"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
"Dartford Warblers skim across the heather before diving into the vegetation, defying all but the quickest observers. At dusk Nightjars churr from the isolated trees or fly overhead, the males clapping their wings in display flight." David Jobbins mourns what has been lost to the fire at Dunwich Heath.
Sam Power explains why Reform UK will find it hard to shake off questions about its donors: "An important thing to note is that the legal onus rests almost entirely on the donor. The party in receipt of the donation simply needs to show that it has conducted a permissibility check on them. In the case of Reform, some of its biggest donors (like Tice) are effectively woven into the party apparatus. This makes it much harder for the party to be seen to be one step removed from the money."
An increasingly narrow English curriculum, with its emphasis on phonics and 'teaching to the test', is squeezing reading for pleasure out of our primary schools, experts in the field tell Lydia Chantler-Hicks.
Rebecca Johns finds that British scientist James Lovelock warned executives of the risks of burning fossil fuels in the 1960s. Rather than share his reports with the public, claims an imminent legal case, Shell responded by funding the Global Climate Coalition – an industry group that pursued multimillion-dollar influence campaigns promoting climate denial and misinformation.
Leanne Tritton reports on the fate of Shrewsbury's Shirehall, the modernist former home of the Shropshire County Council.
"Dirk Bogarde came in for some stick from certain quarters for his portrayal of General Sir Frederick 'Boy' Browning, who was under considerable pressure from Monty to deliver Operation Market-Garden. Dubious about taking Arnhem, Browning stated that they’d be going 'a bridge too far.' He said this before the operation, but there is no scene with Montgomery in the film, instead Bogarde gets the line after the snafu, coming across like an aloof clever-dick 'told you so' type." Tim Pelan looks back to to 1977 and the making of A Bridge Too Far.
Here's a remarkable thing. Between 1933 and 1963, it was illegal in Britain for a child under 12 to appear in an entertainment production on stage or on screen. And that explains the following press cuttings.
One of the best-kept secrets of the British film industry is revealed at last by producer Ronald Neame’s announcement that John Howard Davies, cast as Oliver Twist Cineguild's screen version of Charles Dickens’s famous novel, has been playing the part at Pinewood Studios for the last four months. [John Howard Davies was nine.]
I am able to reveal to-day the name of another of those juvenile lawbreakers who act in films under the age of fifteen: Carol Reed, who finishes directing The Lost Illusion” to-day. gives me permission to say that the important part of the small boy who becomes involved in a murder case has been played for the past two months by Bobbie Henrey, an attractive eight-year-old with blond wavy hair. [The Lost Illusion was retitled The Fallen Idol before release.]
It is three months since watched a scene being shot on the floor at Pinewood Studios for the new Dirk Bogarde thriller Hunted. The unechoing spaces of a sound stage have their own special atmosphere especially when carpenters and jobbers are silenced for shooting but on this occasion the sense of hush was almost tangible.
It was in fact hush-hush for through a door at the back of the set – a typical transport drivers' cafe halt – came Dirk Bogarde and small blond child. At my elbow a whisper informed me that no mention could made of the boy: not until the film was finished completely cut and polished ready for screen.
That is the way the law or rather the evasion of the law works in the British film industry Child actors are not supposed to do this work therefore as far as everyone but those intimately involved the making of the film are concerned they do not exist I think 1 am right in saying that the law prohibits the employment of children under 12 years of age. And here was 6½-year-old Jon Whiteley in middle of perhaps the longest screen role a child has ever attempted.
And, come to think of it, though there were popular British child stars in the years before these three productions – Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Bartholomew, Roddy McDowall – they made their films in Holywood.
In 1948 it had been expected that an amendment to the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 would relax the rules on young performers and remove the need for this subterfuge, but it was unexpectedly ruled out of order by the speaker.
I've even seen it suggested that the very public search for an Oliver Twist was designed to reassure the authorities that the producers were intending to cast an older boy, when they had already chosen John Howard Davies, the son of a well-known scriptwriter. The story goes that one of the production team had seen him when he was invited to dinner by the boy's parents.
