On Anton Walbrook

Gaslight (1944) is a film directed by George Cukor adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light. It stars Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and, making her screen debut, the 18-year-old Angela Lansbury. It's terrific.

But it's not a patch on the original British production, directed by the greatly undervalued Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984).  To my delight this version is currently available to watch online (but has so far attracted fewer than 300 viewers). It's a brilliantly atmospheric and chilling tale of a fragile woman manipulated by a cold husband into believing that she is going mad. Find the time to watch this, and switch all the lights off when you do. 

Anton Walbrook! He's one of my favourite actors, not least for his superlative performances in two of the greatest Powell & Pressburger films - as the good German Theo Kretszchmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and the Diaghilev-like Count Boris Lermontov  in The Red Shoes, a very sexy maniac.

A later Dickinson film, also starring Walbrook, is The Queen of Spades (1949) adapted from the Pushkin short story. Not available online, alas. It features Edith Evans (in her screen debut) as the aged countess who sells her soul to the devil in exchange for virtuosity as a card player.  Look out for this.

Bowie, Bing and me.

David Bowie was a great artist, not only on the strength of his many dazzling achievements but also, I'd argue, on the quality of his failures. 

Great artists sometimes fail because they are constantly moving forward, never resting on their laurels. Second-rate artists (and many of these are my favourites as nobody can live on an unrelieved diet of High Art) tend to stick to what they do best - Wodehouse and Chandler come to mind. Joyce, on the other hand  . . . 

Bowie's career is a brilliant conflagration of burning bridges accompanied by era-defining haircuts - he seldom looked back, or even forwards. He was forever defining his now, which became our now and his themes were Larkinesque. As he said in a 2002 interview:

The trousers may change, but the actual words and subjects I’ve always chosen to write with are things to do with isolation, abandonment, fear and anxiety, all of the high points of one’s life.

But think of the non-canonical stuff. Not just the execrable novelty single Laughing Gnome but also Tin Machine (a much-derided project which paved the way for grunge and so on); the gigs with Tina Turner; his unlovely Dancing in the Street with Mick Jagger and, perhaps above all, this very engaging duet with, of all people, Bing Crosby. If you haven't seen this before - and nearly 8 million viewers have - do watch it, and wonder. The setting is Bing's snowbound baronial lodging, ostensibly in Olde England but clearly in a Burbank studio at the height of a blazing Californian summer. "I'm David Bowie. I live down the road" says our man by way of introduction, unravelling his scarf and camply mistaking Bing for the butler, Hudson. We watch this every Christmas, affectionately, sentimentally. 

"Do you like modern music?" says the Thin White Duke.

"I think it's marvellous. Some of it's really fine" slices back the old crooner, equivocally. 

Then they sing The Little Drummer Boy together and the schmaltz meter shoots up to 11 - not a dry eye in the house. Lovely, like William Burroughs duetting with Al Bowlly.

Everyone has their Bowie memories. I tend to associate his music with Manchester in the late 1970s, which I spent as an impoverished and skinny undergraduate in the brutalist Hulme estate where we all wore dead men's overcoats. "Heroes" never sounded better than it did there, and then. The magnificent Berlin trilogy (Low, "Heroes" and Lodger) was the chilly soundtrack to those years.

That ambulant stuffed condom David Cameron (our current Prime Minister) tweeted (or got some Downing Street intern to tweet on his behalf):

I grew up listening to and watching the pop genius David Bowie. He was a master of re-invention, who kept getting it right. A huge loss.

'Pop genius' my arse. It's like calling Henry James a wordsmith. I can't begin to believe that Cameron grew up at all - he popped up fully-formed and glistening, a pod-hatched Tory boy. Picture him grinding away conscientiously at a Fresher's Ball to Young Americans, and shudder. Then think of his government's dismantling of a social order and education system in which a working class South London boy who failed his 11 plus and left school with a solitary 'O' level (in Art, of course) could still navigate his way through life, and keep getting it right. A huge loss indeed.
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Now a Minor Motion Picture

'Based on the book by Leo Tolstoy'

Thus runs the credit in the BBC's acclaimed small-screen adaptation of the great Russian novel. Yes novel. Not 'book', Tolstoy was a novelist, not a book-writer. Somebody, for whatever reason, has decided that War and Peace is a book, not a novel. Just saying.

