Peppa Pig and the Crisis of Masculinity

Bryan Appleyard recently wrote a fine piece on that pervasive cultural phenomenon of our times, the Hapless (not to say comprehensively incompetent and pathetic) Male - here's a link... Oddly he makes no mention of Peppa Pig - perhaps he's lucky enough never to have encountered the phenomenon.
 Peppa Pig, I should explain, is a hugely popular porcine - hugely popular, that is, with the nation's toddlers. The adventures of Peppa and her family - not to mention all the spin-off merchandise - are everywhere in the toddler's world, and the stories (crudely drawn and lazily written) appear to exert a mysterious fascination, bordering on addiction. My granddaughter - who, as I might have mentioned before, is the most adorable two-year-old on the planet - is, alas, a huge fan of Peppa Pig, and currently can't get enough of a compendium volume containing six stories of Peppa and her family. Heaven knows how many times I and her parents and grandmother have read her these stories - and how we have suffered in the process.
 But where, you might be asking, does the Hapless Male come in? He takes the form of Daddy Pig, a character whose ill-shaven face resembles a scrotum and who represents Hapless Masculinity in excelsis. This is a man - okay, boar - who would be hard pressed to (as the Australians say) find his bum with both hands. Everything he attempts results in epic failure and humiliation. When he takes the wheel of a car, he will instantly get lost and have to be helped out by Mummy Pig or any other (by definition omnicompetent) female who happens to be around. When the oil runs low, he will prove himself unable even to find the engine without the help of a passing woman - okay, sheep.
 On a visit to the funfair, Daddy Pig throws a wobbly when he reaches the top of the helter skelter and proves so shaky afterwards that he can't wield the hammer on the 'test your strength' set-up, so Mummy Pig takes over and instantly rings the bell and wins the prize. Yes, this sad sap doesn't even have physical strength or strong nerves, let alone mental competence or basic life skills. Only once does Daddy Pig demonstrate anything resembling a useful ability: this is in the last story in the volume, when he unexpectedly proves capable of diving to the bottom of the swimming pool to retrieve a lost item for a friend of Peppa's, who thanks him by kicking water into his uncomplaining imbecilic face.
 Happily the adorable granddaughter is also under the spell of Beatrix Potter and Shirley Hughes and Maurice Sendak and an ever growing range of benign literary influences, so it's unlikely Peppa Pig will have made any lasting impression. However, it's come to something, hasn't it, when such a blatantly sexist, emasculating version of family life passes without comment and is regarded as normal, healthy fare for very young minds?

Gibbons

Let's have a little Sunday music again...
Glenn Gould's favourite composer was not, as you might expect, Bach, but the great Jacobean Orlando Gibbons: 'He is my favourite composer,' declared Gould, 'always has been. I can't think of anybody who represents the end of an era better than Orlando Gibbons does.' Having heard a recording of Gould playing Gibbons (Lord Salisbury's Pavan and Galliard) the other day, I thought I might post a link to more, but nearly all the footage seems to be barred to UK viewers. While I was searching, though, I came across this - a piano arrangement of a Vaughan Williams piece better known in its orchestral version: Hymn-Tune Prelude on Song 13 by Orlando Gibbons. I think it's rather lovely - enjoy (and enjoy the accompanying Peak District landscapes)...

