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Climbing Mount Ulysses

 

© Penguin

 

Today is June 16th, a day that connoisseurs of Irish literature will recognise as Bloomsday, the date on which the events described in James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses took place in Dublin in 1904.  Literary legend has it that on the real June 16th, 1904, Joyce and his muse and future wife Nora Barnacle – “She stuck to him like a limpet!” one of my university lecturers liked to quip – acquired carnal knowledge of each other for the first time.  And since 2022 is the centenary of Ulysses‘ original publication in 1922, today is a special Bloomsday indeed.

 

Ah, Ulysses.  I first encountered it in 1982, when I spied a hefty copy of it reposing on a rack in Whitie’s, the main bookshop in my hometown of Peebles.  As someone who was into books and writing, I decided that this was something I ought to experience.  So I purchased it, lugged it home and started reading: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from a stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed…”

 

The task took me several months.  This amused my school English teacher Iain Jenkins, who cheerfully admitted that he’d never read Ulysses and never intended to, believing it to be a pile of pretentious twaddle.  Whenever he bumped into me, he’d mischievously inquire how I was getting on with Joyce’s masterwork, assuming sooner or later I’d throw in the towel and never get to the end of Bloomsday.

 

But I persevered.  The months passed.  April, May, June, July…  In fact, the countries I was in changed too, for I finished school in May and left Scotland for some pre-university wandering: France, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium…  And I took Ulysses with me.

 

As far as I can remember, it was in a chilly youth hostel in Brussels in November, as far away from Dublin on June 16th as seemed possible, that I navigated the book’s final section.  This is the lengthy stream of consciousness going on inside Molly Bloom’s head that ends: “…yes I said yes I will Yes.”

 

I should point out that during those half-dozen months I didn’t just read Ulysses. Over the same period I remember reading stuff by Ernest Hemmingway, Ray Bradbury, Jerome K. Jerome, Sean O’Faolain and Anthony Burgess.  Incidentally, Burgess, who was still alive at the time, was probably the world’s most famous Joyce authority and had written a book about him called Here Comes Everybody in 1965.  It actually helped that I would read a section of Ulysess, leave the book for a couple of weeks, read something by someone else, and return to it.  I’d discovered how episodic it was, each episode having its own theme, style and literary gimmicks, and reading it this way gave me time to process one episode before I started on the next.

 

Famously, the episodes of Ulysses parallel the adventures of the mythological Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey, although this didn’t dawn on my 16 / 17-year-old self until the scene set in Barney Kiernan’s Pub.  This climaxes with the Citizen hurling a biscuit tin at Leopold Bloom’s head, which I realised was a representation of Polyphemus the Cyclops lobbing a rock after the escaping Ulysses in the Odyssey.

 

How did I find it? Well, there were times early on when it was bloody hard work.  At one point in June, while I was in France, I nearly did give up.  I was possibly mired in the book’s third section, which is notoriously abstruse.  But later it all seemed to click for me.  Joyce’s prose, however complicated it got, settled into a comforting, familiar rhythm.  The external and internal voices of its two main characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, became like the banter of old friends.  And when I finished, I felt I’d read a truly great book.  I suspect, though, my admiration for it then was like the admiration a climber feels for the grandeur of Mount Everest while standing on its summit.  The admiration is mingled with his or her own sense of achievement at having climbed the beast.

 

One thing that impressed me was that Joyce had obviously gone out and done some living.  He knew and was able to convincingly portray Dublin and its inhabitants – all its inhabitants, not just the posh or arty ones.  Perhaps that’s why I was never enthused by the works of Virginia Woolf, which I tackled soon afterwards.  Surely Woolf and her affected Bloomsbury (as opposed to Bloomsday) set wouldn’t have lasted long in Barney Kiernan’s Pub.

 

Talking of pubs, while I was wandering around Switzerland in October that year, I happened across an establishment in Zurich called the James Joyce Pub.  It cashed in on the fact that much of Joyce’s post-Ireland life had been spent in Zurich.  Eagerly, I popped inside for a Guinness. What a disappointment the place was.  It was full of people who regarded themselves as intellectuals and took themselves way too seriously – the opposite of what I believed Ulysses, in which all human life seemed present, was about.

 

And now?  Well, I wouldn’t like to read the book again.  One thing I’ve noticed about growing older is that, as the years and experiences accumulate, it becomes harder to feel impressed.  New people I meet, whom I would have found fascinating in my youth, make less of an impression because I’ve met their type before and their personality traits no longer seem special.  The same goes with books.  Literary razzle-dazzle that might have blown me away when I was younger just annoys me in my middle-age.  Sorry, I’ve seen all that already.  When I read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) in my twenties, I thought, “Wow!  This the profoundest book ever!”  Whereas I read Kundera’s Slowness (1995) last month and thought, “Oh, stop showing off, you poser.”  I’d hate it if I read Joyce’s opus again and reacted with the same weariness.

 

Some things are best left in the past. And though I still think it’s a great book, Ulysses is probably one of them.

 

From wikipedia.org

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Grovel, Britannia

 

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

 

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70th year of her reign on the British throne.  I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family.  It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

 

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them.  They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward.  Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

 

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper.  It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

 

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth.  It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy.  This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town.  This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run.  And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long.  She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

 

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police.  The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

 

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy.  That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down.  The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain?  Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

 

That was then, however.  Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.  Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

 

From pixabay.com / © Ben Kerckx

 

Now I just want the whole thing gone.  Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me.  My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein.  (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19.  Aye, right.)  It’s more to do with the state of Britain.  The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

 

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past.  Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

 

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment.  The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government.  I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

 

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s.  In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

 

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies.  There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’.  Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have.  It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on.  It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

 

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society.  Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever.  This is never more obvious than in the country’s press.  British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

 

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

 

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee.  There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen.  Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.”  No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are.  She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

 

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone.  Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them.  But obviously, that isn’t going to happen.  The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly.  And as for the country they’re supposed to represent…  Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.

 

From pixabay.com / © Sabine Lang

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Music à la Mode

 

From Facebook / © Depeche Mode

 

Well, bugger.  Just as I’m starting to get into Depeche Mode again, one of the sods goes and dies on us.

 

I’m referring to Andy Fletcher, founding member of Depeche Mode, bass, keyboard and synth-player, and from all accounts the bloke who dealt with the business, financial and legal matters that his two bandmates (Dave Gahan and Martin Gore) found too boring to deal with.  Fletcher passed away on May 26th.  Considering the industrial amounts of drugs and booze that Gahan and Gore have put away over the years, he surely wasn’t the band-member most people would have bet money on to pop their clogs first.

 

Not that Fletcher escaped all the excesses of Depeche Mode, which were at their most destructive in the early-to-mid-1990s, around the time of their notorious 1993 Devotional and 1994 Exotic tours.  While Gahan suffered cracked ribs and internal haemorrhaging from a botched stage-dive, became convinced he was a vampire and tried to bite a music journalist, had a drug-induced heart attack, attempted suicide and spent a few minutes technically dead after a 1996 heroin / cocaine speedball overdose, and while Gore experienced seizures that were the culmination of long-term alcohol and substance abuse, and while one-time member Alan Wilder quit due to what he euphemistically described as relations in the band being ‘seriously strained, increasingly frustrating and, ultimately, in certain situations, intolerable’, Fletcher had to temporarily leave Depeche Mode and check into hospital suffering from severe anxiety issues.

 

For me, one fact sums up the kamikaze state of Depeche Mode at the time.  Their support band during the North American leg of their 1994 tour was so horrified by what they saw that they recorded their next album in conditions of strict sobriety.  The support band was none other than the druggy, leather-trousered, hard-living, psychedelia-loving, Rolling Stones-worshipping Primal Scream.  Yes, Primal Scream!  As journalist Phil Sutcliffe noted in Q magazine, “Behold, then, Depeche Mode: the band who frightened Primal Scream into temperance.”

 

That Depeche Mode in the 1990s mutated into such out-and-out rock monsters came as a shock to me.  When they started at the beginning of the 1980s, I thought they were insufferable, synth-twiddling wimps.  Their maddeningly jaunty hit singles, like New Life and Just Can’t Get Enough (both 1981), made them popular with the sort of brainless pubescents whose purchasing power had recently clogged up the pop-charts with the unspeakable likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet (and had recently turned me, at the age of 17, into the musical equivalent of a grumpy old man: “Kids today!  They call this shit music?  Gah!”)  And even if Depeche Mode hadn’t won the adoration of those dopey New Romantic fans, and were judged purely by the standards of being an early 1980s synth-pop act, they seemed much less interesting than other acts of that type, like Soft Cell and the Human League.

 

It was funny, though, that Just Can’t Get Enough eventually became a football anthem. One set of supporters would sing it with the words slightly amended to insult an opposing set of supporters: “You just can’t get it up!  You just can’t get it up!”

 

© Mute

 

However, in the early 1990s – by which time I was living in Japan – I noticed something odd.   People whom I liked and whose musical tastes I respected, such as a friend from New York called Mary Beth Maslowski, and another friend, a Sapporo-ite called Satomi Munakata, had started arguing with me that Depeche Mode were good.  “Impossible,” I’d retort.  “They’re wimps!  Haven’t you heard Just Can’t Get Enough or  New Life?  What piffle!”  In fact, Satomi felt so strongly about the matter that she presented me with five of their albums recorded on cassette tapes and insisted that I listen to them.  Setting my prejudices aside, I slotted the things into the tape-deck of my stereo…  And, I had to admit, some of the stuff on them was actually really decent.  This was especially true of the more recent Depeche Mode albums, like Violator (1990) and Songs of Faith and Devotion (1993).

 

While it’s customary for bands to begin strong, full of youthful energy, imagination and enthusiasm, and then, having fired all their creative bolts during their first few albums, to become shite, the opposite had happened with Depeche Mode.  They’d begun shite but gradually become good.  Their annoyingly dinky sound of the early 1980s had gradually given way to a darker, crunchier one that had the relentlessness of industrial music but was also leavened with some melodies.  Goths, I noted, had become especially partial to the band.

 

After I’d decided I liked them, I bought each new Depeche Mode album that came out: Ultra (1997), Exciter (2001), Playing the Angel (2005), Sounds of the Universe (2009), Delta Machine (2013) and Spirit (2017).  These were sometimes uneven, but all had moments of quality.  Playing the Angel, full of groovy tunes like A Pain that I’m Used to, John the Revelator, Suffer Well and The Sinner in Me, is a particular favourite of mine, though nothing quite beats the mighty Barrel of a Gun on Ultra.

