Dave revisited

Way, way back, when Malcolm’s Home and Away Services were blogspotted, he found himself pre-occupied with the multiplicity of Daves.

That was prompted in part by George Strait’s 2009 album, Twang. Then newly-released it was thoroughly raspberries by Steve Morse, reviewing it for the Boston Globe. Across the Great Divide, Randy Lewis for the LA Times nailed it as:

a pretty nifty summation of what commercial country is, circa 2009.

Note that “commercial”. It is not a compliment, but it makes one wonder what “uncommercial country” must amount. Particularly so when it’s a “big hat”act.

Anyway, Twang includes a song, Arkansas Dave (a folksy old-fashioned C&W morality, credited to Strait’s son):

He rode up on a winter day,
Steam rising off the street, they say.
Said, “You probably know my name:
If you don’t it’s Arkansas Dave.

He talked of fifteen years ago,
And how he got to play hero.
Said he killed a man in Ohio:
First man he killed, first horse he stole.

Marty Robbins did this kind of thing with more style, and more originality, a half century gone.

Johnny Cash could, and did, do it sequentially — starting with Don’t Take Your Guns to Town in 1958. When Strait’s boastful (and totally forgettable — Malcolm wishes he could purge it from his memory) Dave ends up miscalculating the odds, and dead in that same street, we are not prostrate in bestaggerment.

Still, let’s hear the good stuff:

 

Davery

In honour of Diddy Dave Cameron, who hasn’t been having a good few days of late, what other lyrics celebrate the forename of the moment?

His Name is Alive, on the King of Sweet album (not Malcolm’s sort of thing, at all, but if you have one, don’t shout about it: it’s worth the odd bob) did two in a row: Ode on a Dave Asman and A Dave in the Life.

Boomtown Rats achieved something eponymous and a bit better known (Pete Townsend rated it), as the opener for The Long Grass album:

But please,
Believe,
The view from on your knees
Deceives
Keep going, Dave.

That one was deep into the trans-Atlantic deep doodoo. The US executives thought it odd that a man might sing a love song to a “Dave”. It had to be re-recorded and issued as Rain. There is a clip on YouTube, but it’s blocked in the UK.

 

Then we have Caffeine (UK punk-rockers, on the road less-taken — unfairly so) doing Dave’s Song (In Slow Motion):

I looked up to the sky, and I saw a figure
It was small with shiny lights;
And out of this, this little blue figure,
With the small shining lights
Stepped a little blue man,
With a little blue figure
And he said to me ”Do you believe?”

Some kind of psychological profile is emerging here; and it doesn’t flatter Daves.

Let’s go to the movies …

On the great Silver Screen (but more at home on off-off-peak sitting-room TV), there was Kevin Kline’s 1993 outing as Dave.

In Malcolm’s view, that was a more than decent movie: light, frothy, with a heart in the proper place. It references two recognisable characters:

• the scheming, creepy, on-the-make Bob Alexander (played by Frank Langella), the inspiration for subsequent melodramatic villains of the Dubya coyer: Karl Rove and Veep Cheney;

and

• the decent, honourable Vice-President Nance (a cameo for Ben Kingsley). He takes the name from “Cactus Jack”, FDR’s first Vice-President, John Nance Garner, and his unacceptably-progressive (except in the company of such as President Jed Bartlet) ideology from FDR’s second, Henry Agard Wallace. In historical terms, just as well that FDR’s death precipitated his third pick, Harry Truman, who deservedly gets into everyone’s Top Ten of all time, into the job.

The slogan on which Dave was advertised went:

In a country where anybody can become President, anybody just did.

The US of A allows even a self-confessed “mutt, like me” to reach the highest office in the land, but, as far as Malcolm can recall, the only time a real “David” made it into the White House, he was David Dwight Eisenhowe (and he didn’t make too bad a show of it). In the UK, of course, it helps to see a Dave through if he has royal cousinage, is descended from the mistress of a royal princeling, has a wife with connections to the Astors, and some £20 million of inheritance money.

Why are some Daves unfailingly “David”?

In particular, why was “Golden Balls” always given his full birth name, never abbreviated — or when he was, he became “Becks”?

