The Joy of Six 1505

Bee Boileau, Lucas Conwell ans Peter Levell find that Help to Buy schemes don't help the people who most need it: "The affordability gains from the equity loan schemes were concentrated among higher-income individuals. Since these individuals would normally be expected to be able to save for a minimum deposit quite quickly even without Help to Buy, it is likely that these schemes accelerated their first home purchase by a few years rather than making the difference between becoming a homeowner or not in the longer term."

"Rebekah Pierre, deputy director of the charity Article 39, said ... posters advertising payments of 'up to £932 per week per child' 'stopped me in my tracks' when she encountered them in a local shopping centre." Joanne Parkes on criticism of a fostering recruitment campaign by Croydon Council, arguing that its messaging risks reducing children in care to a "price tag".

Emma John reports that some researchers say that the common framing of ADHD as a characteristic for success can be unhelpful for those who are struggling.

James Cracknell says that AI is being used to undermine real local journalism: "North London News features stories about Enfield and Barnet and other boroughs that are put together by AI bots using existing stories published on other websites, including our own. This is bad enough – but what's worse is that they are also adding fake quotes, fake people (including fake councillors), fake organisations and fake facts into these stories as well. Whatever AI system they are using, it is massively flawed."

"Several startling passages of dialogue have sent me scrolling through the week’s listings to unveil an author. Katie Hims can nail a character through their choice of confectionery: of course, the trad Jim Lloyd would go for wine gums. Nick Warburton scripted a bonkers visit by a character obsessed with train timetables and pebbles, then cleverly had one of the most stolid residents complain that the incomer was a bore." Susannah Clapp praises The Archers scriptwriters.

"In Britain hauntings occur in ancient manor houses, old inns, and Gothic asylums – places whose very age makes them groan and creak, where shadows sit deep, and which are scarred by the lingering imprint of lives lived and lost. And yet arguably the most famous British ghost story of the 20th century took place somewhere quite different: in a humble council house, only half a century old, in Enfield, north London." Ray Newman considers the haunting of social housing.

Some staggering moments from 75 years of The Archers

A fellow Liberal Alliance councillor told me back in the Eighties that, when he was a small boy, he and his friends were avid listeners to Dick Barton – Special Agent. 

When they heard that a new series called The Archers was to occupy its slot, they naturally assumed it would be about Robin Hood and his Merrie Men.

Imagine their disappointment when they tuned in for the first episode...

At the start of this year, the Guardian celebrated 75 years of The Archers with 75 of its most staggering moments. Here are few they chose:

• Outsiders have always been treated with suspicion in Ambridge. In its first year, unrepentant townie Bill Slater was fatally injured in a brawl outside the Bull.
• Nelson Gabriel, once voted the Greatest Rogue in the series’ history, vanished in an alleged plane crash in 1967. Implicated in the Great Borchester Mail Van Robbery, he was eventually returned by Interpol.
• Adam Macy’s overprotective parenting style might be partly explained by the fact that in 1970, at the age of three, he was kidnapped from the Bull by a couple of Brummie bunglers hoping to blackmail his wealthy paternal grandfather. Three days later, he was rescued from the big bad city thanks to a tip-off from Sid Perks.
• Fresh from her adventures at Greenham Common, Guardian-subscriber Pat Archer almost left Express-reader Tony for her women’s studies lecturer in 1984 … until Tony wooed her back with a bold plan to go organic. (On the farm, not in the bedroom.)
• Four years after their first kiss, Emma and Ed Grundy made their relationship public – a delay explained by the fact that in the meantime she had married and had a baby with his brother Will.

William and Ed Grundy are the King's sons William and Harry

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One of the great Archers scenes was the one with Clarrie in labour with her first child:

"Eddie, if I die, I don't mind you marrying again. But not that Jolene."

After the baby had been born, she told Eddie and Joe:

"His name's William and I want the house cleaned before I come home."

It was clear that William Grundy was named by Clarrie after Charles and Diana's son William.

Which has made me realise how much the Charles III's sons resemble Ed Grundy's:

• William – upright, respectable and just a bit of a prig – is William.
• Ed – chaotic, a little dodgy but likeable – is Harry.

QED.

One of the perks of helping out with Liberal Democrat News at party conference was that I used to get to talk Cambridge Footlights with Adrian Slade and The Archers with Jock Gallagher.

