BBC – Blood and Porridge

March 11, 2024March 11, 2024

Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

© BBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© BBC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© From rugbyrelics.com

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

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

From artuk.org / © Beltane Studios

December 11, 2023December 25, 2023

How Terrance left a stamp on me

From downthetubes.net

If you were to draw up a list of great children’s authors of the 20^th century, you’d no doubt end up with names such as Roald Dahl, Alan Garner, Tove Jansson, Clive King, C.S. Lewis, Astrid Lindgren, A.A. Milne, Philip Pullman and Rosemary Sutcliffe. But you probably wouldn’t think of including Terrance Dicks, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 84.

Dicks made his name on television as a scriptwriter and script editor. He was involved in TV shows like The Avengers (1961-69), Moonbase 3 (1973), Space 1999 (1975-77) and much-maligned ITV soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), and also in a raft of TV adaptations of classic literary works that the BBC broadcast on Sunday evenings and included Great Expectations (1981), Beau Geste (1982), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Oliver Twist (1985), David Copperfield (1986-87) and Vanity Fair (1987). But his most famous TV work was with the BBC’s long-running science fiction / fantasy show Doctor Who, which kicked off in 1963 and has recently celebrated its 60^th birthday with a series of TV specials featuring Scottish actor David Tennant, returning to the role of the Doctor after 13 years, and Rwandan-but-also-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa making his debut in the role too.

Yet I suspect it was as a writer of books, not TV shows, that Dicks left his greatest legacy. For he had a huge but unsung influence on the reading habits of British kids during the 1970s and 1980s.

Dicks served as script editor on Doctor Who from 1970 to 1975, when the title character was played by Jon Pertwee as an imperious, cape-and-bowtie-wearing, vintage car-driving, karate-chopping man of action. He also contributed the occasional script to the show during the tenures of Pertwee’s immediate predecessor (Patrick Troughton) and successors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison). However, it’s for his role as novelist-in-chief for Target Books’ Doctor Who series that I believe Dicks is most important. The Target series turned most of the Doctor Who TV adventures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s into neat, collectible paperbacks, with attractive and colourful covers that were often courtesy of fantasy-artist Chris Achilleos.

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

Back then, the BBC seemed disinterested in repeating past episodes of Doctor Who. And if you were a fan of the show, as I was, there were no such things as whole-season box sets, Internet streaming or BBC iplayers, or indeed, DVDs or even video cassette tapes, to allow you to catch up with missed episodes. And you often missed them, because the show was broadcast early on Saturday evenings, and Saturday was a school-free day when you’d be out of the house doing stuff. Plus, there were many episodes you hadn’t seen because they’d been broadcast before you were even born…

It didn’t help that the BBC wiped many of the early episodes featuring the first two Doctors, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, assuming that the tapes served no financial or cultural function and only took up unnecessary space in their storerooms. Considering how the BBC has made millions since then selling the show and its memorabilia to worldwide audiences, they must be really kicking themselves about destroying those episodes now.

So, in those days, if you were a ten-year-old wanting to experience past adventures with past Doctors, your only option was to buy the Target novelisations, the majority of which were penned by Dicks in his simple, no-nonsense, fast-moving prose. Admittedly, I think their quality tailed off a bit in later years as demand for them increased, and the backlog of un-novelised adventures grew greater, forcing Dicks to churn them out at a faster rate, but some of the ones he wrote in the 1970s were great and, even without the TV show behind them, would have stood up as excellent children’s books in their own right: for example, The Auton Invasion (1974), The Abominable Snowmen (1974), The Terror of the Autons (1975), The Three Doctors (1975), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

The only problem with Dicks’ books was that they tended to make the stories seem much more spectacular on the page than how they’d appeared on the screen. One of Dicks’ paragraphs, coupled with a child’s imagination, could conjure up incredible settings – teeming utopian cities, vast gladiatorial arenas and huge bustling spaceports. Whereas on TV these were really poky little BBC studio-sets, bare and shaky and obviously low-budget. Meanwhile, the immense alien deserts, wastelands and battlefields evoked by Dicks’ prose were invariably, on TV, a big quarry outside London where the show seemed to do 80% of its outdoor filming. Years later, when you finally got to see those old TV episodes that you’d previously only known through reading the novelisations, they disappointingly looked a bit rubbish.

At ten years old, and as a budding writer, I decided to follow Dicks’ example and write my own Target Books Doctor Who novelisation. I made up my own TV adventure in my head and then wrote it as a book, by hand, in a hundred-page jotter. I even added my own black-and-white illustrations every dozen pages or so. The cover (again drawn by me) showed a giant, gauntleted fist grabbing hold of planet Earth. The book was called Bloodlust of the Sontarans. The Sontarans were war-like, potato-headed aliens who at that point had appeared on the show a couple of times to menace Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors. When it was relaunched in 2005, the Sontarans were reintroduced during the Doctor-ship of David Tennant and one of them, played by Dan Starkey, even became a semi-regular character while Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi occupied the lead role.

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

Two years later, I decided to produce my second Doctor Who novelisation, and for this one I became positively hi-tech. My parents had given me a typewriter for Christmas, so with that I banged out about 130 paperback-sized pages and then taped them together. There were no illustrations in this volume, but I drew a colourful, hopefully Chris Achilleos-style cover showing Tom Baker getting his head fried by a futuristic brain-washing machine. This I titled Destruction of the Daleks and, yes, it featured the show’s number-one villains, the demented, eye-stalked, kitchen-plunger-waving, Nazi pepperpots, the Daleks. The premise of this novel was that the Daleks had started to be killed off by a newly evolved virus and were going to extreme lengths to locate a cure for it. I was peeved when, several years later, the BBC seemed to nick my idea and used it as the basis for an official Doctor Who TV adventure, Resurrection of the Daleks, which starred Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor. I should have sued.

As I said, I’m positive Dicks’ books got a lot of kids (who otherwise would have been glued to their TV sets all the time) reading, even if it was the TV connection that got them to open the books in the first place. And as I’ve suggested in the previous two paragraphs, he was also a big influence on kids who wanted to become writers themselves. Decades later I still write stuff, and get the occasional thing published, and when I use certain words I find myself reminded of Dicks, who originally showed me how to use those words in certain ways. For example, ‘croak’ instead of ‘said’, to describe a raspy voice – that came from Dicks using it in reference to the Daleks, who regularly ‘croaked’ the word “Exterminate!” Or ‘wheezing’ or ‘groaning’ to describe a particular type of sound, like the one made by the Doctor’s space / time-ship, the Tardis, when it was materialising or dematerialising.

I ended up with a row of colourful Target / Doctor Who novels on my bookshelf. I assumed it was just me who was geeky enough to possess such a collection, but then one day in the late 1980s I happened to be in the Edinburgh flat of one Dougie Watt, whom I knew fairly well back then and who is now a novelist and historian. I noticed a similar row of Target books on his bookshelves too. However, as Doctor Who was definitely not considered cool in those days, and labelling yourself a Doctor Who fan was about as damaging to your street credibility as announcing that you took a shower once a month or your all-time favourite musical act was Rick Astley, I tactfully pretended I hadn’t noticed them and avoided Who-shaming my friend.

