Across central and eastern Europe, nationalists are exploiting the painful history of the second world war to whip up anti-Russian feeling and rehabilitate the far right as social and economic discontent grows - and the process is mirrored in Russia. The latest in a string of such moves is the decision by the Polish authorities to block the reopening of the permanent Russian exhibition at the site of the Auschwitz death camp because of its description of some of its victims (from annexed pre-war Polish territory) as Soviet citizens. It's difficult to imagine a more sad and cynical debate than one about the citizenship of the massacred millions. Most were of course Jewish, and in the eyes of the Nazis both Poles and Russians were regarded as Untermenschen.
The Polish decision comes after Estonian MPs decided to remove a Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn a few weeks back. The act authorising its removal is the Law on Forbidden Structures Act, a rather Orwellian name for a new cold war against history. The "forbidden structure" in this case is a 2m bronze statue of a Soviet soldier erected in 1947 to commemorate Red Army soldiers killed fighting the Nazis.
Bronze and marble soldiers are being toppled across eastern Europe. The campaign began in 1989-91 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops: Soviet memorials were demolished, Russian-sounding names of streets and squares changed, and red stars from walls cast away. In some countries, the tensions calmed after the turbulent transition period, but in the Baltic republics this anti-historical cold war seems to be a permanent crusade.
The removal of the Tallinn memorial is only the tip of the iceberg. A draft bill recognises the Estonians who served in the German army, including in the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, as "fighters for Estonia's independence". Service in the SS is added to the record of work on retirement, while service in the Red Army as part of the anti-Hitler coalition is not.
Latvian rightwingers are also active in rewriting history. The marches of Latvian SS legions are well known - and even the most anti-communist friends of Latvia in the US and western Europe are shocked by these state-sponsored Nazi parades. Most Latvian Jews were murdered by Latvian police, and it is disgusting to read Latvian websites and books that put the blame on the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as "collaborators of Stalin".
Of course, there are many in the Baltic republics who reject this whitewashing of the Nazi past. And there are democrats in the Estonian and Latvian parliaments (not to mention the strong left in Lithuania), the media and NGOs, who defend the anti-fascist memorials and oppose the Nazi cult rallies. The Estonian president spoke out against the "irresponsible behaviour" of supporters of the "forbidden structures" law. Many Latvians oppose the SS rallies and call for equal rights for the country's Russian minority. These democrats need more support from western and central Europe.
Soviet memorials are respected in Berlin, and visitors to the rebuilt Reichstag can still see the graffiti carved on the old walls by Russian soldiers in 1945. Germany has set a good example on how to handle its Nazi past, but only a few eastern nations are ready to learn from it.
In my hometown, Budapest, the main Soviet memorial on the Szabadsag (Freedom) Square survived leftwing and rightwing governments. But last September, extreme rightwing rioters who set fire to the state television offices also attacked the memorial. In some Hungarian communities, newly elected rightwing mayors began their jobs by removing Soviet memorials and symbols.
In the west, the memory of the anti-fascist coalition is largely still intact, and only a few extremists claim it would have been better to have been allied with Hitler against the Soviet Union. But in the east, the fall of the Berlin wall created a vacuum in history. The new politicians and media failed to tell the complicated truth about the war, the old pro-Soviet cliches were replaced by anti-Soviet cliches. The tragedy of the Baltic republics under Soviet rule does not change the fact that the death camps of Auschwitz were created by the Nazis and liberated by the Red Army. And the crimes of the Stalinist regime do not alter the fact that millions of Soviet soldiers died for the freedom of Europe.
The Baltic republics should remember Stalin's victims, and we have to understand their mixed feeling towards Russia. But those who sacrificed their lives against the Nazi regime should be heroes for every democrat.
I have memories of Soviet armed intervention. I was five years old during the 1956 uprising in Hungary. I played with my friends on a Soviet tank burnt out by Molotov cocktails. I know how heroic the fight against the Soviet soldiers was. They had come as liberators but, due to the geopolitical reality, they became oppressors. Opposing the occupation didn't mean we wanted the Nazis back.
The huge sculpture of a woman on Budapest's Gellert Hill, erected by order of Marshall Voroshilov, still welcomes the liberators from the east. The soldiers died, we remember their heroic deaths - and life goes on. That's why we have memorials. It is a lesson across eastern Europe and the Baltic republics as well.
Gyula Hegyi is a Hungarian socialist MP. From The Guardian, 11.4.07
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
SPORTIN' LIFE: Gideon Haigh on R.L. Hunte
RL Hunte had it all. He appeared in two Test match scorecards; his records appeared in Wisden for eighteen years; he had a contemporary corporeal counterpart. But when he vanished hugger-mugger, it was as though he'd never been there. And, in fact, he hadn't. This is the story of a cricketer who did extremely well considering that he didn't exist.
Errol Ashton Clairmonte Hunte was born in Port-of-Spain on 3 October 1905 and grew into a nimble keeper and a batsman good enough to open for Trinidad, although when chosen to represent West Indies against the MCC team led by Hon F. S. G. Calthorpe in January 1930 he was for some reason consigned to number 11, making 10 not out and 1.
Yet, that that was not the only confusing aspect of Hunte's Test baptism. Though Wisden 1931 recognised him in his debut appearance as "E Hunte", when he appeared in the Second Test in his hometown, scoring 58 and 30 at first-wicket down, it was as "RL Hunte". This suggests a simple mishearing of Errol as "RL", although there was also a real RL Hunte around at the time, 46-year-old Ronald Lionel, who opened the bowling for British Guiana when MCC played them at their next port of call, Georgetown.
In Georgetown himself, Errol Hunte, now back to being "E", made his greatest Test contribution, helping Clifford Roach add 144 for the first wicket. At one stage, after the first of twin hundreds from George Headley, West Indies were one for 340, and beat a useful touring XI including Patsy Hendren, Bob Wyatt, Wilf Rhodes and Andy Sandham by 289 runs.
Of Hunte's 53, Wisden reported that he was `missed four times', MCC's fielding being "badly at fault". But Wisden was not best-positioned to be commenting on the errors of others. For, by the average tabulations on page 689, Hunte's split personality had been further divided. "E Hunte" had been stripped of one of his Test caps, being left with only his debut match; "RL Hunte" had been awarded two Tests, his average for 155 runs having been plumped to 38.75. The real RL Hunte, meanwhile, had played his last game for Trinidad, but his subtle gravitational pull would exert an influence on cricket's records for almost forty years.
Errol Hunte's cricket was to be laden with disappointment. He went to Australia with Jackie Grant's team of 1930-31, but lost his role as first-choice keeper to Ivan Barrow, and lingered in first-class cricket only three more years. Perhaps he was not a Wisden reader. Almanacks probably didn't have a wide circulation in Trinidad; even CLR James, who as a "British intellectual long before ten" was devouring Review of Reviews, Tit-Bits and Comic Cuts among other journals, doesn't mention Wisden coming into his purview. But if Hunte opened Wisden 1948 to consult its inaugural compilation of Test cricketers, what disappointment awaited him: "RL Hunte" still had one of his Tests, and would keep it almost the rest of his life.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, of course. And just as it's sometimes said that it's harder to get out of the Australian team than get into it, books of record can be the same: so intent on assimilating the present that, as Omar Khayyam warned, piety, wit and tears are no remedy - especially in an era when news travelled so slowly and in such confined circulations. In fact, while "E Hunte" lived his diminished life, "RL Hunte" went from strength to strength, with each year's repetition embedding himself more deeply in cricket's past. You can hear the Charters and Caldicott conversations, can't you? "Y'know, Charters, I can't fathom why they picked that E Hunte for those two Tests, can you?" "No, Caldicott, but they got it right when they picked that RL Hunte: he was up the mark, eh?" "My word, yes. Look, he not only kept wickets but opened the bowling for Guiana too!" "Wonder why he never played again. Inter-island jealousies, no doubt." "Ah yes - the ooooooold inter-island jealousies: the curse of Caribbean cricket!"
An immaterial alter ego, of course, is not without its uses. "Another rum and coke, please, Harry. And put it on RL's slate." Yet, the torment of losing the credit for such a large part of one's career! Imagine, if you will, an encounter between Hunte and the anti-Hunte.
"So, we meet at last. I believe you have something of mine: a Tests cap."
"Hey, I didn't take it, pal. I was going along, minding my own business; next thing I know, I'm a Test player. I figure, hey, just go with it. And lemme tell you, the babes love it. They're always asking me to tell them about my half-centuries, being dropped four times, facing Rhodes, joking with Patsy Hendren, what Learie Constantine's really like. Did I tell I'm releasing my own tour diary?"
"You fiend! That should be my tour diary!"
"Tell someone who cares, buster. I'm in Wisden, and I ain't budgin'."
It was almost too late before anything was done. To coincide with the arrival of Garry Sobers' team of 1966, Wisden assembled a sizeable supplement of West Indian records; one imagines it was then that editor Norman Preston realised he had a rogue cricketer on his hands, for in the 1967 edition the almanack restored to Hunte his lost cap, and "RL Hunte" dematerialised with a last spectral chuckle.
All the same, the correction went unacknowledged in the errata, reserved instead for such instances of slightly preening pedantry as: "Page 820. Add 100 for Australians: S. Trimble 164* v Barbados Colts at Bridgetown (not first-class)". And it is unlikely Hunte derived much satisfaction from his rehabilitation, for he died on 26 June of that year.
Of course, it's always possible the book, being published as usual in April, was sped to his bedside as belated corroboration of that third Test; one can imagine his wife reading it aloud, eyes a-gleaming. "Errol, look! `Hunte, E. 3: v E 1929 (3)'. There it is, Errol...Errol. Errol! Oh God..." "He's gone, Mrs Hunte. I'm sorry." Even then, however, the almanack didn't cover itself in glory. In Births and Deaths of Cricketers in Wisden 1968, his entry was curtly amended to `d 1967', and the obituarist guessed he was `62': in fact, he was 61 and 266 days.
Those were the days, of course, when Wisden was a corner store compared to the hypermarket of today. It was a manual, labour-intensive business, dependent on the diligence of contributors, and the squinting eyes of a single hard-pressed proof-reader from Sporting Handbooks. Such inexactitude is nowadays almost inconceivable, with statistics updated by the second, and so many cricket-loving souls poring over them daily with access to email and chat: Wisden today discretely honours Hunte with his full name, and correct birth and date dates.
Mind you, check out the player page for EAC Hunte on Cricinfo, if you will. We have, at last, corrected Hunte's mortal span at the top. But, because the obituary has been lifted direct from the Almanack, down below he is still 62. Seventy-seven years after not playing a Test, "RL Hunte" is still plaguing hapless Errol.
Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer
Errol Ashton Clairmonte Hunte was born in Port-of-Spain on 3 October 1905 and grew into a nimble keeper and a batsman good enough to open for Trinidad, although when chosen to represent West Indies against the MCC team led by Hon F. S. G. Calthorpe in January 1930 he was for some reason consigned to number 11, making 10 not out and 1.
Yet, that that was not the only confusing aspect of Hunte's Test baptism. Though Wisden 1931 recognised him in his debut appearance as "E Hunte", when he appeared in the Second Test in his hometown, scoring 58 and 30 at first-wicket down, it was as "RL Hunte". This suggests a simple mishearing of Errol as "RL", although there was also a real RL Hunte around at the time, 46-year-old Ronald Lionel, who opened the bowling for British Guiana when MCC played them at their next port of call, Georgetown.
In Georgetown himself, Errol Hunte, now back to being "E", made his greatest Test contribution, helping Clifford Roach add 144 for the first wicket. At one stage, after the first of twin hundreds from George Headley, West Indies were one for 340, and beat a useful touring XI including Patsy Hendren, Bob Wyatt, Wilf Rhodes and Andy Sandham by 289 runs.
Of Hunte's 53, Wisden reported that he was `missed four times', MCC's fielding being "badly at fault". But Wisden was not best-positioned to be commenting on the errors of others. For, by the average tabulations on page 689, Hunte's split personality had been further divided. "E Hunte" had been stripped of one of his Test caps, being left with only his debut match; "RL Hunte" had been awarded two Tests, his average for 155 runs having been plumped to 38.75. The real RL Hunte, meanwhile, had played his last game for Trinidad, but his subtle gravitational pull would exert an influence on cricket's records for almost forty years.
Errol Hunte's cricket was to be laden with disappointment. He went to Australia with Jackie Grant's team of 1930-31, but lost his role as first-choice keeper to Ivan Barrow, and lingered in first-class cricket only three more years. Perhaps he was not a Wisden reader. Almanacks probably didn't have a wide circulation in Trinidad; even CLR James, who as a "British intellectual long before ten" was devouring Review of Reviews, Tit-Bits and Comic Cuts among other journals, doesn't mention Wisden coming into his purview. But if Hunte opened Wisden 1948 to consult its inaugural compilation of Test cricketers, what disappointment awaited him: "RL Hunte" still had one of his Tests, and would keep it almost the rest of his life.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, of course. And just as it's sometimes said that it's harder to get out of the Australian team than get into it, books of record can be the same: so intent on assimilating the present that, as Omar Khayyam warned, piety, wit and tears are no remedy - especially in an era when news travelled so slowly and in such confined circulations. In fact, while "E Hunte" lived his diminished life, "RL Hunte" went from strength to strength, with each year's repetition embedding himself more deeply in cricket's past. You can hear the Charters and Caldicott conversations, can't you? "Y'know, Charters, I can't fathom why they picked that E Hunte for those two Tests, can you?" "No, Caldicott, but they got it right when they picked that RL Hunte: he was up the mark, eh?" "My word, yes. Look, he not only kept wickets but opened the bowling for Guiana too!" "Wonder why he never played again. Inter-island jealousies, no doubt." "Ah yes - the ooooooold inter-island jealousies: the curse of Caribbean cricket!"
An immaterial alter ego, of course, is not without its uses. "Another rum and coke, please, Harry. And put it on RL's slate." Yet, the torment of losing the credit for such a large part of one's career! Imagine, if you will, an encounter between Hunte and the anti-Hunte.
"So, we meet at last. I believe you have something of mine: a Tests cap."
"Hey, I didn't take it, pal. I was going along, minding my own business; next thing I know, I'm a Test player. I figure, hey, just go with it. And lemme tell you, the babes love it. They're always asking me to tell them about my half-centuries, being dropped four times, facing Rhodes, joking with Patsy Hendren, what Learie Constantine's really like. Did I tell I'm releasing my own tour diary?"
"You fiend! That should be my tour diary!"
"Tell someone who cares, buster. I'm in Wisden, and I ain't budgin'."
It was almost too late before anything was done. To coincide with the arrival of Garry Sobers' team of 1966, Wisden assembled a sizeable supplement of West Indian records; one imagines it was then that editor Norman Preston realised he had a rogue cricketer on his hands, for in the 1967 edition the almanack restored to Hunte his lost cap, and "RL Hunte" dematerialised with a last spectral chuckle.
All the same, the correction went unacknowledged in the errata, reserved instead for such instances of slightly preening pedantry as: "Page 820. Add 100 for Australians: S. Trimble 164* v Barbados Colts at Bridgetown (not first-class)". And it is unlikely Hunte derived much satisfaction from his rehabilitation, for he died on 26 June of that year.
Of course, it's always possible the book, being published as usual in April, was sped to his bedside as belated corroboration of that third Test; one can imagine his wife reading it aloud, eyes a-gleaming. "Errol, look! `Hunte, E. 3: v E 1929 (3)'. There it is, Errol...Errol. Errol! Oh God..." "He's gone, Mrs Hunte. I'm sorry." Even then, however, the almanack didn't cover itself in glory. In Births and Deaths of Cricketers in Wisden 1968, his entry was curtly amended to `d 1967', and the obituarist guessed he was `62': in fact, he was 61 and 266 days.
Those were the days, of course, when Wisden was a corner store compared to the hypermarket of today. It was a manual, labour-intensive business, dependent on the diligence of contributors, and the squinting eyes of a single hard-pressed proof-reader from Sporting Handbooks. Such inexactitude is nowadays almost inconceivable, with statistics updated by the second, and so many cricket-loving souls poring over them daily with access to email and chat: Wisden today discretely honours Hunte with his full name, and correct birth and date dates.
Mind you, check out the player page for EAC Hunte on Cricinfo, if you will. We have, at last, corrected Hunte's mortal span at the top. But, because the obituary has been lifted direct from the Almanack, down below he is still 62. Seventy-seven years after not playing a Test, "RL Hunte" is still plaguing hapless Errol.
Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer
SPORTIN' LIFE: Gideon Haigh: On Roy Marshall
Roy Marshall felt that cricket contained two kinds of madman: the fast bowler, because he expended his energies so wildly and thriftlessly; but also the opening batsman, for it required another species of lunacy to deal with madmen of one's own volition.
As an opening batsman, and one of the most spectacular of his generation, Marshall knew whereof he spoke. In his own case, he confessed, he did not like opening, was worried by extreme pace, and often exceptionally nervous. But the alternative was worse. 'I am not ashamed to say that there have been many occasions in my life when I have been frightened as I went out to face a fast bowler for the first time in a match,' he confessed. 'The plain truth is that I just cannot bear hanging round.'
Few cricketers have been so honest. Maurice Leyland allowed that 'no one liked fast bowling, but some show it more than others'. But, generally, fear is not something batsmen own to. Marshall, too, was a visible worrier before batting. If bowling of truly speedy repute was in the offing - and his years as the hope of Hampshire took in Tyson, Trueman, Statham, Loader, Snow and Ward - Marshall would fall quiet in the dressing room. He would tense up. He would dislike being spoken to. He would fiddle with his thick glasses, without which he stumbled round blindly. He was disturbed by Trueman's propensity for visiting the opposition dressing room before games. 'Why doesn't he get the hell out of here?' Marshall would think. 'What right has he got to come in here cracking jokes at this moment when in a few minutes' time he'll be trying to knock my head off?'
All of which makes his cricket the more remarkable. For, in the middle, Marshall hurled himself at the bowling with an almost vindictive fury. No county cricketer of the 1950s and 1960s drove more lavishly, or cut more fiercely: standing in the gully to Marshall was not for the faint of heart, and most learned to stand some yards deeper than usual. His eye was as good as his nerve. 'All right,' Frank Tyson announced in the middle of an over one day. 'Let's have all the fielders out and we'll play baseball.'
Marshall would have been remarkable anyway. A scion of the Barbados plantocracy, he toured England and Australia with West Indian teams of the early 1950s without immediately looking the part. About this, again, he was acutely honest: 'Being a white West Indian myself, the son of a planter and living a fairly sheltered life, I suppose I did grow up with slight racialist feelings. It was never anything that was said or done but just that I was brought up in a white man's world and white men, at the time, probably ruled the day-to-day life in Barbados.'
Ironically, Frank Worrell became his idol and also one of his staunchest admirers, while Marshall made an enemy of white Jeff Stollmeyer, whose Trinidadian faction with Gerry Gomez dispossessed John Goddard on the 1951-52 tour of Australia. It was in youthful disillusionment with inter-island jealousies that, having already represented Lowerhouse in the Lancashire League, he took the county shilling, thereby foresaking international cricket - a choice and a sacrifice that today seems altogether bizarre, but was made by scores of players at the time, mainly Australians like Somerset's Bill Alley and Nottinghamshire's Bruce Dooland, but also South Africans like Syd O'Linn and Stuart Leary at Kent, and West Indians including Ron Headley at Worcestershire and Shirley Griffiths at Warwickshire.
Marshall's success was more or less instantaneous. His first game, against the 1953 Australians, he belted 71 in 85 minutes including five sixes. His first full season contained 2115 runs; at his peak, he surged past 2000 in five consecutive years. Worrell twice implored him to return to Test cricket to partner Conrad Hunte. There was nothing doing: 'I had a duty to Hampshire who had shown faith in me in the first place.' For if his batting sometimes smacked of carelessness, Marshall was anything but casual; he could even be a bit of a prig. For example, he heartily disapproved of sledging, of which he found a startling amount to complain, even in what is usually regarded as a period of prelapsarian innocence. 'I think the thing that shocked me more than anything else was the amount of swearing I heard on the field,' he recalled of his first season. 'I've learned to ignore the language hurled about but don't let anyone fool you that cricket is always a gentlemanly pursuit.' He once rounded on the famously salty Wilf Wooller, who had been cursing him from short leg: 'For a Test selector, I think your behaviour is absolutely disgraceful.' Even Wooller was momentarily lost for words.
While he had left West Indian cricket, Marshall found that county cricket had its own form of exclusion: the distinction between amateurs and professionals which Marshall thought 'totally wrong'. Unapologetically, outspokenly professional, Marshall declared: 'If someone is ill, he does not call for an amateur physician to attend him. If someone needs legal advice, he doesn't seek out the barrack room lawyers.' He was especially irked at Hampshire by 'amateur players coming along in the summer holidays and wanting a game', who were 'often found a place in the side, although they did not possess half the talent of the professional player they displaced'. Marshall was such a pro, in fact, that one season when he found himself in line for the 100-pound Lawrence Trophy, presented to the compiler of the season's fastest hundred, he paid 25 pounds to buy an insurance policy against a faster century: no gay blade, this.
Then there was that batting. If fear was in the mix when he faced pace bowling, it never showed; 'indeed,' noted John Arlott, 'at times he seemed positively to enjoy it'. At Canterbury in August 1957, Marshall top-edged Kent's hard-working swing bowler Fred Ridgway into his face, shattering his glasses and opening a wound under his eye requiring six stitches. Hampshire's next fixture was on their own very fast Portsmouth wicket, against Surrey's extremely rapid Peter Loader, whose action was of dubious purity. Marshall's captain Desmond Eagar offered him the game off; Marshall would not hear of it. Loader bounced him to hell and back, at one stage striking him a glancing blow on the temple just inches from his stitches. Nonetheless, Marshall made 56 out of 120 then 111 out of 230 in a masterful display. 'No finer display of batting,' wrote Eagar, 'has been seen in Hampshire since the war.'
When Eagar's successor Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie staked money on his Hampshire team to win the 1961 Championship, he was influenced by one man alone. It was Marshall's benefit year: that would surely imbue him with that 'extra little killer instinct'. His 2607 runs were crucial; his opening partnerships with Jimmy Gray as decisive as they were often imbalanced. Of the 155 they added against Somerset, for instance, Gray contributed 38. Marshall was finally dismissed for 212 with the score at 317.
Marshall bowed out of the game with little evidence of decline. If anything, his attacking style was more refreshing than ever. On day one at Derby in August 1972, he made 203 at Derby in August 1972 contained twenty-nine fours and two sixes; on day three, the hosts batted 136 overs, 65 of them maidens. Marshall also left a residue of rare candour. Batting against fast bowling, he reminded us, is a physical challenge and a mental test. To feel fear and overcome it is no small thing; bravery without fear is simply insensate, automatic, a form of miscalculation in extremis. Marshall may have been right to view a taste for opening the batting as a kind of madness - but it is surely the very finest kind.
SPORTIN' LIFE: Gideon Haigh: On Blythe
Wednesday week marks a hundred years since a game of forgotten feats but immemorial imagery. Over three days from 9 August 1906, Kent overcame Lancashire at Canterbury's St Lawrence Ground by an innings and 195 runs, thanks largely to 176 from their elegant amateur Kenneth Hutchings and destructive fast bowling from Arthur Fielder, en route to securing their first county championship of the modern era. But it would have receded into antiquity like myriad others of the period had not it become the subject of an extraordinarily detailed likeness by the salon painter Albert Chevallier Tayler.
E. W. Swanton reckoned it "one of the finest ever portrayals of distinguished identifiable cricketers in action"; it is by some way the most valuable, having fetched £600,000 at auction last year. The eye falls first, out of habit, on the striking batsman: the diminutive figure of Lancashire's Johnny Tyldesley, who had taken the Kent bowlers for 295 earlier in the season, but whose dismissal for 19 and 4 here was a leading indicator of Lancashire's eclipse. But the image is set in motion by the figure of Kent's slow left-arm hero Charlie Blythe, about to release from the pavilion end where he was favoured by a slight slope, in the setting where his 281 wickets cost less than 15 runs each.
The opposition is an intriguing one. Although Hutchings and Fielder were the match's undoubted stars, ahead of greater feats the following year in Melbourne where the former made a hundred in a session and the latter conjured the winning runs in a one-wicket victory, Lord Harris apparently insisted that Blythe be the bowler in the picture. By homing in on Blythe's duel with Tyldesley, Tayler makes the game's defining contest, in a period defined even in the writings of C. L. R. James as a belle époque of amateurism, that between two skilled professionals. What's more, they strike attitudes of exquisite poise. Tyldesley's trim figure, still but relaxed, is nearly upright, the high-gripped bat placed daintily in the block, the toe of his front foot poking toward cover. And Blythe, hovering above the crease, face fixed, body tensed, front foot arched in space, invisible arm about to begin its upswing - Blythe's arm, in fact, came, with a studied nonchalance, from behind his back, hiding the ball until it left the hand. Harry Altham's description of Blythe in action might well serve as its caption: "the very look on his face, the long, sensitive fingers, the elastic back sweep of the arm before delivery with the right hand thrown up in perfect balance against it, the short dancing approach approach, the long last stride, and the final flick of the arm as it came over, all these spoke of a highly sensitive and nervous instrument, beautifully coordinated, directed by a subtle mind, and inspired by a natural love for its art."
Blythe came from unpromising material, the son of an engine-fitter at the Arsenal. "Blythe lived at Deptford," wrote his Kent mentor Captain William McCanlis, "a place one would hardly go in search of cricketers. The lads of this town have only the roughest parts of Blackheath on which to play their occasional cricket." McCanlis first spied Blythe as "one of the crowd" bowling idly at Walter Wright when Kent visited the town; impressed by what he saw, McCanlis invited the boy to trial at his Tonbridge "nursery". Observing his slim build and high forehead, Cardus the junior romantic's nurtured an elaborate fantasy of Blythe's aristocratic past until it was rudely disturbed by hearing him twit a teammate: "I'll `it yer on top o' the nose in a minute!" Yet he began his portrait of Blythe in Good Days (1934) with an aesthete's appreciation: "Blythe of Kent - what a name, how perfect for the prettiest slow left-handed bowler of his, or surely any other, period!" And he was right to sense delicate sensibilities behind the deceptive flight. Blythe played the violin with his supple spinner's fingers; likewise on big occasions, the tendency exacerbated by epilepsy, was he strung up to concert pitch.
A year after Blythe's canvas immortality, he achieved a cricket indelibility, taking 17 Northants wickets in a day at Northampton, then in the Test at Headingley the following month 15 South African wickets for 99. C. B. Fry called the latter game "the tautest cricket match in which I have ever played", and perceived the toll on its star: "The strain of the match was severe, especially on Colin Blythe, who was completely knocked up. From start to finish he never bowled a single ball except of impeccable length. The situation was that three bad overs could have lost the match." The strain was such, in fact, that in the next ten days, a wan Blythe could winkle out only four county batsmen for 313. He bowled well at The Oval, then on the Ashes tour that winter failed altogether: Philip Trevor could hardly believe it was "the real Blythe", as "he often found it difficult even to keep a good length".
It was situations rather than opponents that troubled Blythe, for he removed batsmen in county cricket with almost surgical deftness - throughbred batsmen, too, including Gilbert Jessop nineteen times, Tom Hayward and his protégé Jack Hobbs seventeen times each. Yet now a reputation for frailty would precede him, preventing improvement on his 100 Test wickets at 18.63 and more than three Players caps against the Gentlemen, as well as the availability of the perhaps less artful but certainly more arch Wilf Rhodes. Unlike Rhodes, for example, Blythe was singularly uninterested in batting, and conveyed that indifference to spectators - so much so that correspondence broke out in the columns of The Cricketer in 1978 about whether he was right or left-handed, answered finally on the authority of his teammate Frank Woolley: "He was a right-hand batsman who spent very little time at the crease, say at the most four balls."
In his last season, Blythe was as potent as ever, striking with undisturbed regularity for 170 wickets at 15: he was thirty-five, and might have bowled on for a decade and more. But young men with his socio-economic background went mainly in one direction after September 1914. Enlisting in the Kent Fortress Engineers soon after the outbreak of war and attached to the Yorkshire Light Infantry, he lost his life to a random shellfall on the railway between Pimmern and Forest Hall two days after the capture of Passchendaele village, the news coming soon after another shell claimed the life of Hutchings. He was to be twice remembered at his happiest hunting ground: as a soldier by two shrapnel-streaked wallets on display in the pavilion, and as an artist in Tayler's painting by his heel hovering an inch or two above the ground, forever.
Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer
From Cricinfo.com, 1.8.06
Simon Jenkins, Grauniad 9.4.07
The Royal Navy's decision to let its personnel sell stories of their failed military operation beggars ever more belief. Even the most ardent student of government openness must wonder at the thought processes involved. The navy may no longer rule the waves, but it waives the rules when it sees the glint of money. Last night it appeared to admit it was wrong, or at least a minister did. Are any of these people really in charge of British military operations?
Having just had a ship, HMS Cornwall, involved in an apparently mishandled incident, silence and a return to base was surely the best policy. Having had 15 sailors - some of them young and clearly unable to handle themselves - captured and "turned", the less publicity the better. Having accused the Iranians of exploiting them for propaganda, why stand open to the identical charge? Having abused the Iranians for treating a woman differently, why treat her differently, allowing her to make a fortune from a "controlled" interview?
Nor is that all. After a rescue involving British and American diplomats in a delicate operation that balanced guilt, pride, nods and winks, what conceivable gain lay in reopening the wound? Why generate headlines bound to contain the words ordeal, rape, knickers, mock execution and "poisonous dwarf"? Starve the story of oxygen and it would have died in a week. What was likely to be the reaction of other services, which are enduring far greater losses and privations than the navy in Iraq? They are actually getting killed. What is "My Ordeal" for £100,000 against that? Every member of the navy press office should be fired.
Last night the defence secretary, Des Browne, acknowledged that the decision had "not reached a satisfactory outcome". The review of procedures ordered by the MoD now must ask whether in future every soldier's tale of derring-do, which might be more saleable than yesterday's unedifying memoir, is up for media bids on return to base. A lucrative precedent has been set. And what of the safety of future hostages taken by the Iranians in this tit-for-tat war? How will the navy's hamfisted adventure into chequebook journalism have helped their plight? Presumably the Iranians will want a cut.
We are told that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) was operating freelance in taking the sailors hostage. It had just seen five of its number captured in Iraq. It is an enemy of the moderates looking to reopen lines to the west, and is eager for a nuclear capability. The IRGC was reportedly out to humiliate Iran's diplomats and technocrats and ensure there would be no backsliding on nuclear enrichment.
A Tehran "Londonologist" might be tempted to see the Royal Navy in a similar light. Bruised by operational failure, desperate to preserve its costly nuclear missiles from political attack and humiliated by the capture of its sailors, it was burning with resentment against the Foreign Office, the Iranians, Gordon Brown's Treasury and the whole Labour establishment. It would show its muscle by setting the tabloids loose in the political china shop. How else to explain such a decision by the mad mullahs of the quarterdeck?
As long as the Iraq occupation continues, Iran is bound to treat Britain and the US as hostile intruders. The west is fighting counterinsurgency wars on Iran's eastern and western borders. Iranian politics is awash with sympathisers for the insurgents. Moderate leadership is blighted by daily atrocities to coreligionists in and around Baghdad. While Tehran has no interest in the Taliban in Afghanistan, it has emotional and religious attachment to the Shia cause in Iraq. No government can stand aloof from the invasion and occupation of a neighbouring state by a foreign power. To expect otherwise of Iran is naive.
Hence the one silver lining that might have emerged from the affair of the captive 15. As a result of the efforts required to free them, some new points of contact might have been opened with those in Tehran who want their country to come in from the cold. Iran is too big, proud, rich and unpredictable a nation to be susceptible to the usual neoconservative swagger. Whatever the import of President Ahmadinejad's boast yesterday, it is clearly on the brink of acquiring substantial nuclear capability. It is not another petty Muslim state of the sort that features in the crusader fantasies of George Bush, Tony Blair and their circle. If ever Blair hoped to carry his "western values agenda" on a white charger to the gates of Tehran, that hope vanished in the mire of Iraq.
The normal hawkish responses are inoperable in the case of Iran. This is a nation of 70 million people. Bombing would be useless. Invading would be madness. A quarter century of international quarantine has not brought down the ayatollahs. It has probably strengthened them by weakening the mercantile class and so lengthening the odds on a return to a more open, secular democracy. Meanwhile the invasion of Iraq has removed Saddam and offered Iran the mantle of anti-western leadership in the region, which it has eagerly accepted.
