to the victor

Everyone knows that history is written by the victors, but I’m not sure it’s always realised – or I should say that I hadn’t considered – how much of a privilege that is. Of course there are the obvious material, societal privileges that come with winning, but I’m thinking specifically about history and the way it’s transmitted.

This little epiphany came while watching the now ten-year-old show, Tony Robinson’s Wild West. It’s not a piece of history that generally interests me, but Robinson belongs to the last generation that grew up with ‘cowboys and Indians’ occupying a major place in popular culture but is also a presenter who tends to look at history from a point of view that conservative critics would call postmodern; i.e. he tends to think that history is complicated and acknowledges injustices, calls exploitation exploitation and that kind of thing, and so it piqued my interest. But one of the unexpected consequences of making an enlightened history show is the focus it places on experts and the way that they come across.

Ancient Greek red-figure pottery c.480 BC

Now, I don’t mean to condemn the historians I’m talking about here; most historians are in some ways at least enthusiasts for their subject, and the best ones have a special, and sometimes quite a nerdy, bond with the period and people that they have chosen to study. When I studied ancient history, one of the best lecturers I had was a specialist on ancient Greece who had seemingly based his physical appearance on the look of Greek men on ancient red-figure pottery; curly hair, big beard and all. And there was a historian of Rome in my Classical Studies course with a ‘Julius Caesar’ haircut. And it feels natural that someone would want to immerse themselves in the civilisation which fascinates them enough to make it their life’s work.

Joe LeFors – lawman & fashion role model

And so it makes sense that some of the historians in Tony Robinson’s Wild West, with their (to British eyes) Edwardian moustaches and waistcoats should look as though they are tending the bar in a saloon in Calamity Jane, or are speaking to the camera from the frontier, while wearing their fringed buckskin jackets. It’s kind of comical, but also isn’t, in the context of that history. The clothes seem like a concession to the romanticism of the Old West, but these are modern historians, and despite being occasionally slightly squeamish about the history they are recounting, and tending to overstate the balance of power in the ‘Indian wars’ they make no serious attempt to whitewash it.

But it feels significant that the Lakota historian talking about the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 wasn’t wearing historical fancy dress, and it would seem strange if he was. And it’s the discussion of atrocities like Wounded Knee which, to paraphrase that historian, is framed as a war crime, because that feels historically, appropriate but in fact there was no war – it was just a crime, albeit one committed by a government. And nakedly genocidal attitudes at the time, encapsulated by a quotes from L. Frank Baum, author of – of all things – the Wizard of Oz and its sequels, make the buckskins, waistcoats and archaic facial hair and fashions of the Western historians seem somewhat incongruous.

Bartender at the Toll Gate Saloon in Black Hawk, Colorado c.1897

Hearing of the death of Sitting Bull in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, Baum wrote in his popular newspaper:

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.

Though thankfully not, or not quite, enacted, this wasn’t a controversial view at the time. But with even with a little knowledge of the historical context (there had been a government policy explicitly called the Indian Removal Act only 50 years earlier), its knowing blatancy is shocking. It’s one thing to talk or read about massacres of Greeks or Spartans or Persians thousands of years ago; it’s quite another to think of it happening in the time of your own great-grandparents, or to think of it happening elsewhere literally as I write these words.

It’s an obvious, problematic and quite cheesy comparison to make, but I’ll make it. A situation where a historian could sit in a black shirt and swastika armband, talking about World War Two – acknowledging quite reasonably the terrible things that were done on both sides, but talking, in an essentially neutral way about the formation of modern Europe, while a far more sombre Jewish historian shows us the Auschwitz museum, is almost unimaginable. And yet – judging by the way these things actually work – it’s not an especially outlandish alternate present.

the Emperor Augustus, statue from the 1st century AD with eternally modern hair

Not only is history written by the victors, but the world we live in is forged by them, and generations on from winning an overwhelming victory they are no longer ‘they,’ they are just us. But that takes time. The historian who loves ancient Greece can afford love it, wherever they come from. Greece was barbaric as well as enlightened, Greece had slaves and was misogynistic – but Greece is only what we call it now for convenience; the collection of independent city states and relatively heterogynous cultures now called ‘ancient Greece’ is not the same as the country Greece. “Rome” is not Italy. The world – especially but not exclusively the western world – has benefitted from ancient Greek and Roman culture and though it’s easy to argue for its negative influence too, that’s less the fault of those ancient people than it is our more recent ancestors who understood those cultures in the way they could and wanted to understand them.

Regarding America, and Britain and everywhere else, all of that may come, in a thousand years or so, when the state of the world will probably be as unimaginable to us now as the internet would be to Herodotus. But. There are photographs of the mass graves being dug at Wounded Knee and while the winners of the ‘Indian wars’ were able to impress their culture on the country and to define that recent history in terms of expansion, exploration and consolidation, the other side of the story is still living history too. And the losers get to just live with it and tell their stories to whoever will listen.

It’s fair to say that the nature of the conquest of America – not just the 1800s and the Old West, but everything from the founding of the first colonies to the establishment and erosion of the reservations – has never been forgotten, but it’s only relatively recently that it’s been publicly acknowledged. Tony Robinson’s television show came about precisely because he belongs to a generation – my father’s generation – where young boys were entertained by stories of heroic cowboys fighting savage Indians in a way that now looks, despite the inevitable messiness of history as opposed to fiction, like an almost perfect inversion of the facts. And I belong to one of the first generations where it hasn’t been popularly presented that way. It’s never too soon to be passionate about history or to tell the truth about it, but even though it’s always nice to find yourself on the winning team, when that happens it’s probably worth considering what it really means and how you got there. And if the dressing up still feels appropriate then go for it.

a victory over ourselves – versions of 1984 in 2025

Remembering 1984 as someone who was a child then, I find that although the clocks didn’t strike thirteen, the year – as encapsulated by two specific and very different but not unconnected childhood memories, as we’ll see – is almost as alien nowadays as Orwell’s Airstrip One. Of course, I know far more now about both 1984 and Nineteen Eighty-Four than I did at the time. I was aware – thanks mostly I think to John Craven’s Newsround – of the big, defining events of the year.

Surely the greatest ever cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Stuart Hughes, for the 1990 Heinemann New Windmills edition

I knew, for instance about the Miners’ Strike and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but they didn’t have anything like the same impact on me personally as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Zola Budd tripping or whatever it was at the Olympics and Prince Harry being born, but they weren’t as important to me as Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd. Even Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood made a bigger impression on me than most of the big news events, despite the fact that I didn’t like it. My favourite TV show that year was probably Grange Hill – and here we go.

Grange Hill, essentially a kids’ soap opera set in a big comprehensive high school in London, ran for 30 years and I recently discovered that the era of it that I remember most fondly – the series’ that ran from 1983-6 – is available on YouTube. When I eventually went to high school later in the 80s, my first impression of the school was that it was like Grange Hill, and now I find that despite the silliness and melodrama, Grange Hill still reflects the reality, the look and the texture of my high school experience in the 80s with surprising accuracy.

Grange Hill”s 5th formers in 1984 (back: Stewpot & Glenroy, front: Suzanne & Mr McGuffy)

But anyway, watching old Grange Hill episodes out of nostalgia, I was struck by how good it seems in the context of the 2020s, despite the obvious shortcomings of being made for children. Check out this scene from series seven, episode five, written by Margaret Simpson and aired in January of 1984. In among typical story arcs about headlice and bullying, the Fifth form class (17 year olds getting towards the end of their time at school) get the opportunity to attend a mock UN conference with representatives from other schools. In a discussion about that, the following exchange occurs between Mr McGuffy (Fraser Cains) and his pupils Suzanne Ross (Susan Tully), Christopher “Stewpot” Stewart (Mark Burdis), Claire Scott (Paula-Ann Bland) and Glenroy (seemingly of no last name) (Steven Woodcock). It’s worth noting that this was the year before Live Aid.

Suzanne: [re. the UN]:"It's about as effective as the school council."

Mr McGuffy: "Oh well I wouldn't quite say that. The UN does some excellent work - UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Peacekeeping force..."   [...]

Claire: "What's the conference gonna be about?"


Mr McGuffy: "The world food problem. There was a real UN conference on this topic ten years ago..Glenroy: "Didn't solve much then, did they? Millions of people still starvin'"

Stewpot: ”Yeah that's cos they ain't got no political clout to do anything about it though, ain't it"

Glenroy: ”Naw man, it's because the rich countries keep them that waySuzanne: “The only chance a poor country's got is if it's got something we wantGlenroy:That's right - they got something the west wants and they'd better watch out because the west starts to mess with their government."

Mr McGuffy: "Well it's clear from what you've all said so far that you're interested in the sort of issues that will be discussed that weekend..."

Suzanne & Claire, 1984

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that that is a more mature political discussion than is often heard on Question Time in 2025. Interestingly, it’s not an argument between left and right as such, but between standard, humanitarian and more radical left-wing viewpoints. Needless to say, if it was presented on a TV show that’s popular with ten year-olds nowadays, a certain demographic would be foaming at the mouth about the BBC indoctrinating the young with “wokeness.” But as a kid this sort of discussion didn’t at all mar my enjoyment of the show – naturally there’s also a lot of comedic stuff in the series about stink bombs and money-making schemes, but one of the reasons that Grange Hill remained popular (and watchable for 8 year-olds and 15 year-olds alike) for so many years was that it refused to talk down to its audience.

The way the writers tackled the obvious big themes – racism, sexism, parents getting divorced, bullying, gangs, sex education etc – are impressive despite being, quite broad, especially when the younger pupils are the focus of the storyline, but what makes a bigger impression on me now is the background to it all. It’s a little sad – though true to Thatcher’s Britain – to see through all this period the older pupils’ low-level fretting about unemployment and whether it’s worth being in school at all.

And maybe they were right. In 1984, when Suzanne and Stewpot were 17, a fellow Londoner who could in a parallel universe have been in the year above them at Grange Hill was the 18-year-old model Samantha Fox. That year, she was The Sun newspaper’s “Page 3 Girl of the Year.” She had debuted as a topless model for the paper aged 16, which is far more mind boggling to a nostalgic middle-aged viewer of Grange Hill than it would have been to me at the time. Presumably, some parts of the anti-woke lobby would not mind Sam’s modelling as much as they would mind the Grange Hill kids’ political awareness, but who knows?

Sam Fox in (approximately) Grange Hill mode c.1986, not sure who took it

Naturally, the intended audience for Page 3 wasn’t Primary School children – but everybody knew who Sam Fox was and in the pre-internet, 4-channel TV world of 80s Britain he had a level of fame far beyond that of any porn star 40 years later (arguments about whether or not Page 3 was porn are brain-numbingly stupid, so I won’t go there; and anyway, I don’t mean porn to be a derogatory term). Anyway, Sam (she’ll always be “Sam” to people who grew up in the 80s) and her Page 3 peers made occasional accidental appearances in the classroom, to general hilarity, when the class was spreading old newspapers on our desks to prepare for art classes. It was also pretty standard then to see the “Page Three Stunnas” (as I think The Sun put it) blowing around the playground or covering a fish supper. It wasn’t like growing up with the internet, but in its own way the 80s was an era of gratuitous nudity.

a nice Yugoslav edition of 1984 from 1984

Meanwhile, on Page Three of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith – who is, shockingly, a few years younger than I am now – is trying to look back on his own childhood to discern whether things were always as they are now:

But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) P.3 – New Windmill edition, 1990

By contrast, some of the roots of 2025 are plain to see in 1984, despite the revolution of the internet that happened halfway between then and now. As the opposing poles of the Grange Hill kids and The Sun demonstrate, there were tensions in British society which would never so far be resolved, but they would come to some kind of semi-conclusion at the end of the Thatcher era when when ‘Political Correctness,’ the chimerical predecessor of the equally chimerical ‘Woke’ began to work in its unpredictable (but I think mostly positive) ways.

 

Most obviously, Page 3 became ever more controversial and was toned down (no nipples) and then vanished from the tabloids altogether for a while (though in the 90s the appearance of “lads’ mags” which mainstreamed soft porn made the death of Page 3 kind of a pyrrhic victory.) More complicatedly, the kind of confrontational storylines about topics like racism that happened in kids shows in the 80s became a little more squeamish, to the point where (for entirely understandable reasons) racist bullies on kids’ shows would rarely use actual racist language and then barely appear at all, replaced by positivity in the shape of more inclusive casting and writing. All of which became pretty quaint as soon as the internet really took off.

a very 1984-looking edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1984

So, that was part of the 1984 that I remember; what Orwell would have made of any of it I don’t know. It wasn’t his nineteen eighty-four, which might have pleased him. For me, it all looks kind of extreme but also refreshingly straightforward, though I’m sure I only think so because I was a child. It’s all very Gen-X isn’t it?

notes in may

May-appropriate art: William Roberts – Bank Holiday in the Park (1923)

This is just what it says*: I intend to post something at least once a month but in lieu of any finished articles, here are various notes I made during May that never got developed into anything more substantial, some of which will probably seem mysterious later since I don’t think I’ll bother to explain the context.

*tragically, that title is a kind of pun though

 

 

“Let them eat space travel”

Publishing light-hearted articles that debate whether AI deserves “human rights,” while not covering the erosion of actual human rights because you don’t want to be ‘political’ is political.

