Kevin Keegan: The humble superstar of the Seventies

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Kevin Keegan made his debut for Scunthorpe United at the age of 17 and played for them for three seasons in the old fourth division. Word soon got round that he was a talent, and managers and scouts from many big clubs came to watch him. Perhaps discouraged by his short stature, none of them took their interest further.

But Bill Shankly did sign him for Liverpool before the start of the 1971/2 season. What made Keegan's name was that Shankly put him straight into the first team, playing just off the tall Welsh striker John Toshack rather than in the midfield role he filled at Scunthorpe, and he was an immediate success. A year later he was playing for England under Alf Ramsey, who did make some funky selections in the dying months of his reign.

During his time at Liverpool, Keegan won three league titles, the European Cup, the FA Cup and the Uefa Cup twice. By 1976 he was England's captain and best player, and the following year he left to play for Hamburg. 

This was an era when hardly any British footballers played abroad, but Keegan made a huge success of it, twice winning the Ballon d'Or, which was effectively the European Player of the Year Award. Keegan returned to England in 1980, playing first for Southampton and then for Newcastle United.

His international career ended in disappointment. In 1982 England qualified for the World Cup Finals for this first time since 1970, but their best two players, Trevor Brooking and Keegan himself, were injured and probably shouldn't have been picked at all. This was a particular blow as the two enjoyed the sort of near-telepathic understanding that Keegan had developed with John Toshack in his early days at Liverpool.

As it was, England won their three group games, and then went through to second group of three teams, along with West Germany and Spain. England played out two goalless draws and failed to progress to the semi-finals, with Keegan only able to play for their last 26 minutes in the tournament.

Keegan's managerial career began at Newcastle United, where he electrified supporters with an attacking brand of football that took the club back into the top division and made them strong contenders for the title. In the end, though, his "don't worry if we let three in because we'll score four" style didn't win trophies, and he was psyched out by the wilier Alex Ferguson. He managed England for 18 months in 1999 and 2000, but resigned admitting that he was not up to the job.

Two more things need to be said. The first is that, while Keegan was undoubtedly a talented player, his prodigious appetite for training was what made him an outstanding one. In his early days at Anfield he upset some of the established players by beating all of them in every single gym test. I don't often remember or quote the words of David Mellor from his days hosting football phone-ins, but when he said Keegan had made himself a better footballer than God had ever intended him to he, he had it about right.

The other thing is that readers today may not realise just what a huge celebrity Keegan was in the Seventies. He released a pop single (it was a hit in Germany where he was then playing), he was a star of the hugely popular BBC television multisport contest Superstars and he advertised Brut alongside Henry Cooper, then the most loved man in British sport. It was the next best thing to being asked to do a television commercial with the Queen Mother.

George Best ('the fifth Beatle') had been a big celebrity in the Sixties, but it was rare before Italia 90 and the advent of the Premiership for footballers to find such fame outside the game. After 1982, for instance, England's captain and best player Bryan Robson was much less famous than Ian Botham.

But in the Seventies Keegan was everywhere. And his personality – hardworking, honest, genuine – made him popular wherever he went.

Liverpool Lib Dem boss accused of using "sex appeal to build fanbase" in cover shoot

Today the Liverpool Echo walks off with our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges requested several copies of Attitude. #JustSayin

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Charlie Young, Carole Cadwalladr and Ian Tucker have discovered "a 'revolving door' that has led to dozens of highly experienced UK government officials, former ministers, intelligence service chiefs and members of the House of Lords taking up key roles in the controversial Silicon Valley surveillance tech company co-founded by Peter Thiel, the libertarian friend and ally of Donald Trump."

"There is no need for the UK to replace its warheads. A Holbrook’s maximum yield is ninety kilotons of TNT-equivalent, about six times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But the US Navy wants a new warhead in the mid-2030s and the UK has to follow suit even though there are no good reasons to do so. No one in Britain played any part in choosing the parameters of the W93." Norman Dombey dissects Britain's nuclear subservience to the US.

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. But it's feared that this slice will come to dominate how humans communicate, report Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier.

