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Showing posts with label Stratford Johns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stratford Johns. Show all posts
I may have got the idea that Matron is too fond of gin from Sheila Hancock, who played Miss Hannigan that way (to Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks) in the first London production of Annie.
Wednesday
I was sad to see my fellow hereditary peers expelled from the Lords. I am not affected by the recent change in the law because mine is a Rutland peerage and thus I am guaranteed lifelong membership of the House under the provisions of the Treaty of Oakham. I forget quite when it was signed or who signed it, but I have a copy – indeed the only copy known to exist – safely locked away in the Library here at Bonkers Hall.
And so to my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans, where excitement is running high at the prospect of Friday’s Beltane bonfire. How sweet their voices sound as they practise their songs! Though I have to say that in my young day folk songs were about chaps setting off on May mornings, with the occasional drowned sailor thrown in.
I don’t know if the Wise Woman of Wing has been drinking gin with Matron again, bringing some of her lore with her, but the words the little inmates sing are alarming: The Unquiet Grave would count as light relief in their company.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.
Last night I watched the film Murder by Decree on Talking Pictures TV. I've watched it several times because the cast and premise (Sherlock Holmes tracking down Jack the Ripper) are so appealing, and because I always forget how disappointing it is.
But Holmes was the not first fictional detective to investigate the Ripper murders. In 1973 the BBC screened a series in which the nation's most celebrated television detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor.
It was this series that introduced the public to the theory that the Ripper had been the eldest son of the future Edward VII, Prince Albert Victor. Stephen Knight did not publish his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution until 1976.
The 1973 television series avoided turning these terrible murders into a parlour game – Martin Crookall describes its approach well:
The format is simple, level-headed and unmelodramatic. On one level, Barlow and Watt move around a contemporary investigation room, surrounded by books, copies of newspapers, such documentary evidence as there is, and reconstruct the five canonical murders in chronological order.
They don’t dramatise things, they talk like senior Detectives sifting evidence, looking for similarities and anomalies, testing the weight of the evidence against their professional experience, building up a picture of the time, the place, the people and the events, as fairly and neutrally as they can. Naturally, they talk as the characters they are playing, indulging in a never belaboured degree of the banter and cynicism of the veterans they are.
Interspersed with this is the reconstruction. Intelligently, and in keeping with the series’ aim to be as factual and complete as possible, these eschew any reconstruction of the killings themselves and lapse into drama only once, showing fourth victim Catherine Eddowes being released from police cells after sobering up, only to be murdered within thirty minutes. She’s the only one of the five victims to actually be depicted in persona.
I'm writing this post because the whole series has reappeared on YouTube – it has a history of coming and going there.
The clip I have chosen above comes from the sixth and final episode. In it Joseph Gorman sets out the meat of the theory and claims that he is the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. I don't believe a word of it, and Wikipedia says he later admitted to the Sunday Times that his story was a fiction. Elwyn Jones, one of the writers of this series, was introduced to him when he told one of his police contacts that he was working on a series about Jack the Ripper.
Finally, a moan and then my Trivial Fact of the Day.
The moan is that when the Rest is History tackled the Ripper story, it said that Barlow and Watt were still in Z-Cars in 1973. In fact, they had left the show as long ago as 1965 to appear in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. By 1973 Barlow had a series of his own, Barlow at Large.
And my Trivial Fact of the Day? It's that Jack Warner's daughter in the often misremembered Dixon of Dock Green was first played by Billie Whitelaw.
Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.
That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)
And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.
Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.
What’s the most frightening thing you’ve seen on television? I can remember an episode of Sexton Blake, shown during children’s hour on ITV, in which Tinker, the great detective’s resourceful young assistant was measured for his coffin by a sinister undertaker while he was still alive.
A bit of research tells me that the Sexton Blake story involving Mr Tapp the undertaker was screened in two parts when I was seven years old.
Don’t listen to the Haunted Generation mob and their claims for the Seventies: we Boomers had a harder time of it in the Sixties.