Even St David of Wales is allowed to be “Davey”, but that’s largely because he is also Dewi Sant. If one is the author of all those psalms, you get your full moniker, and pass it on to all the others. Dabíd mac Maíl Choluim and Daibhidh a Briuis, as the two Kings David of Scotland, are historically dignified without shortening. And if you were sculpted by Bernini, by Donatello, by Michelangelo or by Verrochio, you get the full five-syllables, though one of you spends eternity in the buff.

David, Prince of Wales, got the top job (briefly) and was recycled as “Edward VIII”, before he become “Duke of Windsor”. But he was just one of three Princes of Wales with that forename, along with Dafydd ap Llywelyn and Dafydd ap Gruffydd. Perhaps we should throw David Lloyd George into that mix.

Musicians seem to tend to Dave rather than David: Brubeck; Davies; Edmunds; Matthews, Swarbrick, Van Ronk. Apart from the economist Davids (Hume and Ricardo) Hume and the playwright Mamet, the most obvious literary David was always elided down to D.H.

Still, most peculiar that the demotic never accepted “Dave” for Beckham..

On the box

Nor should we overlook Freeview channel 12. Here we find the BBC’s marketing vehicle for antique video-tape. It’s Dave, tending to laddishness (and named on the principle that “Everybody knows a man called Dave”), the 1998 fifth reboot of a repeats channel. Stephen Fry and TopGear seem never far away from the schedule.

In recent years Dave has  has has spawned a whole litter of siblings, and even got around to the odd original (if dirt cheap) studio shows never knowingly oversold as:

full of complete and utter wits

Or as:

The home of witty banter

Read those very, very carefully. Any miscue is deliberate.

The posters for Dave, common on the London Underground, are unfailingly striking, and frequently zoological:

 

 

At least it is switch-offable or channel-hop-able. And isn’t based entirely on prat-falls and mis-speaks of the Cameron kind.

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages …

… because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.

Once upon a time, when the world was young, Malcolm worked out how to write audience-pleasers.

His audience then were the academics, the teachers, the lecturers and the professors who would opine on his laboured thoughts, and respond with a simple — usually disappointing — grade and a cryptic — usually demoralising — comment.

The strategy Malcolm evolved (and he boasts it was self-devised and taught by nobody) amounted to:

• having an eye-opener opener, which could be reprised in the closing sentence or two;
• which opener would employ a knowing literary animadversion (though Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction, or Robert A. Heinlein, both as above, would neither be a good choice, at least for that audience);
• a use of well-chosen, precise and extended vocabulary, though not so much to be pretentious;
• marshalling expression as tri-partite Ciceronian expressions;
• deliberately opposing constructions, by use of colons, by antitheses and by jarring shifts of style.

That’ll do for the time being.

Some of those techniques may persist in his writing to his present senility.

James Kirkup, with his politics blog for the Telegraph, is up to similar tricks.

He starts one effort today:

Gay marriage and David Cameron: what he could learn from Conan the Barbarian

There’s a scene from the first season of the West Wing when Josh Lyman tells President Bartlet: “We talk about enemies more than we used to.”

It’s either touching or cloying, depending on your perspective, but either way, it touches on an essential truth of politics: to govern is to make enemies. For better or for worse, the exercise of power is almost always a zero-sum game. Every choice you make will make someone happy and someone else unhappy.

Any friend of Josh is invited to be a friend of Malcolm.

The rest of Kirkup’s neat little essay has some nice throw-aways:

… Gordon Brown, a man who could write several books about political feuds and political enemies. Mr Brown’s view of political dissent was formed in the unforgiving world of Scottish Labour, whose culture was once described as “Dog eat dog, and vice versa.” Despite the odd appeal to the punters, the Brown approach to enemies was built on machine politics and sheer aggression, a willingness to demolish utterly those who stood in his way.

Sometimes, to speak to Team Brown was to be put in mind of a line from Conan the Barbarian, when Conan is asked: “What is good in life?”

He replies:

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Kirkup, a bit naughtily Malcolm feels, is citing the film there, not the text.

Is that admiration or criticism, young James?

