Not so much the iron lady…

…as the rubber lady. Certainly in the 90’s.

Second on my trip down memory lane is Spitting Image. I remember being allowed to stay up late to watch this one when it first began. Not so much because I was an avid viewer at first, more because I wanted to put off the inevitable return to school on Monday morning for as long as possible. Later, with a TV in my room, it did become a must see.

I’m beginning to spot a theme with my favourite teen-tv here, but something which may not come as too much of a surprise to friends used to my cynicism, dark humour and sarcasm. Fantastic purely for its Agadoo-mocking Chicken Song, and for being instrumental in the downfall of Thatcher, it certainly started a few careers. A mere glimpse of the voice-cast list reads like a who’s-who: Chris Barrie, Alastair MacGowan, Harry Enfield, Hugh Dennis, Steve Cougan.

You can read more here, or here.

That’s you that is…

Or, more correctly… That’s you that is.

So I’m off again for a few days. After the rather depressing weekend of ill that was Easter, which was spent mostless doubled-over on the sofa to a soundtrack of “ugh…” or trying to sleep on a bed bathed in glorious sunshine, I’m off to Jersey. A couple days of often disorganised pottering, intermingled with beach-reading and ocassional rehearsing.

So I’d thought I’d leave you with a few brief glimpses of how I’ve been wasting valuably using my time lately taking walks down the internet byways of old TV. I think it’s something to do with my birthday which is fast approaching this week, and feeling old. So here you have it, a few shows that have shaped my view of the world.

First on the list is The Mary Whitehouse Experience.

Although few people believe me, I cottoned on to TMWE when it was still on Radio 1. Back in the days when Mark and Lard still had Simon Armitage and others reading poetry and long before every third word of radio 1’s playlist had to be bleeped out, it had a comedy hour which also including Armando Ianucci and Lee and Herring’s Fist of Fun. I have to admit to preferring Punt and Dennis, possibly because I’d seen them on parental favourite The Jasper Carrott Show, exhibited in my now religious listening to The Now Show on Radio 4.

Rob Newman and David Baddiel may now be touting their Oxbridge skills in novels nowadays, but back then repeated catchphrases were the way of the world. Like a thinking-man’s Harry Enfield’s and Chums, it led to many hours of shouting “Lovely, Milky-milky”, and hilarity in the form of pointing to a school textbook and saying “see that snot on the corner of my Y5 maths book? That’s you that is…”

Wonderful. Join me in my interweb meander down memory lane here, or here.

Not so much A-B cos of BA

An update to my previous problems on booking a flight with a cello….

Today was the day for booking the quartet’s flights to Norway. Looking more like a test for Which? magazine, four of us sat around a circular table with a MacBook and PC Laptop between us. After some minutes avoiding the process of making us poorer getting organised, and before it became necessary to draw straws, I was nominated to go first as I had to book a seat for my cello.

First I found the telephone number for customer services, and before calling to check about how to book the cello seat decided to get the flight info up on screen for easy reference. The phonecall too should have been fairly easy.

Me: (After 10 minutes on hold to ticket sales dpt) Hi. I’m travelling to Norway and need to book a seat for my cello. Can I do that online?
BA: Sorry, this is the wrong department. I’ll put you through.
Me: As above.
Real Ticket Sales Dpt: No. You’ll need to do that on the phone, and it will incur a £15 charge because you’ve chosen to do so rather than paying online.
Me: But you said I couldn’t do it online, so I ‘m not really choosing am I?
RTSD: Well, this is the wrong department. I’ll put you through.
Me: Third repeat of opening statement.
Some other BA Department: Have you already booked your own ticket online?
Me: No.
SOBAD: Well, you have to do that first, then call us and we’ll sort out the cello ticket.