 

That said, I hadn’t listened to the band so much in recent years.  However, during the past month, alarmed at the state of my health – about as good as that of the average Depeche Mode member between 1993 and 1996 – I decided to get back into the habit of going to a gym.  And in the gym, I decided to spend most of my time running on the treadmill.  I used to be a keen jogger, but had pretty much given up because running on pavements and tarmacked roads and footpaths was subjecting my ageing knees and ankles to too much wear and tear.  Running on a treadmill, I thought, would be less damaging.  And to stop myself getting bored on the treadmill, I found myself listening to loads of Depeche Mode on my iPod.  (Yes, my iPod.  I told you I was ageing.)

 

I’ve especially listened to Depeche Mode: Remixes 81-04.  A bunch of Depeche Mode classics remixed by DJs, producers and bands like François Kervorkian, William Orbit, DJ Shadow, Goldfrapp, Underworld and the Beatmasters, where things go (electronically) ‘Thud!’ and ‘Thump!’ and ‘Crash!’ with machine-like regularity, are the perfect soundtrack when you’re trying to get your body into the rhythm of running again.

 

But then, suddenly, Andy Fletcher died.  Which sucks.

 

© Mute

 

Meanwhile last month, nine days before Fletcher passed away, another maestro of electronic music, whom I’d originally considered to be a bit crap but later changed my mind about, died too.  I’m talking about Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou, aka Vangelis.  For many years, I’d been sceptical about Vangelis’s musical talents because (a) he’d been half of the duo Jon & Vangelis (the other half being Jon Anderson), whose ultra-limp hit single I’ll Find My Home cleared dance floors the length and breadth of Britain in 1982; and (b) he provided the ponderous music for the ponderous 1981 movie Chariots of Fire.  The history of the British film industry is littered with boringly worthy costume dramas that I hate, but Chariots of Fire is probably the boringly worthy costume drama that I hate most.  Also, is it just me, or does the Chariots of Fire theme not sound like the Alexander Brothers’ These are my Mountains played at the wrong speed?

 

And yet…  Vangelis’s soundtrack album for Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) is a work of genius.  I didn’t appreciate the music so much when I originally saw the film, because I was overwhelmed by its cyberpunk visuals.  But a few years later, when I bought the soundtrack album, I realised how good it was.  Aurally, it perfectly captures Blade Runner’s aesthetic of toweringly futuristic skyscrapers, street-level mazes of Asian-style food counters and market stalls, high-tech corporations, low-fi 1940s-esque film noir sleuthing, neon, rain, grime and smoke.

 

Tracks like Tales of the Future, which featured the singer Demis Roussos, Vangelis’s fellow Greek and former colleague in the late 1960s / early 1970s prog-rock band Aphrodite’s Child, were spine-tingling.  (At the time poor Demis was something of a joke in Britain, thanks to his high-pitched warbling being featured in Mike Leigh’s hilarious satire on social class and social mobility, 1977’s Abigail’s Party).  I now regard the urgent end-credits theme as one of the most rousing pieces of film-music ever.  And then, when it segues into the late, great Rutger Hauer doing his ‘Tears in Rain’ monologue…  Well, what can you say?

 

Vangelis certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice to create the musical accompaniment to Blade Runner.  But as things turned out, I’m glad he got the gig.

 

© East West / Atlantic

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In the multiverse of Sam-ness

 

© Marvel Studios / Walt Disney Motion Pictures

 

Though I’ve enjoyed some of the films produced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in recent years, and though I was a big fan in my youth of the Marvel comics that inspired those films, until now I’ve not been tempted into a cinema to watch one of them.  Usually, I’ve caught up with them courtesy of DVDs, streaming services or some airline’s in-flight entertainment system and seen them on a smaller screen.  However, the other day, for the first time, I actually got off my backside, left the comfort of my apartment, made my way to the nearest cinema and bought a ticket to see the latest MCU offering, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).

 

There were two reasons for this.  First, it’s Doctor Strange.  And secondly, the film’s directed by Sam Raimi.

 

In the 1970s, when I was a kid and read any Marvel comic I could lay my hands on, I loved Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and the rest, but Doctor Strange seemed something else.  The artwork by artists like Frank Brunner and Gene Colan was fascinatingly weird and psychedelic.  The fact that the LSD-fuelled Summer of Love loomed large in recent memory might have had something to do with this.  Also, the strip’s premise, whereby Doctor Steven Strange spent his time battling not science-fictional superpowered villains or alien beings but demons, sorcerers and other supernatural agents, gave the comic a special thrill.  At the time I was living in Northern Ireland, which was heavily populated with hard-line, Bible-thumping, Christian nutjobs.  To them even something as anodyne as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) was an unspeakable act of blasphemy and a portent of the coming End of Days.  Thus, reading a comic strip choc-a-bloc with demons, black magic and occult imagery felt, in that environment, to a nine-year-old kid, like forbidden fruit indeed.

 

Meanwhile, I’ve been a big fan of Sam Raimi’s work since seeing his horror-comedy movie Evil Dead II in an Aberdeen cinema in 1987.  I found Evil Dead II a brilliant mixture of crude, lowbrow slapstick – evidenced by the moment where a female character swallows an eyeball flying from an exploding head – and knowing, highbrow humour – evidenced by the scene where the hero, the ever-beleaguered Ash (played by Raimi’s long-time acting collaborator Bruce Campbell), chainsaws off his own demonically-possessed hand, then traps the severed appendage under a bucket and weighs the bucket down with a hardbacked edition of Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

 

© Renaissance Pictures / Rosebud Releasing Corporation

 

Raimi’s kinetic directing style and love of violent chaos seemed to owe as much to comic books as to anything in the cinema that’d come before him (though he was a big fan of the Columbia Pictures comedy team the Three Stooges).  So, it wasn’t altogether a surprise when he directed the first big cinematic comic-book adaptation of the 21st century, the Spiderman trilogy (2002-07) with Tobey Maguire.  Mind you, Raimi had already made a superhero movie, the overlooked but fascinatingly scuzzy Darkman (1990) with Liam Neeson.

 

Supposedly, Raimi was disappointed by the critical reaction to his third Spiderman film and decided not to make another superhero one, but couldn’t resist the invitation to direct this, the second outing for Doctor Strange – the first was released in 2016.  And when Raimi lets his imagination loose on such comic-book material, which had already been pretty out-there, the results are wonderful.

 

The basic plotline helps too.  Doctor Strange, played by the impeccably caped and goatee-ed Benedict Cumberbatch, encounters a young girl (Xochiti Gomez) with the power to travel from one universe to another.  Some universes are similar to ours but with a few discombobulating alterations, while others are bizarrely and surreally different.  There’s a malevolent force in pursuit of the girl, wanting to drain her of this power, and before long she and Strange are barrelling from one universe to the next with a super-villain hot on their heels.  Raimi has a field-day orchestrating the backdrops to their adventures, presenting us with universes that range from one resembling Salvador Dali in a hypothetical gothic phase to one resembling a topsy-turvy Jurassic Park to one where everything comes apart like a collapsing Rubik’s cube. There’s even a gloopy universe where everything is made of paint.

 

Equally, Raimi is allowed to let his horror sensibilities off the leash, which makes this easily the most macabre movie to come out of the MCU.  That said, with Ray Harryhausen-style lumbering trolls and flying ghouls, a partly decayed but nice zombie, and several deaths that are gruesome in a determinedly bloodless way, I doubt if this will induce nightmares in anyone over the age of ten.  Actually, as I watched Doctor Strange and his new young friend rush through portals in the fabric of reality, from one universe to another, I was reminded of the climax of Evil Dead II when Bruce Campbell’s Ash gets sucked through a portal, conjured up by black magic, and is thrown back in time to medieval Europe.  This sets things up for the third and final film in the series, Army of Darkness (1992), which was also full of Ray Harryhausen-style creations.  (I saw Army of Darkness in a cinema too, this time when I was living in the Japanese city of Sapporo.  The Japanese, picking up on the fact that Ash, when he wasn’t fighting demonically-possessed zombies, worked in a rather shit-sounding hardware store – “Shop Smart.  Shop S-Mart!  Got that?” – retitled the movie Captain Supermarket.)

 

©  Dino De Laurentiis Communications / Universal Pictures

 

Thus, I liked the parts of the movie that show Raimi’s creative stamp, and I liked the parts that share DNA with the original Doctor Strange comic strip…  But I could have done without the references to the rest of the MCU.  And you get a lot of those.  There are call-backs to the last two Avengers films, to the last Spiderman one, and to the Marvel TV series WandaVision (2021).  Also, the cast features not only Doctor Strange regulars like Chiwitel Ejiofor’s Mordo and Benedict Wong’s splendidly imperturbable Wong, but also, later, a bunch of characters from the wider Marvel gestalt.

 

This didn’t mean there was an unnecessarily complicated MCU backstory that made it hard to follow what was going on – I had a working knowledge of the characters from the old comics, rather than the more recent movies, and I managed fine.  It’s just that I prefer Doctor Strange, inhabiting his own little world where magic, the supernatural, the occult, demons, ghosts, etc., are realities, to be separate from the more conventional, sci-fi-style super-heroism of the rest of the Marvel canon.  That was something that spoiled the first Doctor Strange movie for me too.  You can imagine how peeved I was when Chris Hemsworth’s Thor turned up in its end-credits scene.

 

© Marvel / From previewsworld.com

 

And I don’t recall the original Doctor Strange comics having much to do with the other Marvel superheroes, though perhaps I just missed reading the ones that did.  I do remember, though, Strange having a crossover adventure in which he encounters Dracula, who was also a Marvel character at the time, courtesy of the comics Tomb of Dracula (1972-79) in the USA and Dracula Lives (1974-76) in the UK.

 

Admittedly, in this new Doctor Strange movie, I enjoyed the presence of Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch character, who in the MCU has chiefly been seen in the Avengers movies and the WandaVision TV show.  I knew the Scarlet Witch from the comics of my childhood too and had always found her an enigma, never sure if she was a good ‘un or a bad ’un.  One moment she’d be a henchwoman of the villainous Magneto, nemesis of Doctor Xavier in the X-Men; but the next moment, she’d appear as a member of the Avengers and suddenly be a good guy.  In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, this moral ambiguity is also evident – though you can probably predict which side, the dark one or light one, she ends up succumbing to.  But even at the character’s worst, Olsen makes her a believable and even beguiling character.  As she tells Strange, “You break the rules and become a hero.  I do it and become the enemy.  That doesn’t seem fair.”

