With very few exceptions, I had very little interest in Peter Gabriel when he was with Genesis, but from the moment he left the band and released his first solo single, I was attracted to his music and interested. At first my attention was spotty, and I did not fully start to appreciate what he was capable of until the So album, on which the majority of the tracks I really love are concentrated, but recently listening to an adaptation of the song by the marvellous Playing for Change (sung by Gabriel himself), it struck me that probably the most important song he ever wrote and recorded is this one, ‘Biko’.
It comes from the album Peter Gabriel but then, pre-So, what didn’t? For reasons known to none but Gabriel himself each of his first four albums were eponymous, distinguished from one another by informal numbering, or one word references to their cover art. The album in question was Peter Gabriel “3”, and ‘Biko’ was both its final track and a single that, on release, peaked at no. 38. Given the nature of the song, its subject and its length, it’s more of a testament to the notorious Great British Record Buying Public that it did so well.
‘Biko’ belongs to the past now, thankfully. It was about the black South African journalist and anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko who, in September 1977 was held in Police captivity and who died. He was thirty years old. He had been arrested for breaking a Banning Order restricting him to one Township. He was severely beaten, beaten to death. The Government lied, profusely, but no-one believed them for one moment. Clive James once commented, thankfully incorrectly, that “(e)ven an idiot can see that all you accomplish by killing a man like Steve Biko is to ensure that insurrection, when it comes, will be led by fanatics instead of moderates.”
But that was what we most of us thought back then, outside South Africa and Margaret Thatcher.
Biko’s story didn’t really start to percolate throughout the world until the 1987 biographical picture, Cry Freedom, so Peter Gabriel was among the first to take up his name in 1978. Beginning with chanting, the song is long and slow, funereally so. It is deliberate, invoking both death and the inevitability of fate and change.
The words too are simple. Gabriel sets out the time, the place, and calmly declares that it was ‘business as usual in Police Room 619’. And then very plainly, Biko’s name. Over and over, until his voice rises in passion. The man is dead, the man is dead.
And the song wends on, carried on a strict rhythm, the instruments standing in the background. There are other words, abstracts, still plain. Nothing political, nothing complex. Just defiance: you can blow out a candle but you can’t blow out a fire. History is bearing down upon those in the wrong. What they have done will lead them to be swept away. And the eyes of the world are watching now. Watching now.
Like Sam Cooke, a generation or two earlier, on another continent, the song is seeing what is to come, and that it can’t be held back. It makes no prophecies: any prophecies are the implications of the present. Murder a man who was working for peace, in the assumption that you yourself are the weight of history and you are impregnable, and your hubris will in the end destroy you.
Such things are not the subject of Top 40 hit singles. It was one thing for Peter Gabriel to make this statement the closing song on an album, fading forty or so minutes of music into a silence that defied saying anything more, but to release it as a single, to put it in front of Radio 1 and, most of all, the Great British Record Buying Public, took courage and commitment. If you were to say he never did a better thing I would not argue with you.
Biko, Biko, because Biko…
Film 2026: The League of Gentlemen
A great many criticisms have been levelled at the 1960 film, The League of Gentlemen but none of these will be levelled by me because I simply enjoyed it from start to finish. The film, adapted by Bryan Forbes (who co-stars) from John Boland’s novel of the same name. directed by Basil Dearden, was almost two absorbing hours depicting the England of my extreme childhood, a period of which I have very few, almost no concrete memories, but which I instantly recognise every time I am exposed to it, a loong-gone, lost time that was nowhere near idyllic except in reminding me of the comfort and security I have never had at any other time.
The film is a heist caper which must have had an influence on The Italian Job (the endings are similar in spirit). It portrays a bank robbery, prepared for and carried out with military efficiency by a team of eight former Army officers. It’s a very masculine film in that female parts are both extremely limited are purely background characters. A former Army Colonel, Norman Hyde (Jack Hawkins), made redundant after twenty-five years service, is disgruntled at his treatment. He assembles a team of seven former officers, experts in different fields, all of whom have been dismissed for various offences, all of whom need money, all of whom are in their various ways crooks. Hyde has researched carefully and come up with a plan to rob a bank of a delivery of £1,000,000 in used notes. It’s executed brilliantly by the team. That’s over £100,000 per man.
The film is calm and proceeds at a mesured pace. It is confident enough in itself to move slowly: there is a long introduction in turn to each of the seven recruits before the plot shows its hand, and nothing thereafter is rushed. It’s also unemotional, concentrating upon the developing plot and its various stages without distraction. Amazingly, but not for the times, everyone co-operates. There is no dissension, no arguments, and best of all no greed or betrayal. Everybody plays their part, resuming military efficiency and discipline as if they’d never left the service. You would not have had that in anby similar film in the last fifty years.
And without once betraying its dramatic purpose, the film is also wonderfully funny. Not comedically funny, but filled with a current of sly wit, natural, often ironic jokes, and unexpected moments that jolt you into laughter. The best example: Hyde has invited his second-in-command former Major Peter Race (Nigel Patrick) into his home. There is a portrait of a beautiful woman hanging by the stairs. It’s actually a copy of a portrait of Deborah Kerr taken from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which starred Roger Livesey (playing former Captain ‘Padre’ Mycroft). Race enquires if it’s Hyde’s wife, which it is. You expect a semi-reverential reference to her being dead but instead, with perfect deadpan timing, Hyde replies “I regret to say the bitch is still going strong.”