In one of those conversations Jock confirmed the truth of the old Archers' Anarchists theory that Brian had murdered the real Adam when he was a boy and buried him somewhere on Bridge Farm. (They never got on.)

God save me from former Cambridge Footlights members stretching their brand

I was in Sainsbury's the other week when Ben Miller came on the PA. You will remember him from the sketch show Armstong and Miller. (Or was it Mitchell and Miller? Or Miller and Webb?)

What was he doing in the supermarket? Plugging his latest children's book.

Not long after that, Humanists UK announced a collection of essays, What I Believe. (It was actually published today.)

And among the contributors - indeed listed first on the page announcing it - are two former Footlights members, Sandi Toksvig and Stephen Fry.

Also announced recently was the presenter of the BBC's eagerly awaited new series Chess Masters. Any guesses? 

It was Sue Perkins.

The British left has accorded comedians too high a status for decades now, perhaps because their politicians have been so uninspiring. Future historians will have to account for the cultural eminence Fry enjoyed for so long.

There used at least to be a second route into BBC comedy - the Socialist Workers Party. But now the SWP is too toxic for any ambitious comedian to associate themselves with it, the Footlights has an open field.

Of course, a person can be good at more than one thing, and, of course, Cambridge takes some of the brightest and best.

But I am reminded of the days when I helped produce Liberal Democrat News at conference. One of the things that made it so enjoyable was that I got to talk about the Archers with Jock Gallagher, who produced the programme for many years, and to talk about the Footlights with Adrian Slade, the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the society.

I remember Adrian saying that Cook was the funniest person he had ever met. He would have you laughing for a whole evening, yet the next day you wouldn't remember a thing he had said. This, I think, was because Cook’s greatest contribution to British comedy - and he was enormously influential - was his absurdist attitude to serious things and important people.

But Adrian also said that there is all the difference in the world between being a stage actor and being a revue actor, where you put on a hat and a funny accent for 90 seconds and then move on.

You see that, I think, in Cook's films. If acting is reacting, then he gave his fellow cast members nothing to work with, because he seems wholly detached from what is going on around him. This sort of works with the characters he plays in The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and Bedazzled, but beyond that it certainly doesn't.

You can see something of the limitations of revue acting in the later careers of David Mitchell and Stephen Fry. In his latest success, Ludwig, Mitchell is essentially playing himself. Fry is a better actor, but even in his finest hour, the film Wilde from 1997, you came away with the idea that Oscar Wilde must have been very like Stephen Fry.

Add to this the way the British tend to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence - something that has fuelled more than one recent political career - and the increasing funding gap between private schools and the rest, and you realise that the future for former Footlights people will be like the present - only more so.

Did The Archers get George Grundy's sentence right?

My favourite YouTube barrister Alan Robertshaw looks at the Radio 4 soap's treatment of the trial and sentencing of Ambridge ne'er-do-well George Grundy.

For the most part, he concludes, they got things right. And, as ever, we learn something of the law and how courts operate along the way.

Book Review... Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown

Playing herself at the Borsetshire Fashion Show on The Archers in 1984, she sounded curiously flat and uninvolved, almost as though she couldn’t get to grips with her own character. After the first run-through, the producer, William Smethurst said: “That’s very good, Ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?” replied the princess.

Craig Brown noticed Princess Margaret's ubiquity when researching an earlier book of his. Open the biography of any public figure from the second half of the 20th century and she will be there in the index. Usually you will be directed to an anecdote about her where she appears haughty or rude.

Brown has turned these brief appearances into a study of Margaret. The tale is familiar: the failure to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the marriage to Lord Snowdon, the years of fun and scandal on Mustique, the decline in her health from too much tobacco  and alcohol, the death a few weeks before that of her mother.

Yet I learnt plenty that was new from Ma'am Darling. Margaret's wish to marry the war hero Townsend alarmed the royal family and court because he was divorced from his first wife. She was persuaded to abandon the idea and him by pressure that went all the way up to threatening to cut her off without a penny. Today's public would be more concerned that Townsend was 16 years older than Margaret, who had been only 13 when they met. After parting from Margaret, he went on to wed an even younger woman.