 

To sum up: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is at its best when it’s being Sam Raimi-esque and Doctor Strange-esque.  it’s not so marvellous when it’s being Marvel-esque.  Incidentally, my happiest moment came when Bruce Campbell appears in a cameo as a belligerent git.  Subjected to a spell cast by Strange, and in the great tradition of Evil Dead II, he starts inflicting slapstick violence against his own face.  Well, what more can you want from a film?

 

© Marvel Studios / Walt Disney Motion Pictures

Posted on

A Lee-centennial

 

© British Lion Films

 

The British actor Sir Christopher Lee, who was born on this day exactly 100 years ago, was a man who embodied evil to generations of film-goers.  He played Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, Scaramanga, Comte de Rochefort, Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Blind Pew, Saruman, Count Dooku, the Jabberwocky, the Devil and, in the 2008 adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, Death himself.  But up until his passing in 2015, I didn’t so much regard him as the embodiment of evil as one of the coolest people on the planet.

 

Lee did a lot during his 93 years and not just in terms of acting – though his movie resume was awesome, with some 275 titles to his name by the time he entered his tenth decade.

 

He was, incidentally, an incredibly literary actor too, because his massive film and television CV contained adaptations of stories by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl, Alexandre Dumas, Rider Haggard, Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Jules Verne.  In real life, he was step-cousin of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming; and by the time Peter Jackson got around to filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2002-2004), he could boast that he was the only member of the movies’ cast and crew who’d actually met J.R.R. Tolkien.  He was also good friends with Robert Bloch, author of Psycho (1959), the fabulous Ray Bradbury, and posh occult-thriller-writer Dennis Wheatley, whose potboiler The Devil Rides Out Lee would persuade Hammer Films to adapt to celluloid in 1968.  And he was one of the last people alive who could claim to have met M.R. James, the greatest ghost story writer in English literature.  As a lad Lee encountered James, who was then Provost of Eton College, when his family tried, unsuccessfully, to enrol him there.  Lee obviously didn’t hold his failure to get into Eton against James because in 2000 he played the writer in the BBC miniseries Ghost Stories for Christmas.

 

Before getting into acting in the late 1940s, Lee did military service during World War II, which included attachments with the Special Operations Executive and the Long Range Desert Patrol , the forerunner to the SAS.  He kept schtum about what he actually did with them.  Decades later, though, he may have unintentionally dropped a hint about his secret wartime activities to Peter Jackson when, on set, he discreetly advised the Kiwi director about the sound a dying man would really make if he’d just had a knife planted in his back.

 

His first years as an actor did not see much success, due to his being too tall (six-foot-four) and too foreign-looking (he had Italian ancestry).  During this period he at least learned how to swordfight, a skill he drew on when appearing in various low-budget swashbucklers.  During the making of one such film, 1955’s The Dark Avenger, the famously sozzled Errol Flynn nearly hacked off Lee’s little finger; although later Lee got revenge when, during a TV shoot with the same actor, a slightly-misaimed sword-thrust knocked off Flynn’s toupee, much to the Hollywood star’s mortification and no doubt to everyone else’s amusement.  Incidentally, I love the fact that Lee could boast of being the only actor in history who’d conducted sword fights with Errol Flynn and Yoda.

 

© 20th Century Fox

 

And I’ve read somewhere that when he made the swashbuckler The Scarlet Blade for Hammer Films in 1963, Lee taught a young Oliver Reed the basics of sword-fighting.  I’m sure fight-choreographer William Hobbs and the stunt crew who worked on The Three Musketeers a decade later quietly cursed Lee for this.  (Lee starred alongside Reed in the film, playing the memorably eye-patched Comte de Rochefort.)  From all accounts, the ever-enthusiastic Ollie threw himself into the Musketeers’ sword-fights like a whirling dervish, and eventually one stuntman had to ‘accidentally’ stab him in the hand and put him out of action before he killed someone.

 

In 1956 and 1957 Lee got two gigs for Hammer films that’d change his fortunes and make him a star – playing the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein and then, on the strength of that, Bram Stoker’s famous vampire count in Dracula.  Apparently, Hammer wanted originally to hire the hulking comedic actor Bernard Bresslaw to play Frankenstein’s monster.  I suppose there’s a parallel universe out there somewhere where Bresslaw actually got the job; so that the man we know as Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy (1965), Bernie Lugg in Carry On Camping (1969) and Peter Potter in Carry On Girls (1973) went on in that universe to play Count Dooku in the Star Wars movies and Saruman the White in the Lord of the Rings ones.

 

Playing Baron Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein and Van Helsing in Dracula was the legendary Peter Cushing and he and Lee would hit it off immediately, become best mates and make another 18 films together, in which for much of the time they did bad things to each other.  As a mad-scientist-cum-asylum-keeper in The Creeping Flesh (1972), Lee brought a monster to life and then, after the monster had attacked Cushing and driven him insane with terror, he coolly incarcerated Cushing in his asylum.  Whereas in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) Cushing chased him, as Dracula, through a prickly hawthorn bush – hawthorns are apparently harmful to vampires and the experience, Lee recalled in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977), left him ‘shedding genuine Lee blood like a garden sprinkler’ – before impaling him on a sharp, uprooted fence-post.  Meanwhile, the 1972 British-Spanish movie Horror Express featured a decomposing ape-man fossil that’d come back to life, was possessed by an alien force and had the power to suck people’s brains out through their eyeballs.  It was such an evil motherf***er that Lee and Cushing had to join forces, for once, to defeat it.

 

© Granada Films

 

Lee was famously uncomfortable about being branded a horror-movie star and about being associated with Dracula, an association that might thwart his ambitions for a serious acting career.  He did, though, play the character another six times for Hammer, and an eighth time in the Spanish production El Conde Dracula.  Tweeting a tribute to him when he passed away, Stephen King said, “He was the King of the Vampires.”  So sorry, Sir Christopher, but when the man who wrote Salem’s Lot (1975) says you’re the King of the Vampires, you’re the King of the Vampires.

 

As Dracula, he got to bite Barbara Shelley, Barbara Ewing, Linda Hayden, Anouska Hempel, Marcia Hunt, Caroline Munro and Valerie Van Ost.  Last-minute interventions by Peter Cushing in Dracula AD 1972 (1972) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) prevented him from biting Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley, which must have been frustrating.  Meanwhile, the 1965 movie Dracula, Prince of Darkness was the first really scary horror movie I ever saw, on TV, back when I was eight or nine years old.  I’d watched old horror films made by Universal Studios in the 1940s, like House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), in which everything was discreetly black-and-white and bloodless, so I wasn’t prepared for an early scene in Dracula, Prince of Darkness where Lee / the count is revived during a ceremony that involves a luckless traveller (Charles Tingwell) being suspended upside-down over a coffin and having his throat cut.  The sight and sound of the blood splattering noisily onto the supposedly dead vampire’s ashes traumatised me.

 

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

 

Thanks to Hammer’s success in the horror genre, the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s saw a boom in British, usually gothic, horror filmmaking.  And during that boom, Lee did many memorable, often evil, things.  He drove his car into Michael Gough and squidged off Gough’s hand in Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors (1965).  He forced Vincent Price to immerse himself in a vat of acid in Scream and Scream Again (1969).  He turned up as a snobbish senior-civil-servant type and tormented Donald Pleasance in Deathline (1972).

 

Lee was probably Britain’s most linguistic actor, speaking German, French, Italian and Spanish and also knowing a bit of Swedish, Russian and Greek.  Thus, he also found it easy to find employment making horror movies on mainland Europe, where the gothic tradition was raunchier, more lurid and looser in its plot logic than its counterpart in Britain.  He worked with the Italian maestro Mario Bava in 1963’s The Whip and the Body and on several occasions with the fascinatingly prolific, but erratic, Spanish director Jess Franco.  Despite Franco’s cheeky habit of shooting scenes with Lee and then inserting them into a totally different and usually pornographic movie – something Lee would only discover later, when he strolled past a blue-movie theatre in Soho and noticed that he was starring in something like Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion (1970) – Lee held the Spaniard in esteem and championed his work at a time it wasn’t fashionable to do so.  Since his death in 2013, Franco’s reputation has improved and art-house director Peter Strickland’s movie The Duke of Burgundy (2014) is a tribute, in part, to him.

 

Franco directed the later entries in a series of movies about Fu Manchu that Lee made in the 1960s, in which he played Sax Rohmer’s supervillain in un-PC Oriental makeup and spent his time barking orders at Chinese minions, who were usually played by Burt Kwouk.  As well as retaining some of the racism that was prominent in Rohmer’s books, the series generally wasn’t up to much in terms of quality.  However, the film’s endings have always haunted me.  Invariably, Fu Manchu’s secret headquarters would blow up and then Lee’s voice would boom imperiously through the smoke, “The world will hear of me again!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

In the early 1970s, Lee finally got opportunities to make the sort of films he wanted to make, including Richard Lester’s two Musketeers movies (1974 and 1975); the ninth official Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun (1975), in which he taunted Roger Moore, “You work for peanuts – a hearty well-done from Her Majesty the Queen and a pittance of a pension.  Apart from that, we are the same.  To us, Mr Bond.  We are the best…  Oh come, come, Mr Bond.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”; and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), regarded by many as the best attempt at bringing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing super-sleuth to the screen.

 

In that latter film, Lee played Holmes’s snooty brother Mycroft.  Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself several times, including in a couple of early-1990s TV movies with Dr Watson played by the impeccable Patrick Macnee, whom decades earlier had been Lee’s schoolmate at Summer Fields School in Oxford.  And he played Henry Baskerville in the 1959 Hammer adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which had Peter Cushing in the role of Holmes.  But for some strange reason, nobody ever thought of casting Lee as Professor Moriarty.

 

In 1973, he also played Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, a film that needs no introduction from me.  Actually, next year is the film’s fiftieth anniversary.  I trust the Scottish Tourist Board will celebrate this fact on May 1st, 2023, by lighting lots of wicker men, with lots of sanctimonious, virginal, Free Presbyterian policemen inside them, along the coasts of Scotland.

 

Later in the 1970s, no longer so typecast in horror movies and with the British film industry on its deathbed, Lee decamped to Hollywood.  He ended up appearing in some big-budget puddings like dire 1977 disaster movie Airport 77 and Steven Spielberg’s supposed comedy 1941 (1979), but at least he was able to rub shoulders with icons such as Muhammad Ali and John Belushi.  And he didn’t, strictly speaking, stop appearing in horror movies.  He was in the likes of House of the Long Shadows (1982), The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985), The Funny Man (1994) and Talos the Mummy (1998).  Amusingly, Lee usually explained this by arguing that these weren’t really horror films.  The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf wasn’t a horror film?  Aye, right.

