St Patrick’s Day – Blood and Porridge

From leftfutures.org

One feature of growing older is that every new day seems to be an anniversary of some sort or other – an anniversary of something you did, or something you experienced, or something big or small that you witnessed happening in the world. For instance, just last Friday, March 17^th – St Patrick’s Day 2023 – I realised it was 30 years exactly since some friends and I went to see the great Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers at Glasgow Barrowland. Both Stiff Little Fingers and the Barrowland, I’m pleased to report, are still on the go; and their histories have been happily entwined during the three decades since. As the latter’s Wikipedia entry reports: “Northern Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers have played sold-out concerts at the venue every St Patrick’s Day since 1992, and recorded their Best Served Loud album there in 2016 to celebrate 25 years at Barrowland.”

Even if it reminds me of how ancient I am now, that’s at least an anniversary of something I remember fondly. However, there’s nothing fond I remember about the event that today, March 20^th, is the anniversary of. It’s now been twenty years since Western military forces, mainly American and British ones directed by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, blasted their way into Iraq.

The invasion was launched in order to depose Saddam Hussein who, it was claimed, possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. It transpired, though, that these WMDs didn’t exist and it became obvious that Bush and Blair had spun a web of lies beforehand to make people believe that they did. In the two decades since the invasion, those WMDs haven’t been the only things to not exist. The Iraq Body Count Project has calculated that, up until 2019, between 183,535 and 206,107 Iraqi people have stopped existing too. Their deaths have been a result of Bush and Blair’s actions – of the invasion, the bungled Western occupation and its chaotic aftermath.

George Bush once donned a flak jacket, posed on the deck of an American aircraft-carrier and boasted that the ‘mission’ in Iraq was ‘accomplished’. That seems a very long time ago now. Mind you, through the dubious involvement in the supposed occupation and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq by outfits such as Haliburton, the debacle succeeded in lining the likes of Dick Cheney’s pockets very nicely. I suppose that was the real point of it.

Of course, the Iraq War helped to put some coinage into Tony Blair’s pockets too. Thanks to his support for the second-most right-wing and incompetent president in American history, the former PM was for a long time revered in Republican sectors of the USA and he made more than a few bob on the public speaking circuit there. (He also profited from a dodgy job negotiating the movement of oil between Iraq and South Korea.) I suppose his popularity in America reduced his pain at being less admired in other parts of the world. For instance, I was working in India during the worst phase of the ‘official’ Iraq War – Abu Ghraib and all that – and whenever I read the Indian English-language newspapers, his name seldom appeared in a sentence without being accompanied by the words ‘poodle’ or ‘lapdog’.

I’d never trusted Blair. His big smile and ingratiating, want-to-be-your-pal manner struck me as phoney, especially compared to the plain-speaking, no-nonsense demeanour of his predecessor as Labour Party leader, John Smith, who died unexpectedly in 1994. However, up until 2003, and having recently endured 18 years of Conservative government, I’d consoled myself with the thought that “At least he isn’t as bad as that other lot.” He headed a political party that claimed to have some conscience, principles and scruples, the supposed antithesis of Maggie Thatcher and her cynical gang. But events in March 2003 changed my opinion.

To be fair, in Britain, it wasn’t just Blair who willed the invasion into happening. He had the support of many in his party, though with a few noble objectors like the late Robin Cook, and the Tories backed him to the hilt. In fact, among the Westminster-based parties, it was only Charles Kennedy’s Liberal Democrats who showed some spine and opposed the bloody thing. It goes without saying that the majority of Britain’s predominantly right-wing newspapers were cheerleaders for it too.

From wikipedia.org / © William M. Connelly

And, though people still talk about the anti-war protests on February 15^th, 2003, which saw the biggest ever political demonstration in London’s history take to the capital’s streets (and was the subject of Ian McEwan’s rather annoying 2005 novel Saturday), I’m afraid to say it had the support of a good chunk of the British population as well. Before and during the initial invasion, I was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but for personal reasons I also spent a lot of time down in East Anglia. Nearly everyone I know in Newcastle – Labour supporters to a man and woman – was horrified by what Blair was doing. But down south, it was a different story. I heard people saying it in pubs, and saw it on stickers in car windows. This war was right, Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with his WMDs, we needed to hit him before he hit us, we had to support ‘our boys’, and if you were anti-war you were unpatriotic, a coward, a traitor. It was the mentality that, nearly 80 years earlier, had seen young men humiliated by getting white feathers if they didn’t sign up to fight amid the mud and bloodshed of the trenches.