Pam Jarvis offers a personal memoir of the Blair-era widening participation policy for higher education, which promised opportunity but left a complex legacy.

"It is impossible not to talk about The Reckoning in the same breath as Get Carter. Both films are about men who have left their working class roots to become successful in their various professions in London, and who are then forced to come home due to a family tragedy. Liverpool, like Newcastle in Get Carter, is depicted as a tough, rainswept working class town. And much like Jack Carter, Marler is intensely uncomfortable in its bleak surrounds, the tiny council house that his family still live in, with its wood panelling and flocked wallpaper, the raucous smokey pubs they drink in, with their bad torch singers and cheap bingo games." Andrew Nette watches Nicol Williamson heading north before Michael Caine.

Chris Baker on an 18th-century plan to build Britain a new capital – in Rutland.

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"These settings are not registered – as they should be by law – with Ofsted. They are meant to be temporary, but a recent report by the children’s commissioner found the average placement lasted six months – one child had been in a 'holiday camp/activity centre' for almost nine months." Alexandra Topping explains why social workers are forced to place children in unregistered homes.

Heather Stewart analyses Labour's crabwise approach to closer economic ties with the EU.

Richard Kemp condemns the snobbery behind the use of classical music to disperse groups of young people: "I have instead asked the Council and Police to support the 'In Harmony' programme of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic which is taking music playing into some of the most deprived areas of Liverpool both during the day and evening. During the day they ensure that every child in three schools gets to play a musical instrument for an hour a week for three years."

"I hope what comes across at the end is an invitation for people to consider the aspects of British culture that they want to celebrate. Albion can't be determined by me; this is a personal quest and a personal vision of the aspects of Britishness that I feel need to be celebrated. It's an invitation for people to say: "I have a stake here, and what do I want to champion?" Zakia Sewell talks to Michaela Makusha about her first book, Finding Albion.

Rob Hakimian reports on a scheme to use the Grand Union Canal to transfer water from the Midlands to London and the South East.

"I have a soft spot for Waddon (1937). Beneath garish commercial signage is a striking Modernist building which can hold its own against any inter-war Tube station." Daniel Wright takes us on a tour of the South London railway stations built between the wars to rival the striking architecture of those on the Underground.

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"They should pivot to the centre-right – announcing a bunch of sensible policies that pitch the Tories as a fiscally and socially conservative alternative to Labour's meek leadership. But Badenoch won’t do that. And here’s why." Sam Bright explains the Conservatives' mystifying strategy. (Clue: follow the money.)

Ruth Lucas reports on depressing but unsurprising new research findings: "Only 40 per cent of disadvantaged pupils identified as high-achieving at the start of secondary school go on to achieve top GCSE grades, compared with 62 per cent of their more affluent peers."

Patrik Hermansson and Harry Shukman take us inside The Sanctuary in Westminster, which offers financial support, free meeting rooms, podcast spaces and catered events to hard-right activists: "Furnished like a Pall Mall gentlemen's club, The Sanctuary has Chesterfield sofas, a taxidermied penguin, and a sketch of the Victorian colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Its bookshelves are decorated with Moët & Chandon champagne, a Fabergé egg, and maps of St Helena, the island on which Napoleon was exiled."

How many lives does God take in the Bible? Colin Marshall points us to a video that makes the total 2,599,499.

"The film succumbs to the constant temptation to map Liverpool’s changing face against your own. Davies’s childhood, like my father’s, was marked by the slum clearances, the first step in the seemingly endless process of regeneration and reification that continues to mar the city to this day." Lizzie Mackarel watches Terence Davies's 2008 film Of Time and the City.

Bill Bibliomane reviews When Last I Died by Gladys Mitchell: "There’s always something to like and appreciate in a Mrs. Bradley novel, but When Last I Died goes the longest way yet to building a taut, suspenseful, and gripping narrative, right up to the closing pages."

The BBC series The Marksman (1987) is back on YouTube

Years ago I blogged about The Marksman, a BBC drama that became controversial after the Hungerford Massacre of 1987. Some sources even say it was never broadcast because of it, but I know it was because I remember watching it.