The pressure to make politicians and news agencies use the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli government’s attacks on Gaza are understandable (because they are committing genocide, by the normal definition of the word: the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods Cambridge Dictionary) but it’s also kind of self defeating. The focus on a word that represents their actions, rather than the actions themselves creates an instant response which, given the nature of genocide, should be horror, but is more often dismissal; “Genocide? Oh, you’re one of those ‘Free Palestine’ people.” A more important question to ask politicians and the media is possibly, if what is being done to the people of Gaza isn’t genocide, is it therefore somehow okay? Would any non-psychopath presented with an estimated death toll as high as 62,000 Palestinian people since October 7th 2023 think “oh well, it’s a lot but at least it isn’t genocide“? The word is important for moral, legal and factual reasons but at this point it seems as likely to distract from the reality that we are seeing every day, rather than to really bring it home.

Arthur Wright – May Day in Town (1974)

Even if the climate emergency is allowed to escalate with no serious attempt to alter it for another decade (which would be, or just as likely, will be, disastrous), it would still be infinitely easier to prevent the Earth from becoming an uninhabitable and Mars-like wasteland than it would to make Mars into a habitable and Earth-like home – especially for any meaningful number of people. Those who are most determined that colonising Mars is a good idea are essentially not serious people, or at least are not serious about the future of mankind. ‘Conquering new worlds’ is just a fun, romantic and escapist idea that appeals more than looking after the world we have; it’s a typical expression of the political right’s obsession with the welfare of imaginary future people as opposed to the welfare of actual human beings who exist.

Just MIT confirming that the problem with solar energy is there’s not enough profit in it

It’s becoming ever more obvious that the UK has a media problem. For a decade now, a particular politician (don’t even want to type his name) with a consistent track record of being unpopular and not winning elections – not, so far coming third or even fourth in a general election – has been foisted on the public to the point where he’s an inescapable presence in British culture. He’s on TV, in newspapers and online on all of the major news outlets, far more than the leader of the official opposition, let alone the leaders of the third and fourth largest parties in the country. By this point, this obsession has seriously started to shape public discourse. It’s fuelled essentially by fact that the small group of very wealthy people in charge of the traditional media are his peers – they support him and his views because they belong to the same millionaire class and milieu. This was the group that made Brexit happen, portraying it as a movement of ‘the people’ when the real impetus for it was the fact that the EU was closing tax loopholes for the millionaire class.

We are now in the Stalinist phase of Brexit (a funny idea, since its adherents are virulently anti-communist) where the only people who have benefitted from Brexit and continue to benefit from it are that ruling class (who still don’t want to pay taxes). As ‘the people’ inevitably fall out of love with Brexit, since it’s damaged the economy, made foreign holidays more difficult and expensive and basically failed to provide any material gains, let alone a raise in the standard of living in the UK, the Brexit ideology becomes stronger and more corrosive, emotive and unhinged. Basically, the media can’t make people satisfied with having less. but it can try to make them angry, and to direct their anger.

The media’s obsession with the views of the man who has become the figurehead for Brexit distracts from the actual views of the public, but naturally it affects them too. Not surprisingly, constant positive coverage of the man and his colleagues has made he and his party more successful – but, after a decade not much more successful, really, given how inescapable his presence has become. But every little increase in popularity is fed into the circular narrative and framed as an unstoppable rise, as if that rise wasn’t essentially being created by those reporting on it. But really, as with Brexit itself, it’s mostly about money.

All of which raises questions; firstly and most importantly, what can be done about it? The readership of even the most popular newspapers isn’t especially big now, but those newspapers are also major presences on social media and on TV. Most importantly (and quite bizarrely, when you think about it) the major broadcasters in TV in the UK still look to newspapers to gauge the political zeitgeist, rather than the other way around (or rather than both TV and newspapers looking to the internet, which would be more accurate but probably not better). The obvious response is to boycott the newspapers and/or TV, but for as long as Parliament still looks to the press barons to find out the mood of the public, that can only remove the governing of the country even further from the lives and opinions of the people. A more positive answer would be to promote alternative politics through what media is available; but again that can only work up to a point, because if politicians are still in thrall to the same old newspapers and broadcasters then, again, Parliament becomes even more of a closed-off, cannibalistic circuit, isolated from popular opinion except when a general election comes around.

Complaining to one’s MP is probably the most sensible thing to do, but unless they happen to be one of the five MPs currently representing the media’s chosen party in Parliament, then they almost certainly agree with you and don’t know what to do about it either. And yet surely it can’t be an insurmountable problem?

A less important, but more heart-breaking question is a hypothetical one; what would the country be like now if the media was obsessed with a party with a progressive political agenda (the Green Party for instance, are actually more popular than ever, and despite a few cranks and weirdos, mostly a positive force)? What if, instead of spending a decade spreading intolerance, division, hatred, racism etc so that a few millionaire businessmen could pay less tax, they had been had been pushing ideas of equality and environmentalism into the culture? Money is at the heart of it all really, and this frustrating situation actually led to me taking the unusual (for me) and pointless step of writing an email to the Prime Minister that he will never have read, part of which said;

Surely one of the most effective way to neutralise the poisonous rhetoric of the far right is not to pursue its populist talking points, but to materially improve the lives of the people of the UK?  In the last general election – less than a year ago – a vote for Labour was for most people a vote for change, not for more of the same. If Britain wanted divisive rhetoric, attacking migrants and minorities, there were far more obvious people to vote for.

William Collins – May Day (1811 – 12)

So anyway; hopefully June is better.

nostalgia isn’t going to be what it was, or something like that

When I was a child there was music which was, whether you liked it or not, inescapable. I have never – and this is not a boast – deliberately or actively listened to a song by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Roxette, Take That, Bon Jovi, the Spice Girls… the list isn’t endless, but it is quite long. And yet I know some, or a lot, of songs by all of those artists. And those are just some of the household names. Likewise I have never deliberately listened to “A Horse With No Name” by America, “One Night in Bangkok” by Murray Head or “Would I Lie to You” by Charles & Eddie; and yet, there they are, readily accessible should I wish (I shouldn’t) to hum, whistle or sing them, or just have them play in my head, which I seemingly have little control over.

Black Lace: the unacceptable face(s) of 80s pop

And yet, since the dawn of the 21st century, major stars come and go, like Justin Bieber, or just stay, like Ed Sheeran, Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift, without ever really entering my consciousness or troubling my ears. I have consulted with samples of “the youth” to see if it’s just me, but no: like me, there are major stars that they have mental images of, but unless they have actively been fans, they couldn’t necessarily tell you the titles of any of their songs and have little to no idea of what they actually sound like. Logical, because they were no more interested in them than I was in Dire Straits or Black Lace; but alas, I know the hits of Dire Straits and Black Lace. And the idea of ‘the Top 40 singles chart’ really has little place in their idea of popular music. Again, ignorance is nothing to be proud of and I literally don’t know what I’m missing. At least my parents could dismiss Madonna or Boy George on the basis that they didn’t like their music. It’s an especially odd situation to find myself in as my main occupation is actually writing about music; but of course, nothing except my own attitude is stopping me from finding out about these artists.

The fact is that no musician is inescapable now. Music is everywhere, and far more accessibly so than it was in the 80s or 90s – and not just new music. If I want to hear Joy Division playing live when they were still called Warsaw or track down the records the Wu-Tang Clan sampled or hear the different version of the Smiths’ first album produced by Troy Tate, it takes as long about as long to find them as it does to type those words into your phone. Back then, if you had a Walkman you could play tapes, but you had to have the tape (or CD – I know CDs are having a minor renaissance, but is there any more misbegotten, less lamented creature than the CD Walkman?) Or you could – from the 1950s onwards – carry a radio with you and listen to whatever happened to be playing at the time. I imagine fewer people listen to the radio now than they did even 30 years ago, but paradoxically, though there are probably many more – and many more specialised –  radio stations now than ever, their specialisation actually feeds the escapability of pop music. Because if I want to hear r’n’b or metal or rap or techno without hearing anything else, or to hear 60s or 70s or 80s or 90s pop without having to put up with their modern-day equivalents, then that’s what I and anyone else will do. I have never wanted to hear “Concrete and Clay” by Unit 4+2 or “Agadoo” or “Come On Eileen” or “Your Woman” by White Town or (god knows) “Crocodile Shoes” by Jimmy Nail; but there was a time when hearing things I wanted to hear but didn’t own, meant running the risk of being subjected to these, and many other unwanted songs. As I write these words, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes, a song that until recently I didn’t know I knew is playing in my head.

And so, the music library in my head is bigger and more diverse than I ever intended it to be. In a situation where there were only three or four TV channels and a handful of popular radio stations, music was a kind of lingua franca for people, especially for young people. Watching Top of the Pops on a Thursday evening, or later The Word on Friday was so standard among my age group that you could assume that most people you knew had seen what you saw; that’s a powerful, not necessarily bonding experience, but a bond of sorts, that I don’t see an equivalent for now, simply because even if everyone you know watches Netflix, there’s no reason for them to have watched the same thing at the same time as you did. It’s not worse, in some ways it’s obviously better; but it is different. Of course, personal taste back then was still personal taste, and anything not in the mainstream was obscure in a way that no music, however weird or niche, is now obscure, but that was another identity-building thing, whether one liked it or not.

Growing up in a time when this isn’t the case and the only music kids are subjected to is the taste of their parents (admittedly, a minefield) or fragments of songs on TV ads, if they watch normal TV or on TikTok, if they happen to use Tiktok, is a vastly different thing. Taylor Swift is as inescapable a presence now, much as Madonna was in the 80s, but her music is almost entirely avoidable and it seems probable that few teenagers who are entirely uninterested in her now will find her hits popping unbidden into their heads in middle age. But conversely, the kids of today are more likely to come across “Owner of a Lonely Heart” on YouTube than I would have been to hear one of the big pop hits of 1943 in the 80s.

Far Dunaway as Bonnie Parker; a little bit 1930s, a lot 1960s

What this means for the future I don’t know; but surely its implications for pop-culture nostalgia – which has grown from its humble origins in the 60s to an all-encompassing industry, are huge. In the 60s, there was a brief fashion for all things 1920s and 30s which prefigures the waves of nostalgia that have happened ever since. But for a variety of reasons, some technical, some generational and some commercial, pop culture nostalgia is far more elaborate than ever before. We live in a time when constructs like “The 80s” and “The 90s” are well-defined, marketable eras that mean something to people who weren’t born then, in quite a different way from the 1960s version of the 1920s. Even back then, the entertainment industry could conjure bygone times with an easy shorthand; the 1960s version of the 1920s and 30s meant flappers and cloche hats and Prohibition and the Charleston and was evoked on records like The Beatles’ Honey Pie and seen onstage in The Boy Friend or in the cinema in Bonnie & Clyde. But the actual music of the 20s and 30s was mostly not relatable to youngsters in the way that the actual entertainment of the 80s and 90s still is. Even if a teenager in the 60s did want to watch actual silent movies or listen to actual 20s jazz or dance bands they would have to find some way of accessing them. In the pre-home video era that meant relying on silent movie revivals in cinemas, or finding old records and having the right equipment to play them on, since old music was then only slowly being reissued in modern formats. The modern teen who loves “the 80s” or “the 90s” is spoiled by comparison, not least because its major movie franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and Jurassic Park are still around and its major musical stars still tour or at least have videos and back catalogues that can be accessed online, often for free.

Supergrass in 1996: a little bit 60s, a lot 70s, entirely 90s

Fashion has always been cyclical, but this feels quite new (which doesn’t mean it is though). Currently, culture feels not like a wasteland but like Eliot’s actual Waste Land, a dissonant kind of poetic collage full of meaning and detritus and feeling and substance and ephemera but at first glance strangely shapeless. For example, in one of our current pop culture timestreams there seems to be a kind of 90s revival going on, with not only architects of Britpop like the Gallagher brothers and Blur still active, but even minor bands like Shed Seven not only touring the nostalgia circuit but actually getting in the charts. Britpop was notoriously derivative of the past, especially the 60s and 70s. And so, some teenagers and young adults (none of these things being as pervasive as they once were) are now growing up in a time when part of ‘the culture’ is a version of the culture of the 90s, which had reacted to the culture of the 80s by absorbing elements of the culture of the 60s and 70s. And while the artists of 20 or 30 years ago refuse to go away even modern artists from alternative rock to mainstream pop stars make music infused with the sound of 80s synths and 90s rock and so on and on. Nothing wrong with that of course, but what do you call post-post-modernism? And what will the 2020s revival look like when it rears its head in the 2050s, assuming there is a 2050s? Something half interesting, half familiar no doubt.

jack told him about the thing – updating children’s books

There’s a strange moment near the beginning of the 1982 Puffin Books edition of Robert Westall’s Fathom Five (1979):

Dad never talked about Life and its Meanings; only fried bread and thrushes. ‘What’s got you up so early?’  Jack told him about the thing in the water.                   It’ll be a mandolin, floated off a sunken ship mevve…’

Puffin Books, 1982, p.35

Strange only that is, because the hero of the book isn’t called Jack, he’s called Chas. I remember first reading this copy of Fathom Five as a child, being puzzled, then moving on. It was only some time – possibly years – later that I read the blurb on the first page, before the title page:

Fathom Five (1978)

Robert Westall wrote this book straight after his best-selling The Machine Gunners, and it features many of the same characters that appear in the earlier novel. However, when the book was first published the names were changed. In this Puffin edition the original names have been restored.