Improved Pubs: Art Deco and Tudor Beams

I'm glad to see that English Heritage has just listed 20 pubs from the interwar period. Products of the 'improved pub' movement that aimed to shake off the Victorian image of pubs as unsavoury drinking dens, these interwar establishments were intended to be wholesome and cheering features of the community, aimed at attracting respectable family men, their wives and even families. They are, most conspicuously, magnificent flights of fantasy - mock-Tudor, mock-baronial, mock-Georgian, mock-rustic, mock-sophisticated - and in this they are very much in keeping with the spirit of the times, and the national character.
 The bald facts of history present the period following the Wall Street Crash as one of prolonged depression, unemployment, unrest and displacement - and yet its built heritage has come down to us as cheery, wholesome, and irremediably fantastic. As well as these fantasy pubs, there are fantasy factories and office buildings, whimsically pretending to be something else - and, above all, that vast acreage covered by mock-Tudor speculative housing, with its streets and avenues and crescents and 'drives', all lined with cosy three-bedroom semis clad in nailed-on 'half-timbering', where the Englishman could believe his (rented) family home was not only his castle but also his country cottage, complete with cottage garden. Domestic fantasy on this scale is, I think, a uniquely English phenomenon, a product of that cheerfully fantastic vein in the English character that is explored so brilliantly by Dickens and, after him, V.S. Pritchett. The pity is that so many of those jolly mock-Tudor semis have now been denatured by replacement windows and roofs and satellite dishes and, above all, by the removal of their front gardens to make parking space for the all-conquering car, whose intrusive presence everywhere has all but put paid to those interwar dreams of rus in urbe.
 But now I'm off to the pub - cheers!

Eltham: Art Deco and Moats

Yesterday, with the rain still falling, I paid a visit to Eltham Palace, a rare survival in Southeast London of a moated bishop's palace, made the more remarkable by the additions and modifications wrought by the Courtauld family in the 1930s.

The result is a bizarre amalgam, or cut-and-shut, of medieval solidity and Art Deco luxury. Being no fan of the Art Deco style, I wandered around these lavish interiors - recently refurbished - dreaming wistfully of what might have been, had a first-rate Arts and Crafts architect got to work on the restoration and adaptation of the palace.
 Eltham is an English Heritage property, and its presentation is directed firmly at 'engaging' the public, re-creating the experience of being a guest in the house, etc. Which would be fine (or at least ignorable) if they'd been a bit more diligent in the refurbishment of the interiors: there are some jarring touches, such as incongruously new taps in some of the bathrooms, and some odd choices of replacement textiles, rugs, etc. Little remains in the house of the Courtaulds' great art collection (and that little is mostly neither labelled nor mentioned in the guidebook), but there are two Veroneses skulking in the shadows - and one of them is in such dire need of cleaning that it's barely visible.
 Still, on the plus side, the medieval great hall is a wonderful survival, its mighty hammerbeam roof a marvel. We had a good view of it from the minstrels' gallery, while down below in the hall, excited children were whacking each other with rubber swords, egged on by a young would-be actor in medieval clothing - all very English Heritage... And the beautiful moat, the gardens, the setting of the house, the tout ensemble are all fine (though a contemporary critic of the 1930s building likened it to a strangely misplaced cigarette factory, and you can see his point). On a less rainy day, the whole experience would have been, I'm sure, very much more enjoyable.
 The same could also be said of the day's other attraction, a mile or so up the road, hard by the railway, the high-street shops and the A2 - Well Hall Pleasaunce, a fine garden, or series of gardens, dating back to medieval times. With formal layouts, a large walled garden, woodland and water, it's a delightful place for a stroll, though it would of course be a good deal more pleasaunt in dry and sunny weather. Well Hall Place - the tall 18th-century house where E. Nesbit lived - was sadly demolished in the 1930s, but the magnificent moat survives (and beside it a restored Tudor barn). It was in Well Hall Place that Nesbit wrote her greatest works, toiling away into the night to support her husband, the appalling Hubert Bland, their family, two of his by-blows and one of his mistresses. Still, she did find time for the occasional punt on the moat.


 

Max

On a grim day of siling rain and livid skies, it's cheering to note that at least it's Max Beerbohm's birthday - 143 today. Somehow it's always cheering to think of Max - and of how many writers or artists can one say that? He seems to have been - at least in his prime - one of those endlessly likeable people who, in a quiet unshowy manner, make their surroundings and the people around them that bit brighter. This, certainly, is the personality that shines through his writings. The few who disliked him were just the sort of people you'd want to be disliked by: Ezra Pound caricatured him in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley -

'The sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;

The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".' 