So that’s what I do. I book my ticket online. Except airport security must be getting really tight now, because I had to enter my information 3 times because the site kept crashing. Then, my credit card’s latest internet security secure-code thingy made my credit card so DiVinci-code secure even I couldn’t crack the code. Brilliant. So I have to make myself instantly poorer now, instead of using well-established delaying tactics. Also how many dpartments do BA have? I know they’re a massive company, but you’d think they’d make sure the Sales department was easy to find, and certainly where they said it would be wouldn’t you? That’s just simple business sense…

Then there’s an obligatory 25 minutes on hold to the same BA customer service line. Still, only 3 more people to go…

Me: Hi, I’m calling because I spoke to one of your colleagues earlier about flying with a cello to Norway. I’ve booked my own ticket online, and now need to pay for a seat for my cello.
Nice Man: Cool. Okay. Um. Er. Um. Can I call you back in 5 minutes? It’s only I’ve only done a cello once before, and I need to check a few things.
[10 minutes later]
Nice Man: Do you have the dimensions?
Me: You wouldn;t believe this, but there’s actually a violist in front of me with a tape measure (there really was!). [So they measure it and read it out, in a strange mix of metric and imperial, which dliutes Nice Man’s mood a little…]
Nice Man: And its weight?
Me: [Now, at this point I have to work very hard to resist a quip about it being shy about its weight and having put on a few pounds over Easter]. Two Stone?
Nice Man: I’ll say 10kilos. That’s what they normally are. [I’m reassured by his clear authoritative voice, having dealt with a cello once before].
Nice Man: Excellent. Well, we’ll ge back to you within 24hrs with a quote for the cello. Have a nice day. [click]

And he was gone. A quote? Did he not hear I’d already booked my own seat? What am I going to do, put the cello on a Ryanair flight if I don’t like the price they quote me with a little tag saying ‘please look after this cello’? I mean, it has no luggage and at 180 years old it surely qualifies for an OAP discount. I’m happy paying full fare, so just give me a ticket?

Needless to say the other 3 were now a bit more shy about going next. Still, I’m off to Norway, so I guess I just have to wait and see whether tomorrow my cello is coming too, or whether it will be Dvorak’s ‘American’ Quartet for string trio and stressed-looking guy singing pathetically as his cello was unfortunately detained in Britain. Probably due to George Dubya.

PS British Airways, if I wanted to hear Delibes’ Flower Duet played on classical guitar I’d find it in the panpipes section of HMV. If I wanted to hear it for 25 minutes non-stop, I’d probably investigate the local psychologists on Yell.Com…

Life on Mars (Is there)

Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seats with the clearest view
And she’s hooked to the silver screen…

So that’s it. After two series and 16 sparkling episodes we all found out what happened to Sam Tyler in BBC’s Life on Mars. Didn’t we?

There are a number of reactions already emerging about what the last episode really meant. From the positive, well-argued, to the scathing and negative.
But I think the writers are smarter than they are being credited for. After years seemingly in a coma and trapped in 1973, Sam returned to 2006 and found that he was lifeless, and unable to feel. Policing had been reduced to policies to protect the criminals. Political correctness had neutralised all sense of feeling. And Sam had dreamed it all up about 1973.
Don’t we all daydream about being able to do our jobs or live our lives without bureaucracy? To live life in the raw? Surely something every male sees in the idol of John Thaw’s Reagan in the Sweeney. Surely there’s some kind of poetic comment in the fact that Gene Hunt, who we’ve been idolising and longing to live like for the last 16 programmes, is a form of rhyming slang which many in the year 2007 would use to describe that character’s behaviour?

And what about the closing scene where the Test-card girl comes and switches off the programme? What comment should we read into that? Stop daydreaming like Sam and start living?

Personally, I’d like to think it’s a direct comment from the writers. The cast and writers have been busy giving interviews about how the series took years to get taken on by a broadcaster. We all know how difficult it must have been to sell a programme about smoking, drinking, rule-breaking, sexist, racist characters. I personally hope the test girl is switching off the television because that little box in the corner of your room is largely responsible for the desensitisation that Sam felt, and that we all feel about life today. Afterall, they didn’t watch Trisha in the 70’s did they, and bleep anything that might offend?

Whatever you read into the script, you have to admire the cunning of the writers. Since the series began we’ve been told this is it, the story is concluded. We’re supposed to believe Sam really did return to 2006, but what if he followed the wrong guy. What if Morgan was the cancer, and 2006 wasn’t real? Afterall, he didn’t feel did he, so was he really alive? Sam’s not been left in 2006, he’s back in 1973, so the whole thing’s open-ended.