I have always uncharitably assumed that what actually happened was that Fathom Five didn’t sell as well as Westall or his publishers had hoped and was then rebranded by them as a sequel to already successful and acclaimed The Machine Gunners in order to boost its sales, but I may be wrong. But either way, it’s apposite at the moment because a range of children’s books are being altered, apparently for various other reasons, but really for that same commercial one.

It isn’t obvious from the generally hysterical media coverage, but re-writing or tampering with “much-loved” (and that bit is important) children’s books, ostensibly to remove any possible offensiveness, has nothing to do with being PC or (sigh, eyeroll, etc, etc) “woke” – l reluctantly use the word because currently it is the word being used to talk about this issue by every moron who’s paid to have what they would have you believe is a popular (invariably intolerant) opinion. Right-wing tabloids love “woke” because it’s a single, easy-to-spell, easy-to-say syllable that takes up much less space in a headline than “Political Correctness” used to. I think there are also people who like to use it because saying “Political Correctness” feels dry and snooty and even the abbreviation “PC” has a certain technical, academic quality; but using “woke” allows them to feel cool and in touch with the times. It’s the same kind of frisson that high school teachers get (or did “in my day”) from using teenage slang or mild swearwords in front of the kids; and the cringe factor is about the same too. Hearing someone with a public-school accent decrying “wokeness” is so milk-curdlingly wrong that it’s masochistically almost worth hearing, just to enjoy the uniquely peculiar and relatively rare sensation of having one’s actual flesh creep.

But anyway, the editing of children’s books has nothing to do with people’s supposedly delicate sensibilities. High profile examples – significantly, there are only high profile examples – being of course tried-and-tested bestsellers like Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, plus various works by Enid Blyton. “Problematic” though those books might be,  the new edits are to do with money, and preventing the cash cow from dying of natural causes (fashion, essentially) like Biggles or Billy Bunter did. Parents aren’t lobbying publishers to have these books edited; “woke” parents generally don’t really want their kids reading racist or offensive books at all. And every year, untold numbers of unfashionable books (like, for example Fathom Five itself, which is great, regardless of the characters’ names) quietly slip out of print without any fuss being made. What it is, is that the books of Roald Dahl, still being adapted into films and plays and Enid Blyton, once ubiquitous enough to still have nostalgia value have made, and continue to make, a lot of money. Publishers naturally realise that some of what those authors wrote is now embarrassingly out of date and, rather than just printing a possibly-off-putting disclaimer at the front of the book, prefer to prevent any chance of damaging sales by seamlessly – well, it should be seamless, in the case of Matilda especially, it seems to be pretty clumsy – editing the book itself.

In an ideal-for-the-publishers-world no-one would even notice that this editing had been done, columnists wouldn’t pick up on it and the kids could go on requesting the books and the parents and schools could supply them and nobody would be upset. But this is precisely the type of trivial issue the (here we go again) “anti-woke” lobby loves. It has no major impact on society, no major impact on children and it has nothing to do with any of the big issues facing the modern world, or even just the UK. It also puts the right-wing commentator in the position they love, of being the honourable victims of modern degraded values, defending their beloved past. Plus, in this case there’s even – uniquely I think – an opportunity for them to take what can be seen as the moral high ground without people with opposing political views automatically disagreeing with them. Even I slightly agree with them. My basic feeling is that if books are to be altered and edited, it should be by, or at least with the approval of, the author. But it’s never quite that simple.

The reason I only slightly agree is because the pretended outrage is just as meaningless as the revising of the texts itself, it’s not a governmental, Stalinist act. The new editions of Matilda etc only add to the mountain of existing Matildas, they don’t actually replace it. If the racist parent prefers fully-leaded, stereotype-laden, unreconstructed imperialist nostalgia, it’s childishly simple for them to get it, without even leaving the comfort of their home. Better still, if they have the time and their love of the past stretches to more analogue pursuits, they can try browsing second hand bookshops and charity shops. It’s possible, even in the 2020s, to track down a copy of the original ,1967 pre-movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the most virulently offensive Enid Blyton books, not to mention long out-of-print goodies of the Biggles Exterminates the Foreigners type without too much difficulty. And in many cases one could do it just as cheaply/expensively as by going into Waterstones or WH Smith and buying the latest, watered-down versions.

the big-format illustrated 1967 Charlie I knew as a child

But anyway, books, once owned, have a way of hanging around; I remember being mystified by Mel Stuart’s 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the second time I saw it, at some point in the early 80s. I had known the book well since I was very young and the first time I saw the film, at home, in black and white, I thought everybody looked and sounded wrong, especially Gene Wilder, but that was all. When I saw it again, a while later, in colour, I found to my bemusement that the Oompa-Loompas were orange.* This definitely seemed odd – but even so, it’s not exactly the kind of thing that burns away at you and so it was only this year, when the book caused its latest furore, that I discovered that, although my mother had read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to me in the late ‘70s and then I had read it myself in the early ‘80s, the edition I knew was the large-format 1967 UK hardback edition. This had Faith Jaques’s beautifully detailed illustrations – which is where all of my impressions of the characters still come from – but more importantly, it had the original Oompa-Loompas. A pygmy tribe, “imported” from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle,” they were immediately controversial in the US, where the NAACP understandably took issue with them. Roald Dahl, who presumably wanted the book to sell as well in the US as it did elsewhere, agreed with them (he may have actually seen their point too, but given his character in general I don’t think it does him too much of a disservice to assume the money was the bigger issue) and changed the book. So, no problem there, even if Dahl’s solution – making the Oompa-Loompas a race of blonde, rosy-cheeked white little people, who still live some kind of life of indentured servitude in a chocolate factory – doesn’t seem super-un-problematic when you really think about it; but it was his decision and his book. The orange Oompa-Loompas were a more fantastical way around the problem, and one which enhanced the almost psychedelic edge of the film.

If the intention of publishers in 2023 is to make Roald Dahl nice, they are not only wasting their time, they are killing what it is that kids like about his books in the first place. If children must still read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and I don’t see why they shouldn’t – they are reading a story so mean-spirited and spitefully funny – and so outdated in so many ways – that it doesn’t really bear fixing. Though it was written in the 60s, Charlie’s poverty-stricken childhood with his extended family feels like something from the pre-war era when Dahl was a non-poverty stricken child, as does the book’s Billy Bunter-esque excitement about and fascination with chocolate. Are kids even all that rabidly excited about chocolate these days? And is a man luring kids into a chocolate factory to judge them for their sins something that can or should be made nice? I don’t think that’s an entirely frivolous point; as a child I remember Willy Wonka had the same ambiguous quality as another great figure of children’s literature, Dr Seuss’s the Cat in the Hat; which is where Mel Stuart went wrong, title-wise at least. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is all well and good, but it’s Charlie – a poor, harmless, nice kid who wants some chocolate – that’s the hero, not Wonka, a rich, mischievous adult man whose motives can only be guessed at. And in fact Gene Wilder captures that slightly dangerous quality perfectly. Almost all of Roald Dahl’s books are similarly nasty; but that’s why kids like them. Where necessary, a disclaimer of the ‘this book contains outdated prejudices and stereotypes which may cause offence’ (but hopefully less awkwardly worded) type is surely all that’s necessary. And anyway, where do you stop? Sanitising Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is patronising and weakens the power of Dahl’s writing, but to sanitise The Twits would be to render the whole book pointless.

*I had a similar epiphany when as a young adult I discovered that Bagpuss was pink and not the relatively normal striped ginger cat I had assumed; the joys of growing up black & white in the colour age!

JJ Fortune’s Race Against Time series – good 80s fun

Anyway; the thing that really makes the updating of books pointless is that kids who like to read, tend to read and understand. As a child in the 1980s, I had plenty of entertaining, modern-at-the-time books to read, like the Fighting Fantasy series, the novels of Leon Garfield and Robert Westall or even JJ Fortune’s slightly silly, very cinematic Race Against Time novels, but I also loved books that were much older and felt much older. I loved Capt. WE Johns’ legendary fighter pilot Biggles – especially the WW1-set Biggles books and The Boy Biggles, about the pilot’s childhood adventures in India. I loved Richmal Crompton’s William series (I wonder if William the Dictator (1938), where William and his gang decide to be Nazis is still in print? I hope so) I loved Willard Price’s Adventure series, about American brothers travelling the world to capture animals for zoos and safari parks. I even liked boarding school stories, especially Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books. I also remember very fondly a book called The One-Eyed Trapper by (will look it up) John Morgan Gray (1907-1978; got to love the internet) which was about (actually, the title says it all). Years later at high school, some of the poems of Robert Frost immediately recalled to me the vivid, bracing outdoorsy atmosphere of The One-Eyed Trapper, though I don’t suppose Frost would have appreciated the comparison. I was never much of an Enid Blyton fan, but I did read a couple of her Famous Five and Secret Seven books. My favourite Blytons though were the series about her lesser-known, far more awkwardly-named gang of nosy children, the Five Find-Outers (presumably it was because of that awkwardness that the names of the Five Find-Outers books were slightly bland and anonymous things like The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage etc).

William the Dictator – good 1930s fun

These were books from the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that were set in those eras and written in outdated language and which, as they say, ‘reflected the values and attitudes of the time.’ Relatability is important in fiction up to a point, but it doesn’t need to be literal – children have imaginations after all. I didn’t want William in jeans or Jennings and Darbyshire without their school caps, or wearing trousers instead of shorts. I didn’t need Biggles to talk like a modern pilot (in fact the occasional glossaries of olden-days pilot talk made the books even more entertaining) or the one-eyed trapper to have two eyes and be kind to wildlife. My favourite member of the ‘Five Find-Outers’ was “Fatty”, which is probably not a name you would have given a lead character in a children’s book even in the 1980s. The idea that changing “Fatty” to something more tactful, making him thinner or even just using his “real” first name, Frederick – would make the books more palatable or less damaging to the young readers of today is ridiculous and patronising. And possibly damaging in itself, to the books at least. Children’s books are mostly escapism, but they are also the most easily absorbed kind of education, and a story from the 1940s, set in a version of the 1940s where the kids look and speak more or less like the children of today and nobody is ever prejudiced against anyone else doesn’t tell children anything about the actual 1940s.

I’m reminded of the recent movie adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. In the novel’s sections set in the 1950s, one of its heroes, Mike Hanlon, who is African-American, is mercilessly bullied and abused by racist teens when he’s a kid. In the movie version he’s just as bullied, but without any racist abuse. I understand why that’s being done – more explicit racism onscreen is obviously not the solution to any of the world’s problems, especially in a story which only has one substantial Black character – but at the same time, making fictional bullies and villains more egalitarian in their outlook than they were in the source material doesn’t feel like the solution to anything either. But even more to the point, there’s only so much altering you can do to a piece of writing without altering its essential character. There are many problems with the much-publicised passage in the latest edition of Roald Dahl’s Matilda where references to Kipling and so forth are replaced with references to Jane Austen etc, but the biggest one is that it just doesn’t read like Roald Dahl anymore.

All of which is to say that, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, a third party “fixing” literature (or any art form for that matter) has its limitations. I remember reading an interview with a director of the British Board of Film Classification (Ken Penry maybe?) back in the early ‘90s, discussing John McNaughton’s notorious Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. He was concerned about the film – though he didn’t dismiss it as worthless trash – but his main worry was that it couldn’t be meaningfully cut to reduce its horrific elements because it was the movie’s tone, rather than its content that was worrisome. A few years earlier, the BBFC had unwittingly made Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop far more brutal by editing a few seconds from the scene where the giant robot ED-209 shoots an executive for a ridiculously long time in a botched demonstration. In the original cut, the shooting goes on for so ludicrously long that it becomes pure black comedy; but cut down a little it becomes a lot less funny and therefore far nastier and (negating the point of the edit) more traumatic for a young audience. There is a reasonable argument that seeing someone get shot to death by a giant robot should be traumatic, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the BBFC’s motive in making the cuts, since the movie was rated 18 and theoretically not to be seen by children anyway.

A children’s novel (or at least a novel given to children to read) that comes under fire for mostly understandable reasons in American schools is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But though the casual use of ‘the N word’ is possibly removable, what would removing it achieve? What people are objecting to hopefully isn’t really just the language, it’s the era and the society that Mark Twain was writing about. How could you and why would you want to remove that context from the book? Making it into a story where African-Americans are, in the narrative, demonstrably second class citizens but no one ever refers to their status by using nasty names seems in a way more problematic than the racist language itself. Similarly, The Catcher in the Rye has been controversial for decades, but what difference would taking the offensive words out of it make? The only real solution, editing-wise for those who object to the ‘offensive’ material in the book would be to make it so that Holden Caulfield doesn’t get expelled from school, doesn’t hang around bars drinking while underage, doesn’t hire a prostitute and get threatened by her pimp, doesn’t continuously rant about everyone he meets; to make him happier in fact. Well, that’s all very nice and laudable in its way and it’s theoretically what Holden himself would want, but it’s not what JD Salinger would have wanted and whatever book came out of it wouldn’t be The Catcher in the Rye.