Everything that happened in Iraq was a reprehensible failure – morally, politically, even in terms of making ground against Osamu Bin Laden in the supposed War on Terror. (It took a Navy SEALs raid in Pakistan during the Obama era to put an end to him.) In Britain, it loosened the Labour Party’s hold on power and paved the way for the David Cameron government and its disastrous austerity policies. It also shook the public’s faith in politicians and what they saw as ‘the establishment’ and, arguably, helped lead to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, which was Britain’s other huge, idiotic mistake of the 21^st century. But all this never dented Blair’s belief that invading Iraq with Bush was the correct thing to do. He was right and those millions of people who came onto the streets to protest against the invasion were wrong.

A lot of this, I suspect, was down to Blair being a devout Christian. Since God was on his side, he reasoned, his decision to back Bush must have divine sanction. Bush, of course, professed to being a Christian too, although I couldn’t imagine the gimlet-eyed Texan being as zealous about it as Blair.

Actually, Blair’s Christianity puts me in mind of something said by the late William S. Burroughs in his spoken lyrics for the Bill Laswell song Words of Advice for Young People: “If you’re doing business with a religious sonofabitch, get it in writing. His word isn’t worth shit, not with the good Lord telling him how to f**k you on the deal.”

From unsplash.com / © Levi Meir Clancy

© BBC

I’m still too busy with work commitments to put any new material on this blog. However, here is a slightly updated version of something I posted a few years ago. Appropriately for today, March 17^th and St Patrick’s Day, it’s a tribute to the greatest Irishman of the late 20^th century.

16 years after his death, I still regard the Irishman Dave Allen as the best stand-up comedian ever. Allen was known to many British TV viewers during his heyday in the 1970s as ‘the comedian with half-a-finger’, although he once pointed out that he was actually ‘the comedian with nine-and-a-half-fingers’.

When I was a kid living in Northern Ireland and when the Dave Allen Show (1968-86) was at the height of its popularity on BBC1, he was the undisputed King of Comedy for me. I didn’t always understand the jokes and stories he told his studio audience, though my parents invariably guffawed at them. However, I loved it when the glass of whisky he sipped from at the side of his chair – despite being a ‘stand-up’ comedian, he spent most of his time sitting down – reached a low level and he said, “It’s time for some sketches.” Those sketches were packed with slapstick and surreal absurdity and were perfect fodder for a ten-year-old. After they’d shown the sketches and the programme returned to Allen in the studio, his whisky glass would be full again.

However, when I look back at the show now, I realise the sketches have weathered the passage of time least well. Rather, it’s the sections where Allen simply sat and chatted to his audience, marvelling at life’s ridiculousness and telling jokes, anecdotes and yarns, that seem timeless now. These tapped into a tradition of storytelling he was familiar with from his boyhood in Firhouse, Dublin, where his father worked as general manager of the Irish Times.

Allen’s formative years were schizophrenic ones. From all accounts, he had a loving and cultured family at home, but he received his schooling from a succession of priests and nuns who had no compunction about beating their young charges and threatening them with eternal hellfire. “People used to think of the nice, sweet little ladies,” he once said of those nuns. “They used to knock the f**k out of you, in the most cruel way that they could. They’d find bits of your body that were vulnerable to intense pain… The priests were the same.”

It’s fair to say that during his professional career Allen got his revenge on the Catholic clergy who’d persecuted him in his schooldays, both through his verbal routines in the studio and through his sketches, which provided a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gags about priests, nuns, monks, altar boys, bishops and, occasionally, the Pope himself.

Taking pops at organised religion and at any kind of authority (for Allen was no fan of politicians either) was brave for a stand-up comedian on British TV in the 1970s, when the safe targets were considered to be mothers-in-law and ‘wimin’ generally, and blacks, Pakistanis, homosexuals and, indeed, Irish people. However, in the history of British comedy, Allen wasn’t just important for his anti-authoritarian streak. Although some of material consisted of traditionally structured jokes and punchlines, some of it too was based on his observations of everyday life and its absurdities. In fact, he was doing observational humour long before the Alternative Comedy boom of the 1980s turned such humour into a stand-up staple.