In other words, America's policy of ostracism, containment and regime change has been counterproductive. There is no "military solution" to Iran or to its nuclear facilities. But that does not make it any less dangerous or its activities any less a concern to the west. It means only that other influences must be brought to bear. The Iranian economy is in such trouble that tighter sanctions from Europe did probably play a part in the hostage release. Ahmadinejad and his clerical sponsors are under pressure from inflation, unemployment and the threat of petrol rationing. They must still fight and win elections and keep a wary eye on the Tehran mob. Iran is not a wholly closed society any more than it is a wholly monolithic dictatorship.
As the west desperately attempts to extricate itself from its policies in the region, constructive engagement with Iran makes the only sense. This means the sticks and carrots, give-and-take, soft-cop, hard-cop that constitutes modern coercive diplomacy. In a region of raging instability Iran is the one country with which the west cannot afford not to do business. The job of diplomacy is to ensure that Iran's power brokers see that they have a similar interest.
One difference between war and diplomacy is that the first is easy and the second hard. Iran is going to be very hard. But why then did Des Browne allow the Royal Navy to smack Iran about the head just when this incident desperately needed closure?
Having just had a ship, HMS Cornwall, involved in an apparently mishandled incident, silence and a return to base was surely the best policy. Having had 15 sailors - some of them young and clearly unable to handle themselves - captured and "turned", the less publicity the better. Having accused the Iranians of exploiting them for propaganda, why stand open to the identical charge? Having abused the Iranians for treating a woman differently, why treat her differently, allowing her to make a fortune from a "controlled" interview?
Nor is that all. After a rescue involving British and American diplomats in a delicate operation that balanced guilt, pride, nods and winks, what conceivable gain lay in reopening the wound? Why generate headlines bound to contain the words ordeal, rape, knickers, mock execution and "poisonous dwarf"? Starve the story of oxygen and it would have died in a week. What was likely to be the reaction of other services, which are enduring far greater losses and privations than the navy in Iraq? They are actually getting killed. What is "My Ordeal" for £100,000 against that? Every member of the navy press office should be fired.
Last night the defence secretary, Des Browne, acknowledged that the decision had "not reached a satisfactory outcome". The review of procedures ordered by the MoD now must ask whether in future every soldier's tale of derring-do, which might be more saleable than yesterday's unedifying memoir, is up for media bids on return to base. A lucrative precedent has been set. And what of the safety of future hostages taken by the Iranians in this tit-for-tat war? How will the navy's hamfisted adventure into chequebook journalism have helped their plight? Presumably the Iranians will want a cut.
We are told that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) was operating freelance in taking the sailors hostage. It had just seen five of its number captured in Iraq. It is an enemy of the moderates looking to reopen lines to the west, and is eager for a nuclear capability. The IRGC was reportedly out to humiliate Iran's diplomats and technocrats and ensure there would be no backsliding on nuclear enrichment.
A Tehran "Londonologist" might be tempted to see the Royal Navy in a similar light. Bruised by operational failure, desperate to preserve its costly nuclear missiles from political attack and humiliated by the capture of its sailors, it was burning with resentment against the Foreign Office, the Iranians, Gordon Brown's Treasury and the whole Labour establishment. It would show its muscle by setting the tabloids loose in the political china shop. How else to explain such a decision by the mad mullahs of the quarterdeck?
As long as the Iraq occupation continues, Iran is bound to treat Britain and the US as hostile intruders. The west is fighting counterinsurgency wars on Iran's eastern and western borders. Iranian politics is awash with sympathisers for the insurgents. Moderate leadership is blighted by daily atrocities to coreligionists in and around Baghdad. While Tehran has no interest in the Taliban in Afghanistan, it has emotional and religious attachment to the Shia cause in Iraq. No government can stand aloof from the invasion and occupation of a neighbouring state by a foreign power. To expect otherwise of Iran is naive.
Hence the one silver lining that might have emerged from the affair of the captive 15. As a result of the efforts required to free them, some new points of contact might have been opened with those in Tehran who want their country to come in from the cold. Iran is too big, proud, rich and unpredictable a nation to be susceptible to the usual neoconservative swagger. Whatever the import of President Ahmadinejad's boast yesterday, it is clearly on the brink of acquiring substantial nuclear capability. It is not another petty Muslim state of the sort that features in the crusader fantasies of George Bush, Tony Blair and their circle. If ever Blair hoped to carry his "western values agenda" on a white charger to the gates of Tehran, that hope vanished in the mire of Iraq.
The normal hawkish responses are inoperable in the case of Iran. This is a nation of 70 million people. Bombing would be useless. Invading would be madness. A quarter century of international quarantine has not brought down the ayatollahs. It has probably strengthened them by weakening the mercantile class and so lengthening the odds on a return to a more open, secular democracy. Meanwhile the invasion of Iraq has removed Saddam and offered Iran the mantle of anti-western leadership in the region, which it has eagerly accepted.
In other words, America's policy of ostracism, containment and regime change has been counterproductive. There is no "military solution" to Iran or to its nuclear facilities. But that does not make it any less dangerous or its activities any less a concern to the west. It means only that other influences must be brought to bear. The Iranian economy is in such trouble that tighter sanctions from Europe did probably play a part in the hostage release. Ahmadinejad and his clerical sponsors are under pressure from inflation, unemployment and the threat of petrol rationing. They must still fight and win elections and keep a wary eye on the Tehran mob. Iran is not a wholly closed society any more than it is a wholly monolithic dictatorship.
As the west desperately attempts to extricate itself from its policies in the region, constructive engagement with Iran makes the only sense. This means the sticks and carrots, give-and-take, soft-cop, hard-cop that constitutes modern coercive diplomacy. In a region of raging instability Iran is the one country with which the west cannot afford not to do business. The job of diplomacy is to ensure that Iran's power brokers see that they have a similar interest.
One difference between war and diplomacy is that the first is easy and the second hard. Iran is going to be very hard. But why then did Des Browne allow the Royal Navy to smack Iran about the head just when this incident desperately needed closure?
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
TV Review: Jackie - A Girl's Best Friend
JACKIE: A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
BBC4, 9.4.07
Dear Cathy and Claire, this is not an easy letter to write. I fancy this programme on TV and so want to write about it. Please help!!!! Yours, a confused boy.
Yes, I’ve a problem. And as the Hotspur and Shoot didn’t have agony aunts, far less the Beano, where else did a bumfluffed ado turn in the late 1970s? But boys didn’t have problems then. Girls did.
This documentary on the heyday of Messrs DC Thomson’s magazine Jackie was akin to wolfing down an entire box of Guylians. Comfort food, not too exclusive, can just manage it. Similarly this was comfort TV, intelligence without braininess. It could have been a mere collection of dullard talking heads. We got a few of them, but most of what they said made more sense than usual, and it said as much about the media as dopily evoking a lost world of training bras and Strawberry Shortcake and Robin Gibb and kissproofing.
There were glimpses of drably horrid emotional and material privation; one letter to Cathy and Claire, the magazine’s legendary agony aunts/big sisses, raged against parents who ‘couldn’t afford to buy a telephone’. Another contained a phial of urine, so desperate was the sender to sidestep the shame of teenage pregnancy. It was, as one staffer put it, ‘their only port in a a storm’. One wants to weep.
The adolescent media preys on hormonal disturbance, on what Martin Amis once perceptively called ‘damp, adoring need’. Why else should this market still be an advertiser’s Holy Grail?
What was omitted was any opinion that Jackie’s take on adolescence was in any way a bad thing. The problem with adolescent media then as now was the sense, perceived only in later life, that they were de facto training manuals, enculturations. Shoot trained boys to read football as a linguistic prism, through which the world was one where people would blast or storm when upset. Headlines like ‘Billy Bremner – The Night I Had Murder On My Mind’ prepared one for accepting a tabloid-mediatised cosmos. Nobody talks like that in real life; but using tabloid shorthand helps cretinize us into thinking that they do, and thinking in similarly circumscribed ways. Similarly Jackie had its own constructions of language ('dishy' was a favourite) and its own goals for its readers.
Some of the celebrity witnesses on this show (why celebs? The David Cassidy Fan Club, none of whose wattles were a day under 40, were much more fun) recounted the magazine’s obsession with propriety and marriage. Then there was the horoscopes. Pseudo-science: ‘If he has a square head, it means he wants to change the shape of the world’ – absolute shit, and the people who made this up gleefully admitted as much. Is this the Frankie Frazer syndrome, where crimes committed 30+ years ago are absolved into larks by a time limit? This show made lively and convincing TV to persuade us that Jackie was a formative influence – Myskow, Carroll, Jacqueline Wilson, ex-Thomsonites all, significantly moved into the upper media echelons from Jackie. Shouldn’t these people be a little bit ashamed of what they did, what they made, and how what they made made of them?
Er… there was Myskow, former Jackie editor, sitting in state like the Queen of Hearts in retirement at Theydon Bois. At least she and Wilson, another ex-staffer, showed a trace of contrition and awareness of their deeds. Not so Sue Carroll, a colour that suggested not so much perma-tan as a Burmese army torturer with a blowlamp. She made George Hamilton look Finn-pale. God, she made fellow-contributor Trisha Goddard look pale.
Why else, save for terminal thickness or masterful manipulation, would the magazine’s target audience, and presumably that of this programme, take seriously the likes of the awful Michelle Collins? Or Fiona Bruce? Or shell out money on Closer? Who made them like this? Jackie did, sure as fortysomething slapheads, Clarksonites and members of Fathers4Justice still view the world through the crosshairs of Dredger and Hellman of Hammer Force.
The present writer’s theory is that many of the UK’s postwar ills can be laid at the scrubbed doorstep of Thomson’s, shapers of the world for untold millions of children. The comic arm of the Wee Frees, a dingy bastion of dingy Dundee, it was stridently and unapologetically illiberal, anti-union, provincial and small minded (abroad was a land of spies and whores where they said things like dratski and caramba! ) mean and antediluvian in morals and thought-processes (so mean they used rubbish illustrators instead of photographers when it suited the company purse). If Adolf had won, it would have bid to produce an Anglophonic translation of Julius Streicher’s periodical Der Sturmer and the party organ Volkischer Beobachter. It was therefore ideally placed to bring to the tinies the virtues of thrift and chastity and prejudice, the lardy cake reality of make-do, pictured in Ivor Cutler’s Life in a Scottish Sitting Room which so underpinned British life post-45. How the Bash Street Kids snuck into this fortress is unknown.
The programme adopted a well-gauged tone, conceived by someone who had the magazine’s number. Conscientious but romantic, head in the sky, feet on the ground, you know the drill. But this post-fem indulgence of oppressive ideologies can only get you so far. What wasn’t given nearly enough space was the charge that Jackie was gynophobic from the off. Significantly, Thomsonite boss Gordon Small’s pinched Lowlands accent, more suited to the pulpit than the composing room, was the first one heard on the subject of sex. How many lives did DC Thomson’s photo-story ruin? This puritanical ostracism of hormonal drives contrasts bluntly with teen literature on the mainland of Europe (the excuse was, of course, that the Germans and Danes and French and wops were all sex mad). But this absurd oversight fucked people over, genuinely, irrevocably, in ways that can’t be undone by a dollop of post-fem giggly irony about how watching the Chippendales can be empowering.
Props and research departments earned their corn, with plenty of feathers and stack heels (memo to producer – why no Wombles?). There was no Janet Street-Porter or Jenny Éclair, which must necessarily improve anything. There wasn’t the fetishisation of the past, making an object of it. Those are essentially male issues of control. The psyche of teenage girls was probed with less shallowness than one might have expected, but wasn’t that depth part of what it meant to be female and young back then? It’s what attracted the boys – me, anyway. Girls didn’t bother with contingent and pointless things, like identifying the green double-decker in one marvellous piece of archive as AN11, a London Country Leyland Atlantean PDR1/1A of Stevenage garage (depot code; SV). The disdain of such nonsense is what made girls special. This is what they were never told made them special.
Sad, then, to see insight not extending to a comparative study of what made girls and boys different, and also how those differences were reinforced by the discourse of their reading matter. The presence of Trevor and Simon as spokesmen for blokes was a poor move, albeit one which performed the minor service of proving that these two saddos seem to have achieved the major feat of being even less funny than they were in their Saturday Superstore ‘pomp’.
Like its intended constituency, this had not a supermodel’s allure, and neither did it wear bottle-bottom NHS bins. It got it right, most of the time. It kept its hand on its penny, as mums would have said back in the mag's youth. In sum, rewarding and deserving workaday TV, of which there is too little of any quality at all.
One other thing, though; if I remember rightly, it wasn’t just Donny v. David; Michael Jackson was in the fantasy mix, too, wasn’t he? Or is this me being insufferably boyish?
Dear Cathy and Claire, there’s this boy who’s really nice, but he ain’t half picky…
Reading The Greens: The US Masters
THE MASTERS
BBC2, 8.4.07
What was TV like in the 1950s? Watch golf and find out. And find out how little has actually changed about the medium and sport. For better and for worse.
Aside of an unacceptable remix of the theme tune, and the replacement of Steve Rider in the MC’s chair by another natural-born smirker, Gary Lineker, things change real slow round golf on the BBC. Rather like at Augusta, Georgia, where the most reactionary sports club in the world presides over one of sport’s most patrician events. US Presidents – even Republican ones – are regarded as mere members at Augusta. Women? Aw, hell, if we must. Blacks? One answer to that – two more Old Fashioneds and a Sidecar, boy. Clifford Roberts, Suthun gennulman, banker and the course’s founder, liked to take his holidays in apartheid South Africa. And yes, for all the wrong reasons.
TV once reflexively tugged its forelock to establishment bodies. Attendance at and coverage of Serious Events did not allow for observations on anything but the host’s divinely-ordained infallibility. Astoundingly, Augusta is still treated thus, not as a sporting event that courts telly, but merely tolerates it (a fiction it finds useful to maintain for the snob appeal of its own snob appeal). Gary McChord, a commentator who is one of many witty contributors to America’s golfing media was effectively banned from broadcasting from Augusta for the perceived flippancy of a remark along the lines of ‘they don’t mow the lawns here, they wax them like bikini lines’ and comparing humps along the fairways to body bags. McChord works for CBS, who have been beaming out the Masters for 51 years, but get on the wrong side of these good old boys and they don’t let you forget it. A sub-clause in the BBC’s Augusta contract must surely stipulate the word ‘beautiful’ be used to describe the course at least once every quarter-hour, preferably adjoining the phrase ‘there’s nothing like the Masters’. This is small ‘c’ conservatism at its pettiest and worst, demeaning the dignity of exploiter and exploitee.
It also makes great and entirely fascinating television.
Because of course Augusta is beautiful. Or rather it is ‘beautiful’ in a way that flatters the eye of the irrevocably bourgeois, inviting adjectives like sumptuous and luxurious. Augusta is one of the nés plus ultra of the insufferable snobbery of the South’s aristocracy of planters and slavers and oilmen and ranchers, the desire to legitimise their nouveaux status by aping the estates of the Old World. The old South money’s gone north and west now, but its ignorant airs remain; from people whose Europhilia never extended to intervening in world wars at the right time. Their models were Capability Brown and Henry Hoare, Stourhead’s creator; their ideals were Versailles, Marienbad, Sanssouci, or, for those who disdained the formality of Italianate classicism and/or of Claude and Poussin, there was Rambouillet, Knole, Fontainebleau, Windsor. Reading the likes of Twain and De Tocqueville on the monied Americans of the 19th century, one can almost picture Augusta. Students of the US cultural critic Paul Fussell (Class, BAD) will also find watching the golf here instructive.
Augusta is a superficially dazzling monument to delusion-inducing vanity and wealth, by and for people who who crave prestige so much it blinds them to the vulgarity of calling themselves names like Hootie and thinking that buying Muffy into Vassar confers intellectual achievement. They want to not only tell those old Europe guys that we are as good as you but also stick one on those Yankee and Jewboy pussies, the Rockerfellers and Vanderbilts with their Hampton mansions and yachts.