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Though he never relented in his workload, it wasn’t until the 1990s that Lee experienced a late-term career renaissance – no doubt because many of the nerdish kids who’d sneaked into cinemas or stayed up late in front of the TV to watch his old horror movies had now grown up, become major players in the film industry and were only too happy to cast him in their movies: Joe Dante, John Landis, Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton.  Hence his roles in two of the biggest franchises in cinematic history, the Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit ones, plus five movies directed by Burton.

 

When he was in his eighties, Lee must have wondered if there were any territories left for him to conquer – and he realised that yes, there was one.  Heavy metal!  He had a fine baritone singing voice but only occasionally in his film career, for example, in The Wicker Man and The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), did he get a chance to show it off.  In the mid-noughties, however, he started recording with symphonic / power-metal bands Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar and soon after he was releasing his own metal albums such as Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, which had contributions by guitarist Hedras Ramos and Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner.  He also released two collections of Christmas songs, done heavy-metal style.  The festive season will never seem the same after you’ve heard Lee thundering his way through The Little Drummer Boy with electric guitars caterwauling in the background.

 

© Charlemagne Productions Ltd

 

Obviously, the heavy metal community, which sees itself as a crowd of badasses, was flattered when the cinema’s supreme badass – Lord Summerisle, Dracula, Fu Manchu, Rasputin, etc. – elected to join them and they welcomed Lee with open arms.  They even gave him, as the genre’s oldest practitioner, the Spirit of Metal Award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods ceremony in 2010.

 

So: singing heavy metal, speaking eight languages, being perhaps the 20th century’s greatest screen villain and, probably, bayoneting Nazis to death.  Was there anything this man couldn’t do?  Well, it seems the only thing he couldn’t quite manage was to live forever.  Mind you, for someone who spent his cinema career dying – even when he penned his autobiography in his mid-fifties, he reckoned he’d been killed onscreen more than any other actor in history – but kept coming back, it feels a bit odd to be writing about Christopher Lee in the past tense.

 

Actually, if anybody wants to congregate in a Carpathian castle after dark and perform a blood-soaked ritual to resurrect the great man, I’m up for it.

 

From the Independent

Posted on

Happy World Goth Day 2022

 

© Halperin Productions

 

Does the sun seem to be shining a little less brightly, or a little more darkly, today?  Does the air seem unusually clammy, redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the bleak December’ rather than the cusp-of-summer May?  Do the people walking past on the street seem to be sporting a tad more kohl eyeliner than normal?  Are you staring at your TV, unsure if the pudgy, chaotic, tousle-haired figure you see on the screen is indeed Boris Johnson and not Robert Smith?

 

If the answer is ‘yes’…  Well, this is probably because today, May 22nd, is World Goth Day.  According to Wikipedia, the idea of having a day dedicated to the planet’s blackest-clad subculture ‘originated in the United Kingdom in 2009 initially as Goth Day, a smaller scale celebration… inspired from the broadcasting of a special set of shows on BBC Radio 6.’

 

So, to mark the occasion, here’s a playlist of my dozen favourite Goth tunes, with YouTube links.  (My apologies for any ultra-irritating YouTube advertisements that might pop up at the beginning.)

 

© Cleopatra

 

First up is the Goth-dancefloor fixture Adrenaline by Liverpudlian band Rosetta Stone.  Actually, when I think of all the Goth nights I attended in my youth in places like Edinburgh, Norwich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, this is the only tune I remember the DJs playing.  Yes, I know they must have played other stuff, but this is the one song that accompanies my memories of those events.  (Maybe they did play Adrenaline all night long, in a Gothic variation on that Father Ted episode where Ted and Dougal organise a charity disco and then realise they only have one record, the Specials’ Ghost Town.)

 

I’ve heard many authorities declare that Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the greatest Goth song of all time.  But by way of something different, I’ll offer this tune instead, which is a cheeky riposte to the venerable Bauhaus anthem: Bela Lugosi’s Back by the fabulously titled Lesbian Bed Death.  I love how they’ve peppered the song’s video with footage from that hypnotically weird and dream-like movie White Zombie, which had Lugosi as its villain back in 1932.

 

© Polydor

 

I’m a big fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I thought on this playlist I’d include something from the formidable SIouxsie Sioux’s other band the Creatures, which she formed with fellow Banshee and one-time husband Peter ‘Budgie’ Clarke.  I’ve had a fondness for the Creatures ever since seeing them perform a storming set at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall in 1999.  This is called Pluto Drive and listening to it always lets a few tingles loose on my spine.

 

© The Mission

 

A band I saw in Edinburgh during the same period, though this time at the city’s Liquid Rooms, was the Mission.  Now it was customary that when the Mission played their most famous number, the Led Zeppelin-esque Tower of Strength, their die-hard fans – who were known as ‘the Eskimos’ – would climb on top of each other and create a human tower in the middle of the auditorium.  Well, not so much a tower as a pyramid, with lots of Eskimos on the floor forming its base, and smaller numbers of them forming the higher levels that tapered up to its apex.  This was easy to do during the Mission’s heyday in the 1980s, when those Eskimos were mostly lean, lithe and light teenagers.   However, by the late 1990s, the Eskimos had got not only a wee bit older but also a wee bit heavier… And I watched the building of that human Tower of Strength with some trepidation.   Predictably, the whole thing soon wobbled and toppled over.  But at least no Eskimos were hurt.

 

Anyway, here’s the song Belief from the Mission’s 1990 album Carved in Sand.  I don’t know why this song isn’t better known, as I always thought it was an epic, relentless thing epitomising the band at their bombastic best.  (Though some unkind critics would probably reword that as ‘at their bombastic worst’.)

 

Similarly, I don’t know why this next tune, Number One by the German outfit Clan of Xymox, isn’t better known either.  It soars in an impeccably synth-y way.

 

I’d like to think that if, besides being tested for the ethnic groups you came from, your DNA could be tested for the musical sub-cultures you belonged to, my DNA would show a strong ‘Goth’ component.  However, also being a fan of heavy metal, I’d hope that it showed a big ‘metalhead’ component too.  Thus, my next two choices lie in that fascinating area where the two genres, Goth and heavy metal, overlap.  First, here’s the wonderfully sepulchral – thanks to the band’s vocalist, the late Peter Steele – Everyone I Love is Dead by Type O Negative.

 

© Music for Nations

 

And here’s the finest goth-metal band to ever hail from Country Suffolk, East Anglia: Cradle of Filth.  Their song A Gothic Romance: Red Roses for the Devil’s Whore follows a tried-and-trusted Cradle of Filth formula, starting with a civilised, classical-music opening, but rapidly descending into howling, pounding, guitar-mangling chaos.  As ever, the croaking / shrieking vocals of Suffolk icon Dani Filth are at the forefront.

 

Now it’s time for another Goth dancefloor-stomper.  It’s hard to resist Doctor Online by industrial Norwegian outfit Zeromancer, a song I assume was inspired by the infamous, euthanasia-supporting Doctor Jack Kevorkian, aka ‘Doctor Death’.

 

Canadian band the Birthday Massacre are smartly named.  The word ‘birthday’ suggests glowing candles, ornately decorated birthday cakes and, generally, the magical happiness that people associate with childhood memories of their Big Day; while the word ‘massacre’ suggests, well, blood, darkness and death.  That juxtaposition sums up Goth perfectly.  And here’s their song Happy Birthday, whose vibe nicely blends that sense of child-like wonder with sinister premonitions that something bad is going to happen.

 

© Beggars Banquet

 

Returning to Bauhaus for a moment, I find this solo effort by their celebrated frontman Peter Murphy, Cuts You Up, poignant and rather lovely.

 

The young band Savages – okay, that’s young by my standards: they formed in 2011 – are described in their Wikipedia entry as a ‘post-punk, noise rock, alternative rock’ outfit.  That description sneakily avoids using the ‘G’ word…  But come on.  I defy anyone to listen to their song Husbands and not think of Siouxsie and the Banshees at their imperious best.

 

Finally, how else could I finish this post but with a link to the greatest Goth anthem ever, the Sisters of Mercy’s majestic, thunderously operatic This Corrosion?  Be warned – this is the 11-minute remix.  By the end of those 11 minutes, after you’ve been bludgeoned into submission by singer Andrew Eldritch and Patricia Morrison’s caterwauling vocals, by producer Jim Steinman’s celestial choirs and Wagnerian guitar-squalls, and by that never-ending chorus of “Hey, now / Hey, now now…”, you will be begging the Sisters for mercy.

 

© Merciful Release

Posted on

Scorpion tales

 

From wikipedia.org / © Eva Rinaldi

 

Here’s a hypothetical question I’ve heard many times. If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time, find the young Adolf Hitler and kill him?  In Stephen King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone, for instance, the hero puts this question to an old man who lost his son in World War II.  The old man replies that he’d stick a knife in Hitler’s heart “as far as she’d go… and then I’d twist her… But first, first I’d coat the blade with rat poison.”

 

Recently, whilst looking at the dire state of the world and feeling fearful about the future, I’ve wondered about a variation on the time machine / Hitler question.  In the future, after manmade climate change has decimated the environment and pig-ignorant ‘populism’ (i.e., fascism) has run society into the ground, who would the remnants of humanity choose to eliminate if they had a time machine and could send an assassin back to, say, the late 20th century?  Who would they remove from the timeline in the belief it’d change history for the better?  The young Donald Trump?  The young Vladimir Putin?

 

Neither.  I suspect those guys would be considered small beer compared to the guy the time-travelling assassin from the future would really go after… Rupert Murdoch.

 

Murdoch’s media operations have, over the last five decades, caused massive damage to human well-being.  He promoted the voracious, greed-is-good, market-über-alles destructiveness of neoliberalism with his support for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  He’s done his best to ignore, distort and discredit the overwhelming scientific evidence for manmade climate change.  Via Fox News, he’s created in the USA a paranoid, xenophobic, extreme-right-wing ecosystem whose millions of inhabitants believe Donald Trump’s lies and will probably vote him again, or someone even worse, into power in 2024 and turn the world’s biggest superpower into an authoritarian state.  Yes, Murdoch has seemingly had a finger in everything shit that’s happened in modern history, in everything’s that propelled humanity further down the road to hell.  No wonder Murdoch’s son James resigned from the board of News Corp in 2020, sick of the oceans of toxicity created by his father.