Allen’s mocking of Catholicism earned him a TV ban in the Irish Republic. This made me feel almost privileged to be living in Northern Ireland, where I could watch his show on the BBC. Also, of course, I felt privileged to be a Northern Irish Protestant, so that I could laugh at all those gags about the Pope doing stripteases and performing somersaults down the aisles of Vatican chapels, bishops lusting after sexy nuns, priests sprinkling holy water over their ironing, altar boys breaking wind, confession boxes turning into dodgem cars, etc., without suffering Catholic guilt and fearing I’d be damned to eternal hellfire. Though in the interests of religious equality I should say that I remember him cracking a lot of jokes about the Reverend Ian Paisley too.

Predictably, Allen also earned the ire of clean-up-TV campaigner Mrs Mary Whitehouse, head of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, Britain’s equivalent of the Moral Majority. She once described one of Allen’s sketches, involving a post-coital conversation between a husband and wife, as ‘offensive, indecent and embarrassing’. Incidentally, when I did some research on Mrs Whitehouse recently, I discovered that in 1977 her organisation gave an award for ‘wholesome family entertainment’ to Jimmy Savile.

Allen was said to have received death-threats from the Provisional IRA for putting the nose of Ireland’s Catholic establishment out of joint. However, Danny Morrison, the former IRA man and editor of the Republican News, has claimed that Dave Allen was actually a big hit with his old terrorist colleagues, especially when they were incarcerated. “Dave Allen was a major hit with Republican prisoners. We all loved his show. We particularly loved his anti-clerical material. You have to remember that Dave Allen was a subversive in the Seventies. He was anti-establishment, and you couldn’t get more anti-establishment than us, so we identified with him.” So it sounds like during the 1970s the inmates of the Republican section of Long Kesh were laughing at those stripping and somersaulting Popes, lusty bishops, sexy nuns, comical priests, farting altar boys, bumping confession boxes, etc., as heartily as us Protestants were.

As well as his comedy shows in the 1970s, Allen hosted a documentary series where he would track down and interview eccentrics, oddballs and people who generally lived their lives not giving a toss about what other people thought of them. Though they aren’t remembered today, Allen’s documentary programmes created a blueprint for later programme-makers like Louis Theroux. Unlike Theroux’s trouble-seeking, if-I-give-them-enough-rope-they’ll-hang-themselves approach, however, Allen was genuinely interested in and respectful of his subjects’ eccentricities.

Dave Allen should have thrived during the 1980s. After all, this was when a younger generation of comics made British comedy less about traditional joke-telling and more about lampooning authority and observing life’s absurdities, stuff Allen had been doing for years. But his TV appearances became less frequent. He did, however, enjoy an acclaimed run doing a comedy show in London’s West End. I heard people claim at the time that Allen was such a genius he went onstage each evening without any script and simply talked about whatever came into his head. From what I’ve learned subsequently, things weren’t quite so freeform. Allen worked with scriptwriters and those writers sat in the front row of the audience holding up cards with keywords written on them, to keep his mind running in the right direction, if not exactly on track.

Dave Allen made his final TV series, of purely stand-up material, in the early 1990s. I know some fans of his shows twenty years earlier who felt uncomfortable with these later performances. Allen, now noticeably greyer, saggier and wrinklier, sounded a lot more acerbic than he had when he’d been perched on that 1970s chair with his whisky-glass, his slapstick sketches and his congenial Irish charm. The routines were more observational than ever but were invested now with an old man’s cantankerousness, with Allen venting his spleen on monosyllabic teenagers, supermarket queues, dog-lovers, retirement and the aging process generally.

One of Allen’s most memorable tirades at this time went: “You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock… You do that for forty years of your life and you retire. What do they f**king give you? A clock!” As the F-word was still a big no-no on British television at the time, questions were raised about him in the House of Commons.

And that was pretty much it for Allen’s public appearances until his death in 2005. His later low profile was due partly to ill-health and partly to his desire for a quiet and stress-free retirement. And he managed to take with him to the grave the true story about what’d happened to his missing half-finger, although over the years he’d teased reporters, interviewers and audiences with tall tales about it. He once told Clive James that his brother had knocked him on the jaw while he had the finger in his mouth, causing him to chomp it off. And I seem to recall him telling a journalist for Loaded magazine that it’d been devoured by his own arsehole one night when that orifice was feeling particularly hungry.

Here’s some Youtube footage of Allen, a self-described ‘practising atheist’, subjecting the Book of Genesis to his own, inimitable scrutiny.

Tag: St Patrick’s Day

The butcher boy

The comedian with nine-and-a-half fingers