After being relaunched in the 21^st century, Doctor Who has had many established writers of books, comics, television and films falling over themselves to write either TV-show episodes or spin-off novels for it: for instance, Dan Abnett, David Bishop, Eoin Colfer, Jenny Colgan, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Paul Cornell, Neil Cross, Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, A.L. Kennedy, Jamie Mathieson, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Ness, Kim Newman, Simon Nye, Robert Shearman and Toby Whitehouse. In addition, the three ‘showrunners’ who’ve helmed ‘Nu-Who’ so far, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall – Davies is currently back in charge – all made their names as writers originally. So it’s a writers’ show through and through. And I suspect that reading Terrance Dicks’ books back in their childhood helped a good number of those people find their calling as writers.

Meanwhile, Russell T. Davies, if you’re reading this and fancy commissioning a script for the next season of Doctor Who with the title Bloodlust of the Sontarans, give me a call.

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

August 2, 2022August 18, 2022

Whatever happened to kids’ Euro-telly?

© Franco London Films / ZDF Television

What a melancholy coincidence… A few weeks ago, for the first time in years, something got me thinking about the 1960s children’s TV show The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and I watched part of an episode of it on YouTube. I wondered if its star, the Austrian actor Robert Hoffman, was still on the go, googled him and was pleased to find that he was. Then, the other day, I read on social media that Hoffman had just passed away.

Anyway, here’s something I originally posted in 2012, which mentions Hoffman and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. It’s now been updated for 2022.

Politics, the economy and, indeed, cultural attitudes in Britain in the last half-dozen years have been dominated by Brexit. This, depending on your point-of-view, has either been a joyous and much-needed liberation of Britain from the stifling bureaucracy and political interference it’d had to put up while it was a member of the European Union; or the most disastrous decision Britain has made since the 1956 Suez Crisis, one that’ll doom the country to being a parochial, xenophobic wee dump that backpedals towards the 1950s while the other European nations get on with living in the 21^st century. Anyone who regularly reads this blog will know which view I subscribe to. Namely, that if you believe there’s anything positive about Brexit, you must have one of those heads that proverbially ‘zip up the back’.

The Brexit vote in 2016 came 43 years after Britain joined the European Union, or the European Economic Community (EEC) as it was then. However, it’d be wrong to believe before 1973 Britons were wholly detached from the culture of continental Europe. Indeed, though I was a mere mite before 1973, much of my headspace had already been colonised by the continent. This was thanks to children’s television.

In the early 1970s, the BBC felt obliged not only to entertain kids after they’d arrived home from school and broadcast juvenile programmes from 4.00 to 5.45 PM, but also to broadcast such programmes during the mornings of school-holiday periods. The morning schedules of the summer holidays in particular were a challenge for the BBC to fill with kiddie-related material. As a result, the channel had to regularly raid its archives for old, dubbed children’s shows from France, Germany and elsewhere and broadcast those.

Let’s begin with my least favourite show. Growing up on a Northern Irish farm where there weren’t many neighbours to mix with, I depended for company during the summer holidays on the elderly couple who lived a few hundred yards along the road from our farmhouse. More precisely, I depended on their two granddaughters, who were around my age and usually came to spend much of the summer with them. Luckily for me, the neighbours’ granddaughters were a pair of Tomboys who were dependable for games of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and other activities normally more associated with young males. However, they had one weakness, a fondness for a show called White Horses.

This was a co-production between German and Yugoslavian TV that’d been made back in 1965 but that rarely seemed to be off the BBC’s children’s holiday schedules in the early-to-mid-1970s. It followed the adventures of a girl from Belgrade, Julia, who was staying on her uncle’s horse ranch. Populating the ranch were handsome white steeds that made my two female playmates swoon with adoration.

As a boy, and not a fan of horses (white or otherwise), I thought this was the dumbest programme ever. And it constantly annoyed me that on those summer mornings the games of cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians would abruptly stop and my two playmates would run indoors to sit goggle-eyed in front of their television the moment White Horses came on. I have to say, though, that while I generally remember other kids’ TV programmes from then but not the details of individual episodes, two episodes of White Horses remain etched on my mind.

In one episode Julia found a metallic, saucer-shaped object on the grounds of the ranch and carried it to her uncle, who immediately screamed, “It’s a mine!” and flung it away as far as he could. At which point it exploded. In the other episode, the ranch’s dog was seen frothing at the mouth and in the ensuing pandemonium all the ranch-hands tore around on horseback, trying to hunt the rabid beast down. Come to think of it, for a silly girls’ show, White Horses was actually quite dark. It left me with the conviction that the European continent was a real danger zone, riddled with unexploded World War II landmines and overrun with rabid mammals. That’s a message I’m sure Brexiters like Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg would approve of.

© Philips

One thing that really annoyed me about White Horses was the sickly theme song. This wasn’t a feature of the original German-Yugoslavian show but had been recorded by the Dublin singer Jackie Lee and stuck onto the dubbed BBC version. The lyrics went: “On my horses let me ride away, to my world of dreams so far away, let me run, to the sun, to a world my heart can understand, it’s a gentle warm and wonderland, faraway, stars away, where the clouds are made of candyfloss, as the day is born, when the stars are gone, we’ll race to meet the dawn…” Despite my intense dislike for it, however, the song is now regarded as a kitsch classic and has been covered many times, usually by ‘knowing’ indie-pop bands like Kitchens of Distinction and the Trashcan Sinatras. Even Catatonia’s Cerys Matthews has had a go at singing it. Here, if you can stomach it, is the original version.

Now if you wanted a Euro-kids’ TV show with a seriously bad-ass theme song, you didn’t have to look any further than The Flashing Blade, a historical swashbuckler made by France’s Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF) in 1967. Set in the early 17^th century, during the War of Mantuan Succession between France and Spain, the show’s theme song was accompanied by footage at the start of each episode showing the principals racing manically across countryside on horseback. Their manic-ness, of course, was increased by the fact that the film was wildly speeded up. The singer implored: “You’ve got to fight for what you want, and all that you believe, it’s right to fight for what we want, to live the way we please, as long as we have done our best, then no one can do more, and life and love and happiness, are well worth fighting for.” Here’s the show’s blood-stirring opening on YouTube.

Unlike White Horses, I don’t remember much about the story of The Flashing Blade, except that to my impressionable young mind it was very like The Three Musketeers. For some reason, however, I’ve never forgotten a scene where two characters – one presumably villainous because he sported a pointed beard – were playing chess and the villain made a comment about the uselessness of pawns with regard to the outcome of the game. The other player immediately came back with an observation along the lines of: “Even the smallest pebble can shatter the most beautiful of mirrors.” As a seven-year-old, this seemed the profoundest thing I’d ever heard.