They try very hard and do a grand job. The perpendiculars of the larch trunks, the birch branches casting Manet shadows across 18 holes in more shades of green than anyone can count, bunkers like little slicks of spilt buttermilk, the sharp contrast of the auburn bark-and-needles rough with the fairways’ manicured malachite. These are badges of old-Europe hauteur, perfecting creation, taming nature, insisting that the owner of this place is in control because he can afford it. There are the kidney-shaped water hazards - here are the brooks that burble to order - over there’s the Ben Hogan Bridge, the stone hop-skip over one of those watercourses and whose lack of a handrail is testament to idealized aesthetic purity as well as to a lack of necessity; no member of the public will ever use be allowed to sully this sylvan bower.
As such it’s a TV dream, a prelapsarian Arcadia made flesh; Augusta can be read as a hack artist’s Romantic idyll, seen best only when devoid of humanity. Who needs people? Especially these people. Up in the galleries, the pink-skinned wannabes and fatsos in their John Deere caps with their fusillades of hollerings (‘get in the hole!’), the style-challenged pros with their heart-on-sleeve God-botheration, their Barbie birds, the caddies in their regulation all-white Augusta uniforms which make the more corpulent bag-carriers resemble Bibendum, Michelin’s cheery mascot.
It’s all about colour. And I don’t just mean skin pigmentation (Augusta, whose reality is actually that of a truckstop shithole, a train junction where mournful whistles chime, is 80% Afro-American; Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh apart, I spotted seven black faces in the whole week, and two of them were wearing security uniforms. Better than the chic of Pullman steward or chain-ganger, I suppose). There is visually chromatic significance in golf that mirrors TV’s view of the world precisely.
The intention of much horticulture and arboriculture is entirely a form of aesthetic oneupmanship; the rhododendrons at the 13th hole are there for a purpose, as significant a statement of identity (I’m rich, me) as Tiger’s red shirt (I’m gonna win, me), which Peter Alliss intelligently remarked on. Bright colours signify consumption, leisure, visibility, and plenty of it all. This is why that despite the notions of Augusta’s grandees and the public imagination, golf’s sprawling spectrum is made for modern colour TV despite the manner of the presenters’ pretence to sacerdotal genuflection to tradition belongs to TV’s distant monochrome past.
The problem for TV at Augusta isn’t a grovelling atavism to outdated notions of the picturesque, or how to present it. There are rumours that Augusta actually dictates the position of cameras to maximise the supposed appeal of the vista, a form of rewriting the theory of the picture window for the 21st century, a media-savviness which display the sheer meretriciousness of the club’s supposed antipathy to modernity. Human interest shots (old hankie-headed dozer in deckchair, chirpy urchin selling golf balls from a makeshift stall in the Turnberry gorse), the province of links golf, aren’t allowed. With all this ordered beauty around, where the creative mind thinks visually, the impression is that the environment is shouting you down.
For there is in golf the aesthetic appeal of the players and their degrees of skill testifying that people do matter in this plutocrat pastoral, and indeed actually enhance the intentions of the course designer. A good golf swing is rendered as pleasing to the eye as a Ronaldinho free-kick, a Federer backhand; one only has to walk the dog on the local range to see the cosmic physical disparity between the Saturday morning hobbyist duffer and, say, Ernie Els. It is comparable to the difference in gracefulness between a grande jétée by Bussell and the present writer slipping on a comedy banana skin.
Fade and backspin are mere concepts to us poor mortals; to these guys, they are a hand-eye lingua franca of their nervous systems. For effective watching, the human agencies of class and economics can bugger with elements like these far less than those of prettified or idealized location. Step forward, Steptoes; Oildrum Lane was no Shangri-la, but you made us laugh.
This is why the sport can, once more contrary to public perception, provide TV with a spectacle that bears out one of the fundamentals of 20th century theatre, that sets and props do not matter if the action’s the thing. Yes, it’s true that golf’s sometimes unbearable tensions unfold with a slowness that should be alien to modern television values, but it’s still on because people keep watching – and there are no sponsors to tell the Beeb to get it off so as to pander to a few more youngsters. Holes can take up to 10 minutes to play, courses four hours. Putts can occupy upwards of two minutes. The bookie-friendly unpredictability of golf, even given the prodigiousness of a Woods or a Nicklaus, is extraordinary. Thus does drama draw us in, agog; climatic quirks and millimetrical margins affect the outcome of tournaments and destinies. Intellectual calculation and instinct combine like Apollo and Dionysus in such circumstances to create champions. Former greats languish in unforgiven humiliation; Severiano Ballesteros’s talent has withered to a degree that makes the word ‘pathos’ sound generous. Yet his smashing a 250-yard drive into a hot dog stand or down the décolletage of Mrs Phil Mickelson also makes for weirdly compelling viewing.
Despite the near impossibility of conveying the perspectival complexities of borrows and cambers and contoured mischief in the design of a course (which way will this putt go? Or that one?) TV handles golf well.
Correction. The BBC handles golf well. For once that deferent cliché nails it. For instance, ESPN Classic, an invaluable little weekend resource for historians of sports TV, showed CBS coverage of the 1989 and 1996 Masters tourneys. Both were slapdash, careless; shots were badly framed, the rake of ball trajectories missed, cutaways were abrupt; there was little feel for drama, palpable even in these necessarily cut-and-paste highlight formats. A hack job, in other words. American broadcasters have voiced their admiration for the BBC’s coverage of the Open, the Ryder Cup, the Wentworth Matchplay, and today’s CBS’s pictures are so much more watchable one might imagine the BBC was in charge.
It’s a shame that CBS’s commentators didn’t get a look in – the plaititudinous fawners are still on Columbia, but Johnny Miller is an unsparing and verbally inventive judge of talent, Nick Faldo a sparkling revelation for those who remember him as the unsmiling automaton of his playing days, rather like Tim Henman waking up one morning in a Gregor Simsa moment to find he is actually Frank Carson.
But as per the Ryder Cup, the Beeb now has a strong team to put a European boot into America. They show their hand with exemplary panache and understatement to the game’s strengths as the equivalent of a bespoke cardie or a particularly well-preserved Humber Super Snipe. This is not unusual – golf commentaries seldom make it into Private Eye’s Colemanballs hall of shame. There is little sense of exclusivity, unusual for golf; there isn’t the third-year dorm ambience of R4’s Test Match Special box, for example. A reactionary he may be, but Alliss is a master of timing and appositeness as well as 19th-hole bonhomie. He does humour with unforced ease, a dying concept in television; introducing his colleague, the excellent Ken Brown, for a mic shift, it was ‘as soon as he adjusts his dress, here’s Ken Brown’. No reason, save maybe a treble Jim Beam too many at lunch.
Aussie Wayne Grady does the Southern Cross proud – he is brief, to the point, and, cued by his peerless compatriot Richie Benaud, never essays the bleeding obvious. Sam Torrance, the obligatory growly Scot, is better than the unbearably oleaginous Alex Hay of unfond memory, but still a mite off the fairway.
Brown, though, is a Faldo-esque rebirth. From club-pro petulance on the European pro circuit, tantruming in the manner of someone who knows deep down he will never be as good as his fantasies, he has become a broadcaster to the manner born. At one point he paraphrased that bard of hackneyed rural lyricism, Wordsworth, to append sufficiently flowery prose to Augusta (he knows the grandees won’t get the irony, they probably can’t spell the word). An audibly amused Alliss teased his co-hack’s little digression for the rest of the day as might the winner of a keen morning twosome. The voices at the mics are those of individuals, not the graduates of broadcasting courses, the Pugatches and Bhasins of this world, the Five Live generation whose demotic is that of headlines and straplines, auditions for bigger and better gigs. Alliss, Brown and Grady are the true heirs of TV’s greatest wearer of blazers, Henry Longhurst.
A lovable strawberry-nosed codger who looked and sounded about 285 years old with jowls the size of Wiltshire, he was a decent and liberal broadcaster, a genial opponent of pretention, who became the sport’s first televisual signifier and its first ‘voice’ (laced as it was with Armagnac, Speyside, Havana, the leather of club armchairs). When first confronted with action replays, Longhurst innocently expostulated ‘my word, he’s done it again’ when a particularly audacious holed bunker shot was played back for a second time.
For a sport which thrives on pretention and bourgeois worship of show, wealth and authority – fancy course design and kit, the didactic mumbo-jumbo of coaches and those people who call themselves ‘sports psychologists’, the words of the Beeb’s foursome are actually refreshing in their plainness, while never affecting man-in-the-street usages.
Yes, of course golf is a sport of reactionaries. London’s outer green belt is now a forest of pin flags, their carparks fat with SUVs like buffaloes at waterholes. The only barriers to ‘No blacks, no Irish’ signs are exposure to a media hungry for PC trivia and that blasted Woods. It is riddled with hierarchies and snobberies. Golf courses’ aesthetics themselves are analogues of capitalist accumulation, command/control and display (nature? Pshaw!). They are manipulative, screwing with our emotions, exercising authority over them, reinforcing those found convenient (order, beauty).
But isn’t this rather like TV itself? Isn’t that what draws us to it, what we worship? That is why the medium and golf are made for each other. The sport is mellifluously visual, a major-key mix of The Eagles and Delius. Sometimes, as in Augusta, whorishly so – and imposes a visual authority upon us, here the inherited dictatorship of an ordained idea of rurality.
But what the hell. Call the Frankfurt School police, the Critical Theory gorillas, see if I care. Golf looks and sounds great on telly, even at this coarsely boskified retreat of racialists. No, more so at Augusta. With the BBC commentary’s subtle and relaxed refusal to take it too seriously, and the infinitely satisfying sculpture of a dramatic sporting narrative from the unpromising clay of poncey blokes hitting a ball with a stick, this is what I call TV worth watching.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
TV Review: Dr Who
DOCTOR WHO
BBC1, 7.4.07
‘Where are we?’ exclaims Martha, near the opening of episode two as she steps from the Tardis into the slurried midden of a Tudor street. ‘I mean… when are we?’ Evidently not 16th century London, as per the producer’s wishes with his costly sets of wattle-and-daub, the numerous bubo-flecked extras (shit-shovellers, doxies, courtiers and damsels all a-simper). No – we were in a BBC focus group circa 2005, and a very obtuse one, if this worryingly ropey fare is anything to go by (even right down to the bubo-flecked extras, but let that pass).
It has become a commonplace going on a social obligation to expound as much uncritical admiration for the 21st century Dr Who as it was mandatory to diss his so-last-millennium predecessors. Watching some of the 2006 series that situation seemed reasonable. Only a fool would deny that the resurrection of the Doctor in 2004 was anything but a fair-sized triumph, but the small qualifications attached to that honour have now grown like Topsy, rather like the disproportionate cultural space allotted to a programme believing its own hype, losing the plot and taking its besotted audience with it.
The premise of this episode – a return to 1599 to save the world from a triumvirate of warty-conked witches from outer space, the Carrionites, and to explain the disappearance from history of a lost Shakespeare masterpiece, Love’s Labour’s Won. The Globe Theatre, see, with its mystically-influenced tetradecagonal design, is to serve as sort of malevolent orgone accumulator of Carrionitic evil summoned by the power of words. Enter Will Shakespeare, stage right. The episode is well-paced, slickly continuing the programme’s newfound penchant for self-contained one-off adventures. So far, so engaging.
But time travel rendered as any kind of prose or screenplay invites even more than all other texts and by its very nature the danger of anachronism, as the word itself implies. There are relative levels of same, of course. Here; yes, Bedlam hospital appeared to be an edifice of very late Jacobean design and therefore unlikely to have been around in 1599. Would Shakespeare have had a Warwickshire accent? This is hair-splitting, like that of those people who yell at the TV when locomotives and rolling stock and buses from the ‘wrong’ period or ‘wrong’ region or (I’m not making this up) ‘wrong’ depot crop up in costume dramas like Miss Marple. Doesn’t matter. Let it go.
But the subplot of the Swan of Avon getting the hots for Martha and addressing one of his most famous sonnets to her was so berkish and improbable that it made me hide behind the sofa for the first time since I saw The Spiders of Metibilis Three (or was it England v. Andorra?). And there’s another problem with the new Doctor; its principal anachronism is of the most annoying kind, i.e. that of needless affectation to court approval. It doesn’t just holler its contemporariness, its uses 70,000 watt Marshall stacks to do so. Worse, that horrible non-word ‘inclusiveness’ has become one of the series’ mottos and threatens to become as big a downer as the originals’ rubbish sets and wooden performances.
This is the reason for first Rose’s and now Martha’s self-consciously estuarial speech patterns, with the obligatory payload of defensive, shopgirly chaff. If sci-fi always discloses more about the time in which its stories were written than the timeframes of their setting, future generations will look on the 21st century Doctor less as a TV classic than a slightly embarrassing timeslip into imagined hipness.
Witness the subsidiary characters. Whereas a convincing emotional three-dimensionality eventually informed Billie Piper’s Rose, this was too often built on the motivations and linguistic devices of soap. As for Martha, her successor, it’s hard to imagine a more obvious example of character-design by committee in Blairite Britain; conveniently mixed ethnicity, successful, feisty, has smarts and street sass in equal measure, yet also a ‘feminine side’™. How many constituencies can one programme suck up to? And, incidentally, why, if she’s so bright - and a doctor to boot - has she never at least heard of Bedlam?
I may be mistaken but I think that at one point, Martha actually uttered that soap staple ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this’. Or possibly it was ‘this is so not happening’. Or whatever (or ‘whatever’). It’s true that most usages in Shakespeare’s time weren’t exactly as refined or waspish of those of Beatrice and Benedick, but this is taking things a bit far. It is the equivalent of Jamie repeatedly telling the Doctor that the Cybermen ‘are just like on a real uptight trip, man’, or Leela chanting ‘women reclaim the night’ every two minutes or Ace having an obsessive crush on so-lush Rick Astley.
Unless writer Gareth Roberts was dazzling us with doublethink and double-bluff, this episode, ostensibly about the transfiguring power of linguistic genius, seemed mostly about contemporary lexical poverty. Detail errors in 1599 costumes and props are tolerable – but when you base a script around words saving humanity and then have to fill the mouths of late Elizabethans with the demotic of dumbed-down telly, you’re in trouble.
The irony was strained to a point where one wondered if the fabric of the space-time continuum would hold. As the Doctor and Martha march into his actorly sodality, Will talks about ‘not signing autographs’ and ‘don’t ask me where I get my ideas from’. Allusions to Harry bloody Potter really are the thin end of the postmodernism-for-kids wedge. But that’s OK, as long as ‘everyone’ has something to ‘identify’ with, as long as everyone ‘gets it’, thus aping the wildlife unit’s idiotic habit of reducing the behaviour of colonies of termites or meerkats or nematodes to the dimensions of a Neighbours plot strand.
The problem is that, as per most things on TV these days, producers will never accept the old saw that a little goes a long way, from sly anachronistic irony to inclusiveness to laboured laffs. A sundry ‘let’s not go there’ or temporally-skewed nod to The Weakest Link is fine; chucking it in an audience’s face isn’t. David Tennant’s m.o. suggests that he understands this perfectly, and his enjoyable penchant for askance raised-eyebrowing and instinctive timing that renders a poor joke superfluous – such as the playwright saying ‘I might use that’ when the Doctor quotes a line from a yet-unwritten Shakespearean opus (using this mundane riff three times was plain shoddy). Just as humdrum was the use of other heavy-handed insertions, ‘the play’s the thing’ etc.
Roberts’s occult references were promising, as in the idea of annihilating a self by uttering his/her/its name – fair’s fair, the use of magic ‘taboo words’ to which J.G. Frazer refers in The Golden Bough tied in loosely with the concept of the power of language to create and destroy, but something seemed missing, unfinished, rushed. There were the usual vague Lovecraftian notions of inconceivably Ancient Ones. There were three witches – Shakespeare, Lear, that hubble-bubbling ho Atropos and her homiez, geddit? But this conceit seemed either to flatter people who’d done Eng Lit O-level or merely as a prompt for GCSE students who were nicking off revision for the evening.
Thus does the BBC fulfil its educational remit, one imagines. There was, nonetheless, one quite neat line which subverts the popular belief that ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ is Shakespeare’s (sorry, Dylan, but that’s how it’s going to be. I always get it wrong, too).
To play and lose this kind of dangerous game with words and text smacks of unfortunate sorcery itself and looks like carelessness – but then to invoke the history-altering power of language and dramatic genius as a plot device looks like carelessness. See how easy it is to just wolf down some other writer’s leavings for effect?