Let us trip lightly over Kirkup on the (ambiguous?) motives of Tim Loughton and his civil-partnership amendment. In the context, clearly Kirkup sees a malevolence here.

Instead let us relish Kirkup’s closure:

Anyone in power for any time will find themselves, like Josh, talking about enemies. Mr Cameron and his friends need to do more than talk. They need to think of something to do about those enemies, and soon.

Hug them close. Bribe them. Charm them. Go over their heads. Kill them all and plough their fields with salt. What’s the best choice? It’s not clear. But one thing is clear: ignoring your enemies won’t make them go away.

In any political generation there may be just the singular political spadassinicide [woo ! woo! Sabatini gets a look in! Change of genre, Malcolm!]. One who could be wholly ruthless, as alien as a Martian … as real as taxes but he was a race of one [which gets back to the Heinlein: sneaky, huh? And you were expecting Conan].

Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

Historical and other parallels

History repeats itself, said Marx (approximately) paraphrasing Hegel, first as tragedy then as farce.

So let Malcolm repeat himself:

• Prime Minister David Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.
• William IV was third son of George III, whose elder brothers were the future George IV and … Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.

Taraaah!

Said Prince Fred is generally accounted to have been the Grand Old Duke of York, who:

… had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only halfway up,
They were neither up nor down.

Fred, who now is dead, earned that reputation because of the futile Flanders campaign of 1799.

Cameron’s  hill-climbing and descents are as well-established as Fred’s; but he doesn’t have ten thousand men. He has just 304 MPs, and 48 of them are definitely not men. Though many of those women have more balls than their male colleagues.

Further back

Malcolm can’t be bothered to work out what the precise relationship is; but Cameron must be related somehow to the Stuarts. Which brings us to James II and VII.

After the near-rout at the Boyne, James sweatily arrived back in Dublin where Lady Tyrconnell enquired how the battle had gone. He replied, “My cowardly Irish have run away.”

She responded with a hint of acid: “Then I see your majesty has won the race.” Again, a speedy characteristic to be observed in Cameron’s hereditary nature.

The gift of leadership

This is an art or a talent in which Cameron has rarely excelled. Particularly so on matters European.

Which is why he is in his present predicament.

And which brings us to the ridiculous “Referendum Bill”; and Isabel Hardman in the Spectator channeling Lady Tyrconnell:

David Cameron was trying to work out how on earth to deal with the latest Europe row in his party. He heard them demanding legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, and this evening, after nearly a year of letter-writing and speeches, he announced that the Tory party will publish a draft bill doing just that. They still can’t get it through Parliament through the government channels, so they’ll be putting it up for any willing backbencher (of which there are many) to adopt in the Private Member’s Bill ballot.

Figures close to the Prime Minister were hinting to Tory MPs this evening there would be a move for legislation, but they were taken by surprise when, just a few hours later, the announcement was made that the draft bill will be published tomorrow.

So is this it? Is the Conservative party falling on its knees with gratitude? Unsurprisingly, MPs are not doing anything of the sort.

Wherein Malcolm found an echo from Li’l Abner, Al Capp, Johnny Mercer and Stubby Kaye:

Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray.
Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Maché?”
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone; 
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he really saved the day!

Isabel was being as polite as the circumstances permit. For sheer vitriol — and a longer view — there’s  Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, subtitled in near Marxist terms — and with a flourish from Mao for added relish:

Drama is giving way to farce. The eurosceptic demands are now plain odd

Touchingly, they really believed it would work. When David Cameron pledged a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU four months ago, his team were certain it would pacify eurosceptic Conservatives, disarm the UK Independence party and ensure he would not need to talk again about this electorally esoteric issue for the rest of this parliament.

That speech, his most important deed as UK prime minister after his austere fiscal policy, has failed on all counts. Tories now hound him to go further, Ukip romp on, and he is condemned to revisit the subject periodically on behalf of his party.

Downing Street is mystified by the collapse of the January truce, and commentators also scribble their surprise. But it is not surprising at all. It was predictable, and predicted. We are now a quarter of a century into the Tories’ rancorous fixation with Europe, a single-issue neuralgia that knows no equivalent in any major party in the west, and the pattern is familiar: no concession satisfies those who ultimately want to leave the EU, even if they say it will before receiving it. Mr Cameron, remember, has withdrawn his party from the centre-right caucus in the European Parliament, vetoed a fiscal treaty and cleared a path to exit. On each occasion, Tories have summoned a practised glee before returning to their core view of him as the craven running dog of a europhile establishment.