 

It says little for Britain’s newspaper industry that Murdoch owns a swathe of its national titles: the Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Sun and Sun on Sunday.  These played a prominent role in influencing the 2016 vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, which led to the economic, diplomatic and cultural shambles of Brexit.  No surprise there, either.  The ghoulish old Antipodean tycoon once famously remarked that he could intimidate one country’s leader, in No 10 Downing Street, into following his wishes, whereas he couldn’t intimidate the combined might of 28 countries’ leaders represented in Brussels.

 

From dailysabah.com / © Sun

 

But Murdoch constitutes just one head of the hydra that is Britain’s predominantly right-wing press.  Among the newspapers sold nationwide, only the Guardian, Daily and Sunday Mirrors and Sunday People could be described as having a political stance leaning any way towards the left.  Elsewhere, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, right-wing and totally honking mad, are owned by the billionaire Frederick Barclay.  Resident on the island of Brecqhou, which is administered by Sark in the Channel Islands, Frederick and his late twin brother David once tried to avoid Sark’s tax-inheritance laws by having Brecqhou declared independent of it.  That’s ironic considering the Telegraphs’ vehement opposition to Scottish independence.

 

Another billionaire, the non-domiciled Viscount Rothermere, owns the equally right-wing Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.  About the Mail, I once wrote: “…you might just view the never-ending diet that the newspaper serves up of ignorance, prurience, grubbiness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, small-mindedness, snobbery, racism, misogyny, Little Englander-ism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, immigrant-bashing, anti-intellectualism, tittle-tattle, curtain-twitching, pseudo-scientific quackery, petty-bourgeois fulmination and general all-round barking right-wing insanity and conclude there’s no hope left for the human race and try to book yourself a one-way passage on the next space probe to Mars.”

 

And let’s not forget the Daily and Sunday Express, near-clones of the Mail titles, though aimed at an even more demented readership who are additionally obsessed with Madeleine McCann, Princess Diana and the British weather.  These used to be owned by millionaire and one-time porno magnate Richard Desmond, but are now the property of Reach plc, which publishes the Mirror.  Presumably, Reach hasn’t tinkered with the Express formula because it’s decided to milk those barmy readers for money while they’re still alive.

 

Over the past few months, Britain’s right-wing newspapers have been fighting the corner of Boris Johnson, ever since they realised the fragility of his premiership.  As PM, Johnson hasn’t been so much skating on thin ice as clog-dancing on it.  It’s transpired that during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the UK had been put in lockdown, Johnson and his cronies turned No 10 Downing Street into an endlessly partying, boozing frat-house that paid zero heed to the strict non-socialising rules imposed on everyone else.  (Intriguingly, Murdoch’s Sun, usually the gobbiest of Britain’s tabloids, has kept relatively quiet about ‘Partygate’, as it’s been dubbed.  This may have something to do with James Slack, the Sun’s deputy editor, being Johnson’s Director of Communications at the time when No 10 was boogieing away the lockdown blues.)

 

The self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious Johnson is a creature of the self-serving, scurrilous, mendacious British press. He started off working at the Times, until he was sacked for fabricating a quote, then found employment as the Telegraph.  Max Hastings, then-Telegraph editor, has since said of Johnson: “…he is unfit for national office, because it seems he cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification.”  As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing spiteful and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain.  These helped fuel the Euro-scepticism that birthed the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.  No wonder the right-wing press barons love Johnson – he’s one of their own.

 

From twitter.com/bbcnews / © Daily Mail

 

Unsurprisingly, their coverage of Partygate, in which they’ve tried to defend and big up the lawbreaking blond oaf, has been nauseating.  First, there was the insistence, made most forcibly by the Daily Mail, that Johnson’s breaking of his own Covid laws was unimportant because Russia had just invaded Ukraine and, well, DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?  More recently, they’ve dedicated their front-page headlines to ‘Beergate’, the hoo-ha over the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer – or, as he’s known in the right-wing press, ‘HYPOCRITE STARMER’ – having a beer and curry at a constituency office in Durham last year while lockdown rules remained in force.  Starmer claimed no rules were broken, but the local police have, under pressure from the media, launched an inquiry into the incident.  The assumption in the editorial offices of the Mail and the rest is that if Starmer is found to have broken lockdown rules too, their beloved Boris will get off the hook for his own, proven misdemeanours.  (He’s already had to pay one fine for a lockdown breach and more fines are likely on the way.)

 

Starmer has just declared that he’ll resign as Labour Party leader if the police do issue a fine to him over Beergate.  This was evidently intended to put some clear, blue, moral water between him and Johnson, already fined but not resigned.  However, if he thought this would earn him some credit from the newspapers, he was mistaken.  The Mail promptly responded with the headline: STARMER ACCUSED OF PILING PRESSURE ON POLICE.

 

The more I think about these rags, the more I think of the fable about the frog and the scorpion.  The scorpion stings the frog to death, even though this will condemn it to death too, because it’s in its ‘nature’.  It’s what it does.  It can’t not sting.

 

The poisonous right-wing nature of much of Britain’s press is a headache for the Labour Party.  How can they ever get a fair hearing when those newspapers are programmed to blindly support their Conservative opponents no matter how corrupt, venal and idiotic they become?  A quarter-century ago, Tony Blair’s policy on this was to cosy up to them.  He got so thick with Rupert Murdoch, the Scorpion King himself, that he became godfather to one of Murdoch’s kids.  In return, the headline THE SUN BACKS BLAIR appeared on the front page of Murdoch’s number-one British tabloid prior to the 1997 general election, which saw Blair win power.  But such sycophancy has its downside.  If you get too close to the likes of Murdoch, you end up either stung to death, like the frog in the fable, or with so much poison in your own system that you become toxic yourself.  The latter outcome happened to Blair.  I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind describing ‘El Tone’ as a paragon of virtue in 2022.

 

Still, I don’t have much sympathy either for the supporters of the last Labour Party leader, the atypically left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, who blamed negative British press coverage for all their hero’s woes.  Yes, aware that Corbyn represented a threat to the wealthy, powerful interests of their owners, those newspapers bombarded Corbyn with every slur going, that he was a terrorist sympathiser, an anti-Semite, a traitor, whatever.  But Corbyn, whom I’ve always regarded as a decent bloke, engineered much of his own bad luck.  He was a hopeless communicator.  He seemed to be living still in the 1970s, when he’d been a compadre of old school socialist Tony Benn, and never responded to the attacks made against him with the imagination and agility necessary in the changed media landscape of the early 21st century.

 

Actually, there’s proof close at hand that, to be successful, a political party doesn’t need to be backed by the majority of newspapers, and can triumph despite most newspapers stinging at it continuously with their scorpion-tails.  In Scotland, only one newspaper, the National, supports the Scottish National Party’s policy of Scottish independence.  The other Scottish newspapers – north-of-the-border editions of the right-wing ones I’ve just discussed, such as the Scottish Sun and Scottish Daily Mail, and locally published ones like the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record – oppose the SNP and leap at any opportunity to excoriate it and its leader Nicola Sturgeon.  (It’s noticeable how, in the headlines of the utterly wretched Scottish Daily Express, the British PM is always referred to as ‘BORIS’ whereas the Scottish First Minister always gets a contemptuous, misogynistic ‘STURGEON’.)

 

From bbc.com/ © Daily Express

 

Yet the SNP have been in power in Edinburgh for the past 15 years and have topped the polls in eight Scottish elections in a row, most recently the council ones on May 3rd that saw them increase their number of councillors by 22.  A large part of this is surely down to Nicola Sturgeon herself.  Whatever you think of her politics, it’s hard to deny that – unlike Johnson – she speaks like a normal human being, communicates her meaning clearly and generally exhibits some semblance of empathy and integrity.  Obviously, this influences a sufficiently large number of Scottish voters, who choose to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears over the crap they read in the newspapers.

 

Let’s hope that, when the time comes, British voters as a whole choose to do the same.

Posted on

Student politics

 

© Profile Books

 

I’ve just read a review in the Guardian of Simon Kuper’s new book, Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Chums tell the real-life story of student politics at Oxford University during the 1980s, a world whose inhabitants would often become well-known public figures in the 21st century.  On the Labour side there were ‘the Miliband Brothers, Dave and Ted, and Eddie Balls and Yvette Cooper’, who were busy ‘organising rent protests at their respective colleges’.  However, it was some Conservative student politicos at Oxford in the 1980s who’d become particular big-hitters and who’d handle – or mishandle – the levers of power in Britain during the 2010s and 2020s.

 

They included Michael Gove, whom Kuper says was bought, wearing a kilt, for 35 pounds at a charity-fundraising ‘slave auction’ at Oxford Union in 1987.  Even in 2022 and even after three-and-a-half decades of inflation, 35 pounds seems rather more than Michael Gove is worth, though maybe the kilt bumped up his value a bit.

 

They also included Britain’s current Prime Minister, the walking disaster area that is Boris Johnson.  Recently, the Mail on Sunday claimed that Johnson’s ‘Oxford Union debating skills’ were so formidable that, during debates in the House of Commons, Labour’s working-class, comprehensive-school-educated deputy leader Angela Rayner had to resort to crossing her legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992) to distract him.  According to Kuper, the young Johnson’s debating strategy was ‘to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments’ and rely instead on ‘carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of the voice, and ad hominem jibes’.

 

Also spicing up life in 1980s Tory Oxford University was David Cameron, though he was ‘rich enough and connected enough to feel himself above the “hackery” of student politics’; the BBC’s future political editor Nick Robinson; Daniel Hannan, NHS-basher, Enoch Powell fan, arch-Brexiteer and now in the House of Lords as Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, who, it’s been said, ‘may have contributed more to the ideas, arguments and tactics of Euroscepticism than any other individual’; and the future spin-doctoring Svengali behind Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings.  Cummings, apparently, was a protégé of Dr Norman Stone, the historian, lecturer, author, advisor to Margaret Thatcher and student-groping pisshead from Glasgow.  One obituary published after Stone’s death in 2019 hilariously noted that he ‘hated Oxford, which he thought… was full of Marxists.’  Actually, I can’t imagine Stone and Cummings together without thinking of Saruman and Grima Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings movies (2002-04).

 

© New Line Cinema / WingNut Films

 

Incidentally, Kuper acknowledges that Oxford University educated and employed not only J.R.R. Tolkien but also Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis.  He notes how ‘the timeless paradise of Oxford inspired its inhabitants to produce timeless fantasies like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, Narnia and, incubating from the late 1980s, Brexit.’