There’s a bravura section mid-film where the gang – who use the sly name of Co-Operative Removals Ltd – pull a con-job on a British Army base in Dorset, Mycroft, Hyde and Race posing as senior officers carrying out a surprise inspection after a complaint of poor food, whilst the others break in the back and steal the weapons, ammunition and gas masks they need. Mycroft plays the General and Livesey, who I have always enjoyed, steals the scene with a pitch-perfect portrayal, taking sly pleasure in ordering his two underlings to taste fried egg and some sort of soup which are obviously foul.
If I have to be critical, the film is let down by its ending. The job is done, the getaway complete, the money divided between eight suitcases, everybody slipping off to their intended destinations. They will not meet again. But this is a Fifties film, no matter that it came out in 1960. The baddies cannot be allowed to win. Firstly, the film introduces an extraneous and ridiculous character in Hyde’s former superior officer and now neighbour, ‘Bunny’ Warren, a brainless, oblivious, permanently chortling buffoon, who clogs up the ending, which is that the Police have surrounded Hyde’s home (an uncredited Ronald Leigh-Hunt as the Superintendent) and everyone is arrested. No, nobody betrayed Hyde. There was one unforeseeable slip, an eight year old kid collecting car numbers and a green constable who reported on numbers, bringing the Police to Hyde’s door.
Law and Order must be reasserted. Malcolm Saville would have approved.
It’s a small price to pay to enjoy films of this short period, Britain as it saw itself, parochial, unambitious, lightly comic and above all moral. It wasn’t like that at all, as the ‘kitchen sink’ dramas of the early Sixties would soon demonstrate. It was Britain as it liked to see itself. It’s a Britain as I was never really a participant but it stood behind me and I cannot help but enjoy being shown this illusion. Names, faces, performances – Hawkins, Patrick, Livesey, Richard Attenborough, Norman Bird, Terence Alexander – types who didn’t exist for much longer. Gerald Harper played a minor role too.
Yes, the film doesn’t delve deep on anyone, it applies its outlines to its plot. But it works that way for me and I’m happy with it as it is. I understand that, before settling on its actual cast, bigger names like Cary Grant, James Mason, David Niven, Trevor Howard and Richard Burton were considered, several of whom turned it down. I’m glad of that. The cast suited the scale of the film, inflsate it with bigger names and it loses its grounding in reality and won’t work half so well. I also understand that in September 2025 a remale of the film was announced, which I confidently predict will be an utter effing disaster. Just wait and see.
The Other Wigan Wonder: 4 – Bryan Talbot’s ‘The Adventures of Luther Arkwright’
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright were the very first time I heard the name Bryan Talbot. When this was I have no idea: it could have been any time from 1977 to the late Eighties, the former because that was when I first discovered comics fanzines in the form of Richard Burton’s already well-established Comics Media News (adding International from issue 34 onwards). Heard of Talbot, heard of Luther Arkwright: the two were synonymous in my mind, but I knew nothing but the names.
Anything from nearly fifty to nearly forty years on I know Talbot’s name and some of his works but Luther Arkwright has always been an unknown to me, one that has intrigued me many times but never before actually got me to go out and find out what it is actually about. Until now.
And, having finally read it, I still have very little idea of what it is actually about.
Actually, it is relatively simple to condense it to a brief summary, by saying that it is an epic SF fantasy set in a multiversal Universe where Arkwright, an agent of a stable universe with various mental powers, including the ability to slip between parallels at will, is attempting to frustrate a force that is dissolving universes, furthering the plans of an undefined enemy known as the Disruptors. Much on the story takes place on a parallel Earth where the English Civil War is still going on, the country under fascistic Cromwellian and Puritan rule with a Royalist Underground trying to regain its Divine Kingship.
Let’s leave it at that for the moment.
The series began with a one-off short story printed in Brainstorn Comics: from the beginning it was a work belonging to underground comics. It continued in Near Myths as a five issue serial, between 1978 and 1980, picked up again with another five instalments in pssst until 1982 (all of which was subsequently collected as a graphic novel, but the story was not completed until taken over by the short-lived Valkyrie Press, publishing it as nine standard comic books between 1987 and 1989, the firs six reprinting the story to date in expanded form and the final three completing it.
Two sequel series subsequently appeared but I’m here to talk about this one story, which I have in a complete set of the Valkyrie series, plus a quasi-apocryphal tenth issue, ARKeology, containing articles about the series rather than any addition to the work.
I struggled to get through the series for several reasons, the first of which being Talbot’s approach. There is no point where the setting for the story is laid out for the audience to easily understand: a perfectly valid approach and not one I’d criticise, a lot of fun, not to mention great satisfaction, can be had in piecing things together for yourself. But Talbot takes this to an extreme I found very difficult to absorb: the story is both a-linear and a-chronological, with no concessions made. It dodges between parallels, is dense with details and does its best to make it difficult to comprehend.
Added to this is the physical comic itself. I don’t want to criticise Valkyrie Press overmuch, they were clearly an independent publisher with restricted financial resources (they only ever published two series including this and folded shortly after completing this run), but the art and the narrative are printed on very cheap paper, grey rather than white, and unsuited to the art itself.
It’s not solely due to them. Talbot is drawing in a very dense and detailed style, avoiding clean lines and holding lines. Images blend into the grey spaces, there are multiple dark pages that are difficult to make out with any clarity, despite the fact that the black ink isn’t black enough to clearly distinguish itself from the paper itself.
And because of the density of the information, the lettering, both hand and typewritten, comes out very small to get the many words in, making the comic difficult to read in the first place. Typewritten lettering, used primarily for newspaper articles and columns, is extremely hard to read at that font size, even for someone naturally short-sighted like myself who has to take his glasses off to read in the first place.