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française

Also originating with France’s ORTF in 1967 was Les Chevaliers du Ciel, which ran on Gallic television for the next three years. By the time it turned up in anglicised form on British TV it’d been retitled The Aeronauts and given a new, hard-rockin’, by BBC standards, English-language theme song by the Canadian musician and TV presenter Rick Jones. His Aeronauts song went: “Better than best, boys, we pass every test, you’re ahead of the rest, when those crime-fighting Aeronauts are cutting those bounds, in a fury of sound, you’re a loser all round, against the crook-catching Aeronauts, so play in the wind, boys, you better give in, because your troubles begin when those two daring aeronauts fly!“ I can’t find the opening sequence for this one, only the song itself.

Incidentally, the memorably bearded, balding and intense-looking Rick Jones was no stranger to children’s TV programmes, as in 1972 he hosted Fingerbobs, which must’ve featured the cheapest and most low-fi puppets in the history of television. Over seven years he also worked on the BBC’s long-running show for pre-school kids, Play School (1964-88), a stint that ended when, to quote his Wikipedia entry, he was ‘fired by the BBC, after a fan sent him two cannabis spliffs at the corporation’s address’. Jones, alas, died in San Francisco last year.

Once again, though I remember the theme music well, I can’t recall much of what went on in The Aeronauts. Maybe that was just as well, since the show was about two hunky young guys called Ernest and Michel who were pilots in the French Air Force. As such, they might’ve spent the episodes bombing la merde out of insurgents in North Africa or Greenpeace activists in the South Pacific.

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française

I’ve spoken ironically about the music on The Flashing Blade and The Aeronauts, but there’s no disputing the fact that the theme tune of Belle and Sebastian had a genuine haunting quality. This was the Anglicised version of Belle et Sebastien, which ran on French television from 1965 to 1970 and was based on the novel by Cecile Aubrey about a boy and his big Pyrenean mountain dog. It’s fitting that wistful Glaswegian indie-pop band Belle & Sebastian took their name from this show. And apparently its theme song was covered by New Zealand singer-songwriter Bic Runga a few years ago. Here’s the original version.

There are a number of things I remember about Belle and Sebastian, apart from its music and its obvious star, the hefty canine Belle. I remember being awed by the sheer, bleak mountain landscapes that formed its backdrop – it’d been filmed around the village of Belvedere in the Alpes-Maritimes. Indeed, years later, when I finally saw the Alps for real, the first association I made in my head was with that old French kids’ TV show.

I also remember how the voices in Belle and Sebastian puzzled me. Not being aware of dubbing procedures or the fact that the BBC employed a small group of actors to do the English dialogue for these imported shows, I couldn’t figure out at the time why the adults in Belle and Sebastian sounded exactly like the adults in White Horses. By the way, Sebastian in the show was played by Mehdi el Glaoui, who was Cecile Audrey’s son. Little Mehdi’s father was Moroccan and indeed his grandfather had been the Pasha of Marrakech.

© Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française

However, musically, the best Euro-kids’ programme of all was surely The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe was of course a British cultural property, but this children’s drama version of the story had been made in 1964 by France’s Franco London Films (FLF) and starred Austrian actor Robert Hoffman in the title role. The BBC got its hands on it, dubbed it and broadcast it regularly during its children’s TV schedules from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.

The BBC added a lovely, mock-classical score composed by Robert Mellin and P. Reverberi, which managed to be both stirring and slightly desolate. I’ve read somewhere that the spiralling opening chords were meant to represent the breakers striking the beach of Crusoe’s desert island. It doesn’t surprise me that when electronica band The Orbital put together 19 of their favourite tracks in 2002 for the Back to Mine compilation series, they decided to close their compilation with this tune.

To be fair to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a lot more of the show has remained with me over the years than just its theme music. For a long time, Hoffman’s youthful features formed my image of how the character should look – so that when I saw other versions of the story later on, such as a 1974 BBC adaptation with Stanley Baker and a more politically correct movie adaptation called Man Friday (1975) with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree, I couldn’t accept them. The series took liberties with Daniel Dafoe’s novel, though. For example, it climaxed with a shipload of pirates invading Crusoe’s island. At which point, Man Friday took off and hid in the island’s jungle, and started killing the pirates off one by one.

Finally, for pure weirdness, you couldn’t beat The Singing Ringing Tree, which had started life as a film made by an East German studio, Das Singende Klingende Baumchen. The BBC duly chopped it into TV-serial form. Even by the standards of the other Euro-kids’ shows I saw at the time, The Singing Ringing Tree was particularly venerable, dating back to 1957. It lingers in my mind because, although it was ostensibly a fairy tale, it spooked the hell out of me.

With characters including an evil dwarf, a humanoid bear creature (who was actually a prince transformed by a magic spell) and a gigantic goldfish, the series resembled a Brothers Grimm story directed by David Lynch. Reviewers, at least those who took the show seriously, noted an influence of German expressionism on how it looked and an influence of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) in particular. To my seven-year-old sensibilities, the fate suffered by the dwarf at the end was especially traumatising. He was last seen swooping around in the air and then plunging through the thin-crusted ground and vanishing in a belch of volcanic, sulphurous smoke.

If this makes me sound wimpish, I should point out that I wasn’t alone in being scared by the show. The comedian and impersonator Paul Whitehouse said of The Singing Ringing Tree that it used to make him ‘pee his pants’ when he was a kid. Perhaps as a way of exorcism, Whitehouse staged a spoof of it on his popular comedy programme The Fast Show (1994-97) called The Singing Ringing Binging Plinging Tinging Plinking Plonking Boinging Tree with, somewhat inevitably, the ubiquitous Warwick Davies in the role of the dwarf. And in 2006, the show lent its name to a ‘wind powered sound sculpture’ in the Pennines in Lancashire.

And there ends my round-up of kids’ Euro-telly. They might have been a set of old, cheap and badly-dubbed TV shows, but nonetheless they converted me into a good little European – even if at the time I still thought Brussels was something you were force-fed at Christmas, not the hub of one of the most important political and trading alliances in the world.

© Franco London Films / ZDF Television

September 29, 2021

A dark Swiss secret

From unsplash.com / © Nadine Marfurt

I seem to have spent a lot of time recently living in the past, which is no doubt due to the lack of anything happening in the present. And that, of course, is because of the ongoing and seemingly never-ending Covid-19 pandemic. Since August 20^th, Sri Lanka, the country I’m currently resident in, has been in its third period of lockdown. When it was announced, my partner and I had just ended a state of self-imposed lockdown, for one of our friends was diagnosed with Covid-19 at the start of August and we’d had to self-isolate. So, basically, we’ve seen little apart from the inside of our flat for the past two months.