Of course the special effects are electrifying. Of course it’s made by people who don’t think that they’re making is pathologically inferior, which so diminished the original Dr Who. Of course it’s all fun for the kids. So why come on to adults with what imagines itself to be clever wordplay? And no, The Simpsons and its brand of split-level referentiality is the wrong – and very disingenuous – answer. If you’re going to woo the grown-ups with kiddie shows, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong in doing so, just do it better, and cobblers to political correctness. Those other cartoonish crossover icons Wallace and Gromit don’t work their magic by being inclusive, or at least not self-consciously so, after all. Dangermouse and Penfold would know what I mean, as would Eric Thompson.
Unless things pick up pronto, the superb Tennant will deserve not so much a BAFTA as an OBE for coming out of this looking so good (is it too late for him to run against Gordon Brown?). Originally pitching at an uneasy amalgam of eccentrics Baker and Troughton – especially the moonstruck, vaguely Edwardian mannerisms of the latter, with a fine handle on blurring the line between wondering effusiveness and incalculably aged wisdom – he has become not just unarguably the best Doctor ever, but, given scripts of waning force, one of the finest performers on British television. Nonetheless, inane audience targeting, that bane of TV, may yet let him down.
Ah, what do I know? The spin-offs will gather pace. What price a 13-week talent show (where you vote! Text us now…) to find the new Doctor? The Hairy Bikers On Skaro (we wish); Soapstar Timelord? Bet against none of them. The Whovian bacillus that has so smartly body-snatched London’s meejah 30somethings will be a willing parasite as they graduate to positions of power, its lifeblood every last penny of millions of innocent licence-payers. Calamity looms… unless a timelord – or, more prosaically, some production values that don’t pander to the witlessness of bored post-adolescents can save the day.
BBC1, 7.4.07
‘Where are we?’ exclaims Martha, near the opening of episode two as she steps from the Tardis into the slurried midden of a Tudor street. ‘I mean… when are we?’ Evidently not 16th century London, as per the producer’s wishes with his costly sets of wattle-and-daub, the numerous bubo-flecked extras (shit-shovellers, doxies, courtiers and damsels all a-simper). No – we were in a BBC focus group circa 2005, and a very obtuse one, if this worryingly ropey fare is anything to go by (even right down to the bubo-flecked extras, but let that pass).
It has become a commonplace going on a social obligation to expound as much uncritical admiration for the 21st century Dr Who as it was mandatory to diss his so-last-millennium predecessors. Watching some of the 2006 series that situation seemed reasonable. Only a fool would deny that the resurrection of the Doctor in 2004 was anything but a fair-sized triumph, but the small qualifications attached to that honour have now grown like Topsy, rather like the disproportionate cultural space allotted to a programme believing its own hype, losing the plot and taking its besotted audience with it.
The premise of this episode – a return to 1599 to save the world from a triumvirate of warty-conked witches from outer space, the Carrionites, and to explain the disappearance from history of a lost Shakespeare masterpiece, Love’s Labour’s Won. The Globe Theatre, see, with its mystically-influenced tetradecagonal design, is to serve as sort of malevolent orgone accumulator of Carrionitic evil summoned by the power of words. Enter Will Shakespeare, stage right. The episode is well-paced, slickly continuing the programme’s newfound penchant for self-contained one-off adventures. So far, so engaging.
But time travel rendered as any kind of prose or screenplay invites even more than all other texts and by its very nature the danger of anachronism, as the word itself implies. There are relative levels of same, of course. Here; yes, Bedlam hospital appeared to be an edifice of very late Jacobean design and therefore unlikely to have been around in 1599. Would Shakespeare have had a Warwickshire accent? This is hair-splitting, like that of those people who yell at the TV when locomotives and rolling stock and buses from the ‘wrong’ period or ‘wrong’ region or (I’m not making this up) ‘wrong’ depot crop up in costume dramas like Miss Marple. Doesn’t matter. Let it go.
But the subplot of the Swan of Avon getting the hots for Martha and addressing one of his most famous sonnets to her was so berkish and improbable that it made me hide behind the sofa for the first time since I saw The Spiders of Metibilis Three (or was it England v. Andorra?). And there’s another problem with the new Doctor; its principal anachronism is of the most annoying kind, i.e. that of needless affectation to court approval. It doesn’t just holler its contemporariness, its uses 70,000 watt Marshall stacks to do so. Worse, that horrible non-word ‘inclusiveness’ has become one of the series’ mottos and threatens to become as big a downer as the originals’ rubbish sets and wooden performances.
This is the reason for first Rose’s and now Martha’s self-consciously estuarial speech patterns, with the obligatory payload of defensive, shopgirly chaff. If sci-fi always discloses more about the time in which its stories were written than the timeframes of their setting, future generations will look on the 21st century Doctor less as a TV classic than a slightly embarrassing timeslip into imagined hipness.
Witness the subsidiary characters. Whereas a convincing emotional three-dimensionality eventually informed Billie Piper’s Rose, this was too often built on the motivations and linguistic devices of soap. As for Martha, her successor, it’s hard to imagine a more obvious example of character-design by committee in Blairite Britain; conveniently mixed ethnicity, successful, feisty, has smarts and street sass in equal measure, yet also a ‘feminine side’™. How many constituencies can one programme suck up to? And, incidentally, why, if she’s so bright - and a doctor to boot - has she never at least heard of Bedlam?
I may be mistaken but I think that at one point, Martha actually uttered that soap staple ‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this’. Or possibly it was ‘this is so not happening’. Or whatever (or ‘whatever’). It’s true that most usages in Shakespeare’s time weren’t exactly as refined or waspish of those of Beatrice and Benedick, but this is taking things a bit far. It is the equivalent of Jamie repeatedly telling the Doctor that the Cybermen ‘are just like on a real uptight trip, man’, or Leela chanting ‘women reclaim the night’ every two minutes or Ace having an obsessive crush on so-lush Rick Astley.
Unless writer Gareth Roberts was dazzling us with doublethink and double-bluff, this episode, ostensibly about the transfiguring power of linguistic genius, seemed mostly about contemporary lexical poverty. Detail errors in 1599 costumes and props are tolerable – but when you base a script around words saving humanity and then have to fill the mouths of late Elizabethans with the demotic of dumbed-down telly, you’re in trouble.
The irony was strained to a point where one wondered if the fabric of the space-time continuum would hold. As the Doctor and Martha march into his actorly sodality, Will talks about ‘not signing autographs’ and ‘don’t ask me where I get my ideas from’. Allusions to Harry bloody Potter really are the thin end of the postmodernism-for-kids wedge. But that’s OK, as long as ‘everyone’ has something to ‘identify’ with, as long as everyone ‘gets it’, thus aping the wildlife unit’s idiotic habit of reducing the behaviour of colonies of termites or meerkats or nematodes to the dimensions of a Neighbours plot strand.
The problem is that, as per most things on TV these days, producers will never accept the old saw that a little goes a long way, from sly anachronistic irony to inclusiveness to laboured laffs. A sundry ‘let’s not go there’ or temporally-skewed nod to The Weakest Link is fine; chucking it in an audience’s face isn’t. David Tennant’s m.o. suggests that he understands this perfectly, and his enjoyable penchant for askance raised-eyebrowing and instinctive timing that renders a poor joke superfluous – such as the playwright saying ‘I might use that’ when the Doctor quotes a line from a yet-unwritten Shakespearean opus (using this mundane riff three times was plain shoddy). Just as humdrum was the use of other heavy-handed insertions, ‘the play’s the thing’ etc.
Roberts’s occult references were promising, as in the idea of annihilating a self by uttering his/her/its name – fair’s fair, the use of magic ‘taboo words’ to which J.G. Frazer refers in The Golden Bough tied in loosely with the concept of the power of language to create and destroy, but something seemed missing, unfinished, rushed. There were the usual vague Lovecraftian notions of inconceivably Ancient Ones. There were three witches – Shakespeare, Lear, that hubble-bubbling ho Atropos and her homiez, geddit? But this conceit seemed either to flatter people who’d done Eng Lit O-level or merely as a prompt for GCSE students who were nicking off revision for the evening.
Thus does the BBC fulfil its educational remit, one imagines. There was, nonetheless, one quite neat line which subverts the popular belief that ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ is Shakespeare’s (sorry, Dylan, but that’s how it’s going to be. I always get it wrong, too).
To play and lose this kind of dangerous game with words and text smacks of unfortunate sorcery itself and looks like carelessness – but then to invoke the history-altering power of language and dramatic genius as a plot device looks like carelessness. See how easy it is to just wolf down some other writer’s leavings for effect?
Of course the special effects are electrifying. Of course it’s made by people who don’t think that they’re making is pathologically inferior, which so diminished the original Dr Who. Of course it’s all fun for the kids. So why come on to adults with what imagines itself to be clever wordplay? And no, The Simpsons and its brand of split-level referentiality is the wrong – and very disingenuous – answer. If you’re going to woo the grown-ups with kiddie shows, and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong in doing so, just do it better, and cobblers to political correctness. Those other cartoonish crossover icons Wallace and Gromit don’t work their magic by being inclusive, or at least not self-consciously so, after all. Dangermouse and Penfold would know what I mean, as would Eric Thompson.
Unless things pick up pronto, the superb Tennant will deserve not so much a BAFTA as an OBE for coming out of this looking so good (is it too late for him to run against Gordon Brown?). Originally pitching at an uneasy amalgam of eccentrics Baker and Troughton – especially the moonstruck, vaguely Edwardian mannerisms of the latter, with a fine handle on blurring the line between wondering effusiveness and incalculably aged wisdom – he has become not just unarguably the best Doctor ever, but, given scripts of waning force, one of the finest performers on British television. Nonetheless, inane audience targeting, that bane of TV, may yet let him down.
Ah, what do I know? The spin-offs will gather pace. What price a 13-week talent show (where you vote! Text us now…) to find the new Doctor? The Hairy Bikers On Skaro (we wish); Soapstar Timelord? Bet against none of them. The Whovian bacillus that has so smartly body-snatched London’s meejah 30somethings will be a willing parasite as they graduate to positions of power, its lifeblood every last penny of millions of innocent licence-payers. Calamity looms… unless a timelord – or, more prosaically, some production values that don’t pander to the witlessness of bored post-adolescents can save the day.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
MUSIC: Norman conquest? Not this time
Norman Lebrecht's new book is making waves. Paul Stump thinks it's time the tide went out
There's money in mortality. From the drivers of the plague carts in 17th century London to modern-day undertakers, the Grim Reaper isn't all bad to some folks.
Take Norman Lebrecht. His Cassandra-like pronouncements of the death of classical music have been making him stacks of dough since his (very, very good) 1991 book on the cult of the conductor, The Maestro Myth. A few years later came When The Music Stops, and now Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Music Industry. That's one hell of an extended death scene, and a very profitable one. Long title, too.
In an article in today's Guardian, fatuous even by that paper's recent arts standards, Martin Kettle provides 1,700 or so words of puff for Lebrecht's thesis which lends more credence to an unspoken mutual admiration as anything written about in the book.
Nobody can gainsay Lebrecht's classical music credentials. He is also a powerful, stylish writer, with an aptitude for the pithy, a brilliant researcher, an anecdotal truffleur without peer in his field, curator of one of the genre's finest photographic archives. The Maestro Myth should be a Desert Island Book for any music lover. He is Classic FM's Antichrist, a status any thinking person should aspire to. Reading his antipathy to the tits-first-voice-second likes of Katherine Jenkins, Charlotte Church et al is as refreshing as champagne. He doesn't skewer Karl Jenkins with the relish one would like, but whatever. Nonetheless, for all this, his Doomsday scenario for music is like that of Chomsky's for capitalism - a trawl-net so full of evidence it seems undeniable, but trawl nets have holes too. Lots of them. As do polemical rants like Norm's and Noam's.
Ask any trawlerman; holes fray and distend the more they're worn.
Here's Lebrecht's schtick. Classical music has eaten itself by its endless repetitions of tired old repertoire (Satie's 890-minute long Véxations is not one) and overpaying star performers, and by the ear-shredding aridity of dodecaphonic modernism. This was the postludial, and perfectly credible, subtext to the virtuosic Maestro Myth. His megaphonic insistence, though, that the entire art form is on the verge of collapse, an alarming tocsin in When The Music Stops, now makes him less John Ogdon than Johnny One-Note. Furthermore, he has a vested interest in pushing thie envelope of musical morbidity. The longer music takes to die, the more shekels he makes. The louder he shouts, the more likely people are to listen, even if actual serious musicians, like cellist Raphael Wallfisch, despair of him; 'what worries me about Norman Lebrecht's negativity is that people will stop fighting'.
Doesn't bother Kettle. Mart is such a fan of Lebrecht that he writes that had it not been for his chum's 'attentiveness... classical music might have gone the way of coal fires and milk bottles.' Phew! So for that CD of Bax choral-orchestral works I got and nearly wet myself over in 2004 - blimey, it ain't Chandos Records or the performers I should thank, but Norm. How wrong can you be?
Meanwhile David Hurwitz, the editor of the independent US-based website www.classicstoday.com (and the most exacting bugger of an editor your correspondent has ever attempted to write for) is one who has Lebrecht's number. Hurwitz is, if anything, an even wittier adept of disparagement than Lebrecht (and doesn't drag Mahler and anti-Semitism into no matter how improbable a subject). On his London colleague Hurwitz scoffs; ‘most of what Lebrecht has to say is so old and tired by now (when it isn’t just plain silly) that it certainly doesn’t bear quoting, much less refuting’.
That classical music's public profile, and therefore its commercial potential for the recording industry, has changed, is a no-brainer. But how much does this really matter? Does a deep slump in classical recordings denote, as Lebrecht argues, a rupture in the 'chain of interpretation', that which, for example, developed pianism from Beethoven through Liszt and Rubinstein and devolved it throughout European conservatoires via Pachmann, Leschititzsky, Long. That which Lebrecht himself catalogued, the podium heritage passed down from Beethoven via Wagner and Bülow and Mottl and Richter to the first great recorded conductor (and probably the greatest stick-wielder ever) Nikisch.
Were these historical miracles governed by the existence of a recording industry? Oh, sod off. Aficionados still argue as to whether this or that conductor is influenced by the approaches of Furtwängler or Toscanini. Both children of the turntable, agreed - but also inheritors of a tradition that predated it. Ply a few Buds to a couple of conservatoire pianists and mention three names from three eras; say, Hofmann, Cliburn, Lazaridis. Watch them rabbit themselves senseless. They'll spend an hour on rubato alone. That's not death I smell, just sweaty youthful enthusiasm.
Even composing's continuum muddles through. I don't care much for Austrian Olga Neuwirth's (b.1968) music, but when I spoke to her in Brussels a couple of years back, she was volubly enthusiastic about the exotic and fantastical orchestral soundscaping of Franz Schreker (1878-1934) of whom her father Gosta was an early biographer, a composer whose friends were Schoenberg and Berg. Neuwirth won't sell many CDs - but to say that the art of someone so excitable is moribund - it's laughable.
Lebrecht, in his first two books, argues persuasively that the recording industry helped to homogenise orchestral sound, epitomised by the sheen of 'beautiful sound' created by Herbert von Karajan and his recording stooge-minions at Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s. Ten years ago, Lebrecht bemoaned the uniformity of classical practise and performance; now, apparently, even rubbish Japanese recordings of Dvorak 9 are invaluable to the survival of western culture.
That classical CDs are staring extinction in the face is - and I am sorry to offend those of refined sensibility - bullshit. As Andrew Clements, the Guardian's official classical critic, who might have been expected to have the last word on Lebrecht's pronouncements, puts it in an attenuated rejoinder-sidebar, there are more CD releases than ever. My wants list has never been longer. Kettle's argument that downloading music offers a sonically inferior product to CDs is disingenuous. For a start, Kleiber's 1981 DG Dresden recording of Tristan with Kollo and Price is by today's standards, equally primitive in breadth and depth of sound in comparison to state-of-the-art SACD, yet still rings my bell like no other studio recording of the work. And by the way, crusty dissing of digital sounds rather odd coming from a senior writer on a newspaper so obsessively in love with new technology it won't employ anyone who doesn't have an involuntary jean-creamer at the mention of the word 'podcast'.
Multinational classical is, as Lebrecht says, is dead. No shit, Sherlock. Dance on its grave, say I. Cram populist artists more full of money than an Landes farmer's wife will force-feed a goose and you bleed money from less commercially-deserving causes. Record 40 versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (TM) and it's no surprise that the 41st promptly stiffs.