If I’m allowed to mention films I saw on television, then the scene in the Bob Hope picture The Cat and the Canary where a hand reaches through the wall behind a bedhead and searches the bed while the occupant sleeps hit me pretty hard.
Until then I’d assumed that if my back was to the wall then at least I was safe from attack by bogeyman from that direction.
Finding The Exorcism
But if I have to name just one frightening programme then it has to be a television play that I saw when I was 12. For decades, as I waited impatiently for the internet to be invented, I didn’t know even what it had been called.
But then I bought a collection of television criticism by the influential Welsh academic Raymond Williams. I began reading his review of a play by Don Taylor called The Exorcism, and it became clear that this was what had scared me all those years ago.
The Exorcism was broadcast by the BBC on Bonfire Night 1972, as part of a series of seven plays called Dead of Night. Originally there were meant to be eight, but the now-famous The Stone Tape came in at 90 minutes and so did not fit the series format. Only three of the seven survive today and the good news is that The Exorcism, which was the first in the series, is one of them.
You can buy those three plays on a DVD from the British Film Institute. The website there describes The Exorcism well:
The best known and perhaps the most terrifying of the episodes – four wealthy, middle-class friends (Clive
Swift, Edward Petherbridge, Anna Cropper and Sylvia Kay) gather for a Christmas dinner in a country cottage only to find that the past will not rest while they feast.
But as I don’t want to have to worry about spoilers here, and as I’m sure you are busy, I suggest you watch The Exorcism on YouTube now while I add some spoiler space.
You may want to have a stiff drink by you.
Are you OK? I did warn you.
When I discovered The Exorcism was on YouTube it took me a while to pluck up the courage to watch it. When I did, it wasn’t as frightening as the first time and not because I was no longer 12 years old. It was more that I knew what was coming. I found I had remembered for 40 years the wine that turned to blood, the total blackness outside the windows and the news bulletin at the end about a bizarre Christmas tragedy.
My motivation for writing this post was to alert readers to this extraordinary piece of television drama. I don’t want to go on saying “Wasn’t it scary when…?”, but if you want to hear a discussion of the play you’ve just watched, then I recommend an episode of A Very British Horror. One of the participants says The Exorcism is the only thing he has watched in the making of the podcast that has given him a nightmare.
What I shall do is offer some thoughts on the individual television play as an art form, some notes on the cast of The Exorcism and, finally, a look at its fortunes after this first broadcast.
The television play
Watching The Exorcism today, it speaks of the year 1972 in three ways. First, it is an essay in folk horror, in that the rational outsiders encounter something dark and rural and come off second best – it is the cottage that has exorcised its new inhabitants, not they who have exorcised the echoes of past horrors.
Second, it is a piece of popular entertainment that wears its politics on its sleeve: there is a discussion of whether it’s possible to be a rich socialist, and the play gives a very definite answer in the negative. Just ask the police officers who had to turn out on Christmas morning.
There would be questions in the House today, but such overt political content was unremarkable in 1972. The BBC broadcast a series call Play for Today between 1970 and 1984 that, by the end, encompassed more than 300 individual plays, and many shared The Exorcism’s politics. It’s been said that if you watched nothing but Play for Today, you would have forecast a Communist revolution in 1979 rather than Margaret Thatcher’s election victory.
And there is a third way in which The Exorcism speaks of 1972: it is a television play that does not aspire to be a movie. Though television drama’s critical standing today is perhaps higher than it has ever been, it does give the impression that it hankers after the sheen of Hollywood. But when The Exorcism was broadcast, the television play was seen as a discrete art form and it, at least, looked to the theatre at least as much as it looked to the cinema.
Don Taylor himself, in his memoir Days of Vision, described the television studio as:
…an empty space. A prepared canvas ready to paint on; the vacuum of an open mind waiting to be filled. It can offer the landscape of the imagination, ready to be entered, a world inside the head as vivid, often more vivid than the world outside the eyes that the film camera photographs so faithfully. It can offer nothingness, waiting to become something, a world waiting to be created out of the chaos of four characterless walls, a shiny floor, and a grid of lights. It is something waiting to happen, a statement ready to be made. One object or person placed within it makes a quite specific and individual point. Two, and the play begins.