Fathom Five 80s rewrite – terrible cover, good book

But, since there is no Stalinist attempt to destroy the books of the past, it’s not all negative. To go back to the Fathom Five example; as a kid there was something fascinating about the phantom “Jack” and had the internet existed at the time I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist trying to track down an un-revised edition of the book.  I still might – but would it be worth it? Well possibly; authors and artists tampering with their old work is always fascinating, but usually it’s the revised version that is less satisfying. In the preface to the 1928 edition of his then ten-year-old novel Tarr, Wyndham Lewis wrote;

turning back to [Tarr] I have always felt that as regards form it should not appear again as it stood, for it was written with extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence. Accordingly for the present edition I have throughout finished what was rough and given the narrative everywhere a greater precision.

Reading that, you already know that the 1918 text is better, and it is. Lewis was a restless reviser of his written works, but for every improvement he made – and he did make many – he lost some of the explosive quality that keeps his often over-elaborate writing alive. As with Lewis, William Wordsworth tampered with his The Prelude – Growth of a Poet’s Mind throughout his life. Like Lewis, some of the changes he made were less to do with the character of the poem than the evolving character of the man who wrote it. The Prelude is an autobiographical work and when Wordsworth first completed the poem in 1805, he was in his mid-30s, a successful youngish poet with some lingering radical tendencies. When he completed the final version, somewhere around 1840, he was a respected, conservative and establishment figure with very mixed feelings about his wilder youth. Both versions are equally valid in their different ways and if the later version doesn’t really eclipse the first – and has shades of the orange Oompa-Loompa redesign about it – the reader is glad to have both. The point with these examples is that all remain available; if Wyndham Lewis had managed to destroy all the copies of the 1918 Tarr or Wordsworth had somehow “taped over” the 1805 Prelude the world would be a poorer place. When it comes to reworking previous triumphs (or failures) literature is no different from the other arts. Some visual artists – Leonardo Da Vinci is the classic example – can never stop messing with their work, and the film industry (think of the phenomenon of the “Director’s cut”) and the music industry frequently have these moments too. In 1988, after 8 years of complaining about the cheap production of their debut album, Iron Maiden finally decided to re-record its opening track, “Prowler” with their then-current line-up and the expensive studios now available to them. Even if original singer Paul Di-Anno hadn’t sung the song better (but he did), “Prowler ’88,” oddly tired and flabby sounding, would still be vastly inferior to the basic-but-vital original; sometimes artists just aren’t the best judges of their own work. U2’s latest venture, essentially re-recording and reworking their greatest hits, has received mixed reviews; but though one has to accept in good faith that the band thinks it was a worthwhile exercise, it’s unlikely that they have enough confidence in the new versions to replace the originals on their actual Greatest Hits from here on in.

Lord of the Rings in drafts

A similar, but backwards version of the above has taken place with JRR Tolkien. A whole industry has been generated from his decades-long struggle with The Lord of the Rings, but the difference here is that the earlier material was only posthumously published. Tolkien himself probably wouldn’t have been hugely enamoured with the idea of the public reading about the adventures of Bingo Bolger-Baggins, “Trotter” et al, but as a fan it’s fascinating seeing the slow evolution of not only the book and its characters, but Middle Earth itself, with its re-drawn maps and growing sense of newly-uncovered history. In this case though, Tolkien was  the best judge of his work; The History of Middle Earth is vast, an even more, but very differently, epic journey than The Lord of the Rings, but the final draft has, unlike the 1928 Tarr, a sense of life and completeness missing from all of the previous drafts and half-drafts. Partly no doubt this was because – again unlike Tarr – The Lord of the Rings remained a work-in-progress and Tolkien’s main focus for many years – the characters and setting ‘grew in the telling’ (as Tolkien puts it) and reached a kind of three-dimensional quality that is missing from most epic fantasy novels, despite Tolkien’s reticence in so many areas, notably (but not only) sex.

Fiona Shaw’s superb Richard II (1995)

Alongside the concern/faux concern of “wokifying” children’s books, there’s a similar list of complaints from the usual people about the “wokifying” of TV and film adaptations of classic literature (or just literature), but here I think they are only wrong with nothing to redeem their wrongness. Firstly, because adaptations are always collaborations – and in a movie adaptation of, say, Barnaby Rudge, the artist isn’t Dickens, whose work is already complete, but those making the film. Adaptations are just that, they adapt, they don’t and can’t precisely transcribe from one art form into another. Early-Primary-School-me thought that Gene Wilder was the wrong guy to play Willy Wonka – adult me can see that in the most important way, the spirit-of-the-text way, he’s completely right. He just doesn’t look like the illustrations I knew or sound the way I thought he should sound. I would say the same (in the capturing-the-spirit sense) about Dev Patel’s David in The Personal History of David Copperfield and Fiona Shaw’s Richard II or the fact that Tilda Swinton could give a note-perfect performance as all the incarnations of the title character in Sally Potter’s Orlando. Colour and/or gender-blind casting (and all the variations thereof) can give directors and performers ways of finding the real heart of a story – or just revitalising something that has grown stale through familiarity – that conventional casting might not – and unlike replacing the word ‘fat’ with ‘stout,’ ‘large’ or ‘fluffy’ in a kid’s book, it keeps the work alive for a new audience, or even for an old one.

Secondly (I think I wrote ‘firstly’ way back there somewhere?), time, scholarship and cultural evolution give us a greater understanding of the context of a novel or play. It’s now clear that Britain, through the 20th century, back into Victorian and even medieval times and beyond, had a much broader ethnic and cultural mix than you might ever suspect from the country’s artistic record. And with that understanding, it becomes clear that characters that occasionally did appear in British fiction of the 19th century and earlier, whether Jewish, Chinese, Black, gay, whatever; tend to be represented as stereotypes to stress their otherness, but in those stories that otherness has grown rather than lessened over the years as the real-life otherness diminishes. In addition, through the passage of time, the gradations of apparently homogenous British characters, even in relatively recent fiction, tend to blend into each other.

Nowadays, Dickens seems to many of us to be full of rich and poor characters, but for Dickens’s audience the social differences between the upper, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, working and under-classes would seem far more marked than they do today and therefore even a caricature like Fagin in Oliver Twist would be part of a far richer tapestry of caricatures than now, when he stands out in ever more stark relief. We can’t, hopefully don’t want to and anyway shouldn’t change the novels themselves – indeed, the idea of a modern writer being tasked with toning down the character of Fagin or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice highlights how ridiculous the treatment of children’s books is, as well as the devalued position they have in the pantheon of literature. But in adapting the works for the screen, the truer a picture we can paint of the society of the time when the works were written or are set, the more accurately we can capture what contemporary audiences would have experienced and perhaps gain more of an insight into the author’s world-view too.

Thirdly, and on a more trivial level; why not make adaptations more free and imaginative, not only to give a more accurate and nuanced picture of the past, or to ‘breathe new life’ etc, but just for the joyous, creative sake of it? The source material is untouched after all. Fairly recently, a comedian/actor that I had hitherto respected, complained online about the inclusion of actors of colour in an episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor travels back in time to London in some past era, on the grounds that it was ‘unrealistic.’ Well, if you can readily accept the time-travelling, gender-swapping Timelord from Gallifrey and its logic-defying time/space machine, but only for as long as olden days London is populated entirely by white people – as it probably wasn’t, from at least the Roman period onwards – then I don’t know what to tell you.

So maybe the answer is yes, change the books if you must; remove the old words and references, make them into something new and palatably bland as fashion dictates – just don’t destroy the old ones and please, always acknowledge the edits. Let the children of the future wonder about that strange note that says the book they are reading isn’t the same book it used to be, and maybe they will search out the old editions and be educated, shocked or amused in time; it’s all good. But until it happens to obscure books too, let’s not pretend the motives for ‘fixing’ them are purely humanitarian.

 

music of my mind (whether I like it or not)

Since the age of 13 or so, music has been an important part of my life. I have written about it for various places, including here, here, here, here and, um, here, but more than that, I listen to music that I don’t have to write about pretty much every day.

I was going to write something about my favourite songs or whatever (and may do still), but thinking about it made me tune into the music that plays in my head, almost constantly and seemingly involuntarily, as the general background to my day. Involuntarily, because when tuned into, it becomes obvious that quite a bit of it is stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily listen to at all. Trying to keep track of the music of your mind is difficult though, because as soon as one focuses on it, one begins to/you begin to – that is, in my case I begin to influence it. Even when it is music that you like and listen to by choice, it’s rarely anything that seems specific to the present moment in a movie soundtrack kind of way – at the moment for instance, it’s Deirdre by the Beach Boys. It’s January (cue January by Pilot – sometimes the conscious mind and/or context does influence these things), so not really a season associated with the Beach Boys, I’m not especially in a Beach Boys kind of mood, I don’t know anyone called Deirdre; but the subconscious mind has determined that that’s what we are playing right now. Playing, but also listening to; it’s peculiar when you think about it.

Though the trombone on Deirdre (which I love) prevents it from being a “cool” choice, this could of course be an opportunity to display cooler-than-thou hipsterism, but as you’ll see in the (mostly DON’T) playlist below, lack of conscious control seems to equate to lack of quality control too. With that in mind, I won’t include things that popped into my head fleetingly, like the immortal  Everybody Gonfi Gon by 2 Cowboys or jingles from advertisements by Kwik Fit (or, more locally, Murisons, whatever that is/was). Not that the songs below have all appeared in their entirety – in some cases I don’t even know the whole song, in several I only know a few lines of the lyrics. So anyway, here – as comprehensively as I can make it – is what I have “heard” today, with notes where there’s anything to say and concluding thoughts at the end…

The 5th January 2023 being-playedlist – *warning* contains actual songs

Thank You for Being a Friend (Theme from the Golden Girls).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7AXRABSng

I have no idea where this came from or why I should apparently be thinking of it, but it’s been a regular on the ‘playlist’ this week. I’ve noticed that some songs stay in rotation for a while, sometimes evolving along the way. A key feature of these kinds of songs is that the ‘voice’ your brain chooses for them and the lyrics etc might be quite different from the real ones, especially when it’s a song you don’t actually know the lyrics of. I haven’t seen The Golden Girls for decades, or heard the theme tune (I included the video without playing it), so this seems an especially odd one. But perhaps it’s an early morning thing; while writing this it occurred to me that the theme from Happy Days has been popping into my head in the shower a lot recently.

Wham! – Last Christmas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8gmARGvPlI

It feels like extremely bad taste to be subjected to one of my least favourite festive songs, after Christmas, especially since I seem to have successfully avoided this one last year – but oh well, something in the Golden Girls theme apparently suggests it, since they tend to occur together.

Frank Sinatra – Young At Heart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZRn4auk4PQ

I’ve never intentionally listened to this song, but I guess it’s part of “the culture.” But at least it’s less mysterious than the Golden Girls theme; on my early morning walk there’s a creaky gate that makes a note that somehow puts this song in my mind, though it took me a few days to realise that’s what was happening.

Magnum – Just Like an Arrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJeLByGsOGo

I like this song – and cheesy 80s Magnum generally – a lot, but it’s another one I haven’t intentionally listened to for a long time. Maybe this is my brain’s way of telling me to revisit it?

Jim Diamond – Hi Ho Silver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6mjSAgxusM

Still stuck in the 80s, but this time in the company of a song I loathe and detest; why brain, why? Isn’t this another one that’s TV-related in some way? John Logie Baird has a lot to answer for, clearly

Men at Work – Down Under

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfR9iY5y94s

*Still* in the 80s, but at least it’s a song I don’t dislike. I’m not sure if I’ve ever deliberately listened to this song (you didn’t need to “back in the day”, you heard it everywhere) but it’s been a regular visitor to my brain for many years. There was even a harrowing few weeks (or months – it seemed like a long time) – when it formed a weird medley in my mind with Paul Simon’s Call Me Al (one of the few of his songs I actually dislike). Except that Call me Al had different lyrics at various points. I remember that the flute (recorder?) part of Down Under came in just after the last line of the chorus. Since that time, whenever I’ve heard that song I’ve been half-surprised that the segue doesn’t happen.

The Supremes – Baby Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAWSiWtUK2s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAWSiWtUK2s

At least most of these are cheerful songs I guess? This one always makes me think of that objectively quite strange scene in Quentin Tarantino’s (in my opinion) best movie by miles, Jackie Brown

Mull Historical Society – Barcode Bypass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StWYuUbl4M8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StWYuUbl4M8

Oh well, they can’t all be cheerful. I’m guessing the opening line “let me get my gloves/and walk the dogs for miles” has something to do with the inclusion of this one. I like it, but the weary melancholy is not at all the mood of most of these.

Slayer – Raining Blood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy3BOmvLf2w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy3BOmvLf2w

???Why not, I suppose?

King Crimson – Fallen Angel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLlmbCkb3As

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLlmbCkb3As

Mysterious: I like bits and pieces of King Crimson but I’m surprised to find that I know this song at all, since I don’t even own the album it’s on (Red, 1974) or any compilations etc. I wonder how I know it? I had to look it up from a fragment of lyric that I knew, but sure enough, it’s Fallen Angel. I thought the only song of that title that I knew was the arguably superior one by Poison, but that’s an argument for another day

Souls of Mischief – ’93 ‘Til Infinity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJc2NYwHjw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXJc2NYwHjw

What this has to do with anything is anyone’s guess; I like it, it’s a classic and all, but I think I heard an alarm of some kind in the distance that somehow morphed into that noise in the background during the “Dial the seven digits” bit. But more importantly, is Tajai really wearing a cricket jumper? And if so, how come he looks cool doing so?