It was a revenge drama, with David Threlfall returning to Liverpool from Spain to uncover the killers of his young son.

The cast list was impressive: Threlfall, Richard Griffiths, James Ellis, Leslie Ash, Craig Charles. And the theme music was by Richard Thompson, aided by some poetry written and performed by Charles.

Yet when I wrote about it in 2011 I said there was not a scrap of it or of Thompson's music to be found on the net. Since then, the series has come and gone from YouTube a couple of times.

The reason for this post it to say that it's back on YouTube - on the excellent Classic British Telly account.

Play the video above and you'll see a short extract, but you can watch the whole of it, and of parts 2 and 3, on YouTube.

Carl Cashman: Lib Dems can take control of Liverpool in 2027

Carl Cashman says be believes Liverpool, which we ran between 1998 and 2010, could be the first core city in the UK to return to Liberal Democrat control. 

In an interview with the Liverpool Echo to mark the second anniversary of his becoming leader of the Lib Dem group on the city council, he talks of people's disappointment with the Labour government and the opportunities and responsibilities it brings:

“I thought they would at least have a little bit of a honeymoon, but it's been quite clear to me that there's been a backlash from that and I think there's a big onus for us to take that mantle on and getting those people that are disillusioned with the Labour Party and support us and not to go to other people, particularly Reform. 

“I think from what I'm seeing in the canvas returns, that that is happening, and, you know, we're campaigning in places that we have in campaigning for a very, very long time, and people have seemed quite happy to see us, and that's been reflected in some of the results that we've been getting recently.”

And he names the two policies he would implement at once: a council tax freeze and a return to building of council houses again.

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"We are not yet a year on from the appalling events in Southport and the violence which followed. That violence was largely based on misinformation and lies and a campaign of mendacity which polluted social media. ... It is in this context that Merseyside Police took the virtually unprecedented step of identifying the ethnicity of the suspect within hours of the incident taking place - a 53 year-old white British man, local to the Liverpool area." Lewis Goodall says the far-right voices complaining about this decision by Merseyside Police are the same ones that made it inevitable.

Fintan O'Toole explains why, despite widespread buyer's remorse about Brexit, Nigel Farage is the rising figure in UK politics: "Brexit was a terrible solution to the problem of English identity. It did nothing to allow ordinary people to 'take back control' of their lives. Its only achievement has been to wipe about four per cent off Britain’s GDP."

"Something strange is happening in England. There are more children in care and fewer people waiting to adopt them. In 2024 there were 83,630 in the care system, a 23 per cent increase from 2014. Simultaneously, between 2013 and 2023, the numbers of “approved families” dropped by 60 per cent." Martha Gill looks at the reasons why prospective parents are no longer queuing up to adopt children in care.

James Breckwoldt argues that unaffordable housing has helped to sink the Conservative Party.

"More so than any of Hitchcock’s prior works about the lengths men will go to satiate their twisted appetites, Frenzy marks a new echelon of sexual sadism in his filmography." Steph Green looks back to 1972 and Alfred Hitchcock's brazen British homecoming film.

Olivia Rutigliano enjoys the wit and wisdom of Dorothy L. Sayers: "I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking" (Have his Carcase, 1932).

Georges I-IV, Boy George, George Harrison and Henry George

Here's another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.

Georges on my Mind

The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.

George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.

It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.

Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.

******

The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true. 

******

There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.

Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten: 

I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”

I said: “Terrific, what is it?”

He said: “Peace.”

I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”

I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.

******

George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.

After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:

Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.

Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.

Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.

At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes. 

Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game.  A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".

The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.

It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.

I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.

You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.

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"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

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"For so long the US has been the core UK and European ally, the backbone of NATO, the largest contributor to the WHO, and the loudest voice in proudly proclaiming its democracy. It seems unbelievable to state baldly that the US is a threat to the global economy, to global health and to global stability. But it is, and the sooner this is acknowledged the better." Christine Pagel shows that Trump is following the playbook that has seen democracy die in other countries.