Anyway, the following entry is a little stroll down memory lane that I originally posted on this blog in 2015. While it looks back (fairly) fondly on an adventure I had in 1983, what revived my memories of the adventure was a disturbing article about Switzerland that I’d just discovered on the BBC news website.

For two months in the late spring and early summer of 1983 I worked on a farm in the Swiss municipality of Niederweningen, which is a 35-minute train ride out of Zurich. I can safely say that in terms of sheer, hard, physical work, I’ve done no job like this before or since.

At the time, I was in the middle of taking a year out between the end of high school and the start of college. As far as I remember, nobody else in my school-year did this. Those who intended to go to college did so in the autumn of 1982, a few months after they’d left school. Everybody around me, including my parents, seemed to think I was insane for delaying my entry to college by 16 months and spending the intervening period doing loopy things like working on a farm in rural Switzerland. Nowadays of course, nearly four decades later, you’re considered insane, and lacking in initiative and employability, if you enter college and you haven’t taken a year out, or a gap-year as it’s known in modern parlance. (At least, that’s how it was before the Covid-19 pandemic and presumably how it’ll be again after the pandemic.)

In 1982 I’d discovered an agency called Vacation Work International, which for a small fee arranged paid working holidays in Switzerland. Switzerland wasn’t top of my list of places to visit but Vacation Work accepted people from the age of 17 upwards. I was 17 at the time and other foreign-job agencies I’d tried had turned me down because, due to visa regulations, they could only take on people who were 18 or older. In October 1982, Vacation Work fitted me up with a month-long job as a grape-picker in a vineyard near Lausanne in French-speaking western Switzerland. This was a tough (and wet – those Swiss wine-producers had a very rainy grape harvest to deal with in 1982) but tolerable job. So, after spending some time travelling in central Europe and working with the Community Service Volunteers in the English Midlands, I thought I’d contact Vacation Work again and give something else on their Swiss brochure a go. This time I plumped for a two-month package where I’d work as a farmhand.

One thing this job did immediately was rid me of the assumption that everyone in Switzerland wore a smart suit and earned pots of money working in a bank. The farming family whom Vacation Work attached me to were not wealthy; certainly not by the standards of any farmer I knew back in the UK (and my Dad is one).

Their house was plain but serviceable, but certain things I’d assumed would be a feature of any household in Western Europe, however rich or poor, such as a television set, were absent. One basic commodity that seemed to be lacking was a decent strip of flypaper because, although the house was reasonably clean, its dining table was always plagued by swarms of big, impudent flies.

Their farmstead possessed a tractor, a trailer and one or two other bits of machinery, but nothing like what even a modest British farm would be equipped with. When the farmer, Hugo, wanted to bale some hay, he had to arrange for the use of a baler that seemed to be shared among a number of farms in the valley. And there were no machines for spraying or weeding crops. Those chores had to be done by someone with a heavy tank of weed-killer strapped onto their back or by someone wielding a hoe, monotonously, all day long, up and down the furrows of a field. Similarly, such devices as front-end or back-end loaders were considered an unaffordable luxury. For shifting things like dung or loose hay, the shovel and the pitchfork were the order of the day. During my two months there, such basic tools were rarely out of my hands.

My abiding memory from those two months is of the daily schedule. Hugo would usually come knocking at my door at 5.30 in the morning and after a hurried breakfast both of us would be outside, ready for action, at 6.00. We’d have an hour’s break at lunchtime. We’d spend the first half that lunch-hour eating and then Hugo would give me a pitying look and suggest, “Jan…” – neither Hugo nor his family could ever get their tongues around the correct /ǝın/ pronunciation of my name – “…eine halbe Stunde.” During this free half-hour, I’d usually doze off in my room and wake up 20 or 25 minutes later with a headache and a rotten taste in my mouth that suggested I’d just been chewing a dead frog.

At some point in the early evening there’d be another meal, but the work usually continued until 8.00 or 9.00 PM. During a busy period, like when we were hay-making, we didn’t clock off until after 10.00. This was the routine six days a week. Only Sundays were free. I calculated I must be doing 70 to 80 hours of physical labour each week. I’d grown up on a farm, and indeed the previous year I’d spent a busy summer working on my uncle’s farm in Ireland. But I hadn’t done anything on the scale of this.

© schweizerdeutsch-lernen.ch

That said, I did quite enjoy myself. I got on well with Hugo and his family were civil to me, although because I was equipped only with the basic German I’d learnt at school and as they spoke the robust – some would say impenetrable – dialect of German known as Schweizerdeutsch, communication was often difficult. At the end of 1983, I received a nice Christmas card and letter from Hugo and his family, which had been written in English by one of their children who was learning the language as school. It wasn’t very comprehensible and I wondered if I’d sounded as strange to them when I’d spoken German.

The family were also kind enough at the end of my two-month service to present me with a going-away gift: a bottle of illicitly-homemade kirsche. This bottle of kirsche lasted for the next two years, into 1985. It was so strong that it could be supped only in minute quantities. A couple of times I sneakily gave glasses of it to college acquaintances who liked to boast about their drinking prowess and, soon after, enjoyed the spectacle of them falling unconscious.

Pleasant too was the scenery at Niederweningen. It wasn’t mountainous but, half-farmed, half forested, it was gorgeous in a sedate, pastoral way. And I formed a friendship with another Vacation Work person who’d been assigned to a neighbouring farm, Rebecca Macnaughton. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we’ve kept in touch to this very day. Actually, no matter how long and how hard I worked, it never seemed to stop me from accompanying my Vacation Work colleague down the road to the local pub for a beer after I’d finally finished for the day.

One evening, we tried exploring a different road and happened across a small restaurant that was run, somewhat unexpected, by a well-travelled and very interesting Sri Lankan guy. In fact, he was the first Sri Lankan I’d ever met and I never imagined that, later in my life, I’d spend seven years living in his home country. Anyway, he described how, previously, he’d worked in Zurich with some young Swiss heroin addicts. And suddenly another of my assumptions about Switzerland, about how it was a bastion of order, decency and law-abidingness, had been turned on its head.

One other positive thing about the experience was how physically fit I felt afterwards. Nowadays, with my body wracked by arthritic aches and pains and my waistline fighting a losing battle against a beer-belly, I look at photographs taken of me after I’d arrived home and can hardly believe how athletic I looked then. Indeed, one of the things I did after that was to spend a fortnight tramping around the Lake District and I seem to remember bounding about those Cumbrian fells like a mountain gazelle.

For my Swiss farm-work I was paid a modest wage, but I was never sure if that wage came out of Hugo’s pocket or if it was provided under some Swiss farming subsidy scheme. From what I could gather, the people provided by Vacation Work International were just one input in a system that saw lots of foreign people working cheaply on those modest-sized, modest-resourced farms. Hugo told me how one farmhand who’d worked for him previously was an African bloke. He’d also employed someone, at some point, from the Faroes Islands. Hugo and the Faroese guy had got along so well that the latter still phoned him for a chat from time to time, from his home in the North Atlantic.