Even that lacks the sheer horror that Ben Brogan, for the Torygraph, evinces:

It may be, as some Tories tried to explain yesterday, that a cunning new strategy is evolving before our eyes, one that Mr Gove and his friend Mr Cameron are developing as part of their wider campaign to shove Labour – and the Lib Dems – on to the wrong side of popular causes. By this theory, Europe is no longer a divisive, dangerous issue for the Tories to be caught arguing about, but is in fact a vote-winner. Look at us, the Conservatives are now shouting, we are so crazy about Europe that we are desperate to give you a vote on it and – nudge nudge, wink wink – we might just join you in voting to get out. By allowing his colleagues to say it all in public, and say it loudly, Mr Cameron is giving himself free advertising for his Euro-robustness two years early. The tease of a referendum, the catwalk of Tory beauties sashaying in their see-through ideological out-fits, the Cabinet loyalists talking naughty – it’s all part of a great plan. By allowing his colleagues to talk up the possibility of a British exit, the Prime Minister’s hand is strengthened in the EU negotiations to come. First welfare, then immigration, now Europe: everything is lining up in Mr Cameron’s favour.

Except it isn’t, of course. No 10 has lost control of this one. Even those involved admit it’s a Euroshambles. After all, can any of this truly be said to advance the cause of a Conservative victory in 2015? Surely the first part of Mr Cameron’s negotiating strategy requires winning the general election? Does an inward-looking spat about Europe really fit alongside the message about a global economic race and the importance of the EU/US trade deal that Mr Cameron found himself promoting in Washington yesterday?

Surely soon we must be reaching the end-game? That can involve just one (or both) of two possibilities: the defenestration of Cameron, and/or the collapse of the ConDem coalition. Either way the lunatics have taken over the Tory asylum.

Which brings Malcolm back to:

Aagh! The Daily Mail may have good reason!

When Malcolm was going Song for song yesterday, he was missing the Big Event.

Whisper it very low: Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is, after all, foul deep-Pinko agitprop:

Dorian Lynskey has the full filth in today’s Guardian supplement:

I’ve become annoyed by the liberal fingerwaggers, solemnly telling the people who hated Thatcher the “proper” way to mark her death. She was a deliberately divisive politician who caused a great deal of suffering to sectors of society that she didn’t value and it’s absurd to insist that people should hold their tongues just because she became old and frail. That just isn’t human nature and the charts, at their most interesting, reflect the messy, visceral, impulsive side of human nature.

They are also dictated by something that Thatcher knew and loved: pounds and pence. Tasteless this campaign may be, but it’s freedom, democracy and market forces in action. Better yet, some of the royalties go to the estate of lyricist EY “Yip” Harburg, the proud leftie (“Yip” was derived from the acronym for the Young People’s Socialist League) who wrote Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and was driven out of Hollywood by the Red Scare blacklist. Ding dong to that.

Harburg was not only the lyricist for the song that epitomises the Great Depression, and for the Oscar-winning songs in Wizard of Oz, he also wrote for Finian’s Rainbow — which, in 1947, was the first time Broadway saw a racially-integrated chorus line. And Harburg smuggled in another bit of subversive socialism:

Let’s reprise that, for the benefit of Gids Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith:

When a rich man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a bon vivant, yes, he’s a bon vivant;
But when a poor man doesn’t want to work,
He’s a loafer, he’s a lounger, he’s a lazy good for nothing, he’s a jerk.

Inevitably, as a figure on the left (Henry Wallace campaign as the Progressive Party nominee in 1948), Harburg was listed by Red Channels in the great clear-out of politically-unreliable talent during the McCarthyite purges. He was out of Hollywood, but continued to fill jobs for Broadway.

That kind of censorship is just what the Daily Mail would believe in.

