On the Scrapheap

When was the last time you saw a really satisfying scrapyard? I came across this ten-minute film while looking for something completely else. The beguiling wonders of this information superhighway will never cease to amaze me

It's from the The Rank Organisation's wonderful "Look at Life" series made in the mid 1960s and is called Down in the Dumps.

Rank made over 500 of these marvellous short films in the ten years from 1959,  for screening at their Odeon and Gaumont cinemas before the main feature. Many of these are now available to view online and are mostly fascinating records of urban environments at a time of rapid change, much of it driven by the rise of private motor cars. The films are particularly evocative, of course, for those of use who grew up in the 1960s.  Invited to find what anthropologists call a 'perfect specific' for my own memories of that decade I'd plump for the design on the back of a box of Rowntree's fruit gums. Here to is:

Image © Nestle UK

Vatican Latin

I remember my one and only visit to St Peter's in Rome and the sour wave of Calvinism that swept over me when confronted with the bludgeoningly ostentatious ghastliness of the fixtures and fittings. I have no taste for the baroque, but (a few incidental masterpieces aside) the elaborate trash that clutters up a fine building left me reeling and nauseous. It's almost as if a bunch of philistine celibates with unlimited financial resources and no taste had been given free reign to displace their feelings of sexual frustration into an extravagant visual correlative. I mean look, just look, at these baldachins (if that's the plural):

Unrelatedly, perhaps: the Vatican City State, a walled enclave with a  population of under a thousand and the smallest independent state in the world, raised the age of consent from twelve (the lowest in Europe) to eighteen. They did this last year. Did you know that the cashpoint machines in Vatican City offer instructions in Latin?

Newsreader gaffe

This has been in circulation for a while but was new to me. Watch it here.

Not having a television for many years I'm taken aback by the thundering music that accompanies the opening of this report - I expect it's standard practice (as mainstream films have long since succumbed to almost uninterrupted and crassly manipulative musical soundtracks, the aural equivalent of having an unwelcome companion offering a constant commentary in a stage whisper.

On the buses with Ian Nairn

I've blogged before about the great Ian Nairn and his masterpiece Nairn's London. Here's the cover of the paperback, the best book about London ever written, with the author sitting cheerfully in the cab of a Routemaster bus.

Image © Penguin Books

Last weekend, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the introduction of the much-loved Routemaster bus, more than a hundred of these gorgeous machines gathered in the sunshine at Finsbury Park in North London. It was an impressive spectacle, featuring beautifully restored vehicles alongside others that were clapped out and rusty (but still roadworthy). Some bore garish new liveries and unhappy new guises, one (in shocking pink) promoting the Superdrug chain. There were leaf-green Routemasters (the ones that served the rural outer suburbs), several open top tourist versions, one in sexy 1960s British European Airways guise and several which appear to enjoy a hectic retirement as mobile nightclubs. There was RM1, the venerably futuristic prototype, purring suavely around the park between the plane trees. That Auden line about a tramway running into a wood came to mind . . .

Image © Chris Sampson

I happened to have a copy of Nairn's London with me (and rarely leave home without it), and was suddenly struck by a familiar number plate - CUV217C. I whipped out my tatty paperback and to my amazement realised that, yes, the bus in front of me was the very same one that featured on the cover of the original, published in 1966.

As fleet number RM2217 (illustrated above) this very bus was to be the last operational Routemaster in public service, on the 159 route between Streatham and Marble Arch. Living as I did at one time in Streatham I must have travelled in it occasionally before the last official run in 2005. A handful still operate as a tourist attraction but not. alas, on Nairn's favourite route 11, from Fulham Broadway to Liverpool Street. Have they really been absent from our streets for nearly a decade?

RM2217 is available as this splendid large-scale model by a company called Sun Star, and I suppose if I were to own a model bus this would be it:

Delivered new to Willesden garage in 1965 (so still quite fresh when photographed with Nairn at the wheel), RM2217 became a 'show bus' for London Transport in 1984, suggesting that this particular vehicle was always kept in good nick for public relations purposes and photo opportunities, which might explain why it was used by the Penguin designer Michael Morris and the photographer Dennis Rolfe. The bus is now available for private hire as part of the Arriva Heritage Fleet - http://www.theheritagefleet.com 

So. A suggestion to any Nairnians out there: how about hiring this fifty-year-old bus for a day and taking a Nairn's tour of London, following (say) the route implied on the cover of the book, from Mile End (starting at Spiegelhalters, a Nairn favourite) to Queenhythe via Camberwell and Lululand? 

The Arriva website says nothing about the cost of hiring one of these old beauties - but if (say) fifty like-minded Nairn enthusiasts joined up we could probably do the thing for between ten and twenty quid a head, ending up with pints of wallop at his beloved pub, the St. George's Tavern behind Victoria station.