I watched part of the first episode over the weekend on my laptop in i-Player. A credit sequence includes the Emperor on a horse gazing at an unspecified Austrian battlefield, seen from behind and evoking Walter de la Mare's poem Napoleon, which runs in full:

'What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.' 

We cut to sunlit St Petersburg and a swish nuit blanche gathering around which the camera moves restlessly and often clumsily, the better (one assumes) to evoke a contemporary feel. I was reminded of the astonishing yet pointless virtuosity of the film Russian Ark directed by Alexander Sokurov - a single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot roaming the Winter Palace.

The actors at the gathering are all mugging horribly, the jittery camera never stops rubber-necking on our behalf, and (has anyone noticed this?) nobody smokes! Even at the Bullingdon Club-style orgy glimpsed briefly ten minutes in (shrewdly timed as that is the point at which I should otherwise have turned off, or switched over if I had a telly) nobody has a cigar or a pipe, or even a Balkan sobranie (a symbol of almost unimaginable sophistication in my boyhood). There's no tobacco fug (as reliable a signifier of masculine depravity as bunches of grapes were in Hollywood's Roman orgies of the 1950s) and, almost literally,  no atmosphere. 

I continued watching because I really admire the American actor Paul Dano (who is 31, astonishingly). He plays Count Pyotr Kirillovich Bezukhov, although he is only ever referred to as Pierre as his aristocratic title presumably wouldn't play well with a popular audience. Dano has a perfect English accent, although his presence and his movements strike me as essentially American - especially the wonderful moment when he does a comic U-turn on a bridge in order to attend the aforementioned orgy. The fluent lunge in the opposite direction was worthy of Chaplin. Dano all but eclipsed the leading man Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood some years ago. Watch them both in the healing scene from this  great film. Dano is terrific.

"Natasha" (Countess Natalya Ilyinichna Rostova) is played beautifully by Lily James (who is 26, even more astonishingly) as a gauche, blinking adolescent. She is, alas, afflicted with the ghastly modern 'creak' in the voice adopted by most actresses under forty (and a few over). I wrote about this for the TLS here. 'Vocal Fry', as it's known, is as aurally anachronistic as a baseball cap, or trainers, or a selfie stick would be visually. There alas no shortage of anachronism in the dialogue - did I really hear Princess Anna Drubetskaya (played by Rebecca Front) say "Don't ask, don't get"?

I shan't bang on. After about fifteen minutes I stopped watching because I had other things to do (such as write this blog). A huge amount of hard work has gone into this production by our national broadcaster - both creative and technical - and that is a Good Thing It's also a Good Thing that the BBC can make such epic productions (although I'd like to see them engage more with contemporary drama, something more challenging - remember Play for Today?). I'm not really much of a telly person, and it's not because of the rubbish (which I wouldn't watch anyway) but because of the supposedly quality stuff. It's not that good, mostly. The type of well-wrought and thoughtful documentary programmes I particularly admired growing up, which formed me (Horizon, for instance) are no longer the sort of thing  regarded by producers as a source of instruction and illumination, but primarily of entertainment. So the bubbly presenter is obtrusive (and generally not an expert in the subject), the serene movements of a rostrum camera non-existent; there's constant music jangling away and, every five minutes, there's a quick re-cap for dullards and late arrivals. I'm also prone to forget anything I've seen on the telly within a few hours - not the case with films, radio and the written word. I guess that's just how I grew up, part of the last generation not to be exposed to television from birth.

As to War and Peace? I'll read the novel. Or book, if you insist.

Visions of Britain: Stephen Fry and Stephen Tallents

Elizabeth Bowen writing about Aldous Huxley in the Spectator (December 11, 1936):

Mr. Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch-party […] He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person.

I read that last sentence with a jolt, because I've long thought that it was an insult first perpetrated by the late satirist William Donaldson (of 'Henry Root' fame) and used by him to describe national treasure Stephen Fry. Which brings me neatly to the ostensible subject of this blog.

First of all, watch this two minute film featuring the aforementioned Stephen Fry aimed at Heathrow airport arrivals from overseas. 

Done that? Thank you. What follows is my blog proper.