You can hear about Taylor’s approach to television drama from his son, the actor Jon Dryden Taylor, in an edition of the podcast The Box of Delights. It’s worth mentioning that part of what makes The Exorcism such a claustrophobic experience is his use of close ups, and another part is that the play takes place in real time - it follows the verities.
I grasped this difference in approach, when compared to today’s television, through watching the 1961 Granada Television production of John Arden’s play Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. When I say it was clear that the aesthetic behind it was that of the theatre rather than the cinema, I don’t mean that Granada had just filmed a stage performance or that the acting was too broad. The cast - Patrick McGoohan, John Thaw, Freda Jackson, Stratford Johns - was far too good for that.
What I mean is that the viewer is aware the performance is taking place in a television studio, and even expects to see the cameras at any moment. You don’t, but you are left wondering if it would matter if you did. Has anyone ever produced Brechtian television?
The cast
Of the four actors in The Exorcism, only Edward Petherbridge is still alive. Like the rest of the cast, he appeared on television far more than on film – it is harder to trace people’s stage careers, but all four were considerable theatre actors too.
Petherbridge is best known for playing Lord Peter Wimsey in BBC adaptations of the Dorothy L. Sayers novels. He also appeared in The Ash Tree – one of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas.
Anna Cropper, who is so impressive here, made her career principally in television plays. She was married for a time to William Roache, who has played Ken Barlow in Coronation for 64 years now, making him the world’s longest-serving actor in a continuous role. Their son Linus Roache had a huge reputation as a Shakespearian actor when he was a young man, but his star seemed to fade. He was very impressive in Stephen Poliakoff’s television series Summer of Rockets in 2019. Anna Cropper died in 2007.
Sheila Kay also worked more in television than films, often appearing in situation comedies, and she later trained and practised as a psychotherapist. She died in 2019.
Clive Swift was a mainstay of British television and is the most recognisable face in the cast because of his years opposite Patricia Routledge as Mr Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. He appeared in the first two Ghost Stories for Christmas: The Stalls of Barchester and A Warning to the Curious. The way he carries off those Seventies threads in The Exorcism is greatly to be admired. He too died in 2019.
The afterlife of The Exorcism
The Exorcism was put on as a stage play in London in 1975. Don Taylor, as his son explains in The Box of Delights podcast, was unhappy with changes that had been made to the script and wanted his name taken off the production. His agent, the famous and fearsome Peggy Ramsay, threatened to disown him if this was how he reacted to his first West End opening, so he relented.
Rachel, the part played by Anna Cropper in the original television production, was played on stage by Mary Ure. She had been married to the playwright John Osborne and been in the cast of his groundbreaking Look Back in Anger. But by the early Seventies, her career and health were in decline, but the opening night of The Exorcism was seen as a triumph.
Ure had drunk her share of champagne and then took her prescription medication on top of it. The mix was enough to kill her. Anna Cropper stepped in to play the role, but the press made great fun of the idea that The Exorcism was a cursed play.
Nevertheless, its small cast and gripping story have made it a favourite with amateur theatre companies. But would I want to watch it again?
This is the one I've been waiting for. I've not watched it yet, but if they leave Richard III alone in the interview room with Barlow, he'll get a confession out of him in no time.
It's an odd programme: Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor investigate historical crimes in the roles of Charlie Barlow and John Watt that they played in Z Cars, Softly Softly and Softly Softly: Task Force.
This device was first used in a six-part investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders screened in 1973. It was notable because the writer, Elwyn Jones, introduced the conspiracy theory involving the Royal Family that Stephen Knight later popularised in his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, which was published in 1976.
Now to watch them tackle Richard III and see Barlow get his man to cough.
Stratford Johns's Charlie Barlow was the most famous detective on British television from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s, appearing successively in Z-Cars; Softly, Softly; Softly; Softly: Task Force; and Barlow at Large.
His most interesting spin-off, however, was Jack the Ripper, in which Johns and his perennial sidekick, Frank Windsor's John Watt, investigated, in character, the notorious East End murders of 1888.