But the hand lettering is thin, and small. It’s rigid and unemphatic, in contrast to mainstream lettering with its words picked put in Bold, or Italic. It may be more mature in that manner, but it reduces everything to flatness. No matter what is being said, the evenness of the lettering, and its cramped thinness, renders everything of equal importance, though the effect is to make it equally unimportant.
In the story itself, apart from Luther who gives off a most Moorcockian aura, recognised by both creators though the actual similarities are few is supported mainly by fellow agent Rose Wylde. Whereas Luther is unique, the only one of him in existence across the whole continuum of the multiverse, Rose is not. There is a Rose in every parallel, unable to shift, but they are all psychically connected to one another so for Luther, who eventually recognises he loves her and she is the only woman who he does or had loved, it’s like dealing with a single woman, no matter the differing roles she plays.
England in the parallel we are occupying is led by a Cromwell, the leadership inherited throughout three hundred years. This Cromwell, and his dictatorial reign, is vicious, brutal, slaughterous, sexually perverted and wholly fascist. He is the embodiment of the extremity the Puritan creed can go to, ‘divinely’ inspired, his every putrid thought the Word of God.
Opposing him, the Royal Family amusingly consisted of a Charles and an Anne. The Charles is understandable since it was a Charles the first Cromwell overthrew, and who regained his throne thereafter. This one is an idiot, equally drunk on his own divine status, unchanged from the 1600s, and dressing (and drinking) like a Cavalier. He’s not drawn to look like any contemporary Charles’ though. He’s killed through his own stupidity, as encouraged by his sister, the Princess Royale (the contemporary Anne’s title since her brother’s first marriage).
She doesn’t look like her contemporary either, though she is nine months pregnant (the father is, are you surprised, Luther) and she’s considerably colder, steelier and smarter than her brother, which is perhaps a slightly exaggerated comment on the personalities of the two elder Royal Children of our time. Thankfully, no Andrews or Edwards are required by this story.
What also makes the story difficult to take in, though these are irrelevancies included for multiversal colouring, are dozens of segments tucked away in gaps between panels detailing disasters, deaths, collapses and assassinations taking place in other parallels, many featuring names familiar to the decade this story was constructed. They don’t matter, but the welter of information, and the many implications these represent, do overload an already complex story. It’s the same technique Howard Chaykin brought to bear on American Flagg! but those references were about building an image-heavy impression of the world of that series: not only did they fit better, there were far fewer of them.
The ending, of course, saw Arkwright successful, almost completely single-handedly. The Commonwealth and the Puritans were overthrown, the Royal Family restored, The Disruptors lured out into the open and eliminated, Firefrost’s menace ended. But I was disappointed, if not surprised, by this being attributed to Luther Arkwright being revealed as the first of Homo Nuovo, who will go on to replace Homo Sapiens.
It was a let-down of an ending. Granted, I feel an affection for and a kinship with Homo Sapien, for all our flaws, and would not welcome being shunted aside by a supposedly superior mutation of us, but what most repelled me is that, Homo Nuovo, Homo Superior or Homo Mutatis, our replacement successors are only ever enhanced in terms of powers, most often mental in terms of telepathy, telekinesis, psychokinesis, but never seem to have developed morally, ethically or empathically, which is the way I’d want to see a superior form of humanity evolve (instead of the devolution we’ve been witnessing of late).
Ultimately, I’ve got to bear in mind that this is a different Bryan Talbot, younger, flashier, unmoderated by his own age and experience and not having yet outgrown the urge to shock. He bears only a passing resemblance to the Talbot of The Tale of One Bad Rat and other, later works. I’ll hold on to the set, re-read it, try to better fathom it, but although the other two Luther Arkwright books are apparently more conventionally linear, I shalln’t follow Homo Nuovo’s career further.
The Good Companions: e01 – In Which We Meet The Company
Rather different fare from our entertainment of the last several weeks.
As my series last year will indicate I am and have for many years enjoyed the books of J B Priestley. The Good Companions, published in 1929, was Priestley’s breakthrough novel and probably still his most popular, though it fell out of favour during the Angry Young Men era and has only enjoyed a critical reappraisal in the last decade and a half. It was very popular during its heyday, with two theatrical and two film adaptations before Yorkshire TV commissioned Alan Plater to adapt it as a thirteen part serial beginning in November 1980.
I remember watching it, having only really discovered Priestley about six years earlier, with The Good Companions one of the first of his books I read. I was far from having read his full output and it’s quite possible it was then first among his books for me, if I hadn’t already read Bright Day.
Plater had been commissioned for thirteen episodes but persuaded Yorkshire TV that the series would work far better as nine (to complete his contract, he proposed and wrote Get Lost, which in turn spawned the wonderful Beiderbecke Trilogy).
The book is built around the doings of a touring concert party, now a long lost element of Britain’s cultural history, especially for the working class. Priestley adopted a three Act structure, formally separated into three Books, choosing a very long prelude in which three very different individuals in very different parts of the country, all simultaneously run away from the unsatisfying lives they’ve been leading, before coming together coincidentally in the same place, where The Dinky-Doos, a touring Concert Party, are dismally contemplating their lack of a future after their manager has run out on them, taking all the money. These are the future Good Companions.
Since the subject of the book don’t come into it until six very long chapters, devoted to our three outsiders, have passed, and since the book was being adapted as something of a musical, with members of the cast erupting into period-appropriate songs composed by David Fanshawe, that gave Plater serious problems about adapting the story for television, since it would debar the majority of the cast from appearing until the audience had shuffled off, unimpressed.