Any takers?

Incidentally it was a pleasure to run into the novelist Simon Okotie at this omnibus gathering. He was selling copies of his excellent novel Whatever Happened to Harold Absolon?, a book set entirely, and ingeniously, on a Routemaster bus. He tells me two sequels are planned. Look out for them . . .

Spike's Great War

This was entirely new to me - Spike Milligan's take on the Great War long before Blackadder. Spike got there first (in this, Episode 1 of the series 'Q9') and he did it better:  he locates the pulse of madness, rather than rely on the forced splenetic ironies of the over-rated Rowan Atkinson vehicle.

Spike's 'Q' series (of which many episodes are now appearing on the internet) was chaotic, deliberately under-reharsed, wildly self-indulgent and sometimes - sometimes - not funny at all. The rest of the time it was the funniest thing to be seen. It's presumably unbroadcastable now, and for the usual reasons - casual sexism, old actors blacked up, Irish jokes and (they hate this, the commissioning editors and policy wonks) there's something unstable and subversive and dangerous. It's not classifiable. It's not safe.

I fondly remember the cohort of corpsing stooges employed in these sketches - many of them borderline unemployable by the look and sound of them - Bob Todd! John Bluthal! Johnny Vyvyan! David Lodge! Alan Clare! And the extravagantly proportioned Julia Breck. Julia Breck!!!

Watch it here  (the WW1 stuff starts at 4:20) and enjoy a guest appearance by the great Raymond  Baxter of Tomorrow's World fame.

On Dai Vaughan

Dai Vaughan was described by Neal Ascherson as "one of the most imperiously intelligent fiction-writers alive."  He died, alas, in 2012, but the imperious intelligence is undimmed and I'm finally catching up with his writing as I'm drafting his entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Vaughan was a brilliant and distinguished film editor and wrote what is, in my view, the single best book about cinema: Portrait of an Invisible Man: the life of Stewart McCallister, Film Editor. McCallister's greatest achievement is Listen to Britain, a solid documentary masterpiece directed in 1942 by Humphrey Jennings, which we should all watch again and again, starting now. It's twenty minutes of unadulterated genius.

He was also a poet and novelist. A small independent publisher, CB editions, publishes a volume of Vaughan poems and a fine, unclassifiable novel, Sister of the Artist. 

Here's a moving tribute,  complete with many Vaughan quotations.

Wand of Undoing

There's an Anne Frank sculpture located in the basement of the British Library. Anne Frank is unquestionably a noble and legitimate subject for commemoration but that doesn't mean we have to put up with bad art. The bust is honourably representational and in a sense beyond criticism - but like too much public sculpture incarnates a Franklin Mint aesthetic.

There's no shortage of extraordinarily bad art in Colin St. John Wilson's beautiful building. In the basement next to the cloakroom and a few feet from Anne Frank are Patrick Hughes's gimmicky 3D optical illusion Paradoxymoron (which might as well be called Paradoxycretin) and a pastel-coloured terracotta mermaid that belongs in a branch of Starbucks. On the ground floor and dominating the lobby is a vast and disorganised Kitaj tapestry.

Also in the lobby is the plug-ugly Sitting on History by Bill Woodrow, a bronze book (doubling as a bench) attached to (see if you can figure out what the artist is trying to tell us here) a ball and chain. There's the Roubilllac statue of Shakespeare (gifted by the V & A in 200, not bad but horribly sited) and some busts of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others at the entrance to Rare Books and Manuscripts. There's a Hockney etching nearby - good but not especially great and more suited to a private setting than a public mezzanine. Outside in the slippery piazza squats the colossal figure of Isaac Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi.

If I could wield a magic Wand of Undoing I'd get rid of every damned one of his horrible impositions on the capital - from the ghastly fast-degrading mosaics in Tottenham Court Road station to the plug-ugly alcove-robot in Fleet Street. In fact the latter was removed recently, having been flogged (ideally for scrap) by the building's owners (the building itslef being a typically stomach-turning piece of 1980s po-mo tat). Then there's his chunky ingot at Euston Square (regularly 'tagged' by graffiti vandals) and the bulky stained aluminium filing cabinet in Pimlico.

I'm researching, on and off, a cultural history of philistinism (both productive and receptive, if you see what I mean), and thinking about the kind of painting (and sculpture, but mainly painting) that can be seen on the northern railings of Hyde Park on Sundays. Where does it all come from? Who makes it? Who buys it? What makes it so bad, if we agree, as we surely must, that it is bad?  How do we write objectively about it? What would happen if, one day, one stumbled across some park railing art which was really, really good?