“2013 has started strongly”: discuss

Films with a Scottish base get a strong showing in the list of 49 best British films of all time, chosen by Barry Norman for the Radio Times. Deservedly, I Know Where I’m Going, Whisky Galore!, and Local Hero are all there. So is Gregory’s Girl, to which we return after the comic relief.

Philip Aldrick does a magnificent job frightening the un-lasagna-ed horses in his piece for the Torygraph.

What he is about is anticipating:

In its three-monthly Inflation Report, the Bank will warn that inflation will remain above the 2pc target until early 2015 but that the economy is too weak to cope with any attempt to bring prices back under control, through either interest rate rises or an unwinding of its £375bn quantitative easing (QE) programme.

It will also say that the pace of growth will be slow and that, although the major risks are receding, they remain a big threat, particularly from a resurgence of the eurozone crisis.

That sure saves us all from having to read the Report, when it is released. Prescience, a guided leak, or an ouija board?

Switching to another source, Aldrick manages one of the more remarkable definitions of “growth”:

According to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2013 has started strongly. It has estimated that growth improved from -0.3pc in the three months to December, to zero in the three months to January.

Somehow that reminds Malcolm of a bit of dialogue from Bill Forsyth’s 1981 film, Gregory’s Girl. Gregory is faffing his first encounter with Dorothy:

Gregory: …. I hurt my arm once, at the joint. Can’t get it any higher than this. [He raises his left arm to shoulder level.] I used to be able to get it away up here, no bother. [He raises the same arm high above his head.]

Cole Porter and other animals

Malcolm and family celebrate the New Year (actually, a day or two after, to allow sobering up to have been achieved) with Trevor Nunn’s production of  Kiss Me, Kate at the Old Vic. Now, in passing, is that the first occasion for a long while when the grammatical comma has been correctly present in the title?

That alone should have triggered a response in Macolm’s conscience during the cooking of that previous item. Particularly so when the phrase ‘professional co-respondent’ was invoked.

Back in 1932 Cole Porter added songs to an unproduced play script by John Hartley Manners. Since Malcolm affects an Irish connection, let him give Manners a run around.

J. Hartley Manners

Manners was born in 1870, a child of an Irish couple, then arrived in London. We might speculate about his political leanings (they become significant some way down this post *) when we realise those parents were Catholics, and his mother wished him to enter the priesthood. Instead he went into the Civil Service, which in turn took him to Australia, where by 1898 he found himself on the stage in Melbourne. A year later, and back in London, he was working with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s and George Alexander’s companies, notably as Laertes in a production of Hamlet — no small achievement for a neophyte.

His apprentice one-act effort, The Queen’s Messenger, later earned a place in media history:

In September 1928, W2XB (owned by General Electric’s WGY) in Schenectady, NY televised the  first dramatic program in the United States, The Queen’s Messenger, by J. Harley Manners, a blood and thunder play with guns, daggers, and poison. There were more technicians required for special effects than there were actors. In fact, technical limitations were so great and viewing screens so small, that only the actor’s individual hands or faces could be seen at one time. Three cameras were used, two for the characters and a third for obtaining images of gestures and appropriate stage props. Two assistant actors displayed their hands before this third camera whenever the occasion demanded. 

That was, in fact, the world’s first televised drama, beating the BBC’s adaptation of Pirandello’s L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca ["The Man with a Flower in his Mouth"] by some eighteen months.

The Queen’s Messenger, back at the turn of the century, had earned Manners a commission to write a star-vehicle, The Crossways, for (and, allegedly, with) Lily Langtree:

Mrs. Langtry opened last night in “The Crossways.” a new play which she has written in conjunction with her leading man. Mr. J. Hartley Manners. A large and hopeful audience greeted her pleasantly; but if it is a case of crossing the heart and hoping to die, it must be deposed that the occasion was not as a whole enlivening…

Their play is a geometric problem, the elements of which are the traditional triangle of husband, wife and lover, with certain projections in the shape of a runaway couple, a stolen necklace of pearls, a race at Acot, and such like. These materials are thrown together so as to make plenty of stage incidents and stage situations, and they lead in the end to the happiest Q.E.D.

So Manners is in New York, where other success persuaded him to concentrate on the writing rather than the acting.