Which brings us up to date and Deirdre: but what other wonders lie ahead?

The Beach Boys – Deirdre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsDYy1l6TQU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsDYy1l6TQU

Conclusion: Hm. I don’t know: the subconscious mind is almost a separate entity with different and broader tastes than its conscious host? Or it has a masochistic streak? Or absorbing decades of unwanted stimuli from pop culture means that there has to be a continual processing (with some regrettable but hopefully harmless leakage) in order to function in any kind of normal, rational way, like an overspilling of the dream state into the waking one? Or maybe the brain is constantly making observations and connections that are necessary for its normal functioning (things like intuition and mood) but which the conscious brain has little or no access to except in this oblique way. A lot of this stuff is from the 80s, when I was growing up and absorbing knowledge etc: whatever; being human is strange sometimes. Hope you’re enjoying whatever your brain is treating you to today!

bounders in oiks’ clothing – the reign of the ordinary bloke

 

“His manner was so friendly that I forgot to put on my cockney accent, and he looked closely at me, and said how painful it must be for a man of my stamp, etc. Then he said, ‘I say, you won’t be offended, will you? Do you mind taking this?’ ‘This’ was a shilling, with which we bought some tobacco and had our first smoke that day. This was the only time in the whole journey when we managed to tap money.”

George Orwell, ‘Hop-Picking’, October 1931. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940. Penguin, 1968, p. 83

Clearly, the old school tie works, even when it isn’t worn. Incidents like this pop up several times in George Orwell’s writings of the 30s, in articles like “The Spike” and in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) etc., and they always make him uncomfortable. The reminder of the deference that he was, in his original identity as old Etonian Eric Blair, accustomed to and had been trained for in his daily life was both welcome and unwelcome. Unwelcome, because firstly, it was embarrassing to be ‘unmasked’ in front of people with whom he had become friends precisely because at the level of society at which they existed – and in these writings it is the poorest of the working class or the unemployed and destitute – there were no class distinctions anymore; as he says in Down and Out in Paris and London, regarding a typical London lodging house:

All races, even black and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu he addressed me as ‘tum’ – a thing to make one shudder, if t had been India. We had got below the range of colour prejudice.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Gollancz 1933, p. 150

Though Orwell was sometimes taken aback by the levelling effect that poverty had, he welcomes it too – his occasional unmasking as a “gentleman” was an unpleasant reminder of his abandoned life as a police officer and tool of colonial oppression in Burma. But it was also useful in a way – not just because money and gentle treatment was welcome after weeks or months of hardship, but because it was a stark and simple illustration of exactly the kind of injustice, inequality and disparity he sought to draw attention to with his writing. Orwell is happy to write openly about his deception, partly because it was essentially harmless and necessary, in order to truly experience the kind of life he wanted to write about. But perhaps he was also comfortable doing so because, much as he would have liked to have ‘proletarian’ readers, – and probably did have a few – he was mainly writing for an audience of his peers; the political class who could, if they really wanted to, improve the lives of the vast, faceless mass of unemployed and homeless that they were no doubt aware of, but preferred to think about, if at all, as feckless layabouts who probably deserved their lowly status.

There were of course many working-class readers in the 1930s, possibly even more than there are now, given the enormous output of publishers of what Orwell calls “cheap novels” in that era, not to mention the libraries, newspapers and periodicals designed to cater for every possible niche hobby, that he lists in his 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies‘. In fact, he notes in Down and Out in Paris and London, that even the unemployed, homeless underclass of itinerant tramps were voracious readers of Buffalo Bill novels and the like, whenever they could get hold of them. Of course, even the most ‘proletarian’ newspapers and publishing houses were owned in the 1930s by people with backgrounds similar to Orwell’s – and by and large they still are. Likewise, at that point it would probably have seemed natural that it was this same class who were to be found running the more recently established broadcasters, notably the BBC. Natural, because before WW2, the role of the upper class was still very much seen as ‘the management’ of the British Empire with the middle class as administrators, but both far outnumbered by the working class who did the work (well, management and administration are work too, but you know what I mean).

What might – or on reflection, might not – have surprised Orwell is that 70+ years after his death, when class differences have been (or appear to have been) diminished, the leaders, for a while, of the relatively extreme left and right-wings of British politics and who appealed openly to the working classes should have been ex-public schoolboys called Nigel and Jeremy. It might surprise him too, to find that members of the openly-elitist public-school educated minority to which he belonged would still be going around pretending to be ‘ordinary blokes,’* almost like he did, in newspapers and especially on television. There are differences in the 21st century; the working class, although now interchangeable to a far greater extent with the middle class, are by virtue of numbers, the main demographic catered to by TV and so whereas Orwell was trying to blend with his social inferiors to prove a point to his peers, undercover toffs today are mostly trying to blend with them in order to appeal directly to, and ultimately financially benefit from, those working class people.

* even as a working class person I inwardly cringe writing “ordinary bloke,” but I think it’s the correct phrase in this instance for what these people think they represent. But bloody hell, “ordinary bloke” – from here on in I’ll just write “OB”

Some observations; the incognito upper class type seems mostly to be a male thing. The female counterparts of these kinds of commentators and presenters are there – Kirstie Allsop or Mary Berry spring to mind, but unlike the men they seem content to be unselfconsciously posh, which is fair enough.

There are various different versions of the type. Some are benign and essentially innocent; people who, one assumes, would have been dropouts whether or not opportunities in TV beckoned and whose scruffy clothes and sloppy speech were probably originally adopted to annoy their parents or just as a way of opting out of the expectations that come along with class privilege (but you get to keep the privilege anyway, so… )

Since at least the 1960s, the pop and rock music business has always been full of these kind of people – and since the 60s too, their opposite has existed; the vastly wealthy who weren’t born into an upper class background. It’s possible that these people, rock stars and entrepreneurs act in some ways as role models to the posh OBs

.

on the left, the standard uniform of the privately-educated “ordinary bloke” On the right, the more raffish, bohemian version of the same. Big posh expensive scarf optional but works with either.

The kind of TV shows made by the benign-dropout demographic tend to reflect a somewhat genteel outsider status* and are often geared towards niche hobbies and interests, so that the whole thing has the aura of the upper class dilletante of the 20s, dabbling in publishing modernist poetry or abstract art. This is a public role in a way, but although it allows the presenter to share his views on the world and life in general, it feels essentially more like a sharing of enthusiasms than anything overtly or covertly patronising or manipulative.

*I do realise that every word of this is probably wildly unfair and doesn’t take into account any of the genuine struggles that come with class expectations etc: oh well.

Where it feels less benign and perhaps more deceptive is when the “OB”-ness of the presenter is an embodiment of what he thinks an actual “ordinary bloke” is like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the evidence suggests that the posh public schoolboy assumes that the OB is what the tabloid press – also, it should be noted, owned by posh ex-public schoolboys – tries to condition them to be. No doubt there are working class people who are old fashioned, conservative, unreconstructedly misogynistic, knee-jerk racist xenophobes, impatient with anything that might seem effete – but it’s also clear that the tabloid press wants them to be that way and does what it can to continue and spread these attitudes. Which is logical enough; the whole point of the class system is to preserve itself and ensure the survival of privilege, blood lines and all that crap. An interesting question – which I don’t know the answer to – is whether it is it self-awareness or self-deception that makes the ersatz OB hide his upper-class accent for TV purposes. Either way it’s probably a wise move, because if there’s one thing that seems risibly effete to the kind of proletarian the tabloid press imagines, it’s the particular kind of upper class speech nurtured in the most expensive and exclusive public schools.

It seems that on the whole, the public is pretty much okay with the fake OB as entertainer and cultural commentator; except for those regular instances when he goes “too far.” But the whole raison d’etre of this kind of public figure is to test the boundaries of what is acceptable, always with the safety net that the whole persona is so obviously contrived that nothing they say can ever be taken seriously, surely? But it’s notable that the self-consciously “outrageous” incidents that pop up from time to time, that seem to simultaneously mark out where those boundaries are and make reactionary attitudes just a little bit more acceptable, always come from the same place. It’s that sweet spot where the tabloid-owner’s classist projection of the “ordinary bloke” – impatient with having to respect people, constantly at war with ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ – happens to coincide and blend with the underlying upper class snobbery and prejudice that we aren’t supposed to notice, because of that bluff OB exterior. Class prerogatives, racism, classism, the fear of privilege being eroded, the snooty, outraged ‘don’t-you-know-who-I-am?’ loathing of having to deal with or, god forbid, defer to social or racial inferiors; the fear of change. But never mind, it’s all just a joke, innit, and if you take it seriously then you are a puritanical killjoy and who would ever want to be that? No self-respecting ordinary bloke, anyway.

 

gateways to horror: the watch house by robert westall

 

What was the first thing that scared you? The answer to that question is no doubt buried deep in your subconscious and could be almost anything. What was the first thing you sought out because you wanted to be scared? That should be easier to answer but for me at least, it isn’t really.

Well, there was Halloween, and Guy Fawkes Night still used to have a certain frisson in the days when effigies were burned on communal bonfires; an archaic-sounding memory now that November 5th is marked, if at all, by a few fireworks and now that Guy Fawkes has a new life as the face of anonymous protest, thanks to the weak movie adaptation of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel V for Vendetta. Whether many of the people using the likeness of “V” know that the real Fawkes’s aim was to restore an absolutist Catholic monarchy, rather than to restore power to the people, or whether most of them even know who Guy Fawkes was, I can’t say.

the terrifying Groovie Ghoulies, which dates from 1971 but was still being aired a decade later

At some point in early childhood I became aware – as we all do – of the classic horror villains; Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, the mummy. Those same creatures in fact that, as horror film-loving adults, are famous as ‘the Universal monsters’ – an appropriate/fortuitous name as they are or at least were a kind of lingua franca for kids in the western world. But at the same time, it’s hard to say when exactly one became aware of them. I was bought (and still own), Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual (more about that here) for Christmas when I was eight – but that was hardly my introduction to Dracula. So what was? The earliest memories of these icons that I can pinpoint are parodies, things like The Munsters which, though already a couple of decades old were still regularly aired when I was a child. Then there was Carry On Screaming and of course specifically made-for-children cartoons like the Groovie Ghoulies – also of a certain vintage by then and the more up-to-date The Drac Pack. But although these were all light and funny, even when watching them as a young child, Dracula/Frankenstein/The Mummy etc remained first and foremost horror characters and the enjoyment of those comical versions depended on knowing about the ‘real’ ones. I remember thinking that The Drac Pack wasn’t scary enough. But compared to what?

the somehow very 80s Drac Pack (1980)

In Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual – surely aimed squarely at the hardback annual audience (was this only a UK thing?), the same kids who bought, or were given, the Grange Hill Annual, the Beano or Dandy or Jackie or the annual Blue Peter book. And yet, in the Dracula annual there are beautifully drawn comic strip adaptations – as faithful as they can be for their brief length – of a couple of classic Hammer horror movies. Dracula (1958) and Twins of Evil (1971) were “x-rated” at the time of their release, but by the 80s would probably have been rated 15 – but even so, the comic adaptations come complete with titillating glimpses of nudity and splashes of blood that weren’t typical for kids annuals, to say the least. I hadn’t seen the movies at the time but I remember that even then I was aware of Hammer films, and thought of them as something old and harmless, rather than actually scary. I’d seen bits of them late at night on TV, mainly sequels; I saw Dracula, Prince of Darkness and The Scars of Dracula years before I ever saw the original, superior 1958 Dracula, but nothing from them sticks out much in my mind so, I can’t imagine I was particularly scared by them.

the edition of Shaun Hutson’s Spawn that nearly made me vomit the first time I read it

But at some point, as an older but still pre-teen child, I became a horror fan. While the theory of gateway drugs has been discredited regarding actual drugs, there’s a lot to be said for the idea in different contexts – as a teenage heavy metal fan you (it seemed inevitably) wanted to find music that was heavier, faster, more harsh. As a young reader of what passed for children’s horror fiction (I have the vaguest memories of enjoying Terrance Dicks’s Wereboy! and Cry Vampire! as mentioned here) you equally wanted to find ‘harder stuff’ – if not more scary, then at least more nasty and graphic. Which is not to say that (in either literature or music) you inevitably stick with the hard stuff; my liking for Stephen King long outlasted my liking for Shaun Hutson. In Hutson’s defence, his books were, as a teenager, ‘cool’ in a way that Stephen King’s only sporadically were, and although I don’t remember ever being actually scared by a Shaun Hutson book, he had other virtues; the pace, the energy, the humour – and to this day the opening of his 1983 classic Spawn (mentioned in various places, notably here) – my first encounter with his work – is the only time that reading a horror novel has made me feel physically sick. No wonder he became a favourite of my teenage years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; if Shaun Hutson marked the zenith of my teenage horror addiction, the initial drug that set me on that road to excess happened a good few years earlier. There were children’s books borrowed from the library which for the most part didn’t really stay with me, although I remember the cover of a book of ghost stories I read then (surely edited by Peter Haining) vividly. As far as being scared goes, the things I remember most from childhood fall into the category of genuine not-fun fear (fear of older kids, skinheads, stuff like that) but also fun real-life fear; walking by a house where a ‘bad man’ lived, being on the streets at Halloween or (to some extent) Guy Fawkes night. The decline of November 5th is often attributed to the tightening of safety rules around fireworks, but I’d say its unique atmosphere actually died out just before that, when the making and burning of effigies (I still knew what “Penny for the Guy” was but I don’t remember kids of my generation doing that) was replaced by the bigger and more exciting (but less intimate and far less peculiar) spectacle of bigger and better communal firework displays.