 

Anyway, apart from making me mightily glad that I didn’t attend Oxford University during the 1980s, reading about Kuper’s book has got me thinking about the place where I was a student during the 1980s, Aberdeen University.  What about the student politicians I encountered there?  Did any of them ever get near – remotely near – those all-important ‘levers of power’?  There follows a heavily revised, fully up-to-date version of a piece about this subject I first posted in 2014.

 

To be honest, I wouldn’t have encountered any student politicians at all if I hadn’t got involved with Aberdeen University’s student newspaper and co-edited it for a term in 1986.  The newspaper office was located in the same building as the offices and meeting rooms where the members of the Students’ Representative Council did their business.  And obviously, those student politicians also figured in a lot of the stories we reported on.  So, I got to observe the species close up.

 

The one who probably did best for himself was Stephen Carter, who served as SRC President from 1985 to 1986.  I found Carter lacking in warmth, humour and character and at one point, in a fit of naughtiness, I published in the newspaper a spoof article depicting him as an aloof Roman Emperor in the manner of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius novels.  The article was entitled I, Carterus.  We didn’t get on very well, though not because I’d likened him to one of the Caesars.  Near the end of my editorship, I wrote a front-page article that made several criticisms of his reign as student president, which infuriated him.  To be fair, I later discovered that I’d made an error with a financial figure I’d quoted, so at least part of his anger was justified.  Being bawled out by the bland, automation-like Carter was a strange experience.   The abuse didn’t seem to emanate from a real human being.  It was like being scolded by an indignant speak-your-wait machine or a cranky elevator voice-recording.

 

From gov.uk

 

Decades later, in 2008, Carter served as Gordon Brown’s Downing Street Chief of staff.  Also, from 2008 to 2009, he was Brown’s Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting.  As he wasn’t a member of either house at Westminster at the time, which would have barred him from taking on a ministerial position, he was quickly ennobled.  He was made Baron Carter of Barnes and entered the House of Lords.  I didn’t hear much about how that he got in on those roles, except for claims that his relationship with Brown’s notorious spin-doctor Damian McBride was ‘fractious’.  Actually, McBride was such a scumbag that it’s to Carter’s credit that the pair of them didn’t get along.

 

Coincidentally, days before Stephen Carter – sorry, Baron Carter of Barnes – ended his stint as Brown’s Chief of Staff, I found myself a full-time student again.  In October 2008 I started an MA course at the University of East Anglia.  The students there had mounted a protest against student debt, with hundreds of them sticking fake cheques to a campus wall.  On each cheque was written the sum of money that each student expected to owe by the time of his or her graduation.  To me (who’d graduated in 1987 with an overdraft of £1,500, which I paid off within two years), some of those sums were eye-watering: £40,000 or more.  What, I wondered, would we have thought at Aberdeen University in the mid-1980s if we’d known that our student president would one day be a key figure in a government presiding over levels of student debt we wouldn’t have imagined in our worst nightmares?

 

Another student politician from that era who’s done well is Katy Clark.  She was a leading light in Aberdeen University’s Labour Party and in 2005 became Labour Member of Parliament for North Ayrshire and Arran.  Her career as an MP ended in 2015 with the virtual wipe-out of Scotland’s Labour seats that happened under the kamikaze leadership of Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and spin-doctor John McTiernan.  However, she kept busy, working as a strategist for Jeremy Corbyn and authoring for him a review of the Labour Party’s democratic structures. Then, in 2021, she got elected to the Scottish Parliament as a Labour MSP for the West of Scotland region.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Parliament

 

When I co-edited the student newspaper, Katy came to our attention when she led protests against Aberdeen University’s then-rector, the former Scottish National Party MP Hamish Watt.  At a debate during Freshers’ Week, Watt had made some supposedly-jovial comments in which he compared the young female students who’d just arrived on campus to ‘unbroken fillies’.  Now, while Watt undoubtedly deserved to be strung up by his sexist testicles, I didn’t enjoy having to speak to Katy about the incident.  I found her to be intense, one-note, lacking in personality and devoid of humour.  Actually, looking at what I’ve just written about Stephen Carter, a theme seems to be emerging in that regard.

 

Despite that, I felt some admiration for Katy because, unlike many other student politicians, she stuck by the left-wing principles she’d had as a university student and didn’t drift rightwards as she started to earn money.  During her career as an MP, she voted against the introduction of ID cards, against the renewal of the Trident missile system and against bombing campaigns in Iraq.  However, in 2020, that admiration was dampened by the fact that she accepted a peerage and entered the House of Lords as Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.

 

What were you thinking, Katy?  I don’t know how any socialists could debase themselves by becoming members of the archaic, undemocratic and embarrassing Lords.  It’s a place where you rub ermine-clad shoulders with the likes of Baroness Michelle Mone of Mayfair (who’s just had her home raided by police as part of a fraud investigation into her links with a dodgy PPE company); and Baroness Dido Harding of Winscombe (who got where she is today through cronyism and blew 22 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money on a failed Covid-19 track-and-trace system); and Baroness Claire Fox of Buckley (the former Revolutionary Communist Party member, Bosnian genocide denier and IRA supporter, now swivel-eyed Brexiteer and enthusiast for all things right-wing); and the afore-mentioned Baron Daniel Hannon of Kingsclere… and many more.

 

While she was there, I wonder if Katy ever bumped into her old Aberdeen University compadre Lord Carter of Barnes and they reminisced about their days on campus in the 1980s. (“What was the name of that hairy, beer-swilling prick with the Northern Irish accent who used to edit the student newspaper?”  “Can’t remember…”)

 

I should add that while running for the Scottish Parliament, Katy promised to ‘stand down’ from the House of Lords; and, according to her Wikipedia entry, on becoming an MSP she took ‘a leave of absence’ from the decrepit institution.  That, though, isn’t the same as ‘quitting’ it.  Also, I notice that on Wikipedia she’s still billed as ‘Baroness Clark of Kilwinning.’

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Scottish Parliament

 

To the rightward end of the spectrum, meanwhile, I have to mention someone else from my old alumni – Murdo Fraser, who’s in the Scottish Parliament as an MSP for the Mid-Scotland and Fife region and was once deputy leader of the Scottish Conservative Party.  That Murdo became a big name in Tory circles surprised me because he’d seemed an unprepossessing character in Aberdeen.  The detail I remember most about him was that he wore a Glasgow Rangers scarf 24/7, to the point where I wondered if it’d been stitched on.  A good friend who knew him a little, the late Finlay McLean, told me once that he had ‘the personality of a deep-frozen Cyberman’.  Then again, for an ambitious politician, not having a personality seems to be part of the course.

 

Murdo’s political ascendancy happened despite the fact that he was once associated with the notorious Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation that by the 1980s had become more right-wing than the Conservative Party of which it was the university branch.  At the time the Conservative Party was led by Margaret Thatcher, so being more right-wing than her was quite an achievement.  In 1986, after a string of well-publicised incidents – wherein FCS members had abused ethnic-minority staff at student bars, brayed their support for the Contras in El Salvador, sang the Special AKA song Free Nelson Mandela with the words changed to ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’, and so on – this extreme-minded group was disbanded by Tory Party Chairman Norman Tebbit.  And yes, being disbanded by Norman Tebbit for being too extreme was quite an achievement too.

 

The FCS at Aberdeen University were particularly obnoxious.  Among other things, they had a penchant for insulting gay people and taunting them about AIDS.  The start of my term as newspaper editor coincided with an incident wherein a bunch of FCS students invaded and disrupted a health-and-welfare talk being given to an audience of new students.  Their motive for disrupting the talk seemed to be because it covered safe sex for gay as well as straight students and was therefore, somehow, encouraging AIDS.

 

Later, after the newspaper had published an article about the society for gay students, Gay Soc, we received a letter from one deranged FCS member accusing us of furthering the interests of ‘the plague rats of the 20th century’.  We published his letter in the belief that by allowing the FCS to air their views publicly, we were letting people see what arseholes they were.  Give them enough rope and they’d hang themselves, we felt.  However, at least one gay friend of mine was deeply upset that the letter had appeared in our newspaper.  Today, 35 years on, I’d think twice about publishing it.

 

In Murdo Fraser’s defence, I’ll admit that he seemed aware of what a squad of bampots he was having to keep company with in the FCS.  He kept his mouth shut when the rest of them were being as offensively vocal as possible, and whenever I saw them strutting about the campus en masse he seemed to trail silently and reluctantly along at the back, rather like Eddie Bunker’s Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs (1992).  Actually, being Mr Blue was appropriate given his footballing allegiances.

 

Having dissed the Labour and the Conservative Parties, I suppose in the interest of balance I should say something about Aberdeen University’s 1980s Liberal Party, the Liberal Democrats as they are now.  The Liberals’ most visible representative was one Dan Falchikov who, with his excitable and eccentric manner and his striking dress sense (a psychedelically-coloured sweater), possessed something that other people I’ve mentioned lacked: a personality.  And I think Dan was a genuinely well-meaning guy even if he wasn’t endowed with a great deal of common sense.  However, he was also an easy target for us unscrupulous hacks at the student newspaper and we spent a lot of time poking fun at him, calling him ‘Dan the Man’, ‘Desperate Dan’ and (when he was being particularly off-the-wall) ‘Dan F**k-me-off’.

 

From the Sutton & Croydon Guardian

 

Out of curiosity, I googled his name a while ago and discovered that, in 2010, while he was a Liberal Democrat activist in the London constituency of Kingston-upon-Thames, Dan got himself embroiled in controversy.  He was overheard boasting on a train that he’d managed to ‘plant’ a story, a false story, in the Evening Standard newspaper about the Labour Party having plans to close Kingston Hospital.  Unbeknownst to Dan while he blabbed about this into a mobile phone, a train-passenger sitting nearby was none other than the journalist Kevin Maguire, political editor of the Daily Mirror.  Maguire not only tweeted about what he was overhearing but also sneaked a camera-phone picture of Dan and posted it online.  Thus, it was a bit unsettling to find the eccentric, psychedelically-sweatered Dan the Man of Aberdeen University dabbling in the political dark arts and establishing himself as the bad boy of local politics in Kingston-upon-Thames.

 

I should add that since then Dan seems to have ditched the Liberal Democrats and joined the Green Party.  Considering that the Lib Dems were part of David Cameron’s discredited, austerity-obsessed coalition government from 2010 to 2015, and were disastrously led by Jo ‘nuke-’em’ Swinson in 2019, this suggests he has more sense than I’d credited him with.

 

I don’t think any of the student politicos I knew in the Scottish National Party went on to have political careers.  Probably having to deal with Hamish Watt, the university rector, ex-SNP MP and vocal admirer of young unbroken fillies, put them off politics for good.