His solution couldn’t really be said to be elegant. What he went with was a musical introduction to the cast, with the Good Companions singing a title song whilst dressed in pierrot costumes before leaping straight to the beginning of Book Two of the novel. This presents a broken down car driven by Miss Elizabeth Trant (Judy Cornwell), an upper middle-class spinster, calling upon a passerby, joiner and Yorkshireman Jess Oakroyd (John Stratton), from Bruddersford (Priestley’s common pseudonym for his home town of Bradford) for help. Oakroyd fixes the car and gets a lift into Rawsley, where Miss Grant is delivering a box of props for Elsie Longstaff (Vivienne Martin, looking and sounding a lot like Rosemary Leach) of the just-abandoned Dinky-Doos. Arriving almost simultaneously are pianist and ex-schoolteacher Inigo Jollifant (Jeremy Nicholas), our third outsider and a bit of an eccentric, accompanying music hall artiste Morton Mitcham (Bryan Pringle).
Everybody gets together. Miss Trant considers paying the CP’s debts and taking them over. Jess goes outside followed by beautiful, lively, handful soubrette Susie Dean (Jan Francis), who gets him to tell the story of how he ‘appens to be here, so far from Bruddersford. And Oakroyd’s story in all its streamlined but still faithful detail comprises the remaining two Acts of the episode.
I remember practically nothing of the series from 1980/81, except that there were musical bits and that, not being a fan of musicals nor able to accept their habit of people unrealistically bursting into song and dance all over the place, thought little or nowt of them. And I was right to do so then and now because we’re not talking about anything at all memorable.
That’s the first episode. A very strong cast in places, most of whom were deliberately underused. I don’t remember Stratton from anything else, and he mostly did guest roles (intriguingly he played Roger Nowell in a 1976 TV movie of |The Witches of Pendle, dramatising the real trial, not the Robert Neill novel, which I bet no longer exists, his only other extended role). Ironically for someone playing a Yorkshireman with a heavy accent, he was actually a born Lancastrian. I’m betting it’ll be the same structure for episodes 2 and 3, serving as full introductions to Miss Trant and Inigo respectively.
Plater was himself a Yorkshireman, and he worked the voice of Priestley in as occasional narrator, through the medium of Leslie Sands, but most of the cast came from further south and so we’re given a bit of relief from the accent. I’m not yet overly impressed but it’s a bloody sight better than the 1986 adaptation by Ian Curteis of Priestley’s Lost Empires, which sadly was made by Granada TV.
The Infinite Jukebox: Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’
Is it really over thirty years since Nirvana?
The early Nineties, indeed practically the whole of the Nineties, was a strange period for music. I’d practically given up on everything, the radio, the music press, Top of the Pops. How I got to hear about anything, let alone hear music I didn’t already have I don’t know. So by the time Nirvana had become big in Britain I think I may have known of them but hadn’t a clue who they were or what they did.
Nirvana were, and still are, classed as grunge. I’ve heard a bit, here and there, of other grunge bands, the Seattle scene, a little Stone Temple Pilots, rather more Pearl Jam (though largely through the album they recorded working for Neil Young which, on due reflection, I decided would have been far better without them). But Nirvana were more than just forerunners, they were… well, I’ve still not entirely come to a conclusion).
I’ve got both the big albums, plus the MTV set. They don’t get played that often, but I won’t get rid of them. I have my favourites but Nirvana in a way come down to those two incredible hits, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirits’ and ‘Come As You Are’, and yet again I’m showing my contrarian tastes by saying that unlike the many I prefer the latter.
A music teacher friend of mine once characterised music as ‘organised noise’. Certainly ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ pushes that definition to its limits. It’s raucous, chaotic, an electric shock of sound, aggression and angst in one battering ram of a sound. ‘Come As You Are’ is more poised, more coherent, more sinister, beginning with that bass introduction, and Kurt Cobain singing within himself, almost normally. The beat is more even, the overall song more conventional after its frenetic predecessor. Is that why I prefer it? I hope not.
The most important person on ‘Come As You Are’ is not Cobain but rather bassist Krist Novoselic, who underpins the entire song, indeed dominates it with a bass riff played on springy, slightly echoey notes. These introduce the song, they are its root, its most prominent motion. Novoselic plays this sequence from beginning to end, over and over, one of those repetitive runs of notes that get into you, that you want to hear over and over. Indeed, until almost halfway through the song nothing else is relevant, save perhaps Cobain’s strained vocals, held in far greater check than on ‘Teen Spirit’ and thus more effective for the restraint.
Then Grohl really pounds into his drums and Cobain unleashes his guitar and the whole thing is a sonic bombardment, but though for a few moments they almost obliterate Novoselic’s motif, it is there, underneath, constant, under and within the heavy attack. And it is there when they haul back, unaffected, a pulsebeat that will echo until the end of the world.
What is the song about? What is Cobain singing? In the verses he’s asking someone to come visit, casually, naturally, but according them the suggested status of old enemy. The ‘chorus’, such as it is, swears that Cobain hasn’t got a gun. Some people interpret that as Cobain seeking to draw in an old enemy that he still hates, not for reconciliation but to kill them. And I swear that I don’t have a gun: methinks he doth protest too much, that sort of thing. Others that he’s being genuine, that he wants to talk, settle things. Some see it as a message to a former lover, because after all he could have either or both of these motivations towards someone once close to him.
You see, or hear, what you want to see or hear. I can’t decide. I hear something plaintive in Cobain’s voice when he denies having a gun, a desperation to be believed when there’s every reason why for the other not to take his word. But I’m unable to be unequivocal about how I respond.
Many connect this song to Cobain’s eventual end, suicide by putting his gun to his own head, suggest that this person he’s seeking to draw in is himself. So much of Nirvana’s music explored pain, anger, hurt, disturbance.