the first horror movie that really made an impression on me – The Omen (1976)

I was still at Primary school when I saw the first horror film that seemed genuinely creepy to me, The Omen. But it was essentially a dead end for a few years as primary school kids then had no way of accessing real horror movies, at least not without the collusion of adults and a budget beyond what I think was normal in my peer group. So my main route to being what could be termed a horror fan (though I don’t think it would occur to me at that point that it was a specific genre I was drawn towards) was through reading. There’s another story to be told that begins with the hugely popular Fighting Fantasy series of game books, which leads (with some help from Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie; an important horror icon in his own way) towards HP Lovecraft, but for me, I think the real gateway drug that led me directly to Stephen King and James Herbert was Robert Westall.

the TV tie-in paperback edition of The Machine Gunners

Westall is best remembered now as a children’s author who wrote about WW2, and especially the Blitz. His most important book will probably always be his first, the iconic 1975 novel The Machine Gunners, winner of the Carnegie medal, which was made into an equally iconic TV show. And it deserves its fame – its story of a gang of Tyneside (actually, Garside; like most of his books The Machine Gunners is set in the fictional town of Garmouth, standing in for his own home town of Tynemouth) teenagers who ‘liberate’ a machine gun from a crashed German bomber plane and set up their own fortress to defend themselves and their town against the predicted Nazi invasion, in the face of what they see as the inadequate response of adult society to the situation. It remains both gripping and moving and is expertly told by a writer who had been a child during the war and was able to give a vivid account of the child’s eye view of ‘the home front,’ but who had also been a teacher with a teacher’s insight into children and their behaviour. Like most of the best children’s fiction it never talks down to its audience, and even allows its protagonists to swear when the realism of the story demands it, which was, quaintly, hugely impressive to children of the ‘80s.

The Machine Gunners TV series was broadcast when I was 9 and I first read the book around that time. It’s not a horror novel in any sense, but there are horrific elements within it. Aside from the general dread and tension of wartime, one scene in particular made a big impression on me, not only because of the gore, but also the subtly ominous build-up to the moment of horror, something which Westall would employ even more effectively in his horror-oriented novels. Near the start of the book, its hero Chas McGill has ventured into “The Wood” which

“was bleak and ugly[…] Some said it was haunted, but Chas had never found anything there but a feeling of cold misery, which wasn’t exciting like headless horsemen. Still, it was an oddly discouraging sort of place” (Machine Gunners, 1975, p.13)

This time though, Chas does find something; the remains of the tail end of a German bomber plane which has been shot down, but which still has its machine gun attached. He climbs the wreckage to get the gun, and the description of what happens next stayed with me for years:

“He peered over the edge of the cockpit.
The gunner was sitting there, watching him. One hand, in a soft fur mitt, was stretched up as if to retrieve the gun; the other lay in his overalled lap. … His right eye, pale grey, watched through the goggle-glass tolerantly and a little sadly. He looked a nice man, young.
The glass of the other goggle was gone. Its rim was thick with sticky red, and inside was a seething mass of flies, which rose and buzzed angrily at Chas’s arrival, then sank back into the goggle again.
For a terrible moment, Chas thought the Nazi was alive, that the mitted hand would reach out and grab him. Then, even worse, he knew he was dead.” (Machine Gunners 1975 p15)


After The Machine Gunners, the next Westall book I read was his excellent ‘Brave New 1984’-style dystopia Futuretrack 5 – again, not horror, but often horrifying, especially the scene near the beginning where the narrator Henry Kitson, head boy at an expensive public school, first becomes aware of the very different lives lived beyond the boundaries of his own privileged existence, and which for me entirely overshadowed the whole book when I first read it:

“… Peering through my jungle, I saw a man with no nose.
He’d had a nose; I could see where it had been. Now he just had two holes to breathe through. He’d no eyebrows either. Just purple rings around his eyes, making them look tiny and staring.”
(Futuretrack 5, 1985, p. 18)

This is Kitson’s first sight of an “Unem”, one of the army of unemployed who is killed shortly afterwards by the authorities. When Kitson asks his father what an Unem is (children asking adults awkward and difficult questions is a recurring theme throughout Westall’s books for children), the reply is chilling;

Shut up’, shouted my gentle father. ‘All you need to know is this – if you ever tell anybody what happened, you won’t have a home or a father or a mother.’ (Futuretrack 5, 1985, p.19-20)

After Futuretrack 5 I read as many Robert Westall books as I could get my hands on, and four in particular, all of which fit more or less within the horror genre, have stayed with me and at times unnerved me probably as much any book I’ve ever read has. In fact, they remain creepy now, if read in the right frame of mind, and are for me the most enjoyable of Westall’s many good books. Those four are The Wind Eye (1976), The Watch House (1977, now scandalously out of print), The Devil on the Road (1978; ditto) and The Scarecrows (1981), which, like The Machine Gunners, won the Carnegie medal. The Wind Eye is probably the least good of the four, but it has some powerful scenes. The action, which involves the bleak Northumbrian coastline, time travel, satanic goats and St Cuthbert, takes place when a troubled family (the central characters are three children from two broken marriages, whose incompatible parents have recently married) go to stay in the house of a distant and eccentric relative who has disappeared and been declared dead. But one of the book’s most effective moments comes right at the beginning, before the family even reaches the predictably ramshackle and spooky house:

“Oh, I’m shocking our little Christian here. So unlike her beloved Father. Don’t be such a prig, Beth. It doesn’t mean a thing.” And she placed her blue shoe on the black marble slab.
Nothing moved; nothing fell. But in that instant Beth knew that someone had become aware of them.” (The Wind Eye, 1976, p.12)

This anticipates some of Westall’s most creepy moments, especially a key scene in The Scarecrows, but although The Wind Eye builds to an appropriately stormy and tempestuous climax, The Watch House is far more effectively chilling throughout, probably because, like Westall’s later horror-oriented novels, the action revolves around a single, complex and isolated character rather than a group.

the sadly weak 1988 TV adaptation of The Watch House is still worth a look for lovers of eerie kids TV

The Watch House, which, like The Machine Gunners, was the subject of a TV series – though a sadly inferior and often laughable one – is the most traditional of Westall’s horror novels. The book is a kind of haunted house story, where a troubled teenage girl, away from home while her parents go through a difficult separation, becomes the focus of ghostly activity. The haunting initially centres around the Watch House, the somewhat dilapidated home of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade, a kind of down-at-heel, local RNLI founded when the town was still a busy fishing port.

The atmosphere, landscape and ingredients of the story are established with skillful economy within the first few pages as the heroine Anne, driven by her spoiled and unsympathetic mother, arrives in Garmouth, where she is to be dumped on her mother’s old nanny for the holidays while the separation is hammered out at home. Garmouth, already depicted in The Machine Gunners as a town whose best years perhaps lay behind it, even in the 40s, is seen in more detail here. It’s a typical fishing town, still busy but slightly dowdy in the recession years of 1970s Britain. Decay is everywhere; Anne is introduced early on to the Black Middens, great rocks in the estuary of the Gar, historically the source of the shipwrecks which are at the book’s heart, but now tamed by great concrete piers. A sea wall, begun but discontinued when funding ran out, snakes along the foot of the cliffs on which the Watch House stands. The cliffs are crumbling, as are the ruins of a medieval priory with its slightly dilapidated coastal graveyard; “The sea must eat away the cliff, thought Anne. Some wild nights, bones long buried in earth must receive final burial in sea.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10)

And then of course there’s the Watch House itself, established almost immediately as a sinister, but fascinating and alluring presence:

“The road ended at the Watch House, which loomed over them as they got out of the car. Built of long white planks, sagging with the years, it had a maritime look. Like a mastless, roofed-in schooner becalmed in a sea of dead grass. Through its windows showed a dark clutter of things that couldn’t be recognised. This clutter and a lack of curtains made the windows look like eyes in a white planked face.” … “The Watch House was well-named. It did seem to watch you. But it was only the effect of dark windows in white walls.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10-11)

For the first two parts of the novel, the Watch House is at the centre of the supernatural action. A working base for the now-rarely-needed Life Brigade, by this time a group of old, retired men, it also houses their memorabilia. Like the house in The Wind Eye it’s full of fascinating curios. But whereas the house had belonged to one man with a fascination for the past, the Watch House is a repository for generations’ worth of knick-knacks; old photographs, items rescued from shipwrecks, ship’s figureheads, even the bones of the dead found among the Black Middens but never identified. Initially a project for Anne to pass the time, the cleaning, organising and documenting of the Watch House’s contents becomes an obsession and initiates the connection between Anne and a ghostly presence, known affectionately to the members of the Brigade, as ‘the Old Feller.’ Hitherto known and only half believed-in as a somewhat playful spirit who knocks things over and leaves messages in the dust, when Anne arrives his messages become frequent and unambiguously urgent and personal; they are a cry for help.

the Puffin Plus edition of the Watch House that I first read at Primary School

Anne’s status as a sympathetic outsider, as well as the somewhat lonely figure at is reinforced throughout the novel, where the other characters are almost all arranged around her in paired opposites. There are Purdie and Arthur, the elderly couple she is staying with, she old fashioned and disapproving, he mischievous and childlike; the friends Anne makes, Pat and Timmo, Pat cosy and docile, the simian Timmo energetic, cerebral and inquisitive; the two clergymen, Father Fletcher – the local Church of England vicar, cheerful, straightforward and relaxed, and Father da Souza, an American Catholic priest, fiery, dynamic and antagonistic. Even Anne’s parents, peripheral but essential elements in the story, fit in with this pattern, Anne’s mother is fashionable, demanding, cold and impatient while her father – who barely appears – is warm, caring, disorganised and ultimately, perhaps a less sympathetic figure than the author intends. Finally, there are the ghosts themselves; the Old Feller, harmless, terrified and childlike, and the real villain, the ghost of a murderous army officer named Hague, who is bullying, menacing and violent. In each of these cases Anne comes between the other characters, at times more-or-less harmoniously (keeping the peace between Purdie and Arthur and Pat and Timmo) and at others inadvertently stoking tension.
Anne’s own personality, less flamboyant than most of the cast, is mainly brought out in contrast with the others and essentially we see her as an ordinary, lonely teenager. She’s clever and industrious, mild-mannered, but also easily bored. There’s a sharper side to her nature too, mainly expressed when her mother is around, which can be surprising and no doubt  helped to earned the book its Puffin Plus (older children and teens) status. We meet this side of Anne right at the beginning of the novel, when, approaching Garmouth, her mother warns her about Arthur;

“Never made anything of himself, even by their standards. He takes advantage, given half a chance. You’ll need to watch him.”
“What is he – a rapist?”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that” (The Watch House p.9)

Anne, already not thrilled at this enforced holiday with near-strangers, is clearly trying to antagonise her mother, but as we discover, her cynicism is well-founded, not because of Arthur himself (who is a harmless, if irritatingly childish old man), but because she is used to the unwanted attentions of her mother’s boyfriend, the loathsome “Uncle Monty”. Late in the novel, when her mother threatens to take her home to London:

“’I don’t want to live with you. I can’t stand having that man around the place the whole time.”
[…] “You mean Uncle Monty? He’s just a friend, you silly goose. He’s just helping me settle in, that’s all.’
‘By spending all night in your bedroom while Daddy’s away? […] He can’t keep his hands off me either. He’s always trying to touch me, when you’re not watching. And give me wet open-mouth kisses.’ It was true. So why was it so terrible to say it?(The Watch House, p.158)

We are reminded throughout the book that Anne is a teenager and not a child; she is at her most teenager-ish when she goes to the local Youth Club disco in the hope of meeting people her own age:

“She’d thought hard what to wear at the Youth Club, and finally decided on plain Wranglers with a Wrangler top. […] Nothing for little cats to get their tongues around; nothing for them to pick holes in. Course, they’d pick holes anyway. But not such painful ones.” [The Watch House, p.65]

Initially, all of the ghostly activity happens within the Watch House itself and takes the form of writing in the dust on the display cases and flickering lights, but when, a few years after reading The Watch House, I first read Stephen King’s IT, the scenes where that novel’s young protagonists first encounter Pennywise irresistibly reminded me of Anne’s first unambiguous encounter with ghosts after the Garmouth carnival, a beautifully effective and atmospheric piece of writing:

“As she got further along the pier, and the sky darkened, the family groups thinned out. She passed through the last, and was alone. Except for one small person in Victorian top-hat and frock-coat, hurrying ahead of her towards the lighthouse. Head down and hands behind his back. Alone among the crowds he looked anxious. He kept peering over his shoulder at her, his face a white blur in the dusk.
[…]
Didn’t she know him?
Of course not. It was just that he looked like that picture of Isembard Kingdom Brunel, who built the Great Western. Except Brunel had looked so much cockier with that big cigar. Not so scared…
And then she knew, quite certainly, that she was looking at a ghost. Because the light on the South Pier came on, and shone right through his face.
[…]
‘It’s me, Anne,’ she took a step forward.
The ghost writhed away.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Her voice rose to a scared shriek.
This had happened before to her. Where? Where? In the orchard with Cousin Jane. She had walked towards Cousin Jane, and Jane had shrieked with terror. Because Anne, all unknowing, had a spider in her hair, and Jane was terrified of spiders.
[…]
Anne whirled round. Something faded round the curve of the lighthouse. Something red. There was a strong gust of seaweed; the smell of the bottom of a river.
[…]
She tried doubling back. Nothing. The Old Feller was gone. She was alone with something red that stank of the river and had terrified a ghost.” (The Watch House p.116-7)

During the first two acts of the novel, Westall expertly raises the tension and confounds expectations, the simple haunting becoming something more complex and less predictable as Anne’s not-always-harmonious relationship with her newfound friends complicates things further. Then, as we enter the novel’s final phase, The Watch House has a feature that I’ve always loved in horror novels and one which I associate with (again) IT in particular – the period of research, usually during a lull in horrific activity after the threat has been established. In The Watch House, Anne initially assumes that the ghost – The Old Feller – is trying to engage her help to save the Watch House – which he, as founder of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade had built – from financial and physical ruin and by extension save the Life Brigade itself. But once Anne has helped to secure the future of the Watch House as a museum and the hauntings don’t stop, it becomes clear that more than one spirit is involved.

