Fawlty Towers – Blood and Porridge

March 31, 2024April 6, 2024

Cinematic heroines 2: Sheila Keith

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

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

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

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

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

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Columbia Pictures

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

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

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

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd / Lone Star Pictures

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

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

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

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

© Cannon Film Distributors

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

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

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

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

November 13, 2023November 15, 2023

Jiggery-wokery

From abc.net.au / © BBC

‘Woke’… What does that word even mean?

Here’s failed US presidential candidate and failed insurrectionist Donald Trump using it to denigrate the American women’s soccer team, who do un-Trumpian things like ‘taking the knee’ during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. “Woke equals failure!” he barked on TruthSocial, his minor social-media platform, when the team was knocked out of this year’s Women’s Football World Cup.

And here’s John Cleese grumping about the BBC being woke because it banned that episode of Fawlty Towers (1975-79) where the Major uses some unfashionable language to describe the West Indies cricket team. (In fact, the episode was temporarily pulled from the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV, and reviewed, and reinstated with a content warning.) Cleese is so incensed by wokeness that he’s started hosting a TV chat-show in which he fulminates against it. His show is called The Dinosaur Hour (2023) and it’s broadcast on the right-wing, alleged ‘news’ channel GB News. Amusingly, Cleese was peeved to discover that his new employers at GB News had just signed Boris Johnson, whom he considers a ‘serial liar’, to host a show too. Well, John, when you lie down with dogs, expect to get up with fleas. In this case, big, blonde, bloviating, bonking Boris-fleas.

Another household name much concerned about woke behaviour is Elon Musk, who last year purchased Twitter (or X, as he calls it now) and set about purging it of wokeness. He’s certainly done that. He’s also purged the platform of half of its advertising revenue and half of the value of its acquisition price. Musk has described wokeness as a ‘mind-virus’ and ‘communism rebranded’ – and communism, he’ll tell you, is a very bad thing. Though that hasn’t stopped him opening a big Tesla plant in communist China, in Shanghai, and being warmly welcomed every time he visits the country, and declaring that democratic, capitalist Taiwan is actually Chinese property. Musk is also introducing to Twitter a ‘snarky, anti-woke AI chatbot’ called ‘Grok’, which sounds like a character from the sci-fi comic 2000 AD (1977-present).

From britishcomic.fandom.com / © Rebellion Developments

I don’t agree with Musk on much but he’s right to liken wokeness to a virus. Because the moment that people with his right-wing politics come into contact with it, they seem to turn red-eyed, froth at the mouth and gibber insanely, like the infected did in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003).

© DNA Films / UK Film Council / Fox Searchlight Pictures

But if you need refuge from wokeness, just move to Florida. There, Governor Ron DeSantis has been pushing a ‘Stop-Woke Act’ in the hope that the state will be ‘the place where woke goes to die’. In fact, DeSantis’s Florida is now so anti-woke, and so determinedly opposed to the teaching of wokey things like Critical Race Theory, that its State Board of Education has kids learning in school that slavery was a good thing because it helped the black slaves to develop ‘skills which, in some cases, could be applied for their personal benefit‘. Wow. Who knew?

I’m sure DeSantis’s achievements in Florida are admired by Suella Braverman, the belligerent and self-serving British Conservative politician who was very recently sacked from her position as the UK’s Home Secretary. During her time in office, she slammed the British police force for being too woke. One example was when she claimed to have reprimanded officers in Essex for the woke act of raiding a pub and removing a display of racist golliwogs. (Except that she didn’t – it turned out that Suella had been disingenuous, or stupid, or both, which is perfectly possible in her case.) Suella, or ‘Sewer-ella’ as I like to think of her, also famously condemned a faction she called the ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’. Supposedly, these have formed a ‘coalition of chaos’ with the opposition parties and are responsible for all of Britain’s ills. She said this whilst serving in the brief but tumultuous government of Liz Truss. Accusing someone else of being part of a coalition of chaos? That’s a bit rich, given the context.

