Harold and Eartha

Thanks, everybody, for your cheering Christmas messages. I am now back from my five-day silent tribute to the late Harold Pinter...
Harold Pinter... (the ... is a quote, of course) - was he half as good as he was cracked up to be? I've always suspected he might have owed his success to mastering a particular clever trick of suggesting everything, stating nothing, and using it to the hilt - to good theatrical effect, creating tension and menace galore. But really was there anything much there? His plays feel hollow and unsatisfactory - trivial even - compared to those of Beckett (from whom, clearly, Pinter learned a lot). Of course, when it comes to theatre (and, indeed, new 'literary' novels), critical standards are pretty indulgent, coloured by a conviction that theatre (like the 'literary' novel) is somehow a Good Thing - and helped along, in the case of theatre, by the determination of a paying audience to convince themselves they haven't wasted their money. In the hothouse atmosphere of the theatrical world, adulation - whether merited or not - thrives. As for Pinter's 'poetry' - had it been written by anyone else, it would surely never have been taken seriously for a moment, would it?
Eartha Kitt also died over Christmas. Here was a woman who had a remarkable life - outlined here. I remember she gave an extraordinarily emotional interview to Anthony Clare in his radio series In The Psychiatrist's Chair, in which she looked back over her traumatic early years and the frequent wrong turns and catastrophes of her later life. Was there, Clare asked the sobbing Eartha towards the end, one man she truly loved and could have been happy with? Yes, she replied, Arthur Lowe. For years afterwards, I cherished the image of a passionate affair between the feline, ultra-sexy Eartha and Captain Mainwaring - but alas, it turned out to be a Hollywood studio executive of the same name. Another illusion gone...

Giles Cooper

Today is the centenary of the birth of Giles Cooper – a name that might still mean something to lovers of radio drama (if they're of a certain age). Cooper was a prolific dramatist who wrote for both radio and TV – among much else, he adapted Simenon's Maigret novels for the hugely successful TV series starring pipe-smoking Rupert Davies. Perhaps his best known radio play was Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which also became a TV drama and a feature film (screenplay by Simon Raven).
  Cooper, who was born into a landed Anglo-Irish family, confounded family expectations by enrolling in drama school, but before much longer he was conscripted into the Army and sent to Burma, where he fought for three years in the jungle in that most gruelling of campaigns (see George MacDonald Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here). After the war Cooper worked as an actor (encountering Kenneth Williams and Harold Pinter in rep), then moved into script editing and playwriting. He died at the age of 48 after, bizarrely, falling from a train as it passed through Surbiton. He had been attending the Guild of Dramatists' Christmas dinner at the Garrick and was perhaps excessively refreshed. The coroner's verdict was misadventure.
  Happily his name lived on for some years after his death, in the shape of the Giles Cooper Awards for radio drama, jointly sponsored by the BBC and the publishers Methuen. These awards ran from 1978 to 1992, and winners included Tom Stoppard, William Trevor, Fay Weldon, Anthony Minghella, Rose Tremain and bloody Harold Pinter. I remember being at several of the (pretty minimal) awards ceremonies back in the days when I was writing about radio for the late lamented Listener. A pity there isn't a prestigious award for radio drama these days – it might raise the standard.