I find all these arguments difficult to reconcile to the thrust of the music, to Novoselic’s long running bass motif, whose springiness of sounds and endless repetition signals life, consistency, stability, and which persists after that angry, frenetic mid-song break when his bandmates let themselves go. It adds up to a song that seems and feels normal, straightforward. Despite it’s inner anguish.
So that explains why I prefer ‘Come As You Are’ to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Perhaps. Nothing to do with greater conventionality and conformity. Or maybe not.
An Alphabet of Authors: G – Robert Goddard’s ‘The Fine Art of Invisible Detection’
I was attracted to this book more by the interesting title than the back cover summary, but it turned out to be a decent read, and as there is a sequel I may look out for that when this project is over.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Goddard before but he’s been around since 1986, won several awards and been very prolific with novels. The Fine Art of Invisible Detection, published in 2021, was his twenty-eighth and there have been three more since then including the sequel. He’s noted for crime fiction and whilst most of his books appear to be standalones, he’s comfortable with short series (no more than three books so far), most recently with this and its sequel, which have alternated with another two-so-far series.
The leading character of this book is Wada Umiko, a Japanese woman in her late forties, a secretary who is forced to become a private detective when her boss, Kazuko Kodaka, sole proprietor of the Kodaka Detective Agency, is killed when on a dangerous job. He’s already involved Wada, a quiet, unassuming childless widow who lost her husband to the horrific Tokyo Subway sarin attack in 1995, sending her to London to interview an Englishman who claims to have information pertaining to a murder in the early Eighties. Wada, already intrigued by the case, takes up the investigation whilst trying to be as unobtrusive as she knows which she is good at knowing that if this matter was dangerous enough to get Kodaka killed, the same thing could likely happen to her.
Digressing slightly, I did some research on Goddard. Alternating with the Wada Umiko books, he’s written/writing a series set in Algeria featuring an aging Superintendent hoping to slip into peaceful retirement but being involved in matters pertaining to Algeria’s past and its relationship with its former French colonisers. This and the general brief blurb about Goddard seems to indicate that he specialises in stories that involve digging up deep and dark past secrets, slowly revealed, secrets that powerful forces don’t want coming out. It suggests something of a formula.
There’s a second protagonist in the shape of private school teacher and artist Nick Miller, in his forties, married, recently lost his mother but remaining close to her partner, April. Before she decided on her sexuality, Caro Miller had a brief relationship with a man, one of her housemates in an Exeter commune, who left without finding out he was a father-to-be. The first eight chapters alternate between Wada and Nick, after which shorter scenes in chapters alternate as the two begin to close in on each other.
The common factor is another of Caro and April’s former housemates, Martin Caldwell. Caldwell contacts Mimori Takenaga, whose father died of an apparent suicide in 1977, suggesting he has information regarding her conviction that her father was murdered. He also contacts Nick, intimating that he has information vital to the teacher. He arranges meetings with both of them, postpones them, doesn’t turn up, disappears. Both Wada and Nick pursue the matter, pursue Caldwell.
I’m going to give away an essential plot point that, if you decide to read the book, you might not wish to know, so be careful. Mimora’s father was accompanied by a translator who disappeared shortly after his death, Peter Evans. Caldwell had two more housemates, Alison Parker and Peter Ellery, who disappeared off a Cornwall beach, drowned. But Peter’s body was never found. He was Peter Evans. He was also Nick’s father, not the man Caro had told him (who is also dead).
And it appears that he is also Peter Driscoll, head of a Japan-based organisation named Quartazon, specialist secret negotiators who work largely for the Nishizaki organisation, a sinister and ruthless organisation with a sinister and ruthless leader. Quartazon are preparing something called Emergence, which seems to involve collecting hundreds of parcels of land in Iceland (the country).
The longer the story goes on, the less plausible I began to find Wada. She’s supposed to be a quiet, unassuming woman, averse to excitement. I can accept her determination to see this case through, no matter where it goes, despite her lack of experience or technique, and I can understand her gradually growing into her new role, but when she goes from escaping from facing threats to her life to actually killing her would assassin, and being responsible for the death of a very important character in the story who links both strands (oh, alright, SPOILER, Martin Caldwell) with barely a flicker of emotion, I started to cavil. There’s coping and then there’s coping and this started to stray into the realm of authorial convenience, which you know I’ll always call out.
Slowly, both Wada and Nick start to approach the core of what Emergence is, and it had an odd, timely correspondence to an article in the Guardian I was reading at the same time, positing that Trump’s intentions towards Greenland lie in its future as a dry land crossing to Asia, once global warming really kicks in and melts the covering ice. Emergence is the selling of plots across Iceland that will, in fifty years time, become the new, luxury liveable spots, auctioned off at fantastic prices to the mega-rich.
As soon as they both get close enough to discover this, Wada and Nick are separately ejected back to England by Quartizon and Driscoll. But a Quartizon employee with far higher moral standards than anyone else in this despicable pull-the-ladder-up scheme points Wada towards the bit that’s not merely legal but disgusting but also genuinely criminal: the geological plan has been tampered with to add another one-thirds worth of plots that are not going to be prime land under any circumstances.
I’m not going to give away the ending, for the benefit of anyone tempted to try the book for themselves, but there are twists and turns and dangers on the way there and a literally explosive climax that more or less settles everything. There’s a safe ending for everyone who deserves it, some of them even happy.
Wada and Nick finally arrive in the same place for the climax and actually meet up in the penultimate chapter after it’s all done. For some not immediately apparent reason, Goddard then switches from the past tense to the present for the final chapter, which serves no better purpose than to yank you out of the story as it’s about to wrap up and have you focus on the writing technique instead. He continues this, with better reason to draw such a distinction, into the Epilogue, or ‘Re-Emergence’, a doubly apt title.