In 1912 he hit the jack-pot with Peg o’ My Heart, the first part subtitled (and this is the element hinted at above *) —

The Romance of an Irish Agitator and an English Lady of Quality

This propelled Manners and the female lead, Laurette Taylor (whom he promptly married), into celebrity status; and the revenue continued with a musical adaptation (songs by Alfred Bryan and  Fred Fis[c]her), a novelisation and a silent movie.

The Manners legacy — and enter Cole Porter

In 1928, stomach cancer and an operation that went wrong finished Manners, but he left an unproduced script, The Adorable Adventure. This fell into the hands of Dwight Taylor (Manner’s step-son by Laurette’s first marriage) who polished it into the book for a musical, Gay Divorce, songs by Cole Porter.

Gay Divorce played on Broadway (248 performances), transferred to London (a run of 180 performances at the Palace Theatre), with Fred Astaire and Claire Luce as leads. It was, therefore, Astaire’s last Broadway musical, and the only one he didn’t have sister Adele as his partner (she had offed and married Lord Charles Cavendish).

When RKO filmed The Gay Divorcee more than grammatical changes were involved. Astaire wanted Luce as his partner. She, however, had suffered a fall in the London run, and that effectively ended her dancing days — though she persisted in dramatic roles into the 1950s. RKO insisted their contract player, Ginger Rogers, be cast as Astaire’s opposite. Most of Porter’s songs went the same way, retaining only Night and Day and adding The Continental.

Cultural significances?

All of that is interesting, to an extent, in itself.

What is probably of more substance is the material of the play and the plot.

First of all, the original story-line seems somewhat advanced for its day. In the wikipedia summary (which is as abbreviated as any):

Guy Holden, an American writer traveling in England, falls madly in love with a woman named Mimi, who disappears after their first encounter. To take his mind off his lost love, his friend Teddy Egbert, a British attorney, takes him to Brighton Beach, where Egbert has arranged for a “paid co-respondent” to assist his client in obtaining a divorce from her boring, aging, geologist husband Robert. What Holden does not know is that the client is none other than Mimi, who in turn mistakes him — because he is too ashamed of his occupation to say what it is, namely pseudonymously writing cheap “bodice ripper” romance novels — for the paid co-respondent.

At the end, when her husband appears, he is unconvinced by the faked adultery—but is then unwittingly revealed, by the waiter at the resort, to have been genuinely adulterous himself.

While elements of that go back to the flighty-but-gritty fin de siècle stuff (try Oscar Wilde and early Shaw, for examples), any grit is about to be subverted into froth by the strengthened Hayes Office code. Even the change of title suggests the new morality imposed by Joseph Breen:

The moralizing Hayes Office said a divorce couldn’t ever be a happy event, but conceded that a divorcee could be in a good mood.

We therefore have a sub-text to the movie: creative artists pushing the Hayes Code as far as possible. And that, folks, is a matter of social history that still persists, even after the Code went into abeyance, and across all arts.

Face off

While Malcolm was in the former American colony of Noo Joisey and in absentia, WordPress would seem to have re-arranged how photographs are inserted into posts. That Malcolm was somewhat jet-lagged after an eventful ride with Mustang Sally was a further confusion.

That means the two protagonists of that anecdote in the previous post went un-illustrated. While Malcolm works out what he is doing wrong, let’s hear it for Aelia Galla Placidia (above).

There’s a decent Wikipedia mini-biog of the lady, well worth a quite viewing — for she was a figure of considerable consequence. She is also mother  to millions — try the account on rootsweb for a taster. One way or another, she figures in the ancestry of many Europeans — and probably all of their hereditary rulers. She was, for example, Elizabeth II’s something-like forty-six-times-back great-grandmother.

Ravenna

The source of that image is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which deserves to qualify as one of the wonder of early European art, recognised by UNESCO as:

the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect.

Slide out of the Mausoleum, take a swift left past the Information Bureau into the Via Cavour, then right into Via di Roma, and there is the Basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo. [Aha! See! Malcolm is getting the knack of this insertion business!]

San Apollinare Nuovo was where W.B.Yeats was confronted by his:

sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

— another poem Malcolm was made to learn at Dublin’s High School for his Leaving Cert., and which has fertilised brain-cells ever since.