The series ran to six parts and included reconstructions of the inquests of the murder victims so the viewer could hear the contemporary evidence being given as well as Barlow and Watts's assessment of it.
What I didn't realise until now is that this series appeared three years before Stephen Knight published his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, which treated Sickert's story as the explanation of the murders. That story has been discredited by more recent research and it appears that Joseph Sickert was not even the artist's son.
The video above will show you Joseph Sickert and a little of Barlow and Watt's discussion afterwards. If you want to watch the whole series, episode 1 is here and YouTube will offer you the rest.
It’s 1968 and downstairs I can hear the theme music for Softly, Softly playing. But it’s eight o’clock and I'm only eight years old. Not suprisingly, I long to watch the programme.
A couple of years later, when I could watch it, Softly, Softly had metamorphosed into Softly, Softly Task Force and it is an episode of this latter series - Copper Wire, first broadcast on 1 December 1971 - that I shall be writing about here.
But to set it in context, we need a bit history of first - the history of police series on British television, or at least on the BBC.
The fall and rise of PC Dixon
That history really begins in the cinema. Ealing Studios released its police drama The Blue Lamp in 1950. It dealt with the murder of a London policeman who’s coming up to retirement, PC George Dixon played by Jack Warner, and the capture of his killer.
As in many British films of that decade, the villains are much more sharply drawn than the good characters. So the young hoodlum who shoots Dixon after robbing a cinema of its takings, Dirk Bogarde, still seems sexy and dangerous today. But James Hanley as the new constable who lodges with the Dixons and acts as a sort of surrogate son comes over as a wet haddock.
There is an indefinable feel of the theatrical backcloth behind their words and actions ... The sense that the policemen they are acting are not policemen as they really are, but policemen as an indulgent tradition has chosen to think they are, will not be banished.
That didn’t stop George Dixon rising from the dead to become nearly immortal.
In 1955 the BBC began to screen Dixon of Dock Green, a police series featuring several characters from The Blue Lamp, including a resurrected PC Dixon - again played by Jack Warner.
Warner was to go on playing him until the series ended in 1976, by which time he was 80 himself.
Dixon of Dock Green is written off in the TV history books as being ridiculously dated long before its 21 years on screen were up.
I remember watching it as a small boy in the Sixties - it was shown at Saturday teatime, so no bedtime issues arose - and each episode began and ended with a homily delivered straight to camera by Dixon himself.
These generally ran along the lines of “Young Johnny wasn’t a bad lad, but he fell in with the wrong crowd.”
Before I move this history on, I should add that, out of curiosity, I watched a 1970 episode of Dixon of Dock Green and found it wasn’t dated at all.
Yes, Jack Warner was visibly at least two decades past retirement age – even his son-in-law Andy Crawford, the equivalent of Jimmy Hanley’s character in the film, must have been disappointed not to have made it past Detective Sergeant at his age.
But the rest of it felt like 1970 and there was good use made of then-derelict Dockland locations.
Even Dixon’s opening monologue, which was about how you could work with someone for years but never really know them, was haunting rather than cosy.
Enter Barlow and Watt
In 1962 the BBC embarked on a new police series set in a new town in the North West of England.
The first episode of Z-Cars began with Detective Inspector Barlow (played by Stratford Johns) and Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor) meeting by the graveside of another version of the original PC Dixon – an old constable gunned down by a young hoodlum.
While the makers of The Blue Lamp could only suggest more bobbies on the beat, Barlow and Watt have a modern answer to the problem.
Watt says:
“If we had crime patrols like other divisions, Reggie Farrow would be alive today. If we had crime patrols in Newtown, when the burglar alarm went at the factory it would have been two tough commandos that tearaway met instead of old Reggie and his bicycle.”
And the rest of the episode shows them assigning suitable officers to these new motorised patrols.
The original run of Z-Cars between 1962 and 1965 – it was one of the last British TV dramas to be screened live – had a strong impact and was hailed as presenting the police as they really were.