After a session of hypnosis with her new friends Pat and Timmo proves both disturbing and revealing it becomes clear that understanding the problem requires more detailed local knowledge than Anne has. She talks to the oldest member of the life Brigade, the 95-year-old Bosun, who gives her an eye witness account of events she has previously seen under hypnosis, through the Old Feller’s eyes. She again enlists the help of Timmo. Introduced in the guise of ‘Doctor Death’, an eccentric DJ running the youth club disco, Timmo is an older teenager, a medical student with a huge variety of interests and expertise, but no real attention span. Timmo is knowledgable and freakishly intelligent, but his interest in the paranormal is as playful and skeptical rather as it is genuine and after the dramatic first hypnosis session, Anne only reluctantly agrees to do it again. Before that happens, Anne insists on some more concrete research, but as is common during these kinds of interludes in horror fiction, she suffers from a sense of dislocation that makes rational thought difficult:

“Next morning, Timmo had to bully her all the way up the hill to Front Street. If he hadn’t called for her, she would never have got out of bed. Her legs felt like lead; she had hardly slept.
Front Street, full of shoppers and red double-decker buses, was insubstantial, like a dream. It was the real world that was ghostly now.” (The Watch House, p.131)

The novel’s final act brings the story to a feverish pitch as the supernatural events become more deadly and Anne’s mother arrives in Garmouth, threatening to take her back to London. The climax, involving the two priests in an extended exorcism – surely influenced by the final scenes in the movie version of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist – is powerful but, like the ending of this article, a little bathetic. Although narratively satisfying, it’s loud and apocalyptic where the novel’s most effectively eerie moments are quiet and understated. The scenes that lingered in my mind – and which remain the most vivid to me decades later – are those when Anne, alone in the Watch House, is menaced by Hague, or when she is stalked by a mangy, grave-digging dog in the old Priory churchyard. As horror fiction, these are among the finest scenes that Westall ever wrote. Anne too, is a surprisingly vivid and sympathetic character; Westall’s female characters are often on the verge of caricature and his usual (youthful, male) protagonists tend to have a manly impatience with the women in his books. I would hesitate to call Westall’s books misogynistic, but there is sometimes a strain of male chauvinism to them which seems to belong to the author as much as it does to the characters. It’s also an oddity perhaps worth mentioning that of all the books I read as a child – and there were quite lot of them – Westall’s are the only ones I recall which almost invariably have a flippant reference to rape in them, which definitely feels bizarre in the 21st century. The Watch House itself is very much a product of the 1970s – with much that that entails; chauvinism, mild homophobia, flared trousers – in a way that The Machine Gunners wasn’t, which possibly accounts for its currently out-of-print status. But it’s a shame, with some kind of preface/disclaimer about its dated attitudes and language, it could easily go on to scare new generations of children, and get them hooked on the mysterious delights of the horror genre.

the cult of maimed perfection

*firstly, may change this title as it possibly sounds like I’m saying the opposite of what I’m saying*

That western culture¹ has issues with womens’ bodies² is not a new observation. But it feels like the issues are getting stranger. Recently there have been, both on TV (where the time of showing is important) and online (where it isn’t), cancer awareness campaigns where women who have had mastectomies are shown topless (in the daytime). This is definitely progress – but it simultaneously says two different things with very different implications.
On the one hand it’s – I would say obviously – very positive; it is of course normal to have a life-changing (or life saving) operation and the scars that come with it, and it can only be helpful to minimise the fear surrounding what is a daunting and scary prospect for millions of people. Normalising in the media things that are already within the normal experience of people – especially when those things have tended to be burdened with taboos – is generally the right thing to do. These scars, after all are nothing to be ashamed of or that should be glossed over or hidden from view. I hope that not many people would argue with that. But at the same time, isn’t it also saying, ‘yes it’s completely normal and fine for a woman to be seen topless on daytime TV, or on popular social media sites, as long as she’s had her breasts³ cut off?’ That seems less positive to me.

¹ Western culture isn’t alone in this, but ‘write about what you know’ (not always good advice, but still). I’m also aware that this whole article could be seen as a plea for more nudity. I’m not sure that’s what I mean

² might as well say it, this article deals mainly with old fashioned binary distinctions, but misogyny applies equally to trans women and I think what I say about men probably applies equally to trans men. 

³ or her nipples, on social media

Raphael – The Three Graces (1505) nudity acceptable due to classical context

Essentially, this positive and enlightened development seems to be inadvertently(?) reinforcing ancient and (surely!) redundant arguments, in a completely confused way. ‘Non-sexual nudity’, whatever that means, has always been okay with the establishment(s) in some circumstances. Now, one could argue from the context (cancer awareness campaign) that the nudity is desexualised, and I think that’s why it is allowed to be aired at any time of day. In fact, the Ofcom (UK TV regulating authority) rules on nudity – which are aimed at ‘protecting the under 18s’ from nudity, a strange a concept, as it always has been*, are pretty simple:

Nudity

1.21: Nudity before the watershed [9 pm in the UK], or when content is likely to be accessed by children […] must be justified by the context.

*Interestingly, Ofcom’s rules about nudity are listed between their rules about ‘Sexual behaviour’ and their rules about ‘Exorcism, the occult and the paranormal’

So presumably, Ofcom (rightly) considers this context to be justified, because the naked body is not being presented in a sexual context. But, at the same time, one thing the cancer awareness film demonstrates – and which I think it’s partly supposed to demonstrate – is that there’s nothing undesirable about the female body post-mastectomy. I mean, possibly that’s just me, projecting the notorious male gaze onto the subject, as if that’s the determining factor in what attractiveness is or isn’t, but let’s ignore that. Of course, the people that devised and created the film are not the same people that determine what can be shown on TV or online and when, but they would surely have been aware of the rules that they are working within.

Even accepting that it’s permitted to show a topless woman on TV during the daytime because it’s ‘de-sexualised nudity’, why is that better? Two opposing sides of that argument, a puritanical, right-wing one and a feminist one might both be (rightly?) skeptical of me, as a heterosexual male writing about this. But if women have to be de-sexualised to be regarded equally, or taken seriously, to not be somehow reduced by the male gaze (or damaging to the child’s gaze, since nudity on TV tends to be fine after children’s standard bedtimes and on the internet is theoretically policed by child locks) then that seems no less problematic – and not even very different – from the traditional, paternalistic Western view which sees the Virgin Mary as the ultimate exemplar of female-kind. And if sex or desire is itself the problem then not allowing specifically female nudity is also, typically, reducing the visibility of women for what is in essence a problem of male behaviour.

Sebastiano del Piombo – The Martyrdom of St Agatha (1520)

It’s worth looking at the fact that nudity is even an issue in the first place, considering that we all privately live with it, or in it, every day of our lives. In many world cultures of course, it isn’t and never has been a problem, unless/until Westerners have interfered with and poisoned those cultures, but it’s widespread enough elsewhere too, to be a human, rather than purely western quirk. It possibly has a little to do with climate, but it definitely has a lot to do with religion.

But the fact is that, in Western culture, even before the era of the Impressionists and their selectively nude women or the (as it now looks, very selectively) permissive society of the 1960s, female nudity has been perfectly acceptable to depict for hundreds of years; as long as the nude female is either mutilated (say, a virtuous martyr like the Roman suicide Lucretia), the victim of alien (non-Christian) assailants (various saints*) or, turning the tables, if she is a heathen herself (various classical figures, plus Biblical villains like Salome; a favourite subject with the same kind of sex & violence frisson as Lucretia)

* I didn’t realise when I posted this article that today (5th February) is the Feast day of St Agatha, the patron saint of – among other things – breast cancer. I’m not a believer in the supernatural or supreme beings, but that’s nice.

Even in Reformation Germany – surely one of the least frisky periods in the history of Western civilisation – in the private chambers of the privileged male viewer, nudity – especially female nudity – was there in abundance, providing it came with various kinds of extenuating nonsense; dressed up (or rather, not dressed up) in the trappings of classical antiquity. Okay, so maybe a woman can’t be flawless like Christ, but she can be nude and beautiful too, as long as she is being murdered, or stabbing herself to preserve her virtue, or is sentenced to everlasting damnation.

Lucas Cranach the Elder – Lucretia (1528)

Men could, in art, and can on TV or anywhere else, be more or less naked (admittedly with a fig-leaf or something similar) at pretty much any time because – I assume – of Jesus. Otherwise how to explain it? The male chest is arguably less aesthetically pleasing than the female one, and certainly less utilitarian in the raising of infants, but in deciding that it is less sexual, our culture makes lots of assumptions and takes directives that come from religious, patriarchal roots.

The dissonance between the ways that female and male nudity are treated in our culture has its roots in Christianity and its iconography and although in the UK we’re technically the children of the Reformation, what’s striking is how little difference there really was between the way nudity was treated in the Catholic renaissance and the Protestant one.

In both Catholic and Protestant cultures, the art that was not solely designed for the private, adult (male) gaze was almost entirely religious. Popes and Puritans both found themselves in the same odd position; Jesus must be perfect and preferably therefore beautiful, whatever that meant at the time – but more than that, it would be blasphemous – literally criminal – not to portray Christ as beautiful. But in addition to being perfect, he must, crucially, be human. Understandably, but ironically, it seemed the obvious way to depict human beauty and perfection was without the burden of clothes. The human aspect is after all how the people of the Renaissance could (and I presume people still can) identify with Christ, in a way that they never do with God in other contexts, where that identification would be as blasphemous as a deliberately ugly Christ.

But how was one supposed to regard the nearly nude, technically beautiful body of Christ? With reverence, of course. But revering and worshipping the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being is not something that a misanthropic (or if that’s too strong, homo-skeptic5) religion can do lightly. Helpfully, the part of Christianity that puts the (nearly) naked figure at the centre of our attention is the human sacrifice ritual of the crucifixion and its aftermath.  That bloody, pain-filled ritual allows the viewer to look at Jesus with pity and empathy and tempers (one would hope; but people) the quality of desire that the naked beautiful body of a perfect human being might be expected to engender. And to that Renaissance audience, the reason for that desire was another, but far more ambiguous subject for artists; Adam and Eve.

4 There are special cases though, see below re Grunewald

5 Doesn’t Alan Partridge call himself homoskeptic at some point? What I mean is – and I’m sure many Christians would take serious issue with this – that Christianity/the Christian God is in theory all-accepting of humans and their frailties, but somehow humans just as they are never seem to be quite good enough to escape negative judgement. Not just for things like murder or adultery that are within their power to not do, but things that are in their nature like envy and greed, and which were placed in their nature by God. And then, making a human being who must be killed for the things that other human beings have done or will by their nature do seems on the one hand, not very different from a horror movie pagan blood sacrifice cult and, on the other, kind of misanthropic

Hans Baldung Grien’s slightly diabolical looking Adam & Eve (1531)

Adam and Eve were a gift to the Renaissance man seeking pervy thrills from his art collection because they are supposed to be sexy. Here are the first humans, made, like Christ, in God’s image and therefore outwardly perfect; and, to begin with, happily nude. But in (almost immediately) sullying the human body, Adam and Eve are fallible where Christ is not. But how to depict the people that brought us the concept of desire except as desirable? Because they are not only not our saviours, but the actual opposite, their nudity can afford to be alluring, as long as the lurking threat of that attraction is acknowledged.

Alongside the problems of the iconography in art came the practical problems of making it; and I think that one of the reasons that, of the four main ‘Turtles’ of the Italian Renaissance,6 Raphael was elevated to the status he enjoyed for centuries, is that his nude women suggested that he might actually have seen some nude women. For all their athletic/aesthetic beauty, figures like Michelangelo’s Night (see below) and his Sistine Chapel Sibyls are the product of someone who found that the church’s strictures on female nudity (no nude models) happened to strike a chord with his own ideas of aesthetic perfection. Likewise,  Leonardo’s odd hybrid woman, the so-called Monna Vanna (possibly posed for by one of his male assistants) seems to demonstrate an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity on the artist’s part.