There were a few prosecutions for employing child actors, but for the most part the 1933 law was ignored until it was superseded by the 1963 Children and Young Person’s Act. You can read more in article by Richard Farmer.
Crystal Palace Park is undergoing a multi-million-pound regeneration project, reports News Shopper, which is particularly good news for its most famous residents:
The restoration of the iconic dinosaur models, a staple of the park since the Victorian era, is now underway with specialist steam cleaning and repair work revealing their original look.
Scaffolding has been erected around larger models on Dinosaur Island to allow targeted work on their upper sections.
The latest Backlisted podcast is a great edition on Shelagh Delaney and her 1958 play A Taste of Honey. It was her first play, written and produced before she was 20. It was then filmed in 1962 with Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan and Murray Melvin.
As the Backlisted blurb asks:
How did a Salford teenager change the face of British theatre? Nearly 70 years on, why do the play's themes and characters continue to resonate in the 21st century? And what did Shelagh Delaney do for an encore (and why do so few people know about it)? This show will open your eyes.
The show certainly reminds us that the modern world did not start with the Beatles. Take the interview above from 1959, which you can hear in it.
Delaney comes over as a thoroughly contemporary figure, while the interviewer sounds like an alien. Where did he learn to pronounce the world "play" like that?
It would be comforting to think his assumptions that Delaney must had help to write the play and faint derision for her "native Lancashire" are equally strange to us now, but I'm afraid I often hear echoes of such views.
I can't recommend this edition of Backlisted highly enough. Listen out for an anecdote about an exchange between Dirk Bogarde and Murray Melvin during the filming of HMS Defiant.
And let's end this post with a piece of A Taste of Honey trivia from 2003:
Earlier in the day Home Office Minister and Salford MP, Hazel Blears, revealed that she appears in kitchen sink classic, A Taste of Honey, shown at the Festival. "They filmed it at the bottom of our road" she recalled "And I was in one scene wearing bunches and a little kilt. My brother sang `The Big Ship Sails On The Ally Ally O'..."
Last night it was Highgate Cemetery. Tonight it's the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
Our Mother's House was one of my 10 British films that should be better known:
A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage.
Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.
If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.
This post was written for Terence Towles Canote's 10th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon, where you will find plenty more articles on British cinema.
What is the most successful piece of casting against type in a British film?
There’s Richard Attenborough’s turn as a bull of a Sergeant Major in Guns at Batasi. There’s James Fox as Chas in Performance, whose hooded eyes and half-smile haunt British gangster films to this day.
And there’s another candidate. How about Alec Guinness playing a hard-drinking officer in a Scottish regiment - red hair and all - who has been promoted from the ranks?
It may sound ridiculous, but you need only watch the trailer above to see that it’s not. In fact, Guinness’s performance as Major Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
This post contains spoilers, but there's good news. You can watch the film on YouTube first if you wish (just don’t tell them I sent you).
Directed by Ronald Neame, Tunes of Glory is set in the barracks of a Scottish regiment just after the end of the second world war.
Though Jock Sinclair, in his own words, has led the regiment "from Dover to Berlin", he is still just a Major. He holds a brevet rank as Lieutenant Colonel, but as Wikipedia explains, brevet ranks are given as a reward but do not necessarily confer the authority and privileges of that higher rank.
We first see Sinclair holding court at the end of a regimental dinner - there are pipers and oceans of whisky. He has news: the regiment is getting a new colonel and it’s not him. It is to be Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow, who is played by John Mills.
The Wikipedia entry on Tunes of Glory has an admirable plot summary, so I’ll let it take up the tale for a little:
Colonel Barrow arrives a day early and finds the officers dancing rowdily. He declines sharing a whisky with Sinclair, taking a soft drink instead. They exchange histories. Sinclair enlisted as bandsman in Glasgow and rose through the ranks, Barrow came from Oxford University. He served with the battalion in 1933. Assigned to "special duties", he has lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Sinclair humorously notes that he was in Barlinnie Prison's cooler for being drunk and disorderly one night in 1933.