A note of dubiety

Despite that image of Galla Placidia having a prominent position in her eponymous Mausoleum (as part of the family group with her two children, Valentinian and Honoria), there are certain snippy critics who question whether it does in fact represent the lady.

Malcolm will have none of that. That is she, majestically, imperially, imperiously so, and no-one else.

Oh, and a further footnote …

One modern legend has it that Cole Porter visited the Mausoleum, came outside, looked up at the Italian sky, and had the notion for Night and Day. And if that’s not a good enough excuse …

Fancy that!

Why is it that old newsprint, about to be discarded, makes one last burst at survival, and unfailingly provides unexpected diversion?

Here was Malcolm collecting paper around the house, recycling bin for the filling therewith.

Here comes the Times Literary Supplement of 31 August.

Tom Shippey reviewing Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections on the Magic of Writing.

Malcolmian Wombling stopped instantly. Reading mode was engaged.

The book is:

a collection of some thirty pieces written over the years by the late Diana Wynne Jones.

Shippey identifies:

The themes which run through the collection are autobiography, thoughts on how to write and how books originate … and thirdly, robust defences of the value of fantasy and the importance of writing for children.

Were Malcolm being sniffy (and he is), he would wonder why the third of those should ever need robust defences. Fantasy is an essential element in any proper upbringing:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourishèd?
Reply, reply.
Is it engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and Fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring Fancy’s bell:
I’ll begin it, — Ding, dong, bell.

Put that into its context, Act III, scene ii, of The Merchant of Venice, and you have something very spooky indeed. That, too, is part of fantasy.

Half-way through his review Shippey opens a Cabinet of Dr Caligari:

Wynne Jones adds herself to the list of children’s authors — E.E.Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter — who had troubled early lives. She writes, “I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old”. Then, in August 1939, Diana and her sister were suddenly uprooted from London, driven to their grandparents’ home in Welsh-speaking Pontarddulais, and left to cope as best they could. It was not for long, for their mother came and fetched them back: not, it seems out of affection, but as a result of a blazing row with Aunt Muriel: “I see my relationship with my mother never recovered from this.” The children were soon packed off again, this time to Westmoreland, where they saw Arthur Ransome in a fury over the noise the children made — “He hated children” — and Diana’s sister Isobel was smacked by Beatrix Potter for swinging on her garden gate: “She hated children, too.”

Ah, sweet!

Quite how good this book is, Malcolm cannot authenticate. The reviewer seems to like it, and is convincing in his observations. It might be something worth seeking out. from a library, or watch for a second-hand copy perhaps: at £25 it looks hardly a steal (even Amazon want £17.50).

One final thought: whenever over the decades of teaching, Malcolm has come upon a well-balanced child, there tended to be an imagination at work, an ability to cross into worlds of fantasy, even a native delight in jokes and word-play. On the other hand, there are far too many warped minds, who — for one lack of reason or another — have been denied that fantasy. Sadly, too many of these minds are the victims of cults of one evil kind or another: the strict Moslem boy who rejected any kind of fiction on principle (someone else’s principle).

There are many good causes to scorn, even despise the verbose spoutings of Ms Rowling: religious wailing about Witchcraft! should never be one of them.

Further showers

“Doubting Thomas” must be Malcolm’s other reader — inexplicably, though, Malcolm’s stat-porn has leapt dramatically these last few days.

“Doubting Thomas” frequently, and happily so, intervenes with provocative notions. And for Malcolm’s mental health (who claims to blog to keep the Alzheimer’s at bay), long may he — and  any others — do so.

Doubting Thomas’s  response to the previous post is one such:

The late Terry Thomas (no relation) used ‘an absolute shower’ in his material and the phrase seems to portray the Tories quite well now that they seem down on their luck through hubris and nemesis, as well as pulic school arrogance.

All absolutely right; but worthy of expansion.

For a start, Malcolm feels a slight affinity with Thomas Terry Hoar-Stevens by reason of propinquity. It’s a short bus ride from Redfellow Hovel to Prince’s Avenue, Finchley — Hoar-Stevens birthplace.

