Thanks to this treatment he recovered, but three of the four other volunteers died. It was while he was convalescing that he produced his first sports commentaries – describing table-tennis matches over the hospital radio.

McLaren was passionately attached to his hometown and famously said, “A day out of Hawick is a day wasted.” Several years ago I visited Hawick for the first time since the 1980s, and saw to my dismay how much it’d deteriorated. Its high street was run-down and riddled with derelict properties – thanks to a faltering economy caused by the closure of local woolen mills, and also thanks no doubt to the opening of branches of Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Lidl, which’d sucked the retailing life out of the place. My first thought was: “What would Bill McLaren have said?”

McLaren’s commentaries were emblematic of an earlier, more innocent age, when rugby was still an amateur sport and because of that it was incredibly accessible. This was especially true if you lived in a rugby-daft place like the Borders, where the guys you saw performing heroic deeds for Scotland on TV on Saturday afternoons existed during weekdays as mortals like everyone else. As a kid living there, I was delighted when the man from the electricity board who came to our house to check on a power outage was none other than Jim Renwick. Meanwhile, Scottish fullback Peter Dods was a joiner down the road in Galashiels and my old man, a farmer, was on nodding terms with Scottish flanker John Jeffrey, who farmed in Kelso – Jeffrey’s teammates had nicknamed him ‘the Great White Shark’ but to Bill McLaren he was just ‘the big Kelso farmer’. And let’s not forget local electrician Roy Laidlaw, whom legend has it had to rewire the public toilets in Jedburgh the Monday morning after the Scotland team he was part of won the Grand Slam in Paris.

Yes, Bill McLaren’s voice evokes a simpler time in rugby, before professionalism, sponsorship, corporatism, razzmatazz and a profit-driven need to win at all costs took over. But homespun though his persona was, I don’t believe there’s been a sports commentator in the years since who’s come close to matching him.

March 1, 2024March 1, 2024

Who shot J.R.R.?

I’ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). There… I’ve said it.

When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages. I stumbled through about 800 pages of it. Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on. Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider. Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn’t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn’t end up as giant-spider-food. Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn’t. Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Return of the King and my assumptions were confirmed.

I found Tolkien’s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters. The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for… Dearie me. I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned. Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn’t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. (In the 2001 movie version, he’s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what’s going to happen to him.) Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland. Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market. Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.

No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom ‘good taste’ is synonymous with ‘restraint’… and ‘civilised’ behaviour means ‘conventional behaviour in all circumstances’.”

And though I was a teenager at the time, I don’t think it’s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings now, I’d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece. For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s original Earthsea trilogy (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant. Indeed, the first two Gormenghast volumes are among my all-time favourite books. Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the ‘grimdark’ movement in modern fantasy – more on that in a moment – and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust. So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.

I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings movies. However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema. And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service. For me, Lord of the Rings was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson’s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle. They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.

So, why am I writing this? Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘monthly British political and cultural magazine’ whose contributors ‘include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young’. The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum. The essay’s writer Sebastian Milbank – also The Critic’s executive editor – says this of the author of Lord of the Rings:

“Those who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy. Tolkien’s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.”

Alas for Tolkien’s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister that is George R.R. Martin. “It’s a genre…” Milbank bellyaches, “generally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance. Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive. Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen. Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed… as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it. Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.”

Even worse, laments Milbank, it’s all the fault of the liberal left. “It’s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative ‘industries’.”

Who shot J.R.R.? Those lefty grimdark degenerates did! Basically, Milbank’s trying to open another front in the culture wars. This time it’s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.

So much is wrong in his analysis that I don’t have time to detail it all here. I’d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert. Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity. In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian. Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk, cosy fantasy or romantasy.

Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn’t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders. In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Breaking Bad (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War (2016). Two of those examples aren’t remotely classifiable as fantasy – unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc – while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he’s allegedly writing about.

Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) aren’t grimdark either. Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist, he’s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned. (“Philip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,” declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.) And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being ‘terribly dated’ in his anti-establishment views. Strangely, considering how Moorcock’s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man, which is actually a work of science fiction.

One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank’s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized ‘high-fantasy’ trilogies of their own, that Tolkien’s influence really began to be felt.

I’d add that when I was a teenager it wasn’t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien. I got the impression he wasn’t particularly valued by the literary establishment – whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration. Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings as ‘a children’s book that somehow got out of hand’, ‘an overgrown fairy story’, ‘balderdash’ and ‘juvenile trash’. Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and / or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.

Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank’s essay “feels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s… Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?” Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019) TV series. But, recognising the essay’s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf – until now.

Because today we live in a time where Britain’s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they’re in for a massive humping at the next general election. So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.

Thus, we’ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss – her with the shelf-life of a lettuce – raving about her premiership being sabotaged by ‘trans-activists’ in the civil service. Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman ‘30p’ Lee Anderson claiming that London’s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of ‘Islamists’. Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News. The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as ‘snowflakery’. The police, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who, James Bond, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being ‘woke’.

It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature. Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.