Mind you, the annual presence of foreign farmhands didn’t seem to improve Hugo or his neighbours’ knowledge of the outside world. I recall one lunchtime having an argument with him and one of his neighbours about where Albania was. I was the only one who maintained that it was in Europe. Eventually, one of Hugo’s kids’ school atlases was dug out and consulted and, yes, it transpired that I was correct.

From wikipedia.org / © Roland zh

I’ve written nostalgically about my days on a Swiss farm, but I have to admit that what rekindled my memories of them and inspired me to write this blog-entry was something altogether darker. Whilst browsing through the online back-pages of the BBC News website magazine, I happened across an article about a phenomenon that the Swiss authorities had until recently kept quiet about. The article is called SWITZERLAND’S SHAME – THE CHILDREN USED AS CHEAP FARM LABOUR and is written by Kavita Puri.

This describes the old Swiss practice of taking orphaned children, or the children of unmarried parents, or children from poor backgrounds, and using them as ‘contract children’; as ultra-cheap labour, often on farms, where they were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Part of the reason for this was simple economics. Prior to World War II Switzerland wasn’t a wealthy country and a low-costing workforce for its agricultural sector had to be found somewhere. However, it was driven too by an unforgiving attitude towards poverty. As one historian explains: “It was like a kind of punishment. Being poor was not recognised as a social problem, it was individual failure.”

The phenomenon of contract children – which over the decades is believed to have involved hundreds of thousands of Swiss youngsters – began in the 1850s and continued for the next century. It didn’t peter out until the 1960s and 1970s, when “farming became mechanised” and “the need for child labour vanished.” Also, “(w)omen got the vote in 1971 and attitudes towards the poor and single mothers moved on.” Even so, Puri’s article mentions one case of agricultural child labour that occurred as late as 1979, just four years before I arrived there for my 70-to-80 hours of weekly hard labour. What a sobering thought.

June 13, 2021June 18, 2021

The kraken’s un-woke

© BBC / From the Guardian

Are you one of those many British people who feels ‘underserved and unheard by their media’ because your politics are a wee bit to the right? Are you hostile towards that trendy left-wing phenomenon called ‘wokeness’ and convinced that ‘the direction of news debate in Britain is increasingly woke and out of touch with the majority of its people’?

Yes, life must be horrible for you in 2021 Britain. There’s absolutely nobody in the British media to defend your views because it’s all so hideously lefty and woke. Well, except for the Daily Express. And the Daily Mail, of course. But aside from those two newspapers, there’s nobody… Oh, and the Sun. And the Daily Telegraph. And the Spectator. And a good chunk of the opinion pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. But that’s it.

Meanwhile, with so many volleys of lefty, woke bullets whizzing around nowadays, there aren’t any right-wing commentators at all who’re bold enough to stick their heads above the parapet. Apart from Toby Young, bless his baldy little socks. And that feisty Julie Burchill. And Jeremy Clarkson, James Delingpole, Darren Grimes, Daniel Hannon, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Katie Hopkins, Quentin Letts, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin Mackenzie, Jan Moir, Tim Montgomerie, Charles Moore, Douglas Murray, Fraser Nelson, Brendan O’Neill, Alison Pearson, Melanie Phillips, Andrew Pierce and Sarah Vine. And that plucky actor chappie, what’s his name? Lawrence Fox? Anyway, there’s only a tiny handful of brave right-wing holdouts against wokeness. You can’t even include Piers Morgan among them. Poor Piers used to be good on Good Morning Britain, but he’s been off the telly since his crusade against Meghan Markle, Woke Evil Personified, made him so angry that his head burst in a geyser of liquified gammon.

Thus, there’s hardly any media outlets or media people in Britain to defend your honest, decent, patriotic, right-wing sensibilities against the predations of the horrible, lefty, woke establishment. That’s an establishment headed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. That’s right, the shamelessly woke Boris ‘tank-topped bumboys’, ‘piccaninnies with watermelon smiles’, ‘Muslim-women-look-like-letterboxes’ Johnson. An establishment run by a cadre of Marxist provocateurs like Priti Patel, Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and Dominic Raab, who’re forever up to no-good, lefty, woke activities such as imprisoning asylum seekers in pestilent hellholes, protecting statues of mass-murdering slave traders, wallpapering the rooms where they do Zoom calls with Union Jacks, and doing anything up to and including eating live cockroaches and hammering rusty nails into their eyeballs to prove their loyalty to Her Majesty the Queen.

Luckily, salvation is now at hand. Today sees the launch of a new TV channel called GB News, which promises to push a right-wing agenda that all sensible, salt-of-the-earth Britons will agree with and promises to call out this woke nonsense that possesses our lefty British media and government. Needless to say, just by existing, GB News has gone against the grain of the British establishment, and its creation is thanks to the efforts of several, heroic, anti-establishment figures. These include financial backers like the anti-establishment American TV company Discovery; and the anti-establishment investment fund Legatum, which is based in that hotbed of punk rock, Dubai; and the anti-establishment hedge-fund boss Sir Paul Marshall, whose son Winston plays the banjo in Mumford & Sons, a band so hardcore anti-establishment it makes Rage Against the Machine look like wimps.

And the chair and main presenter of GB News is the most awesomely anti-establishment figure you can imagine: Andrew Neil. Well, he’s anti-establishment if you look at his CV with one eye closed and the other eye half-open and manage somehow to miss his 11 years as editor of the Sunday Times; his involvement in the founding of Sky TV; his decade as editor-in-chief with the Barclay Brothers’ Press Holdings group, overseeing the Scotsman, the Business and the European; his 15 years as chairman of the publishing company ITP Media Group (also based in Dubai, home of the Sex Pistols and the Clash); and his 17 years with the BBC. And that villa he owns in the South of France.

Anyway, setting the sarcasm aside for a moment… I was aware of Neil’s malign influence in the British media from an early age. At school at the start of the 1980s, I did a Scottish Higher course in Modern Studies and I remember being advised by the teacher, Sandy Bowick, to read a ‘quality Sunday newspaper like the Observer or the Sunday Times’ every weekend to keep abreast of what was happening politically in the world. Accordingly, I got into the habit of reading the Sunday Times, which was still under the stewardship of the much-respected Harold Evans. But tragically, the gimlet-eyed Rupert Murdoch acquired the Sunday Times in 1981 and by 1983 had installed Andrew Neil as its editor. Neil wasted no time in transforming this once laudable newspaper into the snide, shrill, right-wing shout-sheet that it remains to this day.

The Sunday Times wasn’t the only example of a newspaper being subjected to Andrew Neil’s reverse-Midas touch, i.e., instantly turning to shit in his hands. Hired by the Barclay Brothers in the mid-1990s, newspapers he supervised like the European and the Business suffered declining sales and eventually folded. Worst of all, he became editor-in-chief of Edinburgh’s one-time quality daily, the Scotsman. It’s hard to believe today but the Scotsman was a newspaper that once was widely read, made its points intelligently and carried some influence – as much as any newspaper published 400 miles from London could. Among other things, up until the 1990s, the Scotsman was a keen supporter, in its cautious and genteel way, of constitutional change in Scotland to allow the country more say in running its affairs.