6 childish

Michelangelo – Night, Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence (1526-31) and Leonardo(?) Monna Vanna (c.1500)

One way around the problem of naked human beauty was – as it seems still to be – to mutilate the body. Paintings like Mattias Grünewald’s agonised, diseased-looking Jesus (perhaps the most moving depiction of Christ, designed to give comfort and empathy to sufferers of skin diseases) and, on (mostly) a slightly shallower level, the myriad Italian paintings of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, do much the same as those Lucretias and St Agathas; they show the ideal of the body as god intended it, while punishing its perfection so that we can look at it without guilt.

This feels, for all its beauty, like the art of sickness. What kind of response these St Sebastians are supposed to evoke can only be guessed at; and the guesses are rarely ones the original owners of the paintings would have liked. Empathy with and reverence for the martyred saint, obviously; but while Grunewald’s Christ reflects and gives back this sense of shared humanity with the weight of his tortured body and his human suffering, St Sebastian gives us, what? Hope? Various kinds of spiritual (it’s in the eyes) and earthly (relaxed pose and suggestive loincloth) desire?

Grunewald’s agonised Christ from the Isenheim Altarpiece (1515) and one of Pietro Perugino’s fairly comfortable-with-his-situation St Sebstians (1495)

There are lots of fascinating themes and sub-themes here, but for now, there you have it; Christ may have, spiritually, redeemed all of humankind, but aesthetically speaking, women remain (as they say in Narnia) ‘daughters of Eve’.

Nowadays, tired presumably of the restrictions on their lives, men have liberated themselves enough that we don’t even need St Sebastian’s spiritual gaze, or a hint of damnation, to justify our nudity. In what remains an essentially patriarchal society, just advertising a razor, or underwear, or perfume, or chocolate, or taking part in a swimming event, or even just being outside on a warm day is enough to justify our bodies, as long as they don’t veer too far from that Christlike ideal, and as long as they aren’t visibly excited. But even now, women – who can look like humanity’s mother Eve, but not our reborn father Christ – can be more or less naked too, at any time of day they like (on TV or online at least); just as long as they are mutilated.

the law won – police academy and 80s pop culture

In the 2020s, the Police may feel beleaguered by the pressure to account for their actions and act within the boundaries of the laws that they are supposed to be upholding, but despite the usual complaints from conservative nostalgists about declining standards of respect, the question of ‘who watches the watchmen’ (or, ‘who will guard the guards’ or however Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? is best translated) is hardly new, and probably wasn’t new even when that line appeared in Juvenal’s Satires in the 2nd century AD.

In the UK (since I’m here), the modern police force (and quasi-police forces like the Bow Street Runners) have almost always been controversial from their foundations in the 18th century onwards – and not surprisingly so.

It’s probably true that the majority of people have always wanted to live their lives in peace, but ‘law and order’ is not the same thing as peace. The ‘order’ comes from the enforcement of the law, and ‘the law’ has never been a democratically agreed set of rules. So law and order is always somebody’s law and order, but  not everybody’s. As is often pointed out, most of the things which we currently regard as barbaric in the 21st century, from slavery and torture to child labour and the lack of universal suffrage, were all technically legal. ‘Respect for the law’ may not just be a different thing from respect for your fellow human beings, it might be (and often has been) the opposite of it; so it’s no wonder that the position of the gatekeepers of the law should often be ambiguous at best.

the Keystone Cops in the nineteen-teens

Popular culture, as it tends to do – whether consciously or not –  reflects this uneasy situation. Since the advent of film and television, themes of law enforcement and policing have been at the centre of the some of mediums’ key genres, but the venerable Dixon of Dock Green notwithstanding, the focus is only very rarely on orthodox police officers faithfully following the rules. Drama almost invariably favours the maverick individualist who ‘gets the job done’* over the methodical, ‘by the book’ police officer, who usually becomes a comic foil or worse. And from the Keystone Cops (or sometimes Keystone Kops) in 1912 to the present day, the police in comedies are almost invariably either inept or crooked (or both; but more of that later).

*typically, the writers of Alan Partridge manage to encapsulate this kind of stereotype while also acknowledging the ambiguity of its appeal to a conservatively-minded public. Partridge pitches ‘A detective series based in Norwich called “Swallow“. Swallow is a detective who tackles vandalism. Bit of a maverick, not afraid to break the law if he thinks it’s necessary. He’s not a criminal, you know, but he will, perhaps, travel 80mph on the motorway if, for example, he wants to get somewhere quickly.’ i.e. he is in fact a criminal, but one that fits in with the Partridgean world view

But perhaps the police of the 2020s should think themselves lucky; they are currently enduring one of their periodic crisis points with public opinion, but they aren’t yet (again) a general laughing stock; perhaps because it’s too dangerous for their opponents to laugh at them, for now. But almost everyone used to do it. For the generations growing up in the 70s and 80s, whatever their private views, the actual police force as depicted by mainstream (that is, mostly American) popular culture was almost exclusively either comical or the bad guys, or both.

redneck police: Clifton James as JW Pepper (Live and Let Die), Jackie Gleason as Buford T Justice (Smokey and the Bandit), Ernest Borgnine as ‘Dirty Lyle’ Wallace (Convoy), James Best as Rosco P Coltrane (Dukes of Hazzard)
the same but different; Brian Dennehy as Teasle in First Blood

The idiot/yokel/corrupt/redneck cop has an interesting cinematic bloodline, coming into their own in the 1960s with ambivalent exploitation films like The Wild Angels (1966) and genuine Vietnam-war-era countercultural artefacts like Easy Rider, but modulating into the mainstream – and the mainstream of kids’ entertainment at that – with the emergence of Roger Moore’s more comedic James Bond in Live and Let Die in 1973. This seems to have tonally influenced similar movies like The Moonrunners (1975; which itself gave birth to the iconic TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, 1979-85), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Any Which Way You Can (1980) and The Cannonball Run (1981) among others. Variations of these characters – police officers concerned more with the relentless pursuit of personal vendettas than actual law enforcement, appeared (sometimes sans the redneck accoutrements) in both dramas (Convoy, 1978) and comedies (The Blues Brothers, 1980), while the more sinister, corrupt but not necessarily inept police that pushed John Rambo to breaking point in First Blood (1982) could also be spotted harassing (equally, if differently, dysfunctional Vietnam vets) The A-Team from 1983 to ’85.

iconic movie; iconic poster

In fact, the whole culture of the police force was so obviously beyond redemption as far as the makers of kids and teens entertainment were concerned, that the only cops who could be the good guys were the aforementioned ‘mavericks.’ These were borderline vigilantes who bent or broke or ignored the rules as they saw fit, but who were inevitably guided by a rigid sense of justice that was generally unappreciated by their superiors. This kind of cop reaches some kind of peak in Paul Verhoeven’s masterly Robocop (1987). Here, just beneath the surface of straightforward fun sci-fi/action movie violent entertainment, the director examines serious questions of ‘law’ vs ‘justice’ and the role of human judgement and morality in negotiating between those two hopefully-related things. Robocop himself is, as the tagline says ‘part man, part machine; all cop’ but the movie also gives us pure machine-cop in the comical/horrific ED-209, which removes the pesky human element that makes everything so complicated and gives us instead an amoral killing machine. The film also gives us good and bad human-cops, in the persons of  Officer Lewis and Dick Jones. Lewis (the always-great Nancy Allen) has a sense of justice is no less keen than that of her robot counterpart, but her power is limited by the machinations of the corrupt hierarchy of the organisation she works for, and she’s vulnerable to physical injury. Jones (the brilliant Ronny Cox) is very aware of both the practical and moral problems with law enforcement, but he’s than happy to benefit personally from them.

Part Man, Part Blue Jeans; All Cop

The following year, Peter Weller (Robocop himself) returned in the vastly inferior Shakedown, worthy of mention because it too features unorthodox/mismatched law enforcers (a classic 80s trope, here it’s Weller’s clean-cut lawyer and Sam Elliott’s scruffy, long haired cop) teaming up to combat a corrupt police force; indeed the movie’s original tagline was Whatever you do… don’t call the cops. And it’s also worthy of mention because its UK (and other territories) title was Blue Jean Cop, though it sadly lacked the ‘part man, part blue jean; all cop’ tagline one would have hoped for). Into the 90s, this kind of thing seemed hopelessly unsophisticated, but even a ‘crooked cops’ masterpiece like James Mangold’s Cop Land (1997) relies, like Robocop, on the police – this time in the only mildly unconventional form of a good, simple-minded cop (Sylvester Stallone), to police the bad, corrupt, too-clever police, enforcing the rules that they have broken so cavalierly. The film even ends with the explicit statement (via a voiceover) that crime doesn’t pay; despite just showing the viewer that if you are the police, it mostly seems to, for years, unless someone else on the inside doesn’t like it.

There’s always an ironic focus on ‘the rules’ – ironic because the TV and movie police tend to be bending them a-la Starsky and Hutch (and the rest), or ineffectually wringing their hands over that rule-bending, like the strait-laced half of almost every mismatched partnership (classic examples being Judge Reinhold in 1984’s Beverley Hills Cop and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, another famous ‘unorthodox cop’ movie from the same year as Robocop) or even disregarding them altogether like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry. So, it’s no surprise that the training of the police and the learning of those rules should become the focus of at least one story. Which brings us to Police Academy.

the spiritual children of the Keystone Cops

Obviously any serious claim one makes for Police Academy is a claim too far. It’s not, nor was it supposed to be, a serious film, or even possibly a good film, and certainly not one with much of a serious message. But its theme is a time-honoured one; going back to the medieval Feast of Fools and even further to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, it’s the world upside down, the lords of Misrule. And in honouring this tradition, the film tells us a lot about the age that spawned it. Police Academy purports to represent the opposite of what was the approved behaviour of the police in 1984 and yet, despite its (not entirely unfounded) reputation for sexism and crass stereotypes it remains largely watchable where many similar films do not. But, more surprisingly, it also feels significantly less reactionary than, say the previous year’s Dirty Harry opus, Sudden Impact.

While it’s a trivial piece of fluff, Police Academy is notable for – unlike many more enlightened films before and since – passing the Bechdel test. Don’t expect anything too deep – not just from the female characters – but it also has having noticeably more diversity among its ensemble cast than the Caddyshack/National Lampoon type of films that were in its comedy DNA. Three prominent African-American characters with more than cameo roles in a mainstream Hollywood movie may not seem like much – and it definitely isn’t – but looking at the era it feels almost radical. At this point in Hollywood history, let’s not forget, the idea for a film where a rich white kid finds the easiest way to get into college is by disguising as a black kid not only got picked up by a major studio, but actually made it to the screen.

In that context, these three actors – Marion Ramsey, Michael Winslow and the late Bubba Smith could look back on a series of movies which may not have been* cinematic masterpieces, but which allowed them to use their formidable comedic talents in a non-token way. More to the point, their race is neither overlooked in a ‘colourblind’ way (they are definitely Black characters rather than just Black actors playing indeterminate characters) or portrayed in a negative sense. Police Academy is not an enlightened franchise by any means; the whole series essentially runs on stereotypes and bad taste and therefore has the capacity to offend pretty much everyone. But although there are almost certainly racial slurs to be found there, alongside (for sure) gross sexism, homophobia etc, the series is so determined to make fun of every possible point of view that it ends up leaving a far less bad smell behind it than many of its peers did; perhaps most of all the previously alluded to Soul Man (1986).
*ie they definitely aren’t

Despite its essential good nature though, there is a genuine, if mild kind of subversion to be found in the Police Academy films. With the Dickensian, broadly-drawn characters comes a mildly rebellious agenda (laughing at authority), but it also subverts in a more subtle (and therefore unintentional? who knows) way, the established pattern of how the police were depicted. Yes, they are a gang, and as such they are stupid and corrupt and vicious and inept, just like the police of Easy Rider, Smokey and the Bandit, The Dukes of Hazzard etc. Unlike all of those films and franchises though, Police Academy offers a simple solution in line with its dorky, good natured approach; if you don’t want the police to suck, it implies, what you need to do is to recruit people who are not ‘police material.’ In the 1980s those who were not considered traditional ‘police material’ seemingly included ethnic minorities, women, smartasses, nerds, and at least one dangerous gun-worshipper, albeit one with a sense of right and wrong that was less morally dubious than Dirty Harry’s. So ultimately, like its spiritual ancestors, Saturnalia and the Feast of Fools, Police Academy is more like a safety valve that ensures the survival of the status quo rather than a wrecking ball that ushers in a new society. Indeed, as with Dickens and his poorhouses and brutal mill owners, the message is not – as you might justifiably expect it to be – ‘we need urgent reform’, but instead ‘people should be nicer’. It’s hard to argue with, as far as it goes, but as always seems to be the case*, the police get off lightly in the end.

The Boys in Blue (1982). Christ

*one brutal exception to this rule is roughly the UK equivalent of Police Academy, the risible 1982 Cannon & Ball vehicle The Boys In Blue. After sitting through an impossibly long hour and a half of Tommy and Bobby, the average viewer will want not only to dismantle the police force, but  also set fire to the entire western culture that produced it.