When it returned in 1968, it was without Barlow and Watt, who had become the dominant characters in a new show. These later years of Z-Cars was never as ground-breaking as the original series, and scheduled like a soap on two evenings a week, it was in danger of turning into a soap.
Still, the Z-Cars theme tune remains one of the greats.
I finally get to watch Softly, Softly
Barlow and Watt had moved on to Softly, Softly. This new drama series again tried to keep up with developments in British policing by covering the work of a regional crime squad – in this case in a fictional region called Wyvern located somewhere near Bristol.
The series took its name from the motto of Lancashire Constabulary Training School: ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’
In 1969 Barlow and Watt, by now promoted to Detective Chief Superintendent and Detective Superintendent respectively, moved to a new series called Softly, Softly: Taskforce. Set in the fictional town of Thamesford (and filmed in the Medway towns in Kent), this concentrated on a team of uniform and plain-clothes police establish to carry out large operations.
It was this series that I got to watch as a boy.
Copper Wire
I’ve chosen Copper Wire for two reasons: the first is what it tells us about policing in 1971 and the second is the quality of the acting.
To get a result, the Task Force relies on either catching the criminals red handed or getting a confession out of them. There is little mention of forensic science beyond fingerprinting - the analysis of blood groups could eliminate suspects but not convict them.
And to get catch criminals in the act you needed a tip off, either from police intelligence – another force hearing rumours that one of their regular customers is planning a job in Thamesford – or from an informer. Every detective has his informers and their identities are jealously hidden even from superior officers.
If you wanted a confession, then Barlow was your man. This was the age before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, but I can’t remember an episode when he beat it out of a suspect. He could be a bully, and he was sometimes shown bullying the innocent, but he also used cunning and psychology. In Copper Wire he resembles a priest hearing confession.
Barlow is being driven home by his sergeant from a dinner where he has drunk too much. Listening in on the police radio for entertainment, he hears a name he recognises from his days in the North West. Partly out of mischief and partly out of nostalgia, he inserts himself in the investigation.
What follows in the second half of this episode is a wonderful two-hander between Stratford Johns as Barlow and Peter Kerrigan as Tiger Mulholland.
Stratford Johns was a mighty actor. Before Z-Cars he had been with the Royal Court in its glory years and he would later shave his head and play Daddy Warbucks in the first West End production of Annie. When he left Softly, Softly: Task Force in 1972, initially to play Barlow in a series of his own, it was never as good.
But Peter Kerrigan is marvellous here too. In what could be a stereotyped Liverpudlian role, he underplays beautifully. Kerrigan had been a docker on Merseyside and was later to appear in many of Alan Bleasdale’s television plays.
Not that good acting in Task Force was a surprise. Thamesford’s Chief Constable was played by Walter Gotell, whose granite face and gravelly voice made him a regular Bond villain. And the dog-handler PC Snow was played by Terence Rigby, who was one of Harold Pinter’s favourite actors.
Frank Windsor devoted much of his career to playing John Watt, but when the series ended he went back to the stage and won warm reviews for his comic acting.
My favourite Task Force character as a boy was Inspector Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler. I was later to learn that Bowler had been a member of the Soho set in the 1950s - here he is talking about the artist John Minton.
To end, and to prove there was some humour in Task Force, here from another episode is a short exchange between Inspector Hawkins and PC Snow, who is gently breaking in his new police dog.
When I saw the cast of this 1961 television play included two Liberal England heroes - Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns - I had to have the DVD of it.
Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is a play by John Arden, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1959 to a less than ecstatic reception. Arden himself adapted it for television, and the general view after it was broadcast was that he had made the story easier to follow.
As Wikipedia explains:
The work follows three privates in the British Army and their sergeant, all of whom are deserters from a foreign imperialist war. Serjeant Musgrave and his men, Hurst, Sparky and Attercliffe, come to a northern English coal mining town in 1879, posing as a recruiting party. The community is in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by winter snow.
The soldiers have with them a store of arms and the body of Billy Hicks, a soldier from the town they are visiting who died in that imperialist war.