Elsewhere, the Daily Mail has complained that woke builders are daring to ‘enjoy yoga, muesli, listening to Radio 4 and sharing their feelings’ rather than ‘devouring greasy-spoon breakfasts and discussing sport.’ Xbox games consoles have been accused of being woke for getting updated with an ‘energy saver’ mode to lessen their power consumption – because, as you know, attempting to be more environmentally-friendly just drips with contemptible wokeness. The makers of The Simpsons (1989-present) have been lambasted for being woke, coincidentally by Cleese’s associates at GB News, for no longer having scenes where Homer loses his rag at Bart, picks him up by the throat and strangles him until his eyes bulge and tongue protrudes. Not wanting to strangle children? How hideously woke.

So, what does ‘woke’ actually mean? Well, according to Wikipedia, it’s “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism and LGBT rights.” Fascinatingly, the phrase ‘stay woke’ goes all the way back to 1938, when it was first heard on a recording of a song called Scottsboro Boys by the legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly.

From wikipedia.org / © William P. Gottlieb Collection

Though how the term ‘woke’ became elastic enough to encompass eating tofu, and builders talking about their feelings, and Xboxes having energy-saving modes, and Homer Simpson not throttling his offspring, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a simpler definition of the term – certainly when you look at the people mentioned above who’ve railed against it, like Trump, Musk, DeSantis, Braverman, the Daily Mail and GB News – might be: ‘Anything that right-wing tossers don’t like.’

Indeed, as somebody who considers himself partly Scottish, I felt a surge of pride a while ago when Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-fascist American militia the Proud Boys, denounced Scotland as ‘the most woke country in the world.” No wonder Scottish novelist Christopher Brookmyre responded to McInnes’s ravings by saying: “That delighted me…”

Unfortunately, nobody ever lost money by underestimating human beings’ intelligence. There’s clearly political mileage in ranting endlessly about wokeness. Gradually, you brainwash millions of people, mainly older ones who don’t get out much, and sit and watch Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News all day, into believing that dark, malevolent woke forces do indeed lurk in the world, planning to deprive them of their Bibles, guns, gas-guzzling automobiles, Big Macs, racist jokes, un-politically-correct 1970s TV shows, etc. It’s also convenient for the likes of Trump (currently facing 91 felony counts) and Britain’s Conservative government (trying to justify why the country is such a horrible, unhappy mess when they’ve been in charge of it for the past 13 years) to peddle the narrative that the establishment is riddled with hostile woke agents. The civil service, the courts, the police… A giant woke conspiracy is being implemented from society’s corridors of power and it’s trying to discredit them and stymie their every move.

I’m not claiming, by the way, that stupidity is confined to right-wingers. The left is also capable of it. In recent years the American right has infiltrated school-boards and removed books they disapprove of from syllabuses and libraries, books deemed too woke, often written by people of colour or members of the LGBT community, and often featuring characters of colour or LGBT characters. There was even a book suspended in Alabama because officials didn’t like the sound of the author’s name, Marie-Louise Gay. But left-wing educators have done themselves no favours by trying to ban books that offend their sensibilities too.

For example, I lately came across the case of a school board in Washington State pulling Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) off its required reading list for ninth-graders because a group of ‘progressive’ teachers objected to it. Sure, you can argue that To Kill a Mockingbird portrays its black characters with less depth than its white characters and has a ‘white saviour’ narrative that’s offensive to many. But shouldn’t teachers focus on developing their students’ powers of critical thinking, argument and self-expression so that they can articulate why they object to the book? Engaging with – certainly, studying – literature shouldn’t be limited to books you’re personally comfortable with. You should have to experience ones you find discomforting too, whilst developing the ability to formulate logical and coherent responses to them.

I don’t deny there are works that some people will find upsetting because of their beliefs or backgrounds or difficult experiences they’ve had in their lives. And I don’t see anything wrong with books and stories having trigger warnings, which inform readers the content they’re about to immerse themselves in may be uncomfortable or even traumatising. I say that as a writer who’s had trigger warnings attached to his fiction in the past. But banning books altogether? I don’t agree with censorship, unless it’s of something that’s completely off-the-scale in promulgating odious stereotypes and stirring up hatred.

Otherwise, I don’t have much of a problem with wokeness. Especially as it seems to annoy all the right – and I mean ‘right’ – people. So, now, it’s time to sign off and grab some lunch. What will I have…? Why, tofu of course. Up yours, Sewer-ella.

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.