In the late 1990s, after spending most of the decade in Japan, I found myself living in Edinburgh and I assumed I’d get into the habit of reading the Scotsman again. I bought a few issues and gave up. It’d suddenly acquired an unpleasantly right-wing editorial tone. It was scathing about the idea that Scotland should get any degree of home-rule from London, even though the Scottish population had just voted for the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament in a referendum in 1997. Hold on, I thought. Hadn’t the Scotsman, the old Scotsman, been in favour of Scottish devolution? Then one night I saw Neil’s visage on a Scottish current affairs programme, where he was introduced as ‘editor-in-chief at the Scotsman’. Horribly, it all fell into place for me. Oh no, he’s back, I despaired. Returned to wreck yet another, once perfectly-good newspaper.

I suspect Neil’s tenure at the Scotsman alienated the Scottish demographic that it needed to survive as a healthy business concern. I knew plenty of folk in Edinburgh who were around my age and, like me, were centre or left politically and interested in current affairs. They weren’t young enough to be into new-fangled digital media and would have happily bought a traditional, physical newspaper if they thought it was worth reading. But whenever its name came up in conversation, such people would shrug and say dismissively, “The Scotsman? Never read it now.”

Although Neil had nothing to do with the Scotsman after it was acquired by the London-based Johnston Press in 2005, the newspaper remained on the right, where he’d dragged it, and never recovered from the dose of journalistic syphilis it’d contracted from him during his regime. By 2018, it was in the hands of JPIMedia and had a daily circulation figure – the one currently quoted on its Wikipedia page – of under 16,400 copies. It’d had to lay off staff-members, reduce its numbers of pages and supplements, and flit from its old headquarters on Holyrood Road to a new one on Queensferry Road that was less than half the size and a third of the rent. The last time I looked at it, much of what it printed was either shallow and vacuous, or hysterical, kneejerk, Daily Mail / Daily Express-style crap.

You’d think that with his antipathy to all things mild-mannered, lily-livered, pussyfooting and, well, woke, Andrew Neil would have given the BBC a body-swerve. And yet during the past two decades he’s done very nicely out of the venerable corporation. Most prominently, he hosted the BBC’s This Week programme (2003-2019), in which Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott and him would sit in a studio and discuss the week’s current affairs whilst indulging in a gruesome three-way mutual-admiration / flirtation fest. Indeed, at the time, I thought it was the most fascinatingly dreadful thing on British television. Not only did Neil and co. believe they were offering cutting insights into the nation’s politics, but they also seemed to think they were cool. Funny, even. And nothing is worse than people who think they’re funny, but aren’t funny, trying to be funny.

For example, I can think of few things more ludicrous than the sight of Neil and Portillo prancing around in the style of the video for Peter Kay’s chart-topping Is This the Way to Amarillo, as they did during the title sequence of one episode in 2005. At least in 2018, when they got Bobby Gillespie from the impeccable post-punk, alternative-rock band Primal Scream onto This Week to talk about Brexit – yes, this is a strange sentence I find myself writing – Gillespie summed up the viewers’ feelings at the episode’s end. By this point, Neil, Michael Portillo and Caroline Flint (drafted in as a replacement for Diane Abbott) had jumped up and starting cavorting around the studio in the manner of the briefly popular, crap Internet dance craze the Skibidi Challenge. Not only did Gillespie refuse to take part in this cringe-inducing farrago, but he sported the stony countenance of a man who’d just discovered a giant dog turd on the end of his shoes. (Mind you, having Michael Portillo dad-dancing beyond the ends of your shoes wouldn’t be much better.)

I’ve written scornfully about Andrew Neil and GB News and the guff they’ve tried to peddle about being some courageous, anti-establishment bulwark against a supposed tidal wave of wokeness. It’s complete disingenuous garbage. However, I have no doubt that they’ll find an audience. One thing about right-wingers is their unswayable belief that they’re the victims, even when a mountain-range of evidence proves they’re actually the victors. Britain has been in thrall to right-wing doctrines since the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher proclaimed there was ‘no such thing as society’, till today, when those in power claim to belong to the Conservative Party but are basically Nigel Farage’s reactionary, xenophobic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in all but name. For a few years in the middle, Tony Blair might have constituted a blip, but he was hardly a left-wing blip. Yet in the paranoid minds of right-wing Britons in 2021, the nonsensical belief that everything they hold dear is threatened by Marxists and social justice warriors is probably more intense than ever.

He might be an utter chancer, but there’ll always be plenty of deluded souls willing to lap up Andrew Neil’s brand of bullshit.

March 28, 2021April 9, 2021

Soft power? No, soft in the head

“And our hard power, conference, is dwarfed by a phenomenon that the pessimists never predicted when we unbundled the British Empire, and that is soft power – the vast and subtle and pervasive extension of British influence around the world that goes with having the language that was invented and perfected in this country, and now has more speakers than any other language on earth.

“And up the creeks and inlets of every continent on earth there go the gentle, kindly gunboats of British soft power, captained by Jeremy Clarkson – a prophet more honoured abroad, alas, than in his own country – or J.K. Rowling ,who is worshipped by young people in some Asian countries as a kind of divinity, or just the BBC. And no matter how infuriating and shamelessly anti-Brexit they can sometimes be, I think the Beeb is the single greatest and most effective ambassador for our culture and our values.”

So spoke Boris de Piffle Johnson at the Conservative Party conference in 2016 on the subject of soft power and the United Kingdom’s ability, at least back then, to project it. The term ‘soft power’ was coined in the 1980s by Joseph Nye, who described it as ‘getting others to want the outcomes you want’ on an international level. With sufficient soft power, a country can influence other countries through them ‘admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness’ rather than by ‘threatening military force or economic sanctions’ against them.

According to Nye, a country’s soft power comes from its culture, political values and foreign policies and its success in communicating and marketing these to an international audience. The UK had several historical advantages here. It was the original exporter of what is currently the world’s most popular international language, a language that, handily, it shares with the world’s number-one superpower. It was also once a superpower itself, a ruthlessly imperial one, which left a legacy of connections around the world with its former colonies. And, before 2016, it enjoyed a position as one of the main players in the European Union.

With these channels in place, all the UK needed were effective agents to facilitate the flow of its soft power and it had these in abundance too. Not so long ago, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Department for International Development (DFID), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the British Council (BC) did a great deal to promote the UK abroad in the fields of, respectively, diplomacy, development, broadcasting and education. It helped too that the UK had many world-famous educational, cultural and sporting brands it could draw on, ranging from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and William Shakespeare to Manchester United and the Beatles. Though Johnson, never one to let the fear of appearing crass get in the way of what he thinks is a jolly joke, claimed that much of the UK’s soft power was due to foreign petrolheads getting off on Top Gear.