 

I’ve tried to keep this account of student politics at Aberdeen University light-hearted, but there were some goings-on I found pretty unsavoury.  For example, before I graduated, some nasty rumours circulated in the SRC building about one student politician making another one pregnant.  There wasn’t actually a pregnancy but this didn’t prevent two SRC people, from two different political parties, both of whom had axes to grind with the guy involved, from approaching me and assuring me it was true.  One even swore that she’d seen the results of a pregnancy test.  Presumably, I was fed this false information in the hope that, as a student journalist, I’d spread the word to the detriment of the guy’s reputation.  Never mind what distress it’d cause him or the woman.  None of the people I’ve mentioned above, I should say, were involved in this saga.

 

Some student politicians I did genuinely like.  Indeed, if I ever bumped into the likes of Graeme Whiteside, Tim Morrison, Alan Strain or Stuart Black again on the High Street of Old Aberdeen, I’d invite them into the St Machar Bar and buy them a pint.  However, with regard to those people, there’s a sobering point to make.  None of those decent sorts, as far as I know, pursued their political careers any further than university.  None of them ended up becoming real politicians.

 

It reinforces Douglas Adams’ famous comment in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980) that “it is a well-known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nick Bramhall

Posted on

A threadbare future

 

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

 

I can’t imagine what has prompted me to repost in April 2022 this entry about Threads, the BBC’s terrifying 1984 drama about a nuclear strike on Britain, which I’d originally put on this blog four years ago to coincide with a remastered version of it being released on Blu-ray.  I mean, it’s not as if anything is happening in the world at the moment to kindle fears of a holocaustic nuclear war breaking out.  Is there?

 

It’s said that everyone remembered where they were and what they were doing on November 22nd, 1963, when they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.  Likewise, I remember where I was and what I was doing on the evening of September 23rd, 1984, when BBC2 broadcast the apocalyptic drama Threads.

 

I was staying in the youth hostel in Aberdeen, with my second year as an undergraduate at Aberdeen University due to begin in a fortnight’s time.  Having worked abroad for the summer, I was now back in the city trying desperately to arrange accommodation for myself for the year ahead.  I’d spent the past few days trudging around flat-hunting without any luck and, to make matters worse, I’d just been informed that I wouldn’t be eligible for a student grant for the next year either.  So I was feeling pretty low about my residential and financial situation that evening when I wandered into the youth hostel’s lounge and sat down among a crowd of hostellers who were about to watch something on television called Threads, a much-anticipated documentary-drama showing what would happen if a nuclear conflict broke out between America and the Soviet Union and the UK was struck by 210 megatons of nuclear weaponry.

 

It’s fair to say that by the time Threads ended 112 minutes later, my mood had not improved any.  Mind you, nobody else in the lounge looked like they were bursting with joie de vivre.  Bill Dick, the hostel’s usually easy-going and affable head-warden who’d been in the audience, couldn’t have looked more down in the dumps if he’d been buried to his neck in garbage.  (I got to know Bill four years later when I spent a summer working at the hostel as a warden and had him as my boss.)

 

A while ago, something compelled me to view Threads again. Here are my thoughts on it from a 21st century perspective. I should warn you that the remainder of this blog-entry will contain spoilers, though you’ve probably gathered already that in Threads absolutely nothing good happens.

 

Directed by Mick Jackson and written by the late Barry Hines, author of the 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave that a year later established Ken Loach as a cinematic force when he filmed it as Kes, Threads consists of three sections.  There’s an initial 45 minutes showing life during the build-up to the cataclysmic nuclear strike.  Then there’s another 45 minutes showing the strike and its immediate aftermath.  And lastly there’s a 25-minute epilogue chronicling Britain a year, a decade, ultimately 13 years into the future when, with its natural environment, economy and social infrastructure pulverised, the country reverts to the Middle Ages.  That’s the Middle Ages minus the chivalry, balladry and pageantry, but with plenty of fallout, nuclear winters, depleted ozone, ultraviolent radiation, cataracts, skin cancer and genetic damage.

 

The gruelling central section imprinted itself on my 19-year-old memory.  I’ve carried its images around in my head ever since: milk bottles melting on doorsteps in the heat of a nuclear detonation, a charred cyclist (still on his bike) lodged amid the branches of a burning tree, cats igniting, dolls melting, a crazed woman squatting amid the rubble cradling her baby’s burnt corpse, a traffic warden with a bandage-swathed face holding off a starving mob with a rifle, doctors in an overrun hospital sawing away a leg while the un-anaesthetised patient screams through a gag, and several dozen other things involving flames, rubble, cadavers, rats, blood, wounds, excrement, vomit and general mayhem and horror.  In particular, I’ve never forgotten the moment when a mushroom cloud rises terrifyingly above the skyline, causing one poor woman to wet herself in the middle of a street – something that led to the actress Anne Sellors having the briefest and most poignant entry ever on IMDb.

 

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

 

But having seen Threads again, I now appreciate the queasy effectiveness of the opening section too.  Here, Hines and Jackson establish the focus of their story, two families in the Yorkshire city of Sheffield.  These are the working-class Kemps and the middle-class Becketts.  The Kemps’ eldest boy Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) has been courting the Becketts’ daughter Ruth (Karen Meagher) and Ruth has just realised she’s pregnant.  Jimmy and Ruth resolve to get married and start renovating a flat to live in while their families uneasily make each other’s acquaintance.  Interestingly, this reflects the uneasy working relationship between Hines and Jackson themselves.  According to Threads’ Wikipedia entry, the working-class Hines saw Jackson as something of a middle-class prat.

 

Meanwhile, ominously, news reports chatter in the background about escalating superpower tensions in the Middle East.  The characters are initially oblivious to what’s brewing.  Early on, we see Jimmy fiddling with his radio, wanting to get away from some boring news bulletin about the crisis and find the latest football results.  Apathy gradually changes to shoulder-shrugging helplessness, something summed up by Jimmy’s workmate Bob (Ashley Barker).  In the pub, he declares that they might as well enjoy themselves now because there’s bugger-all else they can do.  Plus, if things do kick off, he hopes he’ll be ‘pissed out of his mind and straight underneath it.’  Ironically, Bob survives after nearly everyone else has perished and we last see him tucking into the raw and probably irradiated flesh of a dead sheep.

 

By the time the characters try to respond to what’s coming, it’s too late.  The bomb goes off while the hapless Kemps are still assembling a fallout shelter comprised of a couple of doors propped against a living-room wall.  The Becketts, being posher, have a cellar to retreat into.  Not that they fare any better in the long run.

 

For me, it’s this opening section that brings home what Threads is about.  A preliminary narration talks about the economic threads necessary for a society to function: “…everything connects.  Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others.  Our lives are woven together in a fabric.  But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”  However, my impression is that the truly important threads – which are obliterated once the missiles hit their targets – are the ones between people, of feeling and compassion, which have been refined by centuries of civilisation and, today, are the essence of what it means to be human.

 

Thus, we see Jimmy (whom we know has been cheating on Ruth and is a bit of a tosser) standing in the aviary in his family’s back garden, doting over the birds kept there.  We see Mr and Mrs Beckett (Henry Moxon and June Broughton) trying to look after an ailing relative discharged from hospital after the NHS is ordered to clear its wards in anticipation of a flood of war casualties.  We see Clive Sutton (Harry Beety), the local government official put in charge of an emergency team that will run things from a bunker underneath Sheffield City Council, attempting to reassure his nervous wife.  But empathy for our fellow creatures rapidly disappears as, in the war’s aftermath, humanity degenerates into a shell-shocked, zombie-like rabble fixated only on its own, scrabbling-in-the-dirt survival.

 

This is made explicit in Threads’ final stages when, years later, we’re introduced to Jane (Victoria O’Keefe), the daughter of Ruth and Jimmy.  When Ruth dies, sick, exhausted, blinded by cataracts and looking decades older than her true age, an impassive Jane reacts by stealing a few items from her mother’s corpse and then clearing off.  The few kids born post-holocaust are a scary bunch, by the way.  Their language is limited to phrases like “Gizzit!” and “C’mon!” and they generally act like feral mini-Neanderthals.

 

Threads came in the wake of the bleak 1983 American TV movie The Day After, directed by Nicholas Meyer, which depicted the effects of a nuclear strike on Kansas City and caused a considerable stir on both sides of the Atlantic.  But while I like The Day After, I think the altogether more graphic and relentless Threads beats it to a bloody pulp.  For one thing, Meyer’s film is disadvantaged by its cast of familiar actors like Jason Robards and John Lithgow, which means you can’t ever forget you’re watching a dramatic fabrication.  In Threads, the cast is comprised of unknown performers, which adds to its harrowing sense of authenticity.

 

That said, saddoes like myself might recognise David Brierley, who plays Ruth’s father, as the voice of K9 in the 1979-80 series of Doctor Who; and a couple of voices heard from the early blizzard of news reports are familiar, like Lesley Judd from the BBC’s famous kids’ magazine programme Blue Peter, and Ed Bishop, star of the Gerry Anderson sci-fi show UFO (1970).  I’m glad Jackson decided not to go with his original casting idea, which was to use actors from the venerable north-of-England TV soap opera Coronation Street – disturbing though the sight of Jack and Vera Duckworth puking their guts up in a makeshift fallout shelter would have been.

 

Threads also contains the sonorous tones of the great voiceover actor Patrick Allen, whom the UK government had hired to narrate its Protect and Survive public information films that would be broadcast if nuclear war looked imminent.  By 1984, the media had got hold of these films and discussed them at length and they’d been derided for their epic uselessness if Armageddon really happened.  (At one point in Threads we hear Allen crisply and matter-of-factly advising the public on how to deal with corpses: “…move the body to another room in the house.  Label the body with name and address and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets.”)  Earlier in 1984, Allen’s Protect and Survive voice-work had been sampled in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s hit single Two Tribes – for which he sportingly added the lines: “Mine is the last voice you will ever hear.  Do not be alarmed.”

 

The futility of Protect and Survive and officialdom’s attempts to deal with the holocaust generally are embodied in Threads by Sutton and his team, who utterly fail to provide leadership and control once the bombs have gone off.  Trapped in their bunker under the rubble of the flattened council building, with insufficient training, malfunctioning equipment and limited supplies of food, water and air, they succumb to bickering, despondency, hysteria and – finally – asphyxiation.  Predictably, when order is re-established in Sheffield, it’s pretty brutal in nature.