When Sinclair presses Barrow about his war years, he replies that he, too, was "in jail". Sinclair recalls that Barrow was a prisoner of the Japanese and belittles the experience - "officers' privileges and amateur dramatics". Barrow simply replies that Barlinnie would have been preferable.
At 3 am Sinclair is drinking with Major Scott, played by Dennis Price, and we hear his outburst to him: "I've acted Colonel, I should be Colonel, and by God... I bloody well will be Colonel!"
Barrow proves to be a martinet and is not prepared to cut the battle-weary regiment any slack. He takes particular exception to the rowdy style of Highland dancing they favour, and orders all the officers to take lessons so they dance they way he wants them to when he holds a cocktail party for the local gentry.
This reminds me that, in a recent episode of The Rest of Politics, Alastair Campbell was surprised to learn that Rory Stewart had dancing lessons when he held a gap-year commission in the Black Watch at the start of the 1990s.
Anyway, the dancing after the party gets rowdy despite Barrow’s efforts and, red faced and furious, he breaks up proceedings before fleeing in shame at his own behaviour. He knows that the bulk of his officers feel a loyalty to Sinclair that they do not feel to him, and the evening can only have made things worse. To the modern viewer, it seems obvious from this and from the collection of tics and twitches Mills deploys, that he is suffering post-traumatic stress from his wartime experiences.
I sometimes struggle to understand the esteem in which John Mills was held as an actor in Britain - he had an unfortunate habit of being cast in roles for which he was visibly too old - but he is good in Tunes of Glory. Particularly so, as his character is less immediately appealing than Alec Guinness’s and does not allow for the same bravura acting.
The clash between these two flawed characters has an almost Shakespearian heft. As the retired US Marine Corps infantry officer and historian Reed Bonadonna observes, it’s tempting to say that each has the qualities the other lacks – “Sinclair is a warrior and leader of men, but he’s hopeless as an organiser and disciplinarian.”
He goes on:
Despite their obvious differences, the two leads are similar in the sense that both are essentially lonely and unfulfilled. Both have been married but are now on their own. Sinclair has a grown daughter with whom he has a loving but somewhat distant relationship. Both are burdened by their memories of the war.
Barrow spent years in harsh and unproductive captivity. Sinclair suspects that his best days are over, and even that his wartime success was a fluke. They also share a keen sense of the burden and isolation of command. There is the hint of Othello in Tunes of Glory, with Barrow as the Moor and Sinclair as his Iago.
And it is Sinclair’s relationship with his daughter that brings things to a head. Unknown to Sinclair, but known to many others in the barracks, she has been going out with one of the regiment’s pipers. When he finally comes across them together, he strikes the corporal.
This is a clear court-martial offence and Barrow is first minded to bring charges against him. But he is put under pressure by almost everyone to deal with the matter himself. He goes to see Sinclair, who promises that he will be supportive in future if Barrow shows him leniency.
Against his better judgement, he decides against a court martial, only to find that Sinclair does not change at all. He still gives him no support and continues to drink with his 'babies', as he calls the officers loyal to him. Humiliated, Barrow leaves them, goes upstairs and shoots himself.
Ironically, it is in his reaction to Barrow’s suicide that we see the best of Sinclair. His command of the situation and concern for the young soldier who found the body make us see why he was a good leader in battle and inspired respect and even affection in the men under him.
To assuage his guilt - "it’s not his body I fear, it’s his ghost," he says to himself at one point - he plans a grandiose funeral for Barrow. As he describes it to the other officers we hear the pipe band playing the 'tunes of glory', but it becomes clear to them that he has lost his reason and the room empties.
"Oh my babies, take me home," Sinclair pleads to Scott and another officer, and as he is driven away, the film ends. With one protagonist dead and the other driven mad, Tunes of Glory, it occurs to me, has unexpected parallels with Performance.
The supporting cast here is uniformly excellent. Dennis Price’s Major Scott is a typically disengaged Price character. We wonder if he is just a sardonic observer of the tragedy, or if he is the real Iago, encouraging Sinclair and Barrow to destroy one another so he can become Colonel amid the wreckage?