For Marcel Marceau (born this day in 1923) and In Memory of Harold Pinter

The Other Garden

 Recently on Andecdotal Evidence (yes, again – and why not? Patrick Kurp's blog is a literary treasure trove) I read about Francis Wyndham, an author who was really only a name to me. When, very soon after, I spotted his sole novel, The Other Garden, I naturally had to buy it. In length it's really a novella (barely 100 pages), but it won the Whitbread First Novel Award when it was published in 1987 – when the first-time novelist was in his early 60s. The paperback edition I have was published as one of the Arena Novella series, and the jacket is emblazoned with superlatives from his fellow authors – always suspicious when the book was written by a publisher. According to Harold Pinter, The Other Garden is 'wry, exact, poised', while Isabel Quigley finds it 'rich, observant and shrewd' (Alan Sillitoe's Out of the Whirlpool, also in the Arena Novella series, is described by the Observer as 'taut, laconic, superbly sandpapered' – not one I'd ever heard before). Hilary Bailey declares that The Other Garden 'comes as close to perfection as you'll get in an imperfect world', while Susan Hill has no reservations: it is 'a completely faultless piece of writing'. 
  Well, it grieves me to report that they are right: this novella of Wyndham's really is damn near perfect. Beginning in the late Thirties and ending after VE Day, it is told in the first person through the eyes of an initially adolescent boy, and takes place mostly in the countryside to which the war has exiled his family and many others. Among the others are the Demarest family, whose grown-up daughter Kay is the focus of the narrator's fascinated attention, and of the story that unfolds. Kay seems mysteriously in thrall to her dreadful parents, unable to break from them, and in love with her elusive brother, a glamorous figure making his way as an actor. Kay and her parents, and their strange, troubled relationship, are brilliantly portrayed, and Kay, in particular, is an unforgettably compelling character. It is the narrator's fascination with her that carries the narrative along to such haunting effect. The sense of place is strong, and the lesser characters are full of life, but they rightly remain in the background. The enigma of Kay is never really solved, and she remains essentially mysterious (as people tend to do), but Wyndham makes us care about her almost as much as the narrator, and feel the same baffled fascination and love. The Other Garden has some comic moments, but the prevailing tone is poignant, and the effect, in the end, is genuinely moving. This is a memorable, utterly convincing and, yes, damn near perfect piece of fiction. Read it – you won't be sorry (well, you might, I suppose – nothing's certain – but at least it's a short read). 

TV for Retroprogressives

Finding something – anything – bearable to watch on television seems to be getting harder all the time, but there's a channel available to all (well, it's on Freeview, Freesat, Virgin and Sky) that can offer a way out. It's called Talking Pictures TV and it's devoted to old films and television from, predominantly, the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Some of it is, undeniably, pretty awful – but usually awful in an enjoyable, old-school way – and some of it is very good, and very different from what we see on the screen today. Case in point: last night TPTV showed a drama that originally appeared on ITV's Armchair Theatre, a high-rating showcase for single plays by prominent writers (even Pinter did one) that ran from 1956 to 1974. Douglas Livingstone's Competition (1971) is a tense, rather unsettling drama that revolves around a poetry reading competition (the set poem is Browning's Home Thoughts from Abroad). Jimmy, an out-of-work man, something of a charming waster who seems to have married money, has to take his clearly unhappy son to the competition. He and the boy are accompanied by their neighbours, Tony and Joyce, who are of an altogether lower caste, and their daughter. Tony, in contrast to Jimmy, has just landed a good job, and this is causing some tension between the two men – but not as much as the fact that Jimmy is having an affair with Joyce. Michael Jayston as Jimmy and John Thaw as Tony both give fine, nuanced performances, Anne Carroll does well with the underwritten role of Jenny, and William Relton is a strong presence as the unhappy boy.
  Competition made for gripping viewing, but what was most striking about it – as about so many productions on TPTV – was how much the grammar of TV drama has changed, and not necessarily for the better. There is more use of close-ups and tight cropping and, with cameras more static and fewer sets involved, much less movement. As a result, there is far less of the time-wasting connective tissue that fills out modern TV dramas – 'atmosphere' shots, people getting in and out of cars, entering and leaving buildings, walking and talking, or just walking. The words have to work harder, and there are far more of them – a script for an hour of TV drama then would be a fatter volume than its equivalent today. Everything is tighter, in every sense, and as a result more intense and concentrated (an effect helped by that tight cropping – and, incidentally, the squarer screen shape). Furthermore, it's all properly lit, there is no background music, and the lines are delivered audibly. What's not to like? If you haven't discovered Talking Pictures TV yet, give it a try. It's like stepping back in time, and at present that's no bad thing.

Reflections on the Laureateship

Wendy Cope is to be commended for ruling herself out of contention for Poet Laureate - but is she going a tad too far in calling for the post to be abolished? For myself, I'm all for preserving traditions, and the more crazy and pointless the better - they're an essential countperoint to the illusions and delusions of 'progress' and 'reason', and let's face it, we Brits are pretty damned good at crazy pointless tradition - or we always were. At the time, the appointment of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate looked like either a masterstroke of crazy pointlessness - or a sign that the whole thing was now being played for laughs. The next step - if only he'd lived - would have been to appoint Harold Pinter...

What are they doing?
They're fucking getting married.
William and Kate.
Fucking getting married.
Fuck them.

Where was I? Oh I dunno - but let's keep the Laureateship, and best make it Simon Armitage. He'd do a decent job - and at least (unlike some we could name) he can write verse.