To begin with the Heathrow short. This lazy, complacent and grindingly humourless exercise is unlikely to feature prominently on Stephen Fry's CV, or that of the scriptwriter Graham Linehan (co-creator with Arthur Matthews of the wonderful Father Ted). It's a rubbishy bit of corporate blah worth watching only for the unhappiness and boredom of the many mute extras populating the ghastly 'pub' in which Fry props up the bar and addresses us directly in that bonhomous Brown Windsor soup voice of his. One can only speculate about his decision to co-operate with the Heathrow people. Alan Partridge, surely, would have been their first choice as presenter? With a script by Peter Baynham?

The national attractions and traits enumerated by Fry never rise above the most humdrum commonplaces. "We Brits do love a queue" for instance. That zinger may well be the case in Fry's spiritual homeland of the 1950s, when all motor cars had walnut dashboards and Londoners lined up in alphabetical order to board jolly red tramcars to the Elephant and Castle. Try struggling onto a bus in Wood Green on a busy Saturday in 2016. The kind of queuing Fry and Linehan imagine harks back half a century to a more biddable and deferential age, before the current maelstrom of pushy self-entitlement and coarseness that characterises life anywhere outside the Costwolds and the Garrick Club.

Now, the point of all this is not to be nasty about Stephen Fry (an offence that carries the death penalty in Britain, something he modestly fails to mention in the film) but to bang on about another Stephen altogether, a visionary civil servant and a hero of mine. Bear with, as the young people say.

Stephen Tallents (1884 - 1958) was a pioneer in public relations and the idealogical driving force behind the creation of the General Post Office Film Unit. In 1933 Tallents published a pamphlet called The Projection of England in which he set out what amounts to a documentary movement manifesto, addressing Britain and the British Empire as his hypothetical client. It's a fascinating and ground-breaking document, couched in the language of the time yet strikingly modern in its description of a global village, of sovereign interdependencies and the vital importance of communication within and across borders. This publication was produced at a time when a quarter of the world's surface and a quarter of the world's population were under British rule, and is nothing less than a guide to how England (that is to say, the United Kingdom) can effectively promote its values  to the rest of the world.

There is an urgent need, Tallents asserts, to produce and disseminate material reflecting 'the English characteristics in which the outside world is most interested', and this can best be achieved by 'breaking up of the fame of England into its primary colours', by which he means national institutions. He cites the Monarchy (as does Stephen Fry, cringingly) the British Navy and the English Bible, Shakespeare and Dickens) and national virtues. Of the latter he offers the following patriotic litany of 'reputations':

In international affairs - a reputation for disinterestedness
In national affairs - a tradition of justice, law and order
In national character - a reputation for coolness
In commerce - a reputation for fair dealing
In manufacture - a reputation for quality
In sport - a reputation for fair play

All very rose-tinted, to be sure, and there was no shortage of contemporary opinion supporting less buoyant appraisals of the national character. Yet these ideals, despite accumulating and often overwhelming evidence to the contrary had - and continue to have - a tenacious appeal, and were certainly not without contemporary validity when it came to the discourse (as we would now say) surrounding the Empire.

Tallents continues in similar vein, supporting his thesis with examples of other British (or English) traditions and institutions that he believes exercise an imaginative appeal to overseas audiences:

At the other end of the spectrum might be found such events as the Grand National,        
the Trooping of the Colour, the Boat Race, Henley, Wimbledon, the Test Match and the 
Cup Final. 

But between these two extremes comes a medley of institutions and excellencies, which 
every man may compile for himself according to his humour and his ingenuity. My own list       would include:

Oxford and St. Andrews
Piccadilly, Bond Street, Big Ben and Princes Street, Edinburgh
The English Countryside, English villages, the English home and English servants
The Lord Mayor of London
The Times, Punch and the Manchester Guardian
The Metropolitan Police and Boy Scouts
The London omnibuses and Underground Railways
Football and Foxhunting
English bloodstock and pedigree stock
The arts of gardening and of tailoring

As a list this 'medley of institutions is', shall we say, partial. Few would make the final cut of any 'Welcome to Heathrow' short today and some of his choices - not only fox-hunting and English servants - will strike 21st century readers as parochial, smug, reactionary and class-bound. Some contemporary critics were also unimpressed, but they had to acknowledge - and so do we, avoiding the pitfall of condescension - that for Tallents and his Whitehall peers these were precisely the qualities that could define Britain to the Empire and the other nations of the world. He avoids such abstractions as democracy and tolerance, he (shrewdly) doesn't mention the Church of England, free speech or democracy. He also, and tellingly, avoids any mention whatsoever of the Empire itself, of its origins and history. 