Either this serves to hint at a direct sequel or Goddard is teasing his audience’s expectations. I’m intrigued enough to consider the sequel we know he wrote to see if it is a continuation of the story.
Previous comments notwithstanding I enjoyed the book overall, though not necessarily to the point of wanting to catch up on Goddard’s back catalogue in full. As a writer he has a plain, unadorned style, not given to flourishes of any kind. He’s stronger on actions than emotions but then that’s the audience he’s writing for. He’s a very good plotter, as I’d expect from so many books, not merely maintaining two essentially separate strands but balancing multiple side-plots and characters without missing any beats, confusing timings or losing the reader. He’s comfortable with Japanese culture, even if most of the story takes place in England or Iceland: the man is obviously a traveller.
But until I’ve finished this project I’m not diverting myself into any one author’s work, at least not unless I uncover a gem on the level of Lafferty, Wolfe or Garner: I can only hope. The sequel will have to wait several weeks yet.
Wednesday Morning Sitcom Time: The Munsters s02 e29-32 – A House Divided/Herman’s Sorority Caper/Herman’s Lawsuit/A Visit from the Teacher
Coming to you slightly behind schedule because I had to pause for an Electricity Safety Inspection halfway, this is the last visit to Mockingbord Lane and the Munsters. I’m both happy and slightly sad about that. Happy that it’s all over, that there are no more episodes to watch of a show that first became painfully unfunny and then, which was worse, tediously unfunny. Sad that something I loved so much when I was younger, so much younger than today, I loved. My memories have been let down, and now I will remember The Munsters for watching it now, not then.
In the shpow’s defence, and my own, I can only say that the second season was the mistake, and this is the first and only time I’ve seen the second season. All my good memories are of first season episodes and those I did enjoy rewatching. Renewing the series was the mistake: the joke had run its course and the show became an exercise in repetition.
Once again I didn’t laugh, or even smile wrily, over the last four episodes. The first was built upon a feud between Herman and Grandpa, after Herman childishly wrecked Eddie’s birthday present as built by his father-in-law, the second was a muddled story in which Herman is hypnotised in an attempt to cure his over-destructive hiccups, is kidnapped as a dummy by two fraternity pledges who think the house is abandoned and left to wake up in a girl’s sorority house. The third saw Herman involved in an accident when a car that hits him is wrecked. Thinking she’s disfigured him, the driver offers $10,000 as a settlement to avoid a lawsuit but Herman thinks she wants $10,000 from him.
The last ever episode saw Eddie write an honest and true but fantastic composition about his family and home life leading to the Munsters being visited by his teacher, Miss Thompson, and Principal, Mr Bradley. Miss Thompson was very attractivebut I didn’t realise until afterwards that I was very familiar with her, she having played middle daughter Bobbie Jo Bradley in 74 episodes of Petticoat Junction, the vast majority if not all of which I’d have watched that same era.
Maybe if these ideas had been put forward in, say, mid-season 1, they might have worked, when the schticks were not so schtale. or maybe just the final two had potential if we hadn’t seen it all before.
Once more I have an open slot in the Wednesday Morning schedule. I’ve an obvious selection to fill it (no, it’s not The Addams Family) but I’ll check to see if there’s anything in my collection that may be a bit different first. But to quote Captain Sensible, glad it’s all over.
The Twilight Zone: s02 e19/20 -Mr Dingle, the Strong/Static
A very grateful nod to friend-of-this-blog Socrates17 for pointing me to where I could watch these two damaged episodes without putting this month’s rent payment in jeopardy.
Mr Dingle, the Strong
It’s not often you get a Twilight Zone episode that’s pure comedy without anything else underlining it but despite the generally low opinion this episode is held in, for exactly that reason, I loved every minute of it: it was hilarious.
The whole thing was set up to be absurd, and played up to that in every moment. Burgess Meredith had the time of his life as the title character, Mr Luther Dingle, small, timid, ineffectual, weak, slighty stammering unsuccessful vacuum cleaner salesman, hanging around a small bar, worrying. Dingle is a nothing, a nobody, a natural punching bag, the kind of guy that 97lb weaklings kick sand in the face of. Unfortunately, this poor schnook habituates the same bar as this large, rude, obnoxious, aggresive guy with strongly-held opinions (all of them wrong), who demands Dingle support his clearly incorrect welsh-on-a-bet claim about a bum call in last night’s game that only everybody else in the world disagrees with, and punches him clean over the bar when Dingle hesitatntly supports the Umpire and the Laws of Baseball.
Said punter is played by Don Rickles, a very distinct comedian of whom I’ve heard thousands of times but never seen before, playing to type and, like Meredith, thoroughly enjoying it. Enter the Martians.
That’s right, a pair of Martian researchers, two-headed, locked into a clearly but deliberately cheap suit, enter the bar invisible to everyone except the audience. They clearly don’t have much time for Earthmen but, as part of their experiment, they invest Dingle with 300 times the strength of a normal human being. Cue much physical comedy made even funnier by Meredith not breaking Dingle’s character as a hesitant, out-to-be-overlooked hopeless loser.
The only thing Serling is out to do is make people laugh, and he does. Needless to say, Dingle becomes a phenomenon, a fad. He demonstrates his strength for television with a kind of shy smugness. Until the Martians reappear, disgusted at the pathetic uses to which he’s putting their gift, and remove it. Dingle is humiliated. Back to square one. Except…
On the way out, the Martians bump into two equally improbable looking Venusians, also on a research expedition, looking for a human subject. They need a hopeless specimen. The Martians point them to, who else? Dingle suddenly becomes 500 times smarter than the average human. He uses it to predict the baseball player’s next hit…
And Serling closes this gloriously goofy episode out by suggesting that Luther Dingle will not retain his new gift all that long, but reminding us that the Universe is full of planets with eager researchers wanting to experiment with gifts…
I loved it. It might not be significant in any way but it was great fun and it’s a while since I’ve laughed so much, even at comedies. I’m very glad I didn’t miss this one after all.