Gordon Jackson plays Captain Jimmy Cairns, the other officer who is there with Sinclair at the end. Yet he has also been Barrow’s right-hand man as he struggles to reform the regiment. Jackson always did have the knack of playing good men who were not dull, which is a rare gift. Certainly, the villains in British films of the Fifties are often surprising dark and alluring, whereas the heroes are just wet - compare Dirk Bogarde and Jimmy Hanley in The Blue Lamp.
Many of the other officers are played - and well played - by familiar faces: Gerald Harper, Paul Whitsun-Jones, Allan Cuthbertson (who you will recognise him from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers, if nowhere else). The Pipe Major is Duncan Macrae, who appeared in every film about Scotland made after the war and was always a welcome presence.
Sinclair’s daughter Morag is played by Susannah York in her first film role. Liberal Democrat readers may be interested to know that York was at RADA with our own Flick Rea. Trivia fans will be interested that Flick told me that a young man from Liverpool shared their classes for two terms but did not make the grade. So he returned North to the family business, to re-emerge a few years later as the manager of the Beatles.
Tunes of Glory is an exceptionally good film. As another American military writer, Jim Shufelt, says:
This is not a 'war movie', but Tunes of Glory features an intense portrayal of leadership, discipline and reintegration issues common to soldiers and units of any conflict, army, or time period.
He goes on to suggest that watching it could form part of current-day officers’ professional development.
This is not a surprise: the screenplay is by James Kennaway, adapted from his own novel of the same name. Kennaway himself held a commission in a Scottish regiment while doing his National Service. He was invited by the Colonel to apply for a permanent commission, but declined, in part because of the tensions between his fellow officers.
Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.
With those caveats entered, let's go.
No Room at the Inn (1948)
Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.
Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.
The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.
This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.
Gone to Earth (1950)
The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.
Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.
The 'Maggie' (1954)
The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.
An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.
Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)
The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.
Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.
Innocent Sinners (1958)
Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.
Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.
The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.
You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
West 11 (1963)
Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.
Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?
Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.
Our Mother's House (1967)
A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage.
Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.
If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.
Comfort and Joy (1984)
This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.
I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.
The Last Resort (2000)
Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.
Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.
There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.
Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.
BBC4 is currently repeating the wonderful 1976 dramatisation of Robert Graves' I, Claudius on Wednesday evenings, three episodes at at time. The first six are now up on iPlayer.
I've been staying up to watch them because they are so good and also because watching them now reminds me of watching them when I was a teenager. It's a way of pretending I'm still young.
Yesterday I discovered a video called The Epic That Never Was. It's a 1965 documentary about an earlier, abortive attempt to adapt I, Claudius for the screen. This was a British film that began shooting in 1937, but was never completed.
People rave about the 1976 cast, but the 1937 one looks enticing too: Charles Laughton, Flora Robson, Merle Oberon, Emlyn Williams, Robert Newton.
The Epic That Never Was includes substantial selections from the rushes, interviews with cast members and on-screen narration by Dirk Bogarde. There are also glimpses of Denham Studios in decay - this is where Carol Reed, David Lean and Powell and Pressburger made many of their great films of the 1940s.
Wikipedia quotes Roger Greenspun's verdict on this documentary:
Something in the controlled modelling of light over the faces of Merle Oberon and Emlyn Williams suggests that this might have been a superb film and that its loss is real and very sad. …
By an admirable trick of fate the 1937 von Sternberg footage has ascended into timeless light, while the style of the surrounding 1965 documentary has dated like crazy. If you have to lose your best project, maybe this is the way to do it.
Robbie (Jon Whiteley), an orphaned 6-year-old boy in care, escapes into the London streets and takes shelter in a derelict bomb site, where he stumbles across Chris Lloyd (Dirk Bogarde) and the body of a man Lloyd has just killed. Aware that Robbie is the only witness to his crime, Lloyd realises that he will have to get out of London and that he has no option but to take the boy with him.
Yes, it's another children-and-bombsites film for my collection.