The 'special assets' he believes Britain can count on to manage a projection of these values are the English language and 'the dispersal of British citizens around the world, with whom a common history is shared'. He then launches into a rousing description of Britain's international role that could be the briskly-spoken commentary for some as-yet-unmade documentary short:

She controls or can influence the machinery of government, including the service of education, in the Colonies and close/sympathetic contacts with the sister Governments of the Dominions. She provides a market for the produce of countless countries, with all the net-work of commercial and personal relationships and needs, the interdependence in well-being, which that provision involves. Her cable companies and news agencies girdle the earth. Her shipping companies control one-third of the world's tonnage, and have their agents in every part of the globe. Her steel rails bind whole countries together. Her bankers and merchant houses, her insurance companies and chartered accountants operate the world over. Englishmen are at work in most of the greater English-speaking newspaper offices. Wherever ships are steered or metals won from the earth, there the ships' engineers and the mining engineers of England are posted.

Yet it is only Russia, Tallents points out, that expresses its point of view and purposes seriously through film, the greatest modern medium of international expression. By the mid-1930s Russian film in particular enjoyed a cultural prestige equal to that of Russian ballet and literature before the Great War. Tallents was a Film Society regular and Russian films were a mainstay of Society screenings, not least because few suitable English films were available. He cites as examples The Cruiser Potemkin [sic], Pudovkin's Storm over Asia, Turin's Turk-Sib and Dovjenko's Earth, adding that Britain is capable of taking such subjects from home and Empire and improving on them. The central themes of such films would be 'English adaptability, industry, industrial quality, modernity.' 

In promoting this initiative to sceptical Whitehall mandarins Tallents really hits his stride:

We need, I suggest, to create, in the borderland which lies between Government and private enterprise, a school of national projection. They must have something of the sense of

responsibility, the prestige and the opportunities of Government, and entry to the fields of Government activity; but they must be more free to make experiments and, like all experimenters, to make mistakes, than the ordinary Government Department dares to be. It must seek to inspire, but never to regulate them (i.e. the agencies).

There is a need to balance prestige and creative experiment, to offer this 'school of national projection' a freedom to explore the medium without restraint and interference by its government paymasters, the Whitehall officials who are sure to take a cool view of an activity with no objectively measurable benefits. Tennant concludes by setting out the conditions under which such films would be produced, anticipating the workplace atmosphere of the Unit as it developed under Grierson:

[T]he only sensible prescription is to pick out the best team that can be found, to put them to grips with their problem, and to leave them, free of undue pressure or interference, to follow, like Socrates, withersoever it leads, the argument in which their own intimate handling of the material all quickly engage them.

Tallents was a public relations genius whose role at the Empire Marketing Board and in the later creation of the Post Office Film Unit has been either undervalued or wholly overlooked. Without him the Unit would have been a very different entity - churning out tub-thumping propaganda rather than films that, over eighty years later, continue to attract attention and admiration. In what amounts to the most innovative and original collaborative film movement of the century, Tallents was a chariot for Grierson's fire.

Back to Stephen Fry and that dismal corporate short. "We’re not all red phone boxes and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn…" says the chirpy Heathrow press release that accompanies the film. But whoever said we were? Marketing professionals, and especially those in the business of 'brand management' could do worse than read the thoughts of a man who died more than half a century ago, and raise their game. They have to raise their game because the stakes are higher. 

Whether addressing visitors or migrants or refugees we can surely offer more than moth-eaten platitudes about politeness and queuing and talking about the weather and unpronounceable Welsh place names. We can - we must - assert that we are a liberal democracy and share the values of a tolerant, ironic, complex society. Add something about the stuff we are, or used to be, really good at (railways, and football and cricket, and television and Concorde and, if you insist, beefeaters and Trooping the Colour). Maybe throw in something about our behaviour towards women . . . 

Extracts © The Estate of Stephen Tallents

Spiegelhalter's - one year on.