But musicians are surviving; they are recording a staggering array of repertoire. The real threat to them comes not from record industry travails but in the erosion of support for live music and musical education from which they draw a substantial part of their incomes (apart from the real stars, this has always been the case). What matters here is that the few young listeners left are exposed to new works, or novel works of the past that excite. This is not Vanessa-Maeism. How much could a budding pianist be animated and inspired by the five stupendously virtuosic concertos of the Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978)? German label CPO look set to record them; who will take them onto the stage? Or how could a young composer be inspired by the work of the Belgian Philippe Boesmans (b.1935) or the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara (b.1928)?
Lebrecht cares about music, there's no doubt. He cares about its spiritual value, about the cultural worth of artistic talent. He also cares about his current account. But beyond the loot, things are better than he admits (Naxos, Chandos, CPO, NMC, the miraculous survival of Hyperion, I could go on) and also worse than he admits ) sclerosis on the platform and the podium). Get your priorities right, Norm. Right now, I'm more worried about the demise through overexposure and overpayment of the talent of one cultural critic than of an art form.
There's money in mortality. From the drivers of the plague carts in 17th century London to modern-day undertakers, the Grim Reaper isn't all bad to some folks.
Take Norman Lebrecht. His Cassandra-like pronouncements of the death of classical music have been making him stacks of dough since his (very, very good) 1991 book on the cult of the conductor, The Maestro Myth. A few years later came When The Music Stops, and now Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Music Industry. That's one hell of an extended death scene, and a very profitable one. Long title, too.
In an article in today's Guardian, fatuous even by that paper's recent arts standards, Martin Kettle provides 1,700 or so words of puff for Lebrecht's thesis which lends more credence to an unspoken mutual admiration as anything written about in the book.
Nobody can gainsay Lebrecht's classical music credentials. He is also a powerful, stylish writer, with an aptitude for the pithy, a brilliant researcher, an anecdotal truffleur without peer in his field, curator of one of the genre's finest photographic archives. The Maestro Myth should be a Desert Island Book for any music lover. He is Classic FM's Antichrist, a status any thinking person should aspire to. Reading his antipathy to the tits-first-voice-second likes of Katherine Jenkins, Charlotte Church et al is as refreshing as champagne. He doesn't skewer Karl Jenkins with the relish one would like, but whatever. Nonetheless, for all this, his Doomsday scenario for music is like that of Chomsky's for capitalism - a trawl-net so full of evidence it seems undeniable, but trawl nets have holes too. Lots of them. As do polemical rants like Norm's and Noam's.
Ask any trawlerman; holes fray and distend the more they're worn.
Here's Lebrecht's schtick. Classical music has eaten itself by its endless repetitions of tired old repertoire (Satie's 890-minute long Véxations is not one) and overpaying star performers, and by the ear-shredding aridity of dodecaphonic modernism. This was the postludial, and perfectly credible, subtext to the virtuosic Maestro Myth. His megaphonic insistence, though, that the entire art form is on the verge of collapse, an alarming tocsin in When The Music Stops, now makes him less John Ogdon than Johnny One-Note. Furthermore, he has a vested interest in pushing thie envelope of musical morbidity. The longer music takes to die, the more shekels he makes. The louder he shouts, the more likely people are to listen, even if actual serious musicians, like cellist Raphael Wallfisch, despair of him; 'what worries me about Norman Lebrecht's negativity is that people will stop fighting'.
Doesn't bother Kettle. Mart is such a fan of Lebrecht that he writes that had it not been for his chum's 'attentiveness... classical music might have gone the way of coal fires and milk bottles.' Phew! So for that CD of Bax choral-orchestral works I got and nearly wet myself over in 2004 - blimey, it ain't Chandos Records or the performers I should thank, but Norm. How wrong can you be?
Meanwhile David Hurwitz, the editor of the independent US-based website www.classicstoday.com (and the most exacting bugger of an editor your correspondent has ever attempted to write for) is one who has Lebrecht's number. Hurwitz is, if anything, an even wittier adept of disparagement than Lebrecht (and doesn't drag Mahler and anti-Semitism into no matter how improbable a subject). On his London colleague Hurwitz scoffs; ‘most of what Lebrecht has to say is so old and tired by now (when it isn’t just plain silly) that it certainly doesn’t bear quoting, much less refuting’.
That classical music's public profile, and therefore its commercial potential for the recording industry, has changed, is a no-brainer. But how much does this really matter? Does a deep slump in classical recordings denote, as Lebrecht argues, a rupture in the 'chain of interpretation', that which, for example, developed pianism from Beethoven through Liszt and Rubinstein and devolved it throughout European conservatoires via Pachmann, Leschititzsky, Long. That which Lebrecht himself catalogued, the podium heritage passed down from Beethoven via Wagner and Bülow and Mottl and Richter to the first great recorded conductor (and probably the greatest stick-wielder ever) Nikisch.
Were these historical miracles governed by the existence of a recording industry? Oh, sod off. Aficionados still argue as to whether this or that conductor is influenced by the approaches of Furtwängler or Toscanini. Both children of the turntable, agreed - but also inheritors of a tradition that predated it. Ply a few Buds to a couple of conservatoire pianists and mention three names from three eras; say, Hofmann, Cliburn, Lazaridis. Watch them rabbit themselves senseless. They'll spend an hour on rubato alone. That's not death I smell, just sweaty youthful enthusiasm.
Even composing's continuum muddles through. I don't care much for Austrian Olga Neuwirth's (b.1968) music, but when I spoke to her in Brussels a couple of years back, she was volubly enthusiastic about the exotic and fantastical orchestral soundscaping of Franz Schreker (1878-1934) of whom her father Gosta was an early biographer, a composer whose friends were Schoenberg and Berg. Neuwirth won't sell many CDs - but to say that the art of someone so excitable is moribund - it's laughable.
Lebrecht, in his first two books, argues persuasively that the recording industry helped to homogenise orchestral sound, epitomised by the sheen of 'beautiful sound' created by Herbert von Karajan and his recording stooge-minions at Deutsche Grammophon in the 1970s. Ten years ago, Lebrecht bemoaned the uniformity of classical practise and performance; now, apparently, even rubbish Japanese recordings of Dvorak 9 are invaluable to the survival of western culture.
That classical CDs are staring extinction in the face is - and I am sorry to offend those of refined sensibility - bullshit. As Andrew Clements, the Guardian's official classical critic, who might have been expected to have the last word on Lebrecht's pronouncements, puts it in an attenuated rejoinder-sidebar, there are more CD releases than ever. My wants list has never been longer. Kettle's argument that downloading music offers a sonically inferior product to CDs is disingenuous. For a start, Kleiber's 1981 DG Dresden recording of Tristan with Kollo and Price is by today's standards, equally primitive in breadth and depth of sound in comparison to state-of-the-art SACD, yet still rings my bell like no other studio recording of the work. And by the way, crusty dissing of digital sounds rather odd coming from a senior writer on a newspaper so obsessively in love with new technology it won't employ anyone who doesn't have an involuntary jean-creamer at the mention of the word 'podcast'.
Multinational classical is, as Lebrecht says, is dead. No shit, Sherlock. Dance on its grave, say I. Cram populist artists more full of money than an Landes farmer's wife will force-feed a goose and you bleed money from less commercially-deserving causes. Record 40 versions of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (TM) and it's no surprise that the 41st promptly stiffs.
But musicians are surviving; they are recording a staggering array of repertoire. The real threat to them comes not from record industry travails but in the erosion of support for live music and musical education from which they draw a substantial part of their incomes (apart from the real stars, this has always been the case). What matters here is that the few young listeners left are exposed to new works, or novel works of the past that excite. This is not Vanessa-Maeism. How much could a budding pianist be animated and inspired by the five stupendously virtuosic concertos of the Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978)? German label CPO look set to record them; who will take them onto the stage? Or how could a young composer be inspired by the work of the Belgian Philippe Boesmans (b.1935) or the Finn Einojuhani Rautavaara (b.1928)?
Lebrecht cares about music, there's no doubt. He cares about its spiritual value, about the cultural worth of artistic talent. He also cares about his current account. But beyond the loot, things are better than he admits (Naxos, Chandos, CPO, NMC, the miraculous survival of Hyperion, I could go on) and also worse than he admits ) sclerosis on the platform and the podium). Get your priorities right, Norm. Right now, I'm more worried about the demise through overexposure and overpayment of the talent of one cultural critic than of an art form.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
What Goes Around: The Tour of Flanders
Cycling means everything in Flanders, and on Sunday it reaches a ritual apotheosis of worship. Paul Stump goes round the weird world of the Ronde
The Tour of Flanders? Except to war grave junkies preyed on by chancer coach-trip cowboys and descendants seeking closure for lost uncles and grandads among the fallen Tommies, to anglophonic ears this concept sounds the antithesis of a good Sunday out. Who, except in the days when Jowitts and Armstrong-Siddeley saloons were mobile evidence of one's aspirations, would have 'toured' the Lincolnshire Wolds, Warwickshire, Flint? Nobody. But this is Belgium, this is cycling. This is Flanders. Nothing is quite as it seems elsewhere.
And so this Sunday, roughly a million people, half the population of this unguessable province, will line its country roads to witness the Ronde Van Vlaanderen, the 200-mile bike race that for Flemings, especially at a time when you can taste virulent national separatism and xenophobia in every litre of De Koninck, is the Derby and the FA Cup Final rolled into one day-long rolling beano.
Flanders, for all the toytown neatness of its villages which hint at the Protestantism of their northern Dutch neighbours, is the land of Breughel and Brouwer, of peasant dances and leapfrogging nippers. The spinning tops and hide-and-seek is now chip vans and watching for the arrival of the TV helicopter following the race. The Catholic effects of Spanish occupation for a century which helped form the characteristic stepped gables of their architectural vernacular, and of the Dukes of Brabant, are never quite purged. If a million spectators and more are on the pavements then half that number will pedal their fietsen, bikes of all ages, whether of carbon fibre or cast-iron, with or without gears, along the course before the passage of the race. Sometimes all of it. Flemish TV simply shuts down to cover the spectacle.
This year the spectacle will be more charged than ever. Tom Boonen, a rangy 26-year-old from the Antwerp burgh of Balen, is going for a third consecutive victory in the first and perhaps greatest of road-racing's spring classic one-dayers. Nobody has achieved this before, not even Merckx. Those three words denote, for cycling aficionados, shorthand for 'the absolutely fucking impossible'.
Nobody who saw the superhuman spurt with which Boonen blew away his rivals with 10km of 2005's race is ever likely to forget it. It made him a hero in Belgium, a deity in Flanders. Boonen is tall, blond, blue-eyed, apparently drug-free, massively glamorising the sport among the young, from a region of Flanders where the violently racist Vlaams Belang (né Vlaams Blok) nurtures its spiritual blood-and-soil proto-spiritual fictions. A lad with a farmworker's brick-shithouse build, he'd be any Nazi's poster boy. Antwerpers turned out a 25% vote for the VB's demotic brand of unreason in 2005, storming to the title of race hate capital of Europe. The likeable Boonen, like many Flemings, will have nothing to do with them; but the fact remains that, by physiognomic and geographic coincidence, his triple crowning would be hijacked by the VB. Nationalist hype, even of the mildest kind, already dubs Boonen as 'the new Merckx', a status he rightly rubbishes. But such is Merckx's standing in Flanders (even after transgressions, i.e. bringing up his son Axel and daughter Sabrina to speak French, calling himself Eddy instead of the Flemish diminutive Ward, so as to engage with Belgian's Wallonian south) that such anointment, even if it is by the pudding-faced votaries of the inane faith called nationalism, means something. Cycling here is itself a faith. It is both a celebration of what it is, and what it meant to be Flemish in the days of Breugel and of Verhaeren. Paul Beving, a Walloon, wrote that 'the Ronde is as much a part of Flemish popular heritage as [the religious festivals of] the processions at Veurne and Bruges, the Kattestoet (Festival of the Cats) at Ypres or the blessing of the sea at Ostend'.
It is said that when it rains there (which it often does), at least one raindrop will always fall on the head of a future great of cycling. William Fotheringham's stirring account of the life and death of Britain's greatest road racer, Tom Simpson (Put Me Back On My Bike) offers a quote from a Belgian supporter, '..."it is a neurosis". He pointed to the sky as if implying that... the love of things two-wheeled comes from above.'
In 2005 Belgium saw the publication of a valuable little portfolio of photographs by the Brussels-based Stefan Vanfleteren. The title's relation to its contents say it all. Title; Flandrien (Flemings). Content; cycling.
Brandtish realism is Vanfleteren's chosen, and superbly-executed, idiom. Forklift drivers and hod carriers gape at the screen in the Supporterscafe Peter Van Peteghem in the great cyclist's home village, Brakel. The ribbon lanes that form the course of the Ronde and Paris-Roubaix snake sadly across coal-black beetfields under the sky of a God in a sulk. Rain and snow always seem to be threatening or just past. Cyclists appear as near-death-knackered, irreparably muddied. This is the land of which the VB have made a myth, of indomitable hard cases like Boonen's ancestry of one-day hard men, born champions that were born of toil, Van Looy, Van Steenbergen, Museeuw, Maertens, de Vlaeminck. The faces are as weathered as the road aggregate, memorial of a time before Flanders was one of the richest areas in Europe. How difficult it is to forget, in a land which seems 95% rural, and has those medieval triumphs Bruges and Ghent as tourist cynosures, the harrowing industrial symbolism of Verhaeren's Villes Tentaculaires (this most Flemish of writers made his name in the language of the national antipode, French). But then again Belgium is tiny, Flanders is smaller (you can cycle across it in half a day) and thus town and country are often as one, or seem to be, the ease of the commute between one and another a possible rationale for the velophilia. Terraces of houses are plonked down in fields as though beamed down from the streets of Anderlecht. Little of it has been gentrified, bourgeoisified. Belgian dormitory suburbs are hardly sub-urban at all. Brussels' nobs live in townhouses, or in Groenendaal and Uccle; Ghent's live in St Amandsberg; a few k's from town.
This beautiful book tells it all. It is more visually expressive of Belgium and of Flanders than the most extravagant coffee-table tome. It is full of tiny topographies and approximate geometries, like those of crumbling repointed bricks in gable ends, like the cobbles whose greys are as manifold and all equally threatening as the sky over Poperinge in March when the clubmen will be out training in the sleet. Vanfleteren also snubs the Little Flandrians by making some of his most powerful images those of the desolate fieldscapes of the Paris-Roubaix, L'enfer du Nord, the Hell of the North, the pig of a race in the Nord département across the frontier over even rougher roads than the Ronde that usually takes place a week after it. For a Fleming to win this - as Boonen did in 2005 - it is the ultimate repository of bragging rights for Flemings over French.
But Vanfleteren's heart is in Belgium. Wait, watch (they don't in Flanders. Too much ale, too many frites). Here they come again. In Z-Peugeot shirts, Molteni tunics, pros and wannabes, out from the tyre-squirt slipstreams of lorries thundering on the straightaways full of spray and headlights that go straight away for ever save when they half-moon it round settlements like Buggenhout and Westerlo. In Schellebelle and St Eloi and Schorisse the rain-bleared cobbles lead always to cafes with names like t' Sportwereld and De Klok. The brilliant yellow of the Flemish flag, with its embossed black lion, is indissoluble from the Ronde, as it is from these images; like the psychedelic lycra of the clubmen and the Sunday touriste-routiers, they are splashes of colour in a land with more shades of dark green and brown than anyone can count. This countryside, the colour of Gannex and duffel (significantly, a Flemish settlement near Antwerp) isn't touristy - the Ronde's sole concession to foreign gawpers is the morning roll-out of the race in Bruges' incomparable Grote Markt.
Then there are the hills, yes, hills, spiky, small and aggressive, like chippy retorts to the belief among foreigners that Flanders is flat, and by implication lacking stature. There are 15 of them on the Ronde; as Tim Hilton writes in One More Kilometre And We're In The Showers, 'whose names should be known by every schoolboy.'
Molenberg. Wolvenberg. Kluisberg. Knokteberg. Oude-Kwaremont. Paterberg. Koppenberg. Steenbeekdries. Taaiberg. Eikenberg. Kapelleberg. Leberg. Berendries. Ten Bosse. Muur-Kapellmur. Bosberg.
Oak Hill, Mill Hill, Stonebrook Lane, Church Hill. Simple names. But they are the stations of the Flemish cross.