Hunted was released in 1952. It's one of Dirk Bogarde's best early films, while Jon Whiteley gives a wonderfully natural performance.
This opening scene is all we see of bombsites in the film, but later on there are some striking industrial landscapes in the Potteries to enjoy.
According to my chronology, by 1952 British cinemas was pretty firmly against the idea that children should play on bombsites - Hue and Cry already seemed a long time ago.
So much so that Jon Whiteley wandered on to a bombsite in two films - Hunted and, from four years later, The Weapon - and got caught up with a killer in both of them.
A clutch of behind-the-scenes photos from Hunted has just appeared on Getty Images, and the one above shows Whiteley and Bogarde on their bombsite.
The actor Barry Evans died in the Leicestershire village of Claybrooke Magna in 1997. The circumstances of his death were mysterious, but no charges have ever been brought.
This video told me much I didn;t know about his career - in particular that he had grown up in care. It would be interesting to know how he managed to get to the Italia Conti Academy and then the Central School of Speech and Drama from such a background.
The clips of his early work here, and the fact that he acted at the Royal Court and the National Theatre, suggest he was capable of far more than the light comedy he became know for and eventually trapped in.
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush is a likeable film, and not only because it has both Traffic and the Spencer David Group on its soundtrack, but after that things went downhill.
The Doctor sitcoms were popular, but they looked back to the Dirk Bogarde films of the Fifties. I never watched Mind Your Language, but it had a reputation for low-grade racism.
Meanwhile, the only films being made in the early Seventies were sex comedies or films of popular situation comedies.
Evans moved to Claybrooke Magna in the Harborough district in 1993 and became a taxi driver. Four years later he was dead.
An author is writing a new book about a tragic TV star whose death at his home in a Harborough village is still a real mystery - and he wants your help.
Daniel Ward has carried out over 80 in-depth interviews with the former colleagues and co-stars of much-loved actor Barry Evans - who lived in Claybrooke Magna, near Lutterworth.
And he’s now asking for anyone who knew Barry after he moved here to Harborough to share their personal memories with him as he puts together his biography.
Having more or less vindicated my memory of having once heard a purported real "stone tape" on the radio, let me confess to a less accurate recollection.
Take a look at these tweets.
The girl has had mental health problems and everyone tries to convince her she never met her father. Her only help is a boy of her own age who plays the flute.
I was living in Sutton Coldfield at the time, so this may be a late ATV production.
Any ideas? 🙏
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers)
October 7, 2021
Replies to them convinced me that I had run together two different serials screened by ITV on Sunday afternoons in that era.
The girl who met her father and was then told she hadn't (a plot that owes something to the early Dirk Bogarde film So Long at the Fair) came from Watch All Night.
But the boy with the flute had wandered in from another series altogether: Barriers.
You can see its opening titles above. I have watched the first episode and, with it scenes of the East/West border and public school life, it feels like John le Carré for teenagers.
So it's appropriate that its star, Benedict Taylor, went on to play the young Magnus Pym in the BBC adaptation of A Perfect Spy.
There were two series of Barriers. Only the first is on YouTube and I think it was the second that I watched, which makes this last point hard to prove.
But could that haunting theme be the reason I am convinced that Fauré's Sicilienne was once used to introduce a period detective series?
A big of googling shows I am not alone in this belief, but if Taylor turns out to have played Sicilienne at some point in the second series of Barriers, I suspect that will clarify another of my unconfirmed memories.
Katy Balls reports Tory disquiet over their prospects in the North Shropshire by-election: "Despite Paterson holding the seat in 2019 with a majority of 22,949, senior Tories have expressed concern over the vote while the Liberal Democrats are talking up their prospects. One senior Lib Dem source has told the Times that they have put money on a victory for their party."
While Ian Dunt detects the formation on of an informal, organic anti-Tory strategic arrangement.
Adam Ramsay on his public school days and the building of upper-class solidarity: "I haven’t lived with my parents for any significant period since I was 13. Some, if they also went to ... ‘preparatory’ (prep) schools, left home at eight or nine. If you suspect that this is likely to lead to insecurity then institutionalisation, then you’d be right."