Can we have a third series in the future? We can if it turns out Sam realised just in time that his waking in 2006 was actually a near-death experience, and that by returning to 1973 he’s still fighting the coma…

[Update:11/4/07

Whatever you think, how long has it been since TV viewers were left still contemplating a TV show the morning after? There are some good answers here on the Mancheter Evening News Blog, includingthe revelation that I may share John Simm’s view of the ending… ]

Stereotypes, there must be more to life…

Firstly, let me just say that my recent spate of Blur quotes will soon be coming to an end. I promise.

Well it happened. Along with about 50% of the working population, I found myself feeling queesy over the Easter Weekend. Not queesy so much, more a stomach ache that left me feeling like I was about to give birth to not just a small baby elephant, but it’s rather larger siblings too. Fortunately, I still have 2 weeks of enforced holiday (two of the 20 or so I get each year), so I’m not going to complain.

However, two days of enforced staying-in-ness has left me contemplating a few things. Firstly, I’m a little concerned that I’m becoming a stereotype. Today I found myself in a garden centre, which afterall is what Easter is all about. Surely Jesus, after a hard weekend of falling and rising, thought on Monday, ‘why, that lawn’s looking a little shoddy over there by the sand dune, must pop down to B&Q. And in years to come, my followers will do the same’. And lo when I set forth into the garden, I did see every other person in suburbia doing the same. I’ve even started coveting a Ford Focus as my next car…

Thankfully the rest of my contemplating left me feeling less stereotypical. Whilst eating a few Jelly Baby/Gums I felt a strange warm glow when I realised they are still made in different shapes. Each colour has a corresponding character, including a green one who seems to be either a) mopping his brow after a strenuous jog, or b) crying like a lost little child/jelly baby. I take this as a sign that the corporate ‘man’ hasn’t yet got to every institution, cost-cutting every facet of English life to the bear minimum.

My second contemplation was slightly more alarming. My enforced sofa-rest due to my incubating baby-elephant which by then had been joined by a giraffe called Jeremy, meant lots of television watching. As it was a Bank Holiday, this left me with a choice of The Sound Of Music, programmes auditioning for people to play characters in musicals, Channel 4’s the top 100 musicals, or a slightly more heterosexual schedule of American sitcoms on E4 and Channel 5. Thus I’ve been watching a lot of Friends, Joey, Happy Days, and Scrubs. The latter is perhaps the most alarming. On the first day of my holiday I knew scrubs was rubbish. However, in my mission to stay completely heterosexual and not press the red button to sing-a-long-a-Julie Andrews, it’s worked it’s way into my brain. I’m not sure quite what did it. I’m still not a fan, I know it’s absolute Elephant dung, but I was won over by a Dick Van Dyke cameo, and the geeky looking kid from Road Trip putting in an appearence. What’s worse is that I’ve started to think of each episode, with it’s unique Zach Braff monologue, as some kind of allegory. As the prologue fades out and the credits begin to roll, I’m left thinking, ‘yeah, that I can really relate to that’.

So there you have it. I’ve become a suburbanite clone, and I’m viewing Scrubs as some kind of philosophical oracle on how to live a good life. I must be ill…

Small town living

Going back to your home town is always full of mixed emotions. I grew up in a market town in Suffolk, a few square miles of, to the casual observer, just a simple 50/50 mix of houses and factories. To those of us who grew up there the housing estates were fabulous, intricate mazes of places to hide and cycle at speed, and the factories were like giant airfresheners which could carpet the entire town with the smell of bubblegum one day, and strawberry the next.

I live in an old market town now so you would think there’s very little difference. But whilst my home town was the birthplace of ‘off-the-peg’ clothing, my new home is the birthplace of JK Rowling.