The Koppenberg is 1 in 4, with cobbles innumerable and bone-jarringly obtruded, an oolitic bubblewrap, an icerink in bad weather, a dustbowl in good. Most cyclists get off and walk. If you can ride in the Ronde and get up without getting off, you're a man in the eyes of a Fleming. The road is as narrow as a gnat's, so much so that the sprightly Dane Jesper Skibby was almost squashed flat by his support car when he slipped off on the hill in 1987.
The Muur in Geraardsbergen, a corkscrewing climb ('the wall' just about sums it up) of almost comparable steepness through streets of ramrod-upright, tall houses, and where the race is usually decided, is always full of hysterical supporters.
Vanfleteren's estaminet interiors are kippered, the tables worn with slapped-down cards, resolutely proletarian, whose smartness pertains to another era, like a very old man's best suit. A Derny (a motorised pushbike with a sound like a bee in a biscuit tin) sits in the hall of the St Hermes in Edelare; the piped-on perm of the sexagenarian landlady of the Leeuw van Vlaanderen (done special for the nice young man with the camera) is aped by that of her toy poodle, popping its head above the formica tabletop from the banquette. Both cafés overlook the Ronde on race day; that is why they are in the book. That is maybe why they exist; for Vanfleteren, it is why the Ronde, and by imagined extension, Flanders, exist.
Boonen's form, over the last 12 months has been, by his standards, indifferent. But if he trebles up on Sunday, there's no telling what such a cathartic event could mean for Belgium, where Flemish separatism inflames the right and is now even singeing the left. Belgium, this strangest of countries was, significantly, born in the unlikely circumstances of a performance of Auber's opera La muette de portici in Brussels in 1830; its dissolution might just be triggered by a similarly electrifying and improbable spectacle.
The Tour of Flanders? Except to war grave junkies preyed on by chancer coach-trip cowboys and descendants seeking closure for lost uncles and grandads among the fallen Tommies, to anglophonic ears this concept sounds the antithesis of a good Sunday out. Who, except in the days when Jowitts and Armstrong-Siddeley saloons were mobile evidence of one's aspirations, would have 'toured' the Lincolnshire Wolds, Warwickshire, Flint? Nobody. But this is Belgium, this is cycling. This is Flanders. Nothing is quite as it seems elsewhere.
And so this Sunday, roughly a million people, half the population of this unguessable province, will line its country roads to witness the Ronde Van Vlaanderen, the 200-mile bike race that for Flemings, especially at a time when you can taste virulent national separatism and xenophobia in every litre of De Koninck, is the Derby and the FA Cup Final rolled into one day-long rolling beano.
Flanders, for all the toytown neatness of its villages which hint at the Protestantism of their northern Dutch neighbours, is the land of Breughel and Brouwer, of peasant dances and leapfrogging nippers. The spinning tops and hide-and-seek is now chip vans and watching for the arrival of the TV helicopter following the race. The Catholic effects of Spanish occupation for a century which helped form the characteristic stepped gables of their architectural vernacular, and of the Dukes of Brabant, are never quite purged. If a million spectators and more are on the pavements then half that number will pedal their fietsen, bikes of all ages, whether of carbon fibre or cast-iron, with or without gears, along the course before the passage of the race. Sometimes all of it. Flemish TV simply shuts down to cover the spectacle.
This year the spectacle will be more charged than ever. Tom Boonen, a rangy 26-year-old from the Antwerp burgh of Balen, is going for a third consecutive victory in the first and perhaps greatest of road-racing's spring classic one-dayers. Nobody has achieved this before, not even Merckx. Those three words denote, for cycling aficionados, shorthand for 'the absolutely fucking impossible'.
Nobody who saw the superhuman spurt with which Boonen blew away his rivals with 10km of 2005's race is ever likely to forget it. It made him a hero in Belgium, a deity in Flanders. Boonen is tall, blond, blue-eyed, apparently drug-free, massively glamorising the sport among the young, from a region of Flanders where the violently racist Vlaams Belang (né Vlaams Blok) nurtures its spiritual blood-and-soil proto-spiritual fictions. A lad with a farmworker's brick-shithouse build, he'd be any Nazi's poster boy. Antwerpers turned out a 25% vote for the VB's demotic brand of unreason in 2005, storming to the title of race hate capital of Europe. The likeable Boonen, like many Flemings, will have nothing to do with them; but the fact remains that, by physiognomic and geographic coincidence, his triple crowning would be hijacked by the VB. Nationalist hype, even of the mildest kind, already dubs Boonen as 'the new Merckx', a status he rightly rubbishes. But such is Merckx's standing in Flanders (even after transgressions, i.e. bringing up his son Axel and daughter Sabrina to speak French, calling himself Eddy instead of the Flemish diminutive Ward, so as to engage with Belgian's Wallonian south) that such anointment, even if it is by the pudding-faced votaries of the inane faith called nationalism, means something. Cycling here is itself a faith. It is both a celebration of what it is, and what it meant to be Flemish in the days of Breugel and of Verhaeren. Paul Beving, a Walloon, wrote that 'the Ronde is as much a part of Flemish popular heritage as [the religious festivals of] the processions at Veurne and Bruges, the Kattestoet (Festival of the Cats) at Ypres or the blessing of the sea at Ostend'.
It is said that when it rains there (which it often does), at least one raindrop will always fall on the head of a future great of cycling. William Fotheringham's stirring account of the life and death of Britain's greatest road racer, Tom Simpson (Put Me Back On My Bike) offers a quote from a Belgian supporter, '..."it is a neurosis". He pointed to the sky as if implying that... the love of things two-wheeled comes from above.'
In 2005 Belgium saw the publication of a valuable little portfolio of photographs by the Brussels-based Stefan Vanfleteren. The title's relation to its contents say it all. Title; Flandrien (Flemings). Content; cycling.
Brandtish realism is Vanfleteren's chosen, and superbly-executed, idiom. Forklift drivers and hod carriers gape at the screen in the Supporterscafe Peter Van Peteghem in the great cyclist's home village, Brakel. The ribbon lanes that form the course of the Ronde and Paris-Roubaix snake sadly across coal-black beetfields under the sky of a God in a sulk. Rain and snow always seem to be threatening or just past. Cyclists appear as near-death-knackered, irreparably muddied. This is the land of which the VB have made a myth, of indomitable hard cases like Boonen's ancestry of one-day hard men, born champions that were born of toil, Van Looy, Van Steenbergen, Museeuw, Maertens, de Vlaeminck. The faces are as weathered as the road aggregate, memorial of a time before Flanders was one of the richest areas in Europe. How difficult it is to forget, in a land which seems 95% rural, and has those medieval triumphs Bruges and Ghent as tourist cynosures, the harrowing industrial symbolism of Verhaeren's Villes Tentaculaires (this most Flemish of writers made his name in the language of the national antipode, French). But then again Belgium is tiny, Flanders is smaller (you can cycle across it in half a day) and thus town and country are often as one, or seem to be, the ease of the commute between one and another a possible rationale for the velophilia. Terraces of houses are plonked down in fields as though beamed down from the streets of Anderlecht. Little of it has been gentrified, bourgeoisified. Belgian dormitory suburbs are hardly sub-urban at all. Brussels' nobs live in townhouses, or in Groenendaal and Uccle; Ghent's live in St Amandsberg; a few k's from town.
This beautiful book tells it all. It is more visually expressive of Belgium and of Flanders than the most extravagant coffee-table tome. It is full of tiny topographies and approximate geometries, like those of crumbling repointed bricks in gable ends, like the cobbles whose greys are as manifold and all equally threatening as the sky over Poperinge in March when the clubmen will be out training in the sleet. Vanfleteren also snubs the Little Flandrians by making some of his most powerful images those of the desolate fieldscapes of the Paris-Roubaix, L'enfer du Nord, the Hell of the North, the pig of a race in the Nord département across the frontier over even rougher roads than the Ronde that usually takes place a week after it. For a Fleming to win this - as Boonen did in 2005 - it is the ultimate repository of bragging rights for Flemings over French.
But Vanfleteren's heart is in Belgium. Wait, watch (they don't in Flanders. Too much ale, too many frites). Here they come again. In Z-Peugeot shirts, Molteni tunics, pros and wannabes, out from the tyre-squirt slipstreams of lorries thundering on the straightaways full of spray and headlights that go straight away for ever save when they half-moon it round settlements like Buggenhout and Westerlo. In Schellebelle and St Eloi and Schorisse the rain-bleared cobbles lead always to cafes with names like t' Sportwereld and De Klok. The brilliant yellow of the Flemish flag, with its embossed black lion, is indissoluble from the Ronde, as it is from these images; like the psychedelic lycra of the clubmen and the Sunday touriste-routiers, they are splashes of colour in a land with more shades of dark green and brown than anyone can count. This countryside, the colour of Gannex and duffel (significantly, a Flemish settlement near Antwerp) isn't touristy - the Ronde's sole concession to foreign gawpers is the morning roll-out of the race in Bruges' incomparable Grote Markt.
Then there are the hills, yes, hills, spiky, small and aggressive, like chippy retorts to the belief among foreigners that Flanders is flat, and by implication lacking stature. There are 15 of them on the Ronde; as Tim Hilton writes in One More Kilometre And We're In The Showers, 'whose names should be known by every schoolboy.'
Molenberg. Wolvenberg. Kluisberg. Knokteberg. Oude-Kwaremont. Paterberg. Koppenberg. Steenbeekdries. Taaiberg. Eikenberg. Kapelleberg. Leberg. Berendries. Ten Bosse. Muur-Kapellmur. Bosberg.
Oak Hill, Mill Hill, Stonebrook Lane, Church Hill. Simple names. But they are the stations of the Flemish cross.
The Koppenberg is 1 in 4, with cobbles innumerable and bone-jarringly obtruded, an oolitic bubblewrap, an icerink in bad weather, a dustbowl in good. Most cyclists get off and walk. If you can ride in the Ronde and get up without getting off, you're a man in the eyes of a Fleming. The road is as narrow as a gnat's, so much so that the sprightly Dane Jesper Skibby was almost squashed flat by his support car when he slipped off on the hill in 1987.
The Muur in Geraardsbergen, a corkscrewing climb ('the wall' just about sums it up) of almost comparable steepness through streets of ramrod-upright, tall houses, and where the race is usually decided, is always full of hysterical supporters.
Vanfleteren's estaminet interiors are kippered, the tables worn with slapped-down cards, resolutely proletarian, whose smartness pertains to another era, like a very old man's best suit. A Derny (a motorised pushbike with a sound like a bee in a biscuit tin) sits in the hall of the St Hermes in Edelare; the piped-on perm of the sexagenarian landlady of the Leeuw van Vlaanderen (done special for the nice young man with the camera) is aped by that of her toy poodle, popping its head above the formica tabletop from the banquette. Both cafés overlook the Ronde on race day; that is why they are in the book. That is maybe why they exist; for Vanfleteren, it is why the Ronde, and by imagined extension, Flanders, exist.
Boonen's form, over the last 12 months has been, by his standards, indifferent. But if he trebles up on Sunday, there's no telling what such a cathartic event could mean for Belgium, where Flemish separatism inflames the right and is now even singeing the left. Belgium, this strangest of countries was, significantly, born in the unlikely circumstances of a performance of Auber's opera La muette de portici in Brussels in 1830; its dissolution might just be triggered by a similarly electrifying and improbable spectacle.
TV Review: Timewatch - Remember The Galahad
TIMEWATCH: REMEMBER THE GALAHAD
BBC2, 2.4.07
Journalists thrive on anniversaries, and 25ths are tricky ones. Some editors lap them up, others pass. Which makes the slightly uncertain step of British television into the potential populist frenzy of the quarter-century landmark of the 'liberation' of the Falklands all the stranger. The present writer hasn't heard the demotic verb 'to yomp' once, and the onetime hero Colonel H.Jones, yomper extraordinaire, SAS hero and, ipso facto, tabloid demigod, has bothered my airwaves just the once. Remember The Galahad, an examination of the destruction of the troop-carriers Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram on June 8 1982 and the loss of 50+ soldiers, was a similarly queasy mixture of unquestioning acceptance of MOD propaganda, lip-quivering famiial testimony, kiddie-crammed Polaroids of yore and crisp reportage of serial authoritorial balls-ups.
The military mentality thrives also on memorialising, a cultic devotional ritual dating from the Great War; 'we will remember them' simply did not exist as a culturally-assimilated and organised mass usage prior to Rupert Brooke's, mostly because those killed in military actions had not previously been conscripted. Loss and grief were private, not public, affairs. For the military, though, most anniversaries have a symbolism, and for the victims of those events so commemorated that goes double. This ritual can whitewash unjustified actions or top-brass bungling as much as it can mourn heroic rearguarders such as the Royal Sussex Regiment in the retreat to Dunkerque in 1940.
Easter weekend's indulgence for sludgily sentimental TV to fulfil its spirituality quotient should doubtless allow a lot of self-congratulatory shite about the heroic roles of Peter Snow and Brian Hanrahan in the 'war' with token and sentimentalised tributes to 'the fallen'. Remember The Galahad was the wobbly opener to this solemnity-fest, as uneasy as a Bach prelude played by an apprentice organist on his first Good Friday, and while a sense of perspective was maintained, one doesn't hold out much hope for a critical perspective of Thatcher's adventure. Given the fact that the red-top argot and attitude that sets all other media discourses since the Falklands, this is nigh-on an impossibility.
Early impressions depressed. A documentary about young British soldiers burned to death by Argentinian bombers does not per se encourage hopes of historical or political acuity or balance. The very fact that there was no pre-title warning about 'disturbing' footage should have been a warning, given the horrible nature of the incident. The historical context of the Falklands, its seizure and settlement by Britain in the 1830s, was entirely ignored. Statements such as 'the world's media looked on' as the ships burned is probably unprovable. One would imagine that this didn't top the news agenda in Belgrade, Stockholm, Rome or Tokyo that day. There was no mention of the unprecedentedly high levels of MOD censorship in the coverage of the Falklands, which is why Remember The Galahad featured no pictures of roasted epidermis peeling like blackened chewing gum, no screams on the soundtrack, no bleeding that won't stop. The macro level was replaced by the micro, of personal and individual tragedy.
There was quietly indemnifying power, though; one squaddie admits that 'outside training... you never really know what the enemy is going to do'. The same man provided a gruesomely poetic account of being caught in a fireball. And yet these were men who went away to die - possibly - in the charge of appalling superiors who were filmed in front of bookshelves full of calf-bound hardbacks in which they looked more comfortable than those who may have been located thus by directors or producers, making cut-glass excuses of the sort that wouldn't wash in places like Pontlottyn and Maesteg where some of the poor bloody infantry came from. Officers, who still always have a chance to find a way out since the days of doing the honourable thing with the pearl-handled revolver came to an end.
All the subordinates on the two burning hulks had sailed out with a Cpt Hurricane faith in adventure as secure as their parents' faith in the power of the chapel and of their God, a folk faith, a fake faith. Did they really have no comparative idea of war? Did their own pain or media discourse blind them to other British forces losses such as the explosion of the Hood or even Basra 2007? The first day on the Somme? Did none of them, these horny-handed hardboy descendants of Nye Bevan, think to retort 'screw you, Thatch, and screw that bunch of South Atlantic sheep-shaggers?'
It is sometimes said of the Welsh that they have a penchant for self-pity, especially in the face of perceived English injustice, yet one obviously brave regimental Sarnt-Major declared that 'nobody was to blame' apart from the MOD. This heroic dignity in the face of tragedy bordered on the over-indulgent.
The inevitable conclusion, the descent of survivors into the inebriate cycle of postwar shock, an acronymic hell where PTSD becomes TDA, GBH and ABH and DOA, was rushed, but intrinsic, to the tale. Simon Weston, the inhuman redness of whose disfigured face is chromatically significant of the tragedy, has become steadily more critical of the glorification of conflict, and may for that reason have lost his tabloid status as plucky hero. You can hear them now; come on, Simon, give us a little more...
It is the grim postscript to the Falklands - it will be instructive to see how subsequent treatments of this blundering military cock-up treat its darkside. Will TV continue to pursue its worship of tabloidism, its myths, its denial of all reason, or will it begin to finally rethink this shabby episode? I counted the jury out; I haven't counted them back in again.