When Musgrave calls a meeting in the town square:
Instead of recruiting townsmen, Musgrave takes out a Gatling gun. The gun is loaded and pointed at the audience. Then the soldiers hoist up the skeleton of Billy Hicks on a lamppost, still dressed in uniform. Musgrave dances below it reciting a rhyme:
... Up he goes, and no-one knows, who it was that raised him. ... He sits on your back and you'll never, never lose him....
Musgrave talks about the atrocities that followed the soldier's death, and explains that since this single death caused five on the other side, five times five townsfolk should be killed to avenge their deaths.
Whether Musgrave is right or has been seized by religious mania is left open, but his plan fails when his men argue amongst themselves and the dragoons arrive.
First, a word about the look of this television play. Though it originates in the theatre, there is nothing stagey about it. This is television in the round.
At one point the camera shoulders its way through a crowd for a tight close up of one actor's face and, though you don't see cameras or cables, it's obvious that the production is taking place in a studio. There is a strong sense that its makers were exploring the possibilities of a new medium and had not yet settled for making television dramas as much like cinema films as possible.
Patrick McGoohan gives a powerful performance as Musgrave, and you can see a little of him in the video below, along with Ian Bannen, who played the role at the Royal Court,
You can also see Stratford Johns in the video, with stick-on whiskers, playing the mayor, who also owns the coal mines. Musgrave has marked him out as the first against wall and he is no leader.
One of Musgrave's men is played by a young John Thaw in what may have been his first screen role, with the result that the two actors who dominated British police dramas for almost 40 years, as Barlow, Regan and Morse, share the screen here.
And Freda Jackson, as she always seems to be, is magnificent. Sympathetic but no pushover, she holds her own with McGoohan's Musgrave.
Someone writing about her brassy Mrs Voray in the 1948 film No Room at the Inn said the performance looked forward to the powerful Northern women of Coronation Street more than a decade later. The soap opera had just started at Granada when Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was filmed at their studios. And again you feel she would have been wonderful in it.
As to John Arden, I can remember that when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his Pearl, a new play written specially for radio, it was treated as a big occasion. But looking it up, I find that was 45 years ago and I can't recall hearing him mentioned since.
Stratford Johns's Inspector Barlow began life in Z Cars in 1962. The critics all say that this series had such an impact because, until then, police drama on television had meant Dixon of Dock Green, which presented a laughably cosy picture of British policing.
Not many episodes of Dixon survive - certainly, few have made their way on to YouTube - but I thought I would watch one of them so I could form my own judgement.
So I chose Wasteland from 1970 and was pleasantly surprised.
Yes, you have to set aside the fact that Jack Warner was by then visibly a couple of decades past retirement age. And even Dixon's son-in-law Andy Crawford, played by Peter Byrne, must have been disappointed not to have made it past Detective Sergeant at his age.
But get past that and there's nothing cosy about it.
Dixon's opening monologue, the description of the missing police officer's dream by his wife and, above all, the vast derelict landscape in which it is set give Wasteland an eerie quality.
And, perhaps because the show was developed by the Labour-supporting Ted Willis, the script is on the side of the ordinary constable rather than the higher ranks - note the disparaging comment about the police medical service.
Among the cast we find - long before Inspector Morse or The Box of Delights - James Grout as Chief Inspector Prescott. His boss, Chief Superintendent Bannister, is played by Arnold Peters, who was the voice of Jack Wooley on The Archers for many years.
You may also recognise the mother of the little boy who collects the numbers of police cars. She is Anna Karen, better known as Olive from On the Buses.
But the real star of the show is that landscape. I believe it was filmed on the Isle of Dogs and that the 'wasteland' is the Mudchute, which is now a park with an urban farm and its own station on the Docklands Light Railway.
Some people on Twitter say they recognise the vast industrial building at the start of the episode from Doctor Who and Blake's 7. Where do television companies find to film now that Docklands has been redeveloped? These derelict riverside locations were a favourite of Gideon and The Sweeney too.
So that's The Wasteland for you - a warning not to accept the word of critics uncritically.