Nataliya Gumenyuk explains why Ukraine wants to fight on: "The horror of Russian military rule has been felt not only in areas of the south and east, where much of the war has been fought, but also near Kyiv in the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion, when Russian forces committed widespread atrocities in the capital’s suburbs."

"I have been very anxious to show that these young people are not 'problem young people,' but young people with problems." Richard Kemp reminds us that one of his key themes as Lord Mayor of Liverpool are the problems faced by care-leavers and many other disadvantaged children in the city.

So concern for the Welsh language scuppered a nuclear power station? Rubbish, says Dan Davies.

Brian Klaas on what Detectorists has to teach us about the meaning of life: "Throughout the show, the allure of money and valuable treasure lurks, but whenever it seduces the detectorists and they lose sight of their intrinsic motivation, their lives begin to fall apart, cursed by a momentarily conversion to the False Gospel."

Colin Yeo, an immigration lawyer, reviews Paddington in Peru.

An interview with Carl Cashman, leader of the Lib Dem group on Liverpool City Council

Read on Substack

Follow the link to Substack to hear Aaron Ellis interviewing Carl Cashman, leader of the Liberal Democrat group on Liverpool City Council and surely a rising star of the party.

The blurb for this interview with one of the party's rising stars runs:

Carl Cashman is the leader of the Liberal Democrats in Liverpool. He does what Sir Ed Davey hopes to do nationally — be the official opposition to Labour.

Aaron and Carl discuss the actual differences between the two progressive parties, if the LibDems should give up ground on the centre-left in order to win over more disillusioned Conservatives, and whether or not the Coalition government should be “rehabilitated”.

They also talk about The Master — Tony Blair.

Aaron is chief strategist for a health technology company and describes strategy as "achieving your ambitions as stuff outside your control tries to stop you".

Or as Harold Macmillan might have put it: "Stuff, dear boy, stuff."

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"The Houses of Parliament are sinking into the Thames. Many dozens of offices were condemned upon their vacation by outgoing MPs. There are electrical and water hazards only a few metres underfoot, and the whole thing will cost billions to fix – not least because MPs are insistent they stay in the building while it happens." Steffan Aquarone says the physical state of the Palace of Westminster is a metaphor for the organisational changes that are needed there.

Richard Kemp promised to put the cause of carer leavers at the heart of his work as Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He writes about an event held yesterday that will help him honour this pledge.

"Dr Newman debunked the popular idea of 'Blue Zones' as regions of exceptional longevity and healthy lifestyles. Many, if not most of the centenarians in the ‘Blue Zone’ have turned out to be alive in the government records but deceased in reality." The press people at University College London on work by Saul Justin Newman that revealed fundamental flaws in research on extreme old age.

Pam Fisher has researched Loughborough's first workhouse.

Amy Boucher is intrigued by Shropshire's female ghosts: "Some of our female spirits have strong historical basis, one only has to peel back the layers to uncover a real woman. Other tales are harder to track down historically, but instead can come to symbolise the suffering and experiences of a collective womanhood. Some of their experiences may even be familiar to you, though your stories are separated by the centuries."

"Perhaps 'cooked' is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish." Alwyn Turner offers an anthology of sausages in literature." 

Who else is in that photograph of John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck as boys?

This photo has been floating about social media for years, and I tweeted it myself the other day because Jimmy Tarbuck was trending. This led to some debate about who is in it.

I have always understood that the three boys from the left are the future journalist and newsreader Peter Sissons, John Lennon and Jimmy Tarbuck. I've also seen it suggested that the tall boy at the back is the future Everton and England centre back Brian Labone.

But it's not Labone. As he explains in the video below, it's Michael Hill. He was to remain a friend of Lennon's through their teenage years and grew up to become "a well-known figure in the international business of marine insurance," according to this page promoting a book he wrote about the teenage Lennon.

He also explains the photo's provenance. It was taken in 1951 on a Dovedale Primary School trip to the Isle of Man and not discovered until about the year 2000, when the teacher who took it died.

What made me nervous is that Hill doesn't mention Peter Sissons, who was a couple of years younger than Lennon and Tarbuck and to become a good friend of Paul McCartney's at secondary school.