Static
In complete contrast this episode was bittersweet and serious, though I don’t think it properly cohered and the ending, predictable in one sense, did not land well for me.
Dean Jagger played Ed Lindsay, a bitter aging man living in a boardinghouse of people of the same generation as him. He’s cranky, cantankerous and bordering on obnoxious. He has one friend, Professor Akerman (Robert Emhardt), with whom he plays checkers whilst fellow border Vinnie (Carmen Matthews) is concerned about him for reasons not revealed until the second act that, when they are spelt out by her in a painful near monologue, are a bleak but small tragedy.
Ed hates the modern world. Nothing is good enough, especially television (the show not just biting but kicking and scratching the hand that feeds it). Every night everyone sits around, goggling mindlessly at it: this episode may perhaps be the source for that much-used line about television turning people’s minds into oatmeal. Ed rescues an old 1935 radio cabinet from the basement and finds he can tune in to programmes from the past. Tommy Dorsey and his band, the comedy about Senator Claghorn (the inspiration for Chuck Jones’ Foghorn Leghorn). But only when he’s on his own: when he calls others in to share this cornucopia, he only gets static.
We the audience know it’s real, but the Professor and especially Vinnie worry that Ed might be cracking up. He knows that’s what they think and it angers him even more. Then Vinnie explains for us. Twenty years ago, she and Ed were engaged to be married. He loved her very much. But they put off the wedding because his mother was sick. By the time she died, it had all changed, both of them changed. It’s completely impossible now, because of both of them. You can’t go back. They missed their chance. Obviously he still matters a great deal to her even if what they might once have been is completely inaccessible now. It’s a powerful speech. It’s neither new nor original but in Matthews’ voice it is telling.
What is it about, though? How does it end? Vinnie and the Professor try to break Ed’s obsession with what they think is this past he’s recreating in his head as an escape from a today that dis-satisfies him in every way by selling his radio to a junk dealer. A furious Ed buys it back. He tunes in to Senator Claghorn, lies back like any kid, enthused beyond measure, laughs loud and long and happily (like me with The Goon Show, though I was too young to hear it at the time).
Then he calls Vinnie to come in. She’s twenty years younger, prettier, happier. He’s twenty years younger too, tall, has hair. They hug. Has Ed somehow reversed time to give them the second chance they should have taken? Or has he got completely off his rocker, stuck in a fantasy? We are given no hint either way, not even in the closing monologue. But it’s too abrupt, too woolly to properly work. I felt left in mid-air, strung up on a wish-fulfillment ending, without even one foot touching the ground.
Surprisingly, this was one of Charles Beaumont’s episodes, lacking even a note of the horror he usually focussed on. One of the supporting roles, the landlady, was played by Alice Pierce, the first Gladys Kravitz in Bewitched. And this was the penultimate episode recorded on videotape, which gave the whole episode a dull, flat look, enforced a distinct staginess to the performances (complete with a distinctly soap opera musical soundtrack), banalised everything, but yet seemed curiously appropriate to what was a very static story. It could have been radio, it might as well have been, radio that had to be believed to be seen.
The Infinite Jukebox: Aimee Mann’s ‘Nightmare Girl’
I have loved Aimee Mann’s music for thirty years now, since a never-really-was girlfriend put her first solo album on a cassette for me. As I have related before, I first played it one Friday night, as background to vacuuming the floor of my dining room. I knew the name but not what sort of music: cocktail jazz? I vaguely guessed.
Within thirty seconds of the introductory chords I had turned off the vacuum and took the cassette into the lounge to listen to it properly. I have collected all her albums assiduously since and seen her live on stage twice in Manchester, the second time accompanied by my then wife, who always thoroughly enjoyed the concert.
She’s written some brilliant songs, full of gorgeous, natural melodies, and shown herself a fantastic lyricist, with penetrating, subtle and cynical couplets, and I have already written about a number of her songs as occupying the Infinite Jukebox.
This is just one more of them. One of my absolute favourite Aimee Mann songs. The thing is, ‘Nightmare Girl’ was nothing but a b-side.
Oh, it’s a little bit more than that, you can get it on the bonus second disc of the Deluxe edition of the 2002 album, Lost in Space, but that’s an afterthought.
What makes this song so good? It was co-written by Mann with Jon Brion and her husband Michael Penn. It was the b-side to her brilliant 1999 single ‘Save Me’, also featured on the Jukebox, both sides featured in the Jim Jarmusch film Magnolia. It’s archetypal Aimee Mann, a smooth, mid-tempo song, presented coolly and without fanfare but rising to one of this natural choruses that make you wonder how, in the history of music, that combination of notes had never been discovered before. The instrumentation is there to support and outline the melody without drawing undue attention to itself and as well as the band there are strings highlighting grace moments, especially in the build up to the chorus.
As for the words, they’re wonderfully effective without actually making any sense at all. Mann sings about the girl at the centre of the song, laying her out in long lines of contradictory impulses and desires in a way that makes this woman impossible to understand yet weirdly influential. I’m distilling everything she said into a potion, but it’s always going to my head in slow motion: oh nightmare girl. Who she is, what she is, what she means is a mystery but the effect is plain: things are getting weirder at the speed of light, nightmare girl, Mann draws out, as smooth as butter.