It’s been a long time since I felt any affinity for the UK as a political entity. I would, for instance, be happy to see Scotland become independent of it. But I still feel I have a dog in the fight over the issue of British soft power because for most of the last quarter-century I’ve worked for various organisations and institutions in the fields of education and development that, directly or indirectly, have helped to promote British soft power abroad. This hasn’t bothered me too much. The days of the imperialist British Empire mentality were, I thought, long gone. And although there have been a few catastrophic foreign policy errors, such as Tony Bliar’s decision to involve the UK in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I thought that the ‘values’, ‘examples’ and ‘openness’ Britain promoted abroad weren’t negative ones. At least, in the early 21^st century, they could have been worse. I wouldn’t necessarily say the UK was one of the good guys as far as countries went, but it seemed one of the better guys.

That, however, was before the disaster of 2016’s Brexit referendum vote and the decision by voters in Britain – well, in England and Wales – to amputate the country from the European Union and embrace a parochial Little Englander nationalism. This was promulgated by an array of shameless opportunistic chancers like Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Aaron Banks and of course Johnson himself. Cheering them on was Britain’s right-wing press, owned by the billionaire likes of Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers.

Johnson’s government, and that of Theresa May before him, have done their best to play to a gallery of xenophobes, reactionaries, gammons and flag-shaggers, making decisions that right-wing tabloid headlines construe as sticking up for plucky little Blighty whilst giving Johnny Foreigner one in the eye. In fact, what they’ve succeeded in doing is eroding the once-impressive edifice of British soft power on the international stage. You can read about Britain’s decline in the world’s soft-power rankings here.

One example of this, perhaps small in the general scheme of things but telling in its malignant stupidity, is how the decision by Johnson’s government to cut UK overseas bilateral aid by at least 50% has impacted on the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) organisation. VSO is dependent for half its budget on the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which is the unwieldy result of DFID being amalgamated with the FCO in 2020. With the foreign aid budget decimated, VSO is now preparing to shut operations in 14 countries, wind down its Volunteering for Development scheme and end its Covid-19 response initiative, which supports four-and-a-half million people in 18 countries. This follows on from the demise of VSO’s International Citizen Service in February.

I worked as a volunteer with VSO in Ethiopia from 1999 to 2001. Now, thanks to some of my experiences there and elsewhere, I’m cynical about much of what goes on in the international aid and development industry and I agree with criticisms of it made in books like Graham Hancock’s The Lords of Poverty (1989) and Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid (2010). In Ethiopia, where I worked as an instructor at a teacher-training institute, I went into primary school classes containing 40 or more pupils who often had to share one textbook in groups of three or four and had to sit on the floor because there weren’t enough chairs. Classrooms often had gaping holes in their floors, broken furniture and no electricity. Meanwhile, officials at the local Regional Educational Board luxuriated in carpeted, air-conditioned offices equipped with computers, printers and projectors. The money given to the region’s educational budget by a Scandinavian aid organisation had never percolated down past the hands of the middle-class bureaucrats into which it’d been entrusted.

The campus I worked on featured its own monument to aid-industry inefficiency. It contained a language laboratory that’d been gifted by French money. I’m not sure if that language lab had ever worked but it certainly wasn’t in use while I was there. It was full of big, dust-covered consoles that, like computers in a flashy 1960s spy thriller, used clunky spools of tape. Whoever had signed the original cheques hadn’t done any research. They hadn’t realised that the language-teaching world’s preferred medium for giving students practice in listening, especially in a rough-and-tumble environment like 1990s Ethiopia, was the humble, durable and portable audio-cassette tape.

But VSO’s modus operandum was not about spending money that was vulnerable to being misappropriated by corruption or incompetence. It recognised that the key was training. Transferring skills from one person to another, so that the recipient is able to do his or her job better, leads to sustainable positive changes. Accordingly, the people who volunteered to work for VSO were experienced professionals in their home countries. By doing a similar job in the same field in what was then termed ‘a developing country’, they could contribute to improving the training and performances of the local people they worked beside. This wasn’t because they were better professionals than their local peers. They’d just had the advantage of having trained and worked in more developed countries.

One important feature of VSO was that its volunteers earned the same salary as their local colleagues. This meant they shared the same working and living conditions as the locals did – unlike employees of other aid agencies, there was no living in fancy compounds, working in high-tech offices or travelling in supersized 4x4s for them. Therefore, the problems faced by local professionals during their jobs were as much of a headache for the VSO volunteers too, and together they had to devise solutions to these problems that drew on local knowledge, were realistic and would actually work on the ground.

In my criticisms of foreign aid, then, I’m not arguing that budgets should be slashed. If necessary, they should be recalibrated so that training and sustainability are at the fore, if those things aren’t already. As the old proverb goes, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

I knew from the responses of Ethiopian friends and colleagues that VSO’s work in their country earned much respect for Britain at the time. Meanwhile, my VSO experiences did a lot for me personally, helping me to become more organised, practical, resourceful, confident and diplomatic. So Britain and the VSO volunteers benefitted as much as the local folk did. It was a win-win-win situation.

The fact that government cuts have subjected VSO to this crisis shows what hot air Boris Johnson’s words about the value of British soft power, quoted at the start of this entry, really were. He clearly has no interest in how the rest of the world perceives and interacts with the UK, other than it providing a few post-Brexit trade deals and being somewhere that he and his moneyed cronies can escape to for their luxury holidays.

Government actions elsewhere underline this. The plug has already been pulled on Britain’s participation in the Erasmus programme, which allowed 15,000 British students annually to study in European universities without paying fees. The BBC seems to stagger from one government-induced crisis to another and its main instrument of international influence, the once-admired BBC World Service, has been in freefall from budget cuts since the Tory government of David Cameron. Other organisations that promote Britain overseas are in similarly dire straits and the current Covid-19 pandemic has made the situation even worse. But Johnson and company obviously don’t care if they wither on the vine.

Yes, as the Conservative government develops its new blueprint for the country as a giant sweatshop where the majority work for peanuts and without protections, and where a political / economic elite make a fortune and pay as little tax as possible, the drawbridge is being pulled up between Britain and the outside world. It’s a tragedy that an exemplary organisation like VSO looks like being the latest victim of this mindset.

August 29, 2020August 31, 2020

The sound of silence

Having perused the British media for the past week, I’ve reached the conclusion that the song that best sums up late-August Britain in this coronavirus-stricken year of 2020 is The Sound of Silence, recorded by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in 1964, although not a hit for them until two years later.

But it would have to be The Sound of Silence played with the volume turned down. No sound. Just silence.