I’m often guilty of being harsh in my attitude to my hometown. Afterall, my mother’s side of the family can be traced back many generations there, and they obviously saw no reason to leave. However, as an illustrated example, take this Headline I saw advertising the local paper:

This is supposed to entice the passers-by to buy the paper, but what is it trying to say? ‘Even less’? How much is that? Was the town once some comic-book style den of crime, twinned with the vision of Detroit painted in the Robocop films? Is it painting the town as some idyllic Dixon of Dock Green type affair, and it is amazing that there could be any less crime in the town? Has the crime simply done as many of the shops appear to have done and move to out-of-town developments, therefore there is no crime in the town?

I think it sums the town and the people who live there nicely. You can read it in one of two ways – 1) It’s a lovely, quiet, peaceful little Suffolk town where nothing bad happens, or 2) It’s dull and uneventful, with a strange lethargy which prevents it ever striving to be more than it currently is.

I’m sure to most people this comment on my town will be largely irrelevant, but I bet there’s something in common with your own home town…

A consuming passion

We live in a 24/7 society now. We have 24hour news, 24hour television. I can go to the corner shop and buy milk and a Fry’s Peppermint Cream chocolate bar at 2am if I wanted to (Not at my corner shop, obv. I’d have to go to a city, but it’s an illustrative point so please let it stand). The freedom of information act allows us to view facts and figures about all manner of public institutions that were once off-limits and considered elite. If you were, God forbid, in the market to buy an electrical item, the internet would be able to list the prices at all of the major retailers and provide you with a litany of professional, and also slightly emo, reviews. The world is at our fingertips. Information is very easy to find. Twelve year olds are getting their Geography homework assignments written for them by enterprising adults in America for the cost of a few flumps and fruit salad chews.

Why then is it so f**k**g hard to sort out a trip to Norway?

Okay, so we’re travelling as a string quartet so we’re not making things easy for ourselves. But I fly regularly with my cello and apart from a few teething problems with the cello getting jammed in the x-ray machine, the annoyance of retired policeman who now work in airside security making what they feel are Seinfeld-worthy Grammy-winning quips about the size of my banjo, and the delays of strangers telling me about the niece/newphew/aunt’s past exploits learning the violin at school, things go okay.

Seriously, it’s like mobilising an army. There are flights to search out, which should be an easy process: visit a website, click a few buttons and ‘hey presto’ I’m smiling at a viking descendant as he checks my passport. Except Oslo has two airports, about 100km apart. Excuse me? Is Oslo 100km wide? I think not. It turns out Oslo’s second airport is, in all actuality, literally, really I’m not joking, quite a few towns away. A bit like London having an airport in Birmingham.

Then there’s the timing problem. A 4.30am check-in sounds okay, I can sleep on the plane. Except wait, some of us are coming from Bristol, or Birmingham so we need to factor that in and that means setting off at a slightly less sociable 2am. Then there’s finding somewhere to leave the cars where they won’t be featured on the BBC as an extra in either Watchdog or CrimeWatch. So now we don’t just want the cheapest flight, we want the most convenient one. Plus we need to fly back on Thursday, and be playing in Wales on Friday morning. But the only flights are late at night, then there’s collecting the cars and getting back to Bristol and trying to squeeze in a few hours sleep and a Little Chef fry-up.

It would be easier, and probably cheaper, to hire a Hercules cargo plane or Challenger tank to get around in Norway as well. What hirecar can fit a string quartet and suitcases in? These people who think His Tonyness just decided on a whim one morning to invade Iraq, and by lunchtime the same day we were kicking down doors in Basra need to try and plan a trip like this. We’re only four people and a few violins, an army, presumably, would need at least someone to type out a brief itinerary.

This is the problem these days, we have inventions to help with everything but those things we need help with. We have electric tin-openers, presumably for people whose wrists have no bone in whatsoever, or who are so unfit doctors have advised them to build up to that level of fitness. We have predictive text, so when you are constructing a text message you have to scroll down two dozen words to get to the one you want, when all you had were two letters left to add. We have spell-check which constantly chastises me for using made-up words, proper nouns, or for simply not being American.