But it is him. A reader kindly tweeted me the cutting above from the Mail, which names all six boys. (Apparently the Mirror had it first, but didn't get further than Lennon and Tarbuck.) And also in the photo are Ivan Vaughan, who was to introduce Lennon and McCartney, and the future professional footballer Jimmy Blain, who didn't make it at Everton but was to become an Exeter City legend.

There remains only for me to remind you that Frank Duckworth, co-deviser of the Duckworth Lewis method, lodged with John Lennon and his Aunt Mimi.

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Richard Kemp says the Liberal Democrats must be a party of the major cities as well of the shires and suburbs: "We will only be a truly national party when we represent people in all areas and from all walks of life. We will now have a greater resource than at any time in my political career to begin to achieve this."

Jason Beer KC discusses being crowned Barrister of the Year, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry and what it has done for public understanding of the role of barristers.

"If you don’t already have generational wealth, your kid will feel it sooner or later. The average fee for an independent school is £16,650. If the schools pass on the VAT increase, that will mean an extra £2,500 a year. If that is too much for your family, then you are better off not sending your kid to a substandard private school." Stella Tsantekidou has some advice for parents.

"There is ... only one sustainable future for the series and the now completed volumes for England, Scotland and Wales, and that future is digital. A small group of supporters are actively pursuing this prospect. Should the project succeed, subscribers will benefit from corrections and updates and a GPS locator." Gillian Darley looks to the future of Niklaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series.

"From writer-director Cy Enfield’s desire to capture native customs on film to the acknowledgement of Cetewayo’s tactical expertise, the picture depicts the Zulus in a manner far removed from the way Africans had been previously depicted on film." Richard Luck defends the politics of Enfield's 1964 film Zulu.

John Lewis-Stempel makes a plea on behalf of eels and for a change in human thinking about nature: "Like everything about the eel, the reasons for its calamitous decline - 95% globally since the 1970s - are mysterious, although shifts in the oceanic currents which bring the elvers to Europe and the pollution of waterways are causal contenders. And it is the eel’s bad luck to be enigmatic rather than charismatic."

Frank Duckworth, co-deviser of the Duckworth Lewis method, lodged with John Lennon and his Aunt Mimi

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Liberal England's Trivial Fact of the Day is taken from the Guardian obituary of the mathematician Frank Duckworth.

It was he who, together with the cricket statistician Tony Lewis, devised the Duckworth-Lewis method. This is a formula used to ensure that the side batting is second is set a fair target in rain-affected matches.

The obituary reveals:

After graduating in the early 60s he stayed on at Liverpool to study for a PhD in metallurgy, sharing a house for a time with John Lennon, as a lodger of Lennon’s aunt Mimi ("not that we had much to do with him, although we heard him plucking his guitar occasionally").

When Duckworth moved on, it was to share a flat with Johnny Ball.

The Duckworth=Lewis method is now known as the Duckworth–Lewis–Stern method because of the later contribution of the Australian mathematician and statistician Steven Stern.

All 19 Ealing Comedies ranked by the Guardian

Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I've seen most of them, so here are a few thoughts on his reviews and rankings. 

Following his counting up the list up from 19th and last place, my first comment is that Hue and Cry is ranked far too low at 16th place. The film a celebration of the way boys ruled London and its bombsites - this would never be seen in such a positive light in a British film again - and there are fine performances by Jack Warner and Alastair Sim.

I can't make much of a case for The Magnet, which stars an 11-year-old James Fox, being placed much higher than the 14th place where Pulver has it, but he gets some things about the film wrong. Fox did not go near a drama school until he was 16: the accent he has in the film is that of a prep school boy of the day, and this is just what he is playing here. Parts of  The Wirral were very posh in 1950. 

Barnacle Bill is at 13. Pulver, quite fairly, says Alec Guinness never gets out of third gear in this film, but then Guinness in third is better than most actors in fifth. When you see his walk at the start of the film you believe absolutely that he is a former Naval officer. The film also sees Ealing take the side of teenagers against the stuffy establishment of the seaside resort where it is set. And where else will you see Guinness boogying with Jackie Collins?