 

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

 

Brutal too is the narrative as it moves forward in time, with Telex-type captions flashing up on the screen giving statistics about fallout levels, the nuclear winter, the ozone layer, epidemics and an ever-rising death-toll.  Things climax with the now-teenaged Jane giving birth after she’s been raped by another of the feral kids.  The baby is stillborn and deformed, and Threads’ last image is a freeze-frame of Jane’s face as she recoils in horror from it.  Early on, Jimmy’s kid brother Michael (Nicholas Lane) had embarrassed his parents by asking, “What’s an abortion?”  Threads ends with the implication that humanity has unwittingly aborted itself.

 

It isn’t perfect.   Thanks to budgetary restrictions, there’s a reliance on stock footage and stills from previous wars and conflicts, which don’t necessarily look like they’re occurring in Sheffield in 1984.   And despite valiant efforts by the make-up department, the actors playing the long-term survivors are a bit too plump and healthy-looking – by then they should have resembled death-camp inmates.  Additionally, the fact that Threads takes place in a pre-Internet, pre-social media world gives it a quaint distance now.  Imagine the reaction if the equivalent events happened today.  While the first warheads exploded over Britain, Twitter would be babbling with idiots blaming everything on immigrants or Muslims or woke-ism or the Covid-19 vaccine.  But, as a traumatic account of what might engulf us if our political leaders are possessed by a moment of trigger-happy madness, it’s still unbeatable.

 

And, in April 2022, with Vladimir Putin making threatening noises about nuclear retaliation against NATO for helping to thwart his military campaign in Ukraine, Threads seems no less relevant than it did 38 years ago.  That’s a sentence I take no pleasure in writing.

 

© BBC / Nine Network / Western-World Television Inc

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Yellow cinema (Part 2)

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoli / Cineriz

 

Continuing my list of favourite giallo movies – a giallo being an Italian “horror-thriller hybrid”, mostly made in the 1970s, “wherein a group of people, usually affluent and beautiful, get despatched by a mysterious killer (identity revealed only in the closing moments) stabbing, slashing and hacking his or her way through them for some unlikely reason.  The results are often Italian films at their most glamorous, stylish, violent, ridiculous and politically incorrect.”

 

All the Colours of the Dark (1972)

Like the stereotypical London bus, you spend all day waiting for a London-set giallo and then two arrive at once.  Hot on the heels of Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) came All the Colours of the Dark, directed by Sergio Martino who, though not as acclaimed as Fulci, Mario Bava or Dario Argento, is to my mind the fourth master of the genre.

 

Colours features several performers who were regulars in Martino’s movies, including George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov and the droopy-eyed, lushly-haired and slightly feline-featured Algerian-Maltese-Sicilian actress Edwige Fenech, considered by many to be the Queen of Gialli.  Its story is about a woman (Fenech) who, traumatised after a miscarriage, becomes involved with a London-based and apparently murderous Satanic sect.  Thus, it veers towards supernatural territory.  It finally transpires, however, that the killings in the film are part of a non-supernatural conspiracy to relieve her of a family inheritance.  As with A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Colours is too long and ultimately loses momentum, but Martino orchestrates some impressive scenes along the way.  Surprisingly for a genre fond of beautifying its characters and settings, a Satanic orgy that Fenech finds herself participating in at one point is determinedly unglamorous.  In fact, the gormless-looking, frankly pug-ugly Satanists around her seem to have wandered in from the set of a leery 1970s British sitcom like ITV’s On the Buses (1969-73).

 

© Lea Film / National Cinematografica / C.C. Astro / Interfilm

 

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)

Emilio Miraglia’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times is a cheap and cheerful retread of Mario Bava’s seminal Blood and Black Lace (1964), with another series of murders taking place in a fashion house.  This time, though, the setting is Bavaria, not Rome.  While the plot references the legend of an evil Red Queen who’s said to come back from the dead every 100 years to commit seven murders, the real killer proves to be a human one.  What particularly endears this film to me is the histrionic cackle, supposedly emanating from the Red Queen herself, that we hear on the soundtrack following each murder.  Playing the film’s heroine is German actress Barbara Bouchet, who that same year would appear in the next film on this list.

 

© Phoenix Cinematografica / Cineriz / Cannon Films

 

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

Don’t Torture a Duckling is Lucio Fulci’s other great giallo movie.  Indeed, it’s one of the best things he ever did. It has none of the excess and goofiness of his later horror films and it benefits from its distinctly un-giallo-like setting.  For a change, it doesn’t take place in an affluent urban world inhabited by high-fliers. Duckling is set instead in a rural and backward south Italian village, its separation from modernity symbolised by the nearby highway where traffic rumbles past oblivious to its existence. While Fulci uses the setting to take pot-shots at the institutions of conservative, traditional, Catholic Italy, his cameras make the most of the sumptuous local countryside.

 

That said, 21st-century viewers will be bothered by some early scenes, seemingly played for laughs, which show Bouchet teasing the village’s young boys by brazenly exposing herself to them.  I doubt if Fulci would have entertained the idea of having hero Tomas Milian expose himself to the village’s young girls, but surely Bouchet’s behaviour is just as bad.  It’s a clumsy foreshadowing of the film’s themes, which are the threat an immoral world poses to childhood innocence, and a serial killer’s determination to preserve the innocence of the children around him by any means necessary.

 

© Medusa Distribuzione

 

Torso (1973)

Sergio Martino made several gialli in the early 1970s, but I think All the Colours of the Dark and Torso are his strongest.  Torso is certainly his most troubling.  Even culture-warring, anti-feminist, male-chauvinistic reactionaries will find its plot, wherein a succession of nubile young ladies are ogled by various, creepy men before being murdered by a masked killer, pretty distasteful.

 

Nonetheless, I admire Torso for its audacious shifts in plot and mood.  It begins in traditional giallo fashion with a serial killer stalking the picturesque, historical city of Perugia.  However, when a group of female students decide to avoid becoming the killer’s next victims by leaving Perugia, travelling into some remote countryside and holing up in a mountaintop villa, and the killer, predictably, follows them and lurks stalkily in the undergrowth and darkness outside the villa, it becomes a prototype for the American slasher / body-count horror movies of the 1980s, epitomised by Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980).  And the final 20 minutes see an abrupt change of tone again.  The film’s ‘final girl’ – Suzy Kendall from Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) – wakes up after a long sleep in a bedroom, her leg disabled by an injury and her senses dulled by anaesthetic, and realises she’s sharing the villa with the killer… who isn’t aware of her presence there… yet.  It makes for a splendidly Hitchcockian finale.

 

© Compagnia CInematografica Champion / Interfilm

 

Deep Red (1975)

And now for my favourite giallo ever, Dario Argento’s Deep Red.  This has David Hemmings as a musician who witnesses a murder.  The victim is a psychic who recently claimed to have picked up murderous thoughts from a mysterious somebody in her vicinity – and that somebody evidently decided to silence her before she acquired any clues to his or her identity.  As with the hero of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Hemmings is troubled by the notion that he saw something at the crime scene that is a clue to the culprit’s identity, but can’t figure out exactly what.  And while Hemmings struggles with this, the murders continue and the killer starts to home in on him…

 

Deep Red contains some of the best set-pieces in the history of giallo cinema and some hardly-vital-for-the-plot but disturbingly barmy details, such as a cackling clockwork doll that totters into view just before the killer strikes.  There’s also a baroque, pulsating score by the German prog-rock band Goblin that, in my opinion, just manages to pip the work of Ennio Morricone to earn the title of Greatest Giallo Music Ever.

 

© Rizzoli Film / Seda Spettacoli / Cineriz

 

And Deep Red boasts a wonderful performance by Daria Nicolodi as kooky journalist Gianna Brezzi. For me, Brezzi is up there alongside Jean-Pierre Marielle’s Arrosio in Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) as one of the most memorable characters featured in a giallo.  Nicolodi – who, alas, passed away in 2020 – was married to Argento while he enjoyed his filmmaking heyday during the second half of the 1970s and she made a big contribution to the scripts of his supernatural classics Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980).  I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that Argento’s movies rapidly went downhill in quality after the mid-1980s, which was when their marriage ended.

 

I love Deep Red, then, but…  It’s evidently not to everyone’s tastes. When I showed it to my partner last year, she professed to finding it ‘dull’ and dismissed Goblin’s soundtrack as being ‘like something from a 1970s disco.’  So that was me told.

 

The House with Laughing Windows (1976)

Like Don’t Torture a Duckling, this film benefits from being set far away from the usual giallo environment of lavish lifestyles, expensive apartments and cosmopolitan cities. Unlike Duckling, it’s set not in the rural south of Italy but in its rural north, in the damp, squelchy lagoon area of Valli di Comacchio in the province of Ferrara.  Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows has a restorer (Lino Capolicchio) arriving in a village to work on a crumbling fresco in a church and learning that the artist responsible for the work was a madman who got inspiration for his images of martyred saints from torturing and killing people.  When a new wave of murders sweeps the village, it seems that someone is carrying on with the artist’s gruesome traditions. The gloomy, marshy setting helps the film’s atmosphere immeasurably, and its ending is as pessimistic and disturbing as that of Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971) five years earlier.

 

© A.M.A. Film / Euro International Films

 

Honourable mentions?  Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971), the middle entry in Dario Argento’s ‘animal’ trilogy, doesn’t have the gusto of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage or Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the films that bookend it, but it’s still worth catching up with. Meanwhile, Argento’s 1980s gialli Tenebrae (1982) and Opera (1987) have their moments but aren’t as involving as his 1970s work – due, I suspect, to their lack of engaging characters.

 

Also of interest are Sergio Martino’s other two gialli, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971) with Martino regulars Edwige Fenech, George Hilton and Ivan Rassimov, and the fabulously titled Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) with Fenech and Rassimov, plus Luigi Pistilli from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood (1971) and Anita Strindberg from Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin.  Your Vice is memorable for having some of the ghastliest characters to ever appear in a giallo, and for its plot basically being an outrageous reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story The Black Cat.  But it’s spoiled by Martino’s inexplicable insertion of a dirt-motorbike race that seems to go on forever.

 

Elsewhere, Fenech and Hilton turn up in the decent, meat-and-two-veg giallo The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. I have a soft spot too for Umberto Lenzi’s agreeably shonky Spasmo, with music by Ennio Morricone and a cast that includes Suzy Kendall, Ivan Rassimov and Robert Hoffman, star of the fondly remembered French-German children’s series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1964).  And I can’t possibly finish a piece about giallo movies without mentioning Giulio Questi’s mad 1968 epic Death Laid an Egg, which boldly places its beautiful giallo characters in the glamorous, stylish world of… intensive poultry farming.