And Malcolm Muggeridge, who cordially loathed Beerbohm, also identified him as Jewish - and homosexual to boot. Max, to his regret, was not Jewish ('That my talent is rather like Jewish talent I admit readily... But, being in fact a Gentile, I am, in a small way, rather remarkable, and wish to remain so'), and his sexuality remains terra incognita, though his long marriage to the American actress Florence Kahn seems to have been happy enough, despite (or because of?) their sharply contrasting temperaments. What's more, he married again shortly before his death at the age of 83.
 As a young boy, Max attended a day school run by a Mr Wilkinson, who, Beerbohm later said, 'gave me my love of Latin and thereby enabled me to write English'. Indeed. If Latin were still taught routinely in schools, the standard of written English would surely be a good deal higher.

Met and Music

After weeks of notably wayward 'weather forecasts', it was good to hear this morning that the notorious Met Office has lost its BBC contract after 93 long years. This was clearly not the wish of the BBC but, for some crazy reason, the Corporation finds itself obliged these days to get the best value for the licence-payers' money. Let's hope the dumping of the Met Office ushers in an era of better, more accurate forecasting. Alas, it probably won't mean that we've seen the last of those 'personality' forecasters, as they'll be free to negotiate contracts with the new providers. So we can expect the insufferable Tomasz Schafernaker to come bouncing back...

Meanwhile, in the continuing absence of The Dabbler (though there are hopeful signs of life), let's have a little Sunday music.
 Like everybody [?], I devote a good deal of futile thought to my eight Desert Island Discs (you never know when you might find yourself stranded with nothing but a wind-up gramophone, your eight favourite platters, the Bible, Shakespeare and a book of your choice). The music list keeps changing - indeed never settles down to a final eight - but one piece I thought would be a permanent fixture was Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, music that is both intensely beautiful and intensely English. However, lately I've been drawn more and more to the equally beautiful, equally English Serenade to Music.
 This setting of a famous passage from Act V of The Merchant of Venice ('How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank...'), for orchestra, chorus and 16 soloists - four sopranos, four contraltos, four tenors, two baritones and two basses - is, for obvious reasons, less often performed and recorded than many of RVW's other masterpieces. It was composed as a tribute to Sir Henry Wood, who conducted the first performance, at the Royal Albert Hall on 5 October 1938. Sergei Rachmaninov, who had performed his Second Piano Concerto in the first half of the concert, settled in a box to enjoy the rest of the evening. At the end of the Serenade, he was found in tears, overcome by the beauty of the music. And no wonder.
 Wood also made the first recording of the piece, with the same soloists, and, rather wonderfully, we can still hear it today, just as Vaughan Williams intended it, and (allowing for sound quality) as Rachmaninov would have heard it. Follow this link (and be sure to turn off when the Serenade ends or you might find yourself confronted with the grinning visage of Alan Titchmarsh).

Oliver's Blues

On this day 60 years ago, the 33-year-old Philip Larkin was on his holidays and having a whale of a time (hem hem). Paying a reluctant return visit to his 'unsatisfactory' parental home in the 'unsatisfactory prime' of his life, he was idly playing jazz records in his 'unsatisfactory' room to pass the time. One of them - Joe 'King' Oliver's Riverside Blues - elicited a call of 'That was a pretty one' from his mother in the hall. From that unpromising soil the poem Reference Back sprang suddenly up - a poem that, like so many of Larkin's, climbs steadily in register as it nears its sharp uncomfortable nub, the pain and loss of time's passing.

That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.

Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.

This is the track Larkin was listening to  - the Creole Jazz Band in its prime, 'blindingly undiminished', with Louis Armstrong on second cornet and Johnny Dodds on clarinet. A pretty one indeed...
Fifteen years later, King Oliver died, a broke and broken man, in a rooming house in Savannah.