Harry Secombe's star vehicle Davy is too high at 10. As Pulver admits, he isn't much of an actor and the film's approval of his character's surrender of his operatic ambitions for the sake of the family variety act is a bit Ealing-by-numbers.

I'm pleased to see the The Maggie (which is rather like a harder-edged Local Hero) in seventh place, which is one above the more celebrated The Titfield Thunderbolt. For me, the latter film's awareness of its own quirkiness is a sign of the studio's decline. The train must be saved because its quaint, not because it helps anyone get to where they want to go.

From now 6 down to 1, Pulver gets it pretty much right:

6. Passport to Pimlico

5. Whisky Galore!

4. The Man in the White Suit

3. The Lavender Hill Mob

2. The Ladykillers

1. Kind Hearts and Coronets

They are all celebrated films, though maybe The Man in the White Suit deserves to be even better known. Its satire hits the spot more accurately than the Boulting Brothers ever managed, perhaps because it doesn't star Ian Carmichael.

It's also worth noting that Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its period setting, is far from being a typical Ealing film. And Pulver gets it right in saying that Dennis Price is its real star.

The Liverpool Overhead Railway

I'm fascinated by the Liverpool Overhead Railway. When it opened in 1893, it became the world's first electric elevated railway. It escaped nationalisation in 1948, but closed in 1956 because the owners could not fund the necessary repairs.

This film tells you all about it.

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"On New Year’s Day 1953, he signed up to become part of the greatest churn of young football talent English football had yet seen, the Busby Babes. The young Charlton, fair-haired and bequiffed, threw himself into metropolitan, cosmopolitan Mancunian life, the cinemas, cafes and dances a world away from his colliery hometown of Ashington." John Brewin pays tribute to Bobby Charlton.

Matthew Pennell on what happened in Mid Bedfordshire and why it will probably never happen again.

"An unfounded accusation that I had 'been unkind' to a non-statutory government document should not have been a reason to attempt to cancel my presence at professional events. Beyond the impact on me personally, it removes my expertise and connections with expert practice around the world from England’s state education system. If this is happening daily across the UK’s ministries, it also paints a frightening picture of a narrowing of discussion and expertise in policy making." Ruth Swailes has been blacklisted by the Department for Education for being critical of its policies.

Errol Morris is interviewed about John le Carré and the film he has made about the author's life and work, The Pigeon Tunnel.

"These days it’s where giddy teens and grizzled pros purchase shiny guitars, but before that it played a founding role in the careers of The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Elton John, the Sex Pistols and more. But this history goes back even further. Before the Second World War, Denmark Street was home to music publishers, their windows piled high with sheet music." Peter Watts tells the story of Denmark Street.

Rail Engineer descends into the cutting at Edge Hill in Liverpool to find the site of the stationary steam engine that hauled trains up the gradient from Lime Street until the 1870s.

The Joy of Six 1170

"Liverpool has a long history of political turbulence. Despite Labour’s current supremacy, the party’s control of the city came late: for more than 100 years, until the second half of the 20th century, the Conservatives were dominant. Since then, Labour’s grip has been intermittent and often marked by conflict and controversy." Brian Groom questions the claim that Liverpool is a Labour city.

Katharine Pindar argues that the Liberal Democrats have nothing to lose by being bold.

Joanna Moncrief is interviewed about her research review that threw doubt on the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

"The blast on October 14 1913 killed 439 men and boys, with another dying during rescue operations. It was, and remains, the worst coal mining disaster in British history and also the sixth worst in the world." Ben Curtis on the Senghenydd colliery explosion.

"Whitfield would always have to put up with 'difficult' male performers (she had grown used to having to get through scenes stroking Frankie Howerd's hair without horrifying him by dislodging his wig, and she had to spend all of The Blood Donor episode - and all of the subsequent others - trying to interact with Tony Hancock whilst he stared blankly over her shoulder reading his cue cards)." Graham McCann says that. because she was a woman, June Whitfield never received the respect she deserved as a performer.

A London Inheritance mourns the death of the city's telephone boxes.