The happiest time in Margaret's life seems to have been the early years of her marriage to Lord Snowdon, when they were London's most fashionable couple - this was a few years before it began to Swing - and moved in glittering social and artistic circles, But their relationship soon soured, and Snowdon treated her with calculated cruelty.

Later she sought solace in the millionaire's paradise of Mustique with the amusing (Roddy Llewelyn) and the criminal (John Bindon). Then her health began to decline and she was seen about no more. She died in 2002, aged 71.

It was not a happy life, and reading about it strengthened my belief that a strong argument against having a monarchy is the impossible lives members of the Royal Family are forced to live.

Ma'am Darling has no index - I took the story about Margaret's appearance on The Archers, which is in the book, from a Guardian article - but I think I'm right in saying that the book omits the one wholly creditable story I have heard about Margaret.

This time I am quoting BBC News on Joan Littlewood's play Oh! What a Lovely War:

Littlewood gave the show a new political bite, as befitted a nation growing tired of deference. The family of Field Marshal Douglas Haig wanted to stop the show reaching the West End, claiming the portrayal of him was a crude caricature.

But [Victor] Spinetti recalls a useful royal visit when the play was still in Stratford. "One evening Princess Margaret came with Lord Cobbold, who as Lord Chamberlain was also the theatre censor.

"Afterwards Princess Margaret came backstage and said 'Well Miss Littlewood those things should have been said many years ago - don't you agree, Lord Cobbold?' He gave a thin smile and said 'Oh yes ma'am'. And Joan knew that was our permission to go into the West End."

Dixon of Dock Green: Not as cosy as the critics tell us

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.

Minor public schools, major public schools and deference

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One overlooked factor in the rise of Boris Johnson may be the instinctive deference that those who went to minor public schools show to those who went to major ones.

Here is Charles Collingwood - Brian Aldridge in The Archers - writing of his schooldays in his memories Brian and Me:

We played cricket against Ludgrove, which was frightfully smart and a serious feeder school for Eton and Harrow. The captain of cricket at Ludgrove was a boy called Mike Griffith, who went on to captain Sussex. On the day we played them, we got off the coach at Ludgrove, shook hands like adults then walked down this immaculate path to the cricket field. To our far left there was another immaculate path so I asked what was the significance of these mown paths? 

"Well except on match days," Mike told me. "The one we're walking on today is for the exclusive use of boys who are going to Eton" 

What about the other immaculate path?" I asked. 

"That's for the exclusive use of boys going to Harrow." 

"What about the unmown path in the middle?" 

"That's for boys going to other schools!!"

The punctuation is ropey, but you get the point.

Six of the Best 984

"What was Brexit like? America’s declaration of independence? A man leaving a golf club but demanding to still be allowed into the bar? Over the years, I went through a few analogies, but the one that persisted was of a married man who has for years enjoyed casually flirting with a work colleague. One evening he makes his traditional half-hearted pass, and instead of rolling her eyes, she replies: 'Go on, then'. A month later, he’s living out of his car and negotiating through lawyers to see his children one weekend a month, and he can’t really tell you how it happened." Robert Hutton on the experience of reporting Brexit.

Sofie Jenkinson says parks, gardens and green space are vital for our mental health.

Donald Trump's tactic of refusing to admit defeat is spreading through the Republican Party, reports David Siders.

"To the very last, he raged against the dying of the light by remaining implacably vigilant; furious at the indignities to which his country was being subjected by bogus patriots, spiv nationalists and sloganeering charlatans." Matthew d'Ancona pays tribute to John le Carré.

"The Archers taps into a myth that the nation’s spirit is most authentically to be found in the countryside, that its irreducible social unit is the village – as if the Industrial Revolution and 19th-century urbanisation were only aberrations." Charlotte Higgins analyses the weird genius of the radio soap opera.

Emily Knight looks at the work of Joseph Wright of Derby, the 'painter of light'.

Norman Lamb honoured alongside The Archers

We're signing off for the evening, but what an inspiring evening it was.

We'll leave you with this clip from Sir @NormanLamb's speech, who won the Making a Difference award. #BupaMindAwards pic.twitter.com/1GpjjZzAiB

— Mind (@MindCharity) November 13, 2019

Norman Lamb, who has just stood down as Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, received the 'Making a Difference' award at last night's Mind media awards.