Don’t ask the song to make any kind of sense, it’s a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces missing and the picture on the box lid is an abstract anyway. This nightmare girl is like an LSD trip, it seems, her presence throwing things further off-kilter than any sugar cube dipped in lysergic acid could do. But Mann hangs it all together with one more of her gorgeous, instinctive melodies, yearning but complete.
In the end I love ‘Nightmare Girl’ and listen to it as often as I do because I love ‘Nightmare Girl’ for the thing it is, a song that embraces me, draws me in and asks me to share its belief that things are getting weirder at the speed of light. And when I hear it I want that world, that world of weirdness and glorious possibility, a breadth far beyond anything I could actually handle if it could come to me in real life but which, for just under four minutes, it is the most desirable thing there could be.
Some songs are just songs. This is a song. And it was a b-side! Imagine that!
Film 2026: They Came To A City
I’ve seen part of this film before, one afternoon on television, coming in part way, though I can’t remember why I didn’t watch it from the start: did it begin whilst I was out? Did I only notice from the paper that it was on after it had started? Either way, I watched it because it was based on a play by J B Priestley, in the days when I had all his novels, and I assumed it to be based upon They Walk in the City, one of the minor works from the Thirties. But it’s not. Despite the similarity of the titles, book and film/play have nothing in common.
Now I’ve seen the film in full, I can only say that it is a minor film, one easy to bury with its flaws. It’s very much a transplanted stage play, treated as such, with limited expansion beyond the boundaries of the elaborate set. It’s all talk and no action, unless you call characters running or walking up and down steps action. It’s a propaganda film on a controversial subject, a polemic designed to present a point of view, whose characters are types, representations, more suited to labels that to names. And it focuses on a moment in time that has now passed and can’t be influenced: the world we live in and watch the film in now is the one that is the consequence of the choices the film wants to affect.
Yet for all these things I found the film fascinating, and in its own way something wonderful. It helps that I agree, innately and by experience and conviction, with Priestley’s hopes, wishes and optimism, arising from his strong pre-Great War true socialism. Cinematically, the film is limited not merely by being all talk but also by its decision not to show us, or even describe in any concrete terms, the utopia that is the City we never get to see. It’s a choice dictated by resources – the film was made and issued in 1944 when there was very much a War going on, a War never acknowledged in the film – but also by the fact that no utopia can plausibly be depicted to a mass audience. That was a necessity, but also in keeping with Priestley’s intentions.
Though I’ve never seen the play it’s very easy to extract it from what’s been added for cinema. Nine strangers arrive, by mysterious means, in dribs and drabs, at a castle that overlooks a city. A door that can’t be forced, decorated by a quasi-angelic eight-pointed star, opens to allow them access. One by one they return to debate their reactions to the City, how they found it, how they liked or hated it, whether they want to stay or not. By age, gender, social class, occupation and inclinations they are a cross-section of British society. How will each of these nine people respond?
The play is an allegory. Though religion is excluded entirely, the City is Jerusalem, not any corporeal Jerusalem but the Jerusalem of Blake. It is also what should be done about Britain once the War is over. Do we build a new, better, fairer, more decent, more equal, more open, transformed Britain out of the wreckage the War has wrought, is still wringing, or must/should the Jerusalem we build be the exact same one as before, brick by brick.
The film concretises the issue by adding bookends, and a mid-film interlude, to explain the allegory in words of one syllable and separate fact from fantasy. Two young people, in uniform, a man and a woman, are arguing whether the post-War situation can/must change and whether it won’t/can’t change. A pipe-smoking middle-aged man sits down to join the debate and put it in allegorical form for them. This is the author. Not just some metaphorical figure but it’s actually an uncredited John Boynton Priestley descending from that great Writer’s Study in the sky.
Add in a sequence in which we briefly meet the nine characters in their everyday settings before they step through a door into more-than-blacout blackness, and that’s the cinematic adaptation.
In the end, like all ensemble films, the characters have different fates. Some, but not all, of the obvious ones reject the City. Some love it and want to stay. One of them, who is lit by a wonderful idealism at the sight of the place, leaves because his dissatisfied, unpleasant, utterly dependant wife effectively makes him. And two leave the City, not because they hate or even dislike it, but because they love it, because it is an ideal to be dreamt of and worked for and so they must go back, to work for it outside so that one day everyone, not just themselves in selfishness, can enjoy its benefits.
Your attitude to the film will depend largely upon your politics. I couldn’t help but recall the superb Danny Boyle-directed opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games, a pageant that was stirring and wonderful and dismissed by Tory MPs as ‘multi-cultural crap’. Cynic though I am, at heart I want to believe in Priestley’s Spocialist belief in togetherness, fairness, co-operation and mutuality. What the film says are all the things I wish this country, this world would be, that I believe are attainable if we try hard enough for long enough. I’ve argued for some time, on a friendly basis, with friend-of-this-blog Garth Groombridge about utopias and whether they are a) good and b) attainable. In objective terms they aren’t and by definition never can be b): utopia is perfection and perfection can always be improved upon and changed by innovation.
But Priestley’s City that everyone comes to is Utopia as a work in progress. Working together, striving together towards the idea of the world being good today but better tomorrow, by cooperation and mutual respect, not competition or advantage. Human nature can be changed, if we put our minds to it. It is changed, every day.
The film was also remarkable in that a majority of its central cast came from the original stage play, including Googie Withers as Alice Foster and John Clements as Joe Dinmore. It was produced by Michael Balcon and directed by Basil Dearden, who co-wrote the screenplay with Sydney Cole and Priestley. It’s available for free on YouTube and I think you should watch it yourselves. Unless you are a Tory MP.
Martin Crookall - Author For Sale 