Beyond that, Terry-Thomas (he always insisted on that hyphen) was a good working comedian and stock actor over decades. He was a carry-over from the Music Hall, and the pantomime — a heritage which also explains the number of outstanding English character actors to this day.

Terry-Thomas came by his signature catch-phrase, which ‘Doubting Thomas’ provided as Malcolm’s peg to hang this hat on, from Private’s Progress. Terry-Thomas was “Major Hitchcock”, who spends much of his script telling the main character, “Private Windrush” (played by Ian Carmichael) he is a “bounder”, a “scoundrel” and — but of course — “an absolute shower”.

A Malcolmian aside

Private’s Progress represents something of a “rite of passage” for British cinema. It was the first of the Boulting Brothers’ social satires, a fertile stream of comedy — and subtle commentary — to come out of the Shepperton Studios. Like the rest of the sequence, the film spoke directly of and to contemporary British (in all truth, explicitly English) experience.

Towards the end of the War, Stanley Windrush is called up and leaves his university. As a university man he would be an obvious candidate for a commission, but Windrush sets out to prove himself totally unqualified. The plot, as far as there is one, exemplifies the skiving and “liberating” that was the commonplace of the time. At one extreme there is the wily Private Cox, who knows every scam and where the bodies are buried. At the other is Windrush’s uncle, Brigadier Tracepurcel, gilding his lily at the War Office. The McGuffin is a hoard of Nazi-appropriated art. The superficial moral is required to be “crime does not pay”; but the whole ethos is “they’re all at it.”

The script grew out of a novel of the same name, by Alan Hackney. He would go on to be involved in the seminal  I’m All Right Jack (another adaptation from his novel, Private Life — which was swiftly rebranded after the film’s success), and a succession of later films and TV series.

Back on track

Still barely into his sixties, Terry-Thomas was stricken by Parkinson’s disease. He disappeared from the scene, and from public appearance, until a stupendous benefit concert at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

His alter-ego survived in Dick Dastardly of Wacky Races. Dastardly is a direct rip from “Sir Percy Ware-Armitage”, the character Terry-Thomas depicted in Ken Annakin’s 1965 romp, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. The DVD cover features Sir Percy to this day. Any mystery amounts to how two very similar films, Magnificent Men (UK release 3 June 1965) and Blake Edwards’ The Great Race (US release 1 July 1965), appeared almost simultaneously — and shared so many plot devices. Malcolm here has assumed that Terry-Thomas’s “Sir Percy” was the natural antecedent of Jack Lemmon’s “Professor Fate”. The apostolic succession was even clearer in Hanna-Barbera’s Dastardly and Muttley follow-up, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (they never did Stop that Pigeon).

Anyone who fears the Commedia dell’arte was lost and gone forever, can be reassured by such delightful guff. ”Sir Percy Ware-Armitage” is Pantalone rendered on film-stock: Zanni, the scoundrel of a valet, becomes Eric Sykes as “Courtney” (and further transmogrified into Muttley, Dastardly’s “horrible hound”). The essential nature of human nature, and the nature of the entertainment it demands, is remarkably unchanging.

Hwæt! We Gardena         in geardagum …

“Listen! We of the spear-Danes …”

That can’t be right! Miscue! But still, Hwæt!

For Terry-Thomas has many other film credits. One deserves particular respect, largely because it’s almost unknown in Britain. He had the main acting credit in Gérard Oury‘s La Grande Vadrouille, at least when the film appeared outside France, otherwise he shared with Bourvil and Louis de Funes.

See! You hadn’t heard of it, had you? It got a US release (and an even more restricted showing in the UK) as Don’t Look Now – We’re Being Shot At. It is a film of note because, from its release in 1966 until the sinking of Titanic thirty years later, it held the record for putting French bums on cinema seats.

This scene works in any language, probably better than it did in 1967 — and may also explain why the film was so heavily cut out of its French original:

Orthopaedic humour

One last aside, here.

If you damage the ligaments of your wrist, in effect splitting them like the characteristic gap in Terry-Thomas’s front teeth, you will be told by a British surgeon that it is the “Terry-Thomas sign”. This says more about what amuses British medics than anything about their professional expertise. In the US, the nominal reference is David Letterman.