The first silencing I’ve read about is one that’s caused the latest stramash in Britain’s seemingly never-ending culture wars. Previous instalments in these culture wars have seen a statue of a notorious slave trader in Bristol get chucked into the sea and ridiculous long-haired historian Neil Oliver react to the deed by wailing about ‘anarchists and communists’ trying to destroy the British way of life… Shaven-headed right-wing thugs giving Nazi salutes in London whilst attempting to protect another statue, one of Winston Churchill, a man revered in Britain for, er, standing up to Nazis… And a great deal of red-faced spluttering when the BBC, on its UKTV streaming service, temporarily suspended a 1975 episode of Fawlty Towers in which the dotty old Major character uttered some offensive racial epithets.

The BBC is also at the centre of the newest storm. It’s decided to have the patriotic British songs Land of Hope and Glory and Rule, Britannia performed at this year’s Last Night of the Proms concert in the Royal Albert Hall without vocalists there to sing the lyrics. The BBC claims this is to reduce the number of people onstage and allow for social distancing. It detractors allege it’s because the lyrics have been deemed inappropriate in these overly sensitive, politically correct times.

In the clips of Last Night of the Proms concerts that I watched on TV in the past – in the distant past, because even as a teenager I found it a gruesome spectacle and never wanted to look at the thing again – most of the singing was done by the audience. And the audience was a sea of drunken, Union Jack-waving Hooray Henrys and Hooray Henriettas making a cacophony that was as pleasant to listen to as a burning chicken-shed. Due to Covid-19, the audience won’t be present this year. That’s got to be an improvement, whether or not the songs are performed as instrumentals.

Predictably, the BBC’s decision to de-vocalise the songs was greeted by howls of outrage from the right-wing shit-sheets that make up much of the British national press, i.e. the Sun, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Express. It was also seized upon by Prime Minister Boris Johnson who, after performing a veritable Gordian knot of humiliating U-turns recently, was desperate to direct attention away from his governmental crapness. Johnson declared that it was time to ‘stop our cringing embarrassment’ about being British. Actually, at this stage, the best way to stop people feeling embarrassed about being British would be to build a time machine, pop back in time 56 years and persuade Stanley Johnson to wear a condom.

Also climbing onto the anti-BBC bandwagon was publicity-seeking hybrid human-donkey mutant Nigel Farage, who promptly tweeted footage of himself singing a lusty rendition of Rule, Britannia at some pro-Brexit rally. This in turn prompted comedian David Baddiel to remark: “There might be some who feel a little sad about Rule, Britannia, seeing it, now divorced of triumphalist origins, only as a Proms tradition. Watching this, however, makes it clear how it’s still basically a C*nts’ Anthem.”

Well, I wouldn’t be quite as severe as Baddiel in his assessment of Rule, Britannia, though I too have difficulty thinking positively of it and Land of Hope and Glory when I see the likes of Nigel Farage belting them out. But apart from that, in terms of actual musical quality, I’ve always thought Rule sounded a bit cheesy and Land was a pompous dirge. I say that as someone who spent his childhood in a fairly Protestant part of Northern Ireland, where the air often reverberated with the sound of people singing patriotically pro-British tunes. While these tunes were frequently offensive to Roman Catholic ears, they, unlike Rule and Land, at least managed to be catchy.

(I remember one good friend from a quarter-century ago, a university lecturer who was a skilful pianist. His university would sometimes rope him into providing live background music at official receptions. He confessed to me that during one such event, bored stiff with ‘tinkling the ivories’, he felt a sudden powerful urge to start playing The Sash. When I pointed out to him that he was a Glaswegian Catholic, and had a cousin who’d once been skipper of the Glasgow Celtic football team, and therefore wasn’t supposed to be a fan of The Sash, he shrugged and said, “Aye… But at least it stirs the blood.”)

© Victor

However, it hasn’t just been Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory that have been silenced lately. Reading a separate news story, I learned how restauranteurs in Scotland have been complaining about a ban on music on their premises, prompted again by the current Covid-19 pandemic. The Scottish government implemented the ban on August 14^th, afraid that if eateries were full of loud music, people would have to tilt their heads close together and shout and thereby increase the risk of spreading the virus. The restauranteurs have dismissed this thinking as ‘ridiculous’, ‘nonsense’, ‘a disgrace’ and having ‘no logic’. One even complained that “We need background music to kill the deathly hush as people feel they have to start whispering when a restaurant is quiet. Diners want to eat out in a place with atmosphere, not a library.”

This set me thinking of the half-dozen restaurants that my partner and I most often go to in Colombo, Sri Lanka, our current city of residence. I can’t remember hearing music played in three of them. If it was played, it was at such a low volume as to be unnoticeable. One restaurant plays music but softly and unobtrusively – I recall Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man (1965) getting an airing there the other week. The fifth used to play some weird 1960s Euro-lounge / psychedelic / jazz stuff, like what you’d hear on the soundtrack of a Jess Franco movie, but they seem to have stopped that since the venue reopened after Sri Lanka’s two-month Covid-19 curfew.

In fact, only one of the six restaurants plays music at a distinctly discernible level and that makes it problematic for us. Although the staff are lovely, the décor is charming and the food is decent, the music is often naff and intrusive. Commonly featured on its aural menu from hell are Phil Collins, Robbie Williams, Coldplay, the Corrs and 1970s / 1980s-era Fleetwood Mac. Come to think of it, there’s only thing I can think of it that’s more horrible than the Corrs and Fleetwood Mac, and that would be the Corrs doing a cover version of a Fleetwood Mac song. And – oh yes! – the restaurant sometimes plays that puke-inducingly twee version of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams that the Corrs did in 1998.

So in other words, the only restaurant we have an issue with is the one that plays music at any volume. And the reason we like to eat in a quiet environment, or in a near-quiet one, is so that we can generate our own noise by indulging in the basic human art of conversation. We like to communicate while we eat, and I certainly like to communicate without having to shout and risk spraying mouthfuls of grub into my dining companion’s face. Also, I assume that any half-decent, welcoming restaurant will be one where the customers feel relaxed enough to strike up conversation immediately. The afore-mentioned ‘deathly hush’ where people feel ‘they have to start whispering’ would suggest a venue that’s snobby and inhospitable.

The same news story contained one quote that made sense to me, however. It came from a spokesman for a chain of pubs who snorted contemptuously, “We don’t go with the crowd so we don’t have music in any of our premises. Our customers are used to it and like it. We have shown you don’t need music to run a pub.” Quite right. Just let the punters chat to one another and create their own entertainment.

Alas, that spokesman represented the JD Wetherspoon chain, which run 75 pubs in Scotland. It’s also the property of Tim Martin, who’s a well-known Brexit-loving, Faragist nincompoop. Martin’s the sort of bloke who probably thinks Covid-19 is a leftist-woke conspiracy to stop patriotic folk from properly singing Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope of Glory by forcing them to wear facemasks.

Thus, realising that I’ve just agreed with a statement issued by Tim Martin’s outfit, I think I need to have a wee lie-down now.