"I have now taken all identifiable details off my CV. Anything that could give an employer a whiff of my age has been wiped, and only my work over the last 10 years remains visible. It makes me sad that after all of my years of hard work, this is what it has come to." Anonymous writes on ageism and the difficulty of job hunting in your sixties.
"The story of how Richmond and Twickenham - and particularly Eel Pie Island - became a seed-bed for the British R&B bands that, in conjunction with the Mersey Beat, reset the course of rock music is such a great one that I’ve often thought it was worth a proper book, particularly after I came to live here 20 years ago and realised that the buildings and the pavements had tales to tell. I never got around to it. But now someone else has, and he’s done it so well that I’m glad I didn’t." Richard Williams welcomes Andrew Humphreys’ Raving upon Thames: An untold story of Sixties London.
Jade Evans examines how Dirk Bogarde's image was crafted for the fans and how his publicity portraits nevertheless give us glimpses of the life of a very private movie star.
Good news from Oxford where my favourite pub in the city, the Lamb and Flag, is to come back to life.
It was closed at the end of January by its owner, St John's College, because of difficult trading conditions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pub, according to the college's website, is to reopen thanks to an agreement with
a diverse and eclectic mix of Oxford people, past and present, scientists and entrepreneurs, writers and artists, Town and Gown, as well as local businesses and suppliers.
This assemblage is called 'The Inklings Group' in honour of a set of academics and writers, including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who used to meet there under this name.
One reason I like the Lamb and Flag is that it's less associated with the Inklings than the dark and hobbit-ridden Eagle and Child across the road. This has been going through its own Covid-driven cycle of closing and reopening.
If I have a hero among the original Inklings it is Hugo Dyson. Legend maintains that he responded to Tolkien's reading of The Lord of the Rings as a work in progress with " Oh fuck! Not another elf!"
Dyson is an obscure figure today, but he did have his 15 minutes of fame in 1965. Having been noticed giving television lectures on Shakespeare, he appeared with Dirk Bogarde and Julie Christie in the film Darling, playing a literary lion.
Talking Pictures TV is always discussed by the press in terms of nostalgia, but the old British films it specialises in are not as tame and twee as we are told.
Observe, say, 1950s Britain through its top-of-the-bill films and it emerges as a land populated by pipe-smoking, twentysomething men who drive vintage Bentleys, usually with Muriel Pavlow in the back.
Explore it from the bottom of the bill and you'll encounter something different: tracts of featureless industrial estates, a world in which Wolseley police cars clatter under railway bridges in Croydon and mid-price actors occupy frowsty suburban drags.
It is threadbare, unspectacular territory, where compromised people spend their time committing adultery and double-crossing each other, often while drinking pre-mixed American cocktails.
And what strikes me about those top-of-the-bill films is how vividly the villains are painted. Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, for instance, remains sexy and dangerous more than 70 years on.
The good young character he is contrasted with, a trainee constable played by Jimmy Hanley, appears utterly insipid, but then I suspect he did when the film was released.
Other villains from this era to seek out are Peter Sellers (playing it utterly straight and with a Liverpool accent) in Never Let Go (1960) and Ronald Ward in Ealing's racing drama The Rainbow Jacket (1954):
"There's a certain gentleman I know - using the term in its widest sense - who wouldn't be at all pleased if you were to win the Leger on Fair Noon."
Talking Pictures TV's latest enterprise is Friday evening's Cellar Club, a slot for British cult cinema. It's introduced by Caroline Munro, singer, model, Bond girl and star of many such films.
She was also the inspiration for this week's music video. Colin Blunstone, the lead singer of The Zombies, explains:
When I wrote Caroline Goodbye, it was about my girlfriend, the Bond girl Caroline Munro. I didn’t want everyone to know who it was about, so I tried to find another name, but nothing fitted.
I admitted defeat and thought that only my close friends would know it was Caroline. However, a journalist found out and I ended up with a two-page spread in the Daily Express, so the secret was out.