All I want to do is travel to Norway on a Sunday, and come home again on a Thursday. I know the flights exist because there have been all manner of politicians and scientists on the telebox telling me I’m evil and that a small family of cute animals will be killed in South America if I book tickets for a flight. I hate myself for being annoyed. A few years ago it would take the average man a year’s salary to fly anywhere, yet now people can commute to work in North Europe, and here I am complaining that 3 flights a day for £4.99 simply isn’t good enough, and that they should put on a special flight just for me and my string playing friends.

The thing is I can’t help it. 24/7 society has made me like that. I shout and fist-shake at the computer if a webpage take more than 2 seconds to download, whereas a few years back dial-up could take 5 minutes just to connect to the World Wide Net. I think it’ll be okay though. I think I have the answer. There’s a small vessel that sails under the cover of darkness, and if I speak to the captain in French codewords we can take the slow-boat to Norway, no cute animals will be killed by CO2 and I will avoid being consumed by consumerism.

Picket Fences

I like living in the country. I like the cows on the common. I like the organic bakery. I like the humour of the local butchers, meeting deer whilst out walking, the sense of community, and the fact we have more joggers here than a Sunday afternoon in Central Park. Life is good.

However, I can’t help daydreaming when there’s some glimpse of smalltown America via the telebox. The mere glimpse of a white picket fence can send me off. It’s not even as though I particularly admire America at the moment – G W Gump is hardly making it a harmonious vision of the future. The Postal Service alone has more shootings than Pinewood studios, and coffee is sold in volumes more akin to paint and petrol. Yet I have always had a burning desire to live there.

When I was over there a few years ago, I spent a some months livin down the road from a lovely little town called Bridgton in Maine, where my fantasies of Twin Peaks-esque living accomodation were allowed free reign. I want the mock-roman columns either side of the door, with brilliant white winow frames. I want a little red mailbox at the end of my drive with ‘the cellist’ written on it. I want to buy my newspaper from a little plastic box on the street corner, and to make friends with a local fat guy called Dale who knows someone who works in the Dairy Queen. And I want to have to drive into the city ocassionally, going along a dead straight road towards a skyscape of skyscrapers and metro tracks.

I want to have lived in America in the next twenty or so years, but then that leads me on to everything else. Although I love town and country living, I also want to have spent some time living in hi-tech city apartment. I want to have driven a two-seater convertible. I want to have cycled across at least a sizeable amount of Ireland. I want to go back to Seattle and buy coffee from the first Starbucks again, and cook a fish bought from the market round the corner at the little campsite with Tepees on Vashon Island. I want to visit Texas, although I’m not quite sure why. I want to have decided on a PhD topic, preferably something to do with The Beatles, or The Who’s Tommy. I want to shear a sheep in New Zealand, and walk up to a Japanese family and ask them to take a picture of me on holiday. I want to have a photograph published in a magazine and, just once, have a craving for salad. I want to go for a walk using those sticky-pole thingies that ramblers have, and learn how to ski.

The thing is the list goes on, and if I’m honest I’m not all that sure I have the time. I’d have to start now. A friend at school was once haunted by a dream that he was going to be killed by a bush and although that fate is probably not going to inhibit my dreams, what if I don’t get my three score and ten? I have to prioritise. I guess the skiing should wait til near the end, in case a dodgy chair-lift cuts things short. A similar risk assessment suggests I should wait until I get a Saga discount on that coach tour of Texas, or greet the guy or gal in the blue postal uniform putting deposits in my little red mailbox.

And again I find myself back to that living in America thing. All suggestions of reasons to move to America, or prospective job offers gratefully recieved…

While my guitar gently… screams

I love music. Okay, so I’m a musician so in most cases this is an obligatory thing, but I often while away the hours reflecting on what made me fall in love with it. I’d love to say that my parents took me to see a recital and I just pointed at the cellist and in some gargled baby-speak said ‘I want that one’ (at the age of say 3, not as a teenager, obv.). I’d love to say I spent many of my hours as a youth playing vinyl discs of Beethoven and listening to Wagner’s operas, learning the sultry tones of the instruments and yearning to play the cello. But I can’t.