It was a year ago today that I launched a campaign to save the facade of Spiegelhalter's in the Mile End Road. Developers wanted to demolish the plucky little structure and replace it with a void flanked by metal shards (what I described as 'pound store Serra'). This would have eradicated what the great topographer Ian Nairn called 'one of the best visual jokes in London'.

The campaign, supported by the Victorian Society, the East End Preservation Group and the 20th Century Society, attracted huge interest. There was coverage in coal and national newspapers, local and national radio and television and (most importantly) around 3,000 signatures from supporters. Thank you all!

You can visit the campaign site here:  here.

And you can read London's peerless chronicler The Gentle Author's fine piece on Spiegelhalter's (also published one year ago today) here: here.

It's good to know this tiny fragment of London's past will survive for now - but elsewhere it's a different story. Look around you - the real London is fast disappearing, the skyline becoming Dubai-on-Thames. Glass blocks of no aesthetic merit are relaxing established and richly-textured districts in the city. The legacy of Mayor Boris will be a cluster of gargantuan dildos on our horizon.

There's no affordable housing to buy or even rent in Greater London or most of the suburbs and the impactions of this for us all are nothing short of catastrophic.

Campaigns are easy to set up but time-consuming to run: but if my modest effort in the East End has any value it's to suggest one way of organising opposition to thoughtless and rapacious developers and architects. We have every right to demand the best from both.

More reasons to be cheerful

2016  has two other highlights I forgot to mention in yesterday's blog (and others I'll no doubt include tomorrow). Apologies to Harry Parker, author of Anatomy of a Soldier, for calling him Harry Morgan in yesterday's blog. I was about to write the following paragraph (about the poet J. O. Morgan) when the Norwich equivalent of Coleridge's person from Porlock dropped by and I lost my drift. Thanks to  reader Alan Crilley for pointing this out!

In February Jonathan Cape will publish Interference Pattern by the poet J. O. Morgan. This will be the poet's fourth collection (following Natural Mechanical, Long Cuts (both CB editions) and In Casting Off (HappenStance Press), and is a radical departure. Disconnected voices from different place s and times, not always easy to identify (like turning the dial on an old-fashioned long-wave wireless set, picking up transmissions old and new. Quite brilliant - a Waste Land for the 21st century. Morgan has a supernatural talent

I am Thomas, a musical about the last man in Britain to be tried and executed for blasphemy, with lyrics by Simon Armitage, will come to Wilton's Music Hall in London in April.

More to follow . . .

Reasons to be Cheerful in 2016

I put on my gypsy bangles, cackle mysteriously and delve into what cultural delights the year ahead will bring. Here goes:


Peerless experimental theatre practitioners Imitating the Dog's production of The Train will be calling at all stations (or some) in January. Also this month: D. J. Taylor's The Prose Factory - the best history of 20th century British Literature I've ever read.

Jumpin' Jack Flash, Keiron Pim's biography of David Litvinof  (which I'll review for the TLS) is published in February. A good book about a bad man.

Also in February, and throughout the year - screenings and other commemorations will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Buster Keaton (and look out for Peter Krämer 's BFI monograph on The General, published in June).

Also also in February 60103 Flying Scotsman will steam again. And about time too. This magnificent locomotive (annoyingly dubbed 'the people's engine' by National Railway Museum's marketing department) will return to the rails after a very long and very expensive overhaul.  This was the first machine in the world to travel at more than 100 miles an hour. It will now be thrashing north from King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley as its builders intended.

My book About a Girl will be published by CB editions in March.

Also in March: Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker will be the literary debut of the year.  I blogged about this astonishing novel recently here.

There's pot and pots of pots at Ceramic Arts 2016  (April 8th - 10th). I know a lot about pottery but I don't know what I like and this show may give me a few clues.

Opening Skinner's Box. Look out for this, one of the theatrical highlights of 2016. Google for clues.

After that nothing much until  . . .

The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride's second novel, will be published in Britain by Faber in September (and everywhere else after that).

My new year gift for you: the Buzzcocks at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester performing Ever Fallen in Love with Soemenone (You Shouldn;t Have Fallen in Love With) in 1978. The thin bloke in the red jacket at the front? That's me, almost four decades ago. Watch and marvel.