TV Review: Great British Kitchen
GREAT BRITISH MENU
BBC2, 2.4.07
'There's something Vichy about the French,' commented Ivor Novello with uncharacteristic bleakness in 1940. Chauvinism derives from the French language , which maybe makes the British a little jealous, so good are we at directing it back at our cousins d'outre-Manche. Just look. Banlieues in flames, joblessness rampant, political sclerosis, cultural malaise (now we're talking). Hell, they're even desperate enough to sell us their houses.
Never mind the holy trinity of Arsène Wenger, Platini and Zidane; Emmanuelle Béart; Ming Pei's glass pyramid; José Bové; Eurostar, the TGV; film makers like Jeunet and Rappeneau and Ozon; an affordable Olympics. Even coverage of the greatest engineering feat of the 21st century to date, the Millau bridge, concentrated less on its gargantuan size than on the fact that it was designed, uninspiredly, by a British architect, Milord Foster.
'The French think that we're simply not in their League. But that's about to change,' purrs the BBC's 'royal correspondent' Jennie Bond. Chippy drivel. Yeah, France is finished. Elizabeth David was an unpatriotic apostate. Great British Menu was going to 'take on the capital of haute cuisine' by going head-to-head with a team of premier French chefs to prepare a banquet for the British ambassador in Paris. Actually some might argue that the capital of haute cuisine has for many years been Lyon. Moreover, in this writer's experience, diplomatic staff are often jobsworth dullards with little taste, but let that pass; maybe Sir John Holmes is a true gastronome.
It's hard to define when the obsession with denigrating French cuisine became part and parcel of British media discourse. From the puritanical, straitened 1950s there was a domestic suspicion of French sauces, their richness was a disguise for allegedly inferior produce. But only when cooking became a media property did this garbage become a media property.
There existed a nasty craving for a kind of legitimisation of the newly-acquired super-affluence enjoyed by London's 1980s and 1990s nouveaux-riches. Of course they could afford the Roux Bros at Le Gavroche and Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat'Seasons. But there simply weren't enough French super-chefs to spread the kudos around; also, given the taste for sensation, conspicuous consumption and vulgarity among this new clientèle, new enfants terribles were unearthed, from sweary Ramsay to moody White. That these guys had the chops wasn't in doubt, but it helped that they were as good at prettifying and pricifying the snap on the plates of punters with eyes bigger than their bellies and wallets bigger than their brains. How else the contemporary idolisation of Heston Blumental (one Australian critic's opinion of the Fat Duck's offering: 'a fart on a cushion of air') and Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Barcelona, whose creations seem to have one eye on the hob and one on the newspaper columns. The snob appeal and multiculti liberal brownie points in exotica, plus the easy way in which they could fill up the column inches of enlightened broadsheets and listings magazines enabled London's gamut of eateries from the subcontinent, Scandinavia and southern California fed a feel-good myth that London was 'the restaurant capital of the world.' That Belgium and even Germany boast a vast array of Michelin stars is kept firmly under wraps.
Tom Wolfe writes, in The Bonfire of the Vanities of the ersatz fame earned by a New York chef, more for his aesthetic abilities with a plate's contents than their quality. One elaborate passage about a Baroquely-executed 'painting in sauce' tells you all you need to know about the role of actual food in the upper end of the public eating experience in the anglophone world.
With the cult of presentation came its bastard cousin, PR, and through the kitchen doors barged through by this unholy pairing surged Ainsley, Jamie, those two woolly woofter Kiwis, Nigella, the Fat Ladies, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. While I wouldn't recommend an omelette of my own making over that of any of the above, one can't escape the possibility that telly chefs who were creations of dedication to the instruction of the French ancestor of haute cuisine, Escoffier, to faire le simple (make it simple) were Delia, Floyd and, more recently, Stein.
The admirably level-headed writer Joanna Blythman flung her plate back in the face of this overloading by the PR men; her riposte took the shape of an excellent book, Bad Food Britain. But she is a rare voice in the wilderness. The cultural sea-change, she argued, was mere sleight of hand, in much the same way that chefs often shift the cheapest dish (and/or the easiest to prepare or preheat) as a 'special'. Her voice remains unheard on British television.
Instead, Great British Menu concentrated with pornographic detail, less on dishes than good shots; instead of instructions as to how caramelise onions just so, the camera doted with eye-candy coloristic juxtapositions and salivated over a slab of ham hock like a director over a starlet's cleavage.
British culinary culture offers encouraging signs. Henrietta Green's Food Lovers' Guide to Britain and more recently, TV's opportunistic setting up of its own farmers' market-stall, Rick Stein's Food Heroes are meritorious, insofar as they often and with the authority of knowledgeable housewives, march past multiethnic gimmickries of samosas and chutneys and stress indigenous and fresh ingredients people can cook with. Not packaged flavours, but agents by which the adventurous can explore gustatory pleasures of their own making.
Cooking is, for most of us, still regarded as sybaritic at best, a chore at worst, the preoccupation of the affected or those with too much time on their hands. Better by far to either 'knock something up' store-cupboarding and shortcutting, or, best of all, eating out. You've done it; I've done it. This saves on time outlay and infuses a warm glow of bourgeois consumption (eating out, even in downmarket joints, is still a pre-eminently middle-class concern. This continuing refusal of the British to investigate taste and texture for themselves allows showiness and expense to lord it over basic quality. Just because people have heard about jus, emulsion and drizzling doesn't mean they have any idea what any of those words signify.
Ask most people who would they prefer to cook the dinner and they would name Ainsley over an equally competent but much better-value gastropub chef such as Andrew Canning at the Clytha in Abergavenny or Stephen Harris at the Sportsman in Seasalter, and Ainsley will win every time. Why? Ainsley's on telly. Applying this moronic criterion to other fields proves how dumb it is - Bobby Crush got on the box more than Thelonius Monk but this didn't make him better at the keyboard.
Publicity-driven hierarchical thinking is increasingly affecting France. The gastro star system occupies a place discreetly outside the box there, but the stakes and prestige are equally high, if not more so. The tyranny of Michelin's Guide Rouge star system led to the suicide of Bernard Loiseau in 2003. Disaffected French foodies, baulking at price and le snobbisme which made dollar signs and Michelin stars indecipherable from one another, have turned to a new generation of bistros within and without urban centres from Dieppe to Draguignan. Genuine greats like Bocuse are still secure dispensing ambrosia from their three-star pantheon, but things are changing. This, of course, is the crucible of good eating; what one can acquire for a bargain. It is still infinitely easier to find excellent simple fare, even snacks. Patisseries of the highest order can still be found, in number, in the most ill-starred French burghs. This inculcates a habit of being able to eat well at home and in a local caff. It is possible to eat the most stomach-churning ordure in France, but less likely than in the country of the gastronomic revolution. Not that you'd know this from Great British Menu or the propaganda of which it forms a pernicious part.
Grab your car, motor out and find anywhere good to eat in places one might not normally ever go - like Maidstone or Carlisle - and you'll look in vain for establishments for which the Guide Rouge reserves the judgement 'mérite un détour'. Unless you pay big-time. Chefs in many gastropubs in Britain are starting to understand this, that the smell of well-cooked food is preferable to niffless neutrality or that of refried onions, and that fair pricing is preferable to exorbitancy.
This, not the uplands of expense and presentation, is where the French are still so far ahead of us they are out of sight. But TV cooking has never been about Escoffier's dictum of doing the easy things well.
This dog's dinner of a show summed it up; chandeliers, marble, swan-white toques; all that was missing was that classic bourgeois buzzword of snob appeal, 'exclusive'. The 'Great British Chefs' are all starred - few, one surmises, come cheap. Good food is thus ghettoised as the province of the monied or the fortunate, not for the proles; while France's top kitchens charge the earth, eating well in that country doesn't cost the earth.
There is no reference whatsoever to the evolution of French and British styles (some would argue the latter has none). That this could be (usually was) like judging a competition between flamenco and death metal guitarists, or who'd win a ruck between The Sweeney and Starsky & Hutch, we never learned. Most unforgivably stupid of all was the obligatory 'your chance to vote' for which 'Great British Chef' would go through and sock it to the frogs. Not that any of the voters have the chance to taste any of the dishes, or have an idea of how they are made.
Fantastically pathetic television. We're talking Crush's rhinestones versus Monk's negritude and daft hat again, aren't we? But then the British never really got music, and on this evidence they still don't get food either.
BBC2, 2.4.07
'There's something Vichy about the French,' commented Ivor Novello with uncharacteristic bleakness in 1940. Chauvinism derives from the French language , which maybe makes the British a little jealous, so good are we at directing it back at our cousins d'outre-Manche. Just look. Banlieues in flames, joblessness rampant, political sclerosis, cultural malaise (now we're talking). Hell, they're even desperate enough to sell us their houses.
Never mind the holy trinity of Arsène Wenger, Platini and Zidane; Emmanuelle Béart; Ming Pei's glass pyramid; José Bové; Eurostar, the TGV; film makers like Jeunet and Rappeneau and Ozon; an affordable Olympics. Even coverage of the greatest engineering feat of the 21st century to date, the Millau bridge, concentrated less on its gargantuan size than on the fact that it was designed, uninspiredly, by a British architect, Milord Foster.
'The French think that we're simply not in their League. But that's about to change,' purrs the BBC's 'royal correspondent' Jennie Bond. Chippy drivel. Yeah, France is finished. Elizabeth David was an unpatriotic apostate. Great British Menu was going to 'take on the capital of haute cuisine' by going head-to-head with a team of premier French chefs to prepare a banquet for the British ambassador in Paris. Actually some might argue that the capital of haute cuisine has for many years been Lyon. Moreover, in this writer's experience, diplomatic staff are often jobsworth dullards with little taste, but let that pass; maybe Sir John Holmes is a true gastronome.
It's hard to define when the obsession with denigrating French cuisine became part and parcel of British media discourse. From the puritanical, straitened 1950s there was a domestic suspicion of French sauces, their richness was a disguise for allegedly inferior produce. But only when cooking became a media property did this garbage become a media property.
There existed a nasty craving for a kind of legitimisation of the newly-acquired super-affluence enjoyed by London's 1980s and 1990s nouveaux-riches. Of course they could afford the Roux Bros at Le Gavroche and Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat'Seasons. But there simply weren't enough French super-chefs to spread the kudos around; also, given the taste for sensation, conspicuous consumption and vulgarity among this new clientèle, new enfants terribles were unearthed, from sweary Ramsay to moody White. That these guys had the chops wasn't in doubt, but it helped that they were as good at prettifying and pricifying the snap on the plates of punters with eyes bigger than their bellies and wallets bigger than their brains. How else the contemporary idolisation of Heston Blumental (one Australian critic's opinion of the Fat Duck's offering: 'a fart on a cushion of air') and Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Barcelona, whose creations seem to have one eye on the hob and one on the newspaper columns. The snob appeal and multiculti liberal brownie points in exotica, plus the easy way in which they could fill up the column inches of enlightened broadsheets and listings magazines enabled London's gamut of eateries from the subcontinent, Scandinavia and southern California fed a feel-good myth that London was 'the restaurant capital of the world.' That Belgium and even Germany boast a vast array of Michelin stars is kept firmly under wraps.
Tom Wolfe writes, in The Bonfire of the Vanities of the ersatz fame earned by a New York chef, more for his aesthetic abilities with a plate's contents than their quality. One elaborate passage about a Baroquely-executed 'painting in sauce' tells you all you need to know about the role of actual food in the upper end of the public eating experience in the anglophone world.
With the cult of presentation came its bastard cousin, PR, and through the kitchen doors barged through by this unholy pairing surged Ainsley, Jamie, those two woolly woofter Kiwis, Nigella, the Fat Ladies, Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all. While I wouldn't recommend an omelette of my own making over that of any of the above, one can't escape the possibility that telly chefs who were creations of dedication to the instruction of the French ancestor of haute cuisine, Escoffier, to faire le simple (make it simple) were Delia, Floyd and, more recently, Stein.
The admirably level-headed writer Joanna Blythman flung her plate back in the face of this overloading by the PR men; her riposte took the shape of an excellent book, Bad Food Britain. But she is a rare voice in the wilderness. The cultural sea-change, she argued, was mere sleight of hand, in much the same way that chefs often shift the cheapest dish (and/or the easiest to prepare or preheat) as a 'special'. Her voice remains unheard on British television.
Instead, Great British Menu concentrated with pornographic detail, less on dishes than good shots; instead of instructions as to how caramelise onions just so, the camera doted with eye-candy coloristic juxtapositions and salivated over a slab of ham hock like a director over a starlet's cleavage.
British culinary culture offers encouraging signs. Henrietta Green's Food Lovers' Guide to Britain and more recently, TV's opportunistic setting up of its own farmers' market-stall, Rick Stein's Food Heroes are meritorious, insofar as they often and with the authority of knowledgeable housewives, march past multiethnic gimmickries of samosas and chutneys and stress indigenous and fresh ingredients people can cook with. Not packaged flavours, but agents by which the adventurous can explore gustatory pleasures of their own making.
Cooking is, for most of us, still regarded as sybaritic at best, a chore at worst, the preoccupation of the affected or those with too much time on their hands. Better by far to either 'knock something up' store-cupboarding and shortcutting, or, best of all, eating out. You've done it; I've done it. This saves on time outlay and infuses a warm glow of bourgeois consumption (eating out, even in downmarket joints, is still a pre-eminently middle-class concern. This continuing refusal of the British to investigate taste and texture for themselves allows showiness and expense to lord it over basic quality. Just because people have heard about jus, emulsion and drizzling doesn't mean they have any idea what any of those words signify.
Ask most people who would they prefer to cook the dinner and they would name Ainsley over an equally competent but much better-value gastropub chef such as Andrew Canning at the Clytha in Abergavenny or Stephen Harris at the Sportsman in Seasalter, and Ainsley will win every time. Why? Ainsley's on telly. Applying this moronic criterion to other fields proves how dumb it is - Bobby Crush got on the box more than Thelonius Monk but this didn't make him better at the keyboard.
Publicity-driven hierarchical thinking is increasingly affecting France. The gastro star system occupies a place discreetly outside the box there, but the stakes and prestige are equally high, if not more so. The tyranny of Michelin's Guide Rouge star system led to the suicide of Bernard Loiseau in 2003. Disaffected French foodies, baulking at price and le snobbisme which made dollar signs and Michelin stars indecipherable from one another, have turned to a new generation of bistros within and without urban centres from Dieppe to Draguignan. Genuine greats like Bocuse are still secure dispensing ambrosia from their three-star pantheon, but things are changing. This, of course, is the crucible of good eating; what one can acquire for a bargain. It is still infinitely easier to find excellent simple fare, even snacks. Patisseries of the highest order can still be found, in number, in the most ill-starred French burghs. This inculcates a habit of being able to eat well at home and in a local caff. It is possible to eat the most stomach-churning ordure in France, but less likely than in the country of the gastronomic revolution. Not that you'd know this from Great British Menu or the propaganda of which it forms a pernicious part.
Grab your car, motor out and find anywhere good to eat in places one might not normally ever go - like Maidstone or Carlisle - and you'll look in vain for establishments for which the Guide Rouge reserves the judgement 'mérite un détour'. Unless you pay big-time. Chefs in many gastropubs in Britain are starting to understand this, that the smell of well-cooked food is preferable to niffless neutrality or that of refried onions, and that fair pricing is preferable to exorbitancy.
This, not the uplands of expense and presentation, is where the French are still so far ahead of us they are out of sight. But TV cooking has never been about Escoffier's dictum of doing the easy things well.
This dog's dinner of a show summed it up; chandeliers, marble, swan-white toques; all that was missing was that classic bourgeois buzzword of snob appeal, 'exclusive'. The 'Great British Chefs' are all starred - few, one surmises, come cheap. Good food is thus ghettoised as the province of the monied or the fortunate, not for the proles; while France's top kitchens charge the earth, eating well in that country doesn't cost the earth.
There is no reference whatsoever to the evolution of French and British styles (some would argue the latter has none). That this could be (usually was) like judging a competition between flamenco and death metal guitarists, or who'd win a ruck between The Sweeney and Starsky & Hutch, we never learned. Most unforgivably stupid of all was the obligatory 'your chance to vote' for which 'Great British Chef' would go through and sock it to the frogs. Not that any of the voters have the chance to taste any of the dishes, or have an idea of how they are made.
Fantastically pathetic television. We're talking Crush's rhinestones versus Monk's negritude and daft hat again, aren't we? But then the British never really got music, and on this evidence they still don't get food either.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)