You see the thing is I loved rock music, and I think I’d have played any instrument that was thrown my way. My very earliest memories are of sitting in the corner of the living room with headphones on, listening to my parents’ record collection on the wood-sided hi-fi. I must have played John Ottaway’s JetSpotter of the Track to death, along with Billie Connoly’s album that had ‘If it was’ne for ya wellies’ on it, on a fantastically green cassette. I quickly progressed to Pink Floyd and Sabbath, although few of my peers believed I had such good taste at that early age. I was always listening to music. I was the first kid in school to get a walkman, and listened to Status Quo and the Rolling Stones. I even had a hat with a radio built into it.

I listened to music when I was walking, working, even riding my bike around the estate via a radio fitted to the handlebars, but it was the guitar that was the symbol of my love of music. It had the power to bring people together, a a symbol of the rebelliousness and anti-‘the man’ attitude that’s been with me all my life. Whether it was Keith Richards thumping away at the Rhythm of RnB (in it’s true sense), or the gentle strumming of Ottaway, somehow if you were onstage with a guitar you instantly became a hero. As Radiohead once sang, anyone can play guitar. And it’s true. University halls of residence are full of them. No self-respecting twenty-something alpha-male would be without one. Everyone can strum a chord on a guitar.

I keep a guitar in the corner of our living room, and even it’s basic shape seems to hold some latent force, a potential energy to lift spirits and give power to its beholder. I have 3 guitars, an acoustic, a bass and Telecaster copy. Each fits a mood. I have the bass when I want to feel funky, playing Stevie Wonder basslines or jazz bass. The acoustic is for my meandering hippyish days when I can play folk or political songs, and the electric to relive the grunge bands of my informative years.

Although I’m a much more accomplished cellist than guitarist, for some reason my relationship with the guitar always seems, if not stronger, clearer. Don’t get me wrong, my cello is my most treasured posession, but the guitar allows me to truly be me, or rather to be someone else. I can play music I connect with somewhere in my stomach. I can strum the chords and feel the anguish of the composer. I can be Neil Young strumming away with the pain of a drug-addicted friend with The Needle and the Damage Done, or I can be playing to a full Central Park with Dave Matthews’ Satelite.

So there you have it. I love music not because of the cello, the instrument I have spent years studying and on which I base my career, but because of the guitar. Is this a bad thing? I’m not quite sure…

All Apologies

Maybe Cobain had it right when he wrote “What else should I be? All apologies”, it certainly seems to be apology season at the moment.

As the Queen, His Tonyness, and various members of the aristocracy and social elite attended a ceremony at Westminster Abbey to apologise for commemorate and remember the slave trade of 200 years ago I couldn’t help whether society was focussing on the right thing. The Church of England are considering offering compensation to descendants of slaves because as Rev. Simon Bessant said “we [The CofE] were at the heart of it”. I can’t help wondering what next? Are we going to start handing out money to Australians because we forced their forefathers onto ships and exhiled them to a land filled mostly with cute miniature bears and kangaroos? What about the land in India, Canada, Australia etc that we took from natives in the process of creating an Empire? Surely there must be some kind of compensation for the damage to the Spanish Armada whilst we’re at it?

But it’s not all bad. We’ll get a few grand from the Germans for bombing Coventry Cathedral, and the French owe us a bit for forcing our courts to work in the French language for a hundred years or so, and forcing children to learn to spell words borrowed from French which don’t follow English spelling conventions. Unless one of those claims direct type companies you see advertised during the daytime television get involved, the money will just shuffle around the globe like a giant sliding puzzle and we’ll all stay the same like that village in the Mike and the Mechanics song where ‘nothing ever happens’, and we’ll all sing along like before. Probably best all round if we just have a worldwide ‘sorry’ day then. There could be a badge or ribbon people could pin on their lapels. People could say ‘sorry’ to complete strangers they meet on the street. There could be a special ‘sorry’ song for kids to sing in school and another for Peter Kay to take to No.1 in the charts. People could be encouraged to give to a ‘sorry’ telethon, although to save on costs it couldn’t be hosted by Sir Terry.

Probably best if we give that money to wiping out third world debt and wiping out disguised forms of slavery in the 21st century actually…