The Ashmoleon Museum site announces the death of the art historian DrJon Whiteley:
Jon joined the Museum in 1976 as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Art. In a career of 38 years at the Ashmolean he was a dedicated teacher to generations of Oxford students; one of the country’s most distinguished art historians; and a well-loved colleague and friend to everyone who knew and worked with him.
But well before that he was a child film star.
In the 1950s he appeared in two films with Dirk Bogarde (Hunted and The Spanish Gardener), in Fritz Lang's Moonfleet and in The Kidnappers, for which performance he was awarded an honoray Oscar.
The photo above shows him with the director of Hunted, Charles Crichton.
"With the local elections, the Lib Dems were finally completely clear in their messaging. “Stop Brexit” – that’s easy to understand. “Bollocks to Brexit” has the added bonus of having a slightly risqué element to it, meaning it will be discussed and thus picked up on." Nick Tyrone says the Bollocks to Brexit slogan is just what the Liberal Democrats need:
Rachel Andrews takes us to the former Bessborough mother and baby home on the outskirts of Cork. Nine hundred children died here, but few graves have been found.
Jonathan Webber introduces us to Simone de Beauvoir's views on parenting.
"Mr Eliot has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems and to pass on to you his congratulations on them." tseliot.com looks at the relations between T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes.
Ken Andrews watches Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant: "One of the delights of The Servant is marveling in Bogarde's depiction of Barrett’s effortless slides in and out of his Manchester accent and contrasting his 'on the job' fussiness with his louche behavior when 'off the clock'."
"The hill was my playground, school and world." Alan Garner on Alderley Edge,
This week Antonia Quirke from BBC Radio 4's Film Programme visited the headquarters of my favourite television channel Talking Pictures TV.
They turned out to be a pebble-dashed detached house in Hertfordshire, but this is no kitchen-table operation.
As Noel Cronin, who runs the channel with his daughter and son-in-law, told her in their interview, the channel attracts audiences of up to 1.3m, spends £1m a year on film rights and makes a profit.
The still above comes from the superior early Dirk Bogarde film Hunted, which Talking Pictures screened again last night. It shows Bogarde with the child actor Jon Whiteley.
The film starts off with a little boy (Jon Whiteley) running away from a burning house. He runs into an abandoned basement and finds Dirk Bogarde standing next to a dead body. Dirk Bogarde abducts the boy and sets out on the lam.
The film is very dark and definitely has that distinct British post-war cynicism. But it's also incredibly touching. The little boy is an orphan, abused by his adoptive father. Dirk is a sailor with an unfaithful wife and a family that cares more about keeping up appearances than his own well being. Both neglected and hurt, the two forge an unlikely bond throughout the course of the film.
I really love movies that show the human side of people who commit crimes. Too often a murderer or thief is portrayed in a completely evil light, with no reason, conscience or feeling. In this film, we see how Dirk Bogarde's character was led to commit his crime because of circumstances and environment, because of pride and honor. At heart, he is really a softy who just wanted a fairy-tale sort of life with the woman he loved.
Jon Whiteley, because he was retired early by his parents, avoided the unhappy fate of many child stars.
I am always pleased when I find out that someone I had assumed was dead is still alive.
The only trouble is that they tend to die soon after you make that discovery.
A couple of years ago it was the England cricketer Bob Appleyard. (What I didn't say in that post was that I was using his name as part of a password at work at the time he died and therefore felt partly responsible for his death.)
Today came news that another such figure had left us: Richard Gordon.
A doctor himself (his real name was Gordon Ostlere), Gordon published a novel based on his experience of medical training, Doctor in the House, in 1952.
It was filmed two years later with Dirk Bogarde in the lead role, and a further six Doctor films were made from Gordon's series of books.
And in 1969 and 1970 Doctor in the House became a London Weekend Television comedy series starring people like Barry Evans, Robin Nedwell and Martin Shaw.
The clip above ends with the most celebrated joke from the Doctor in the House film. It cracked them up in 1954.