This award is made each year to someone in the media who has set the agenda and initiated change.

Other winners included The Archers, which won the award for soaps and continual series.

Pig Steals Campers Beer, Gets Drunk & Starts a Fight With a Cow

A pig yesterday

Outdoor Revival wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges dedicated today's contest to the late Joe Grundy.

The next Academic Archers conference will be held in Sheffield

The fourth Academic Archers conference will take place from 5-7 April 2019 at the University of Sheffield.

Papers in the programme include:

• Is Ambridge Parish Council fit for purpose? The Localism Act (2011) and its impact on decision-making and governance in a small rural community
• "We Should have called him Damien." A discussion of the impact of Henry Archer’s early years on potential crimes of the future
• Queering Shula
• Spirits of the Am - A Paranormal Tour of Ambridge

Full details of the conference are on Eventbrite.

Six of the Best 732

Ed Thornley on the prospects for the Liberal Democrats in the North of England.

"I waited patiently for my turn to come. You don’t know if you will speak until your name gets called so all I could do was sit and hope." Ryan Lailvaux made his first speech to Lib Dem Conference in Bournemouth last month.

"To be of the radical centre does not, it seems to me, mean the kind of tiptoeing towards little tweaks to the system here and there, especially when the global economic system is designed to create billionaires and to enslave the rest of us, little by little." David Boyle demonstrates how to be a radical centrist without being a centrist dad.

Kate Raworth reminds us that the game of Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism.

"I do now suspect that, a couple of miles off the Irish boats, we housed a Magdalene Laundry of our own here in Liverpool." Ronnie Hughes has been researching a dark episode of local history.

Simon Williams surveys his career from James Bellamy to Lillian Bellamy.

Six of the Best 702

The Liberal Democrats went backwards in every English and Welsh seat they defended, Richard Holden on Conservative Home has some analysis we should all read.

David Runciman looks at this month's general election: "The Labour Party managed to park Brexit as an issue by acknowledging it as a fact while hinting that anything was still possible. This allowed the party to focus on other issues, above all on the growing public dissatisfaction with austerity, and to draw attention to the contrasting personalities of the two leaders."

Jerry Hayes puts the boot into the Conservative Party.

"Any good modern therapist working with children ... knows that discipline, limits and unconditional love, not medication, are what children really need, not drugs." Redmond O'Hanlon contrasts French and American approaches to ADHD.

Peter Wrigley on The Archers and the taxation of land.

A lonely grave in Lydd leads Flickering Lamps to speculate on a connection with the family of the last Tsar of Russia.

Six of the Best 677

"This lack of engagement with any actual evidence permeates the entire piece. The widely understood phenomenon of induced demand (building roads creates more traffic) is dismissed as ‘anti-car environmentalism’, while any attempts to point out that issues might be linked are dismissed as ‘holistic (i.e. woolly) thinking’." Nick Barlow is not impressed by a new publication on the environment from Liberal Reform.

"Edinburgh City Council has employed a social return on investment model which concluded that for every £1 of investment in parks, around £12 of benefits are delivered, with a higher return when money is invested in premier central parks." Janet Sillett says we should celebrate the full value of parks.

Jennifer Brown, Jeannie Mackie and Yvonne Shell offer psychological, legal and clinical commentary on the Helen Archer (Titchener) attempted murder trial in Radio 4’s The Archers.

"If Take Me High failed to anticipate how briefly concrete would reign, it was prescient in foreseeing which direction the city would turn next. When Birmingham wanted to shake off its concrete-and-cars reputation it looked to its canal network to provide a new narrative. The redevelopment of Brindley Place took place in the early 1990s but Cliff had started the whole process off almost two decades earlier." Catherine O’Flynn on a prescient Cliff Richard film.
RR
Jane Dismore on Pocahontas and the search for her bones.

Crown Court was always on television if you were off school in the 1970s. Ivan Kirby examines a case in depth.

The 1959 Rutland Grand Prix

Click on the still above to view this short film on the British Film Institute website.

There the blurb runs:

15-year-old Peter Ross may not have gone on to be the next Stirling Moss and would be far too young for any Champagne but he does have one important victory to his name: the 1959 Rutland Grand Prix. 

This downhill race for homemade go-karts brings out the camera of ATV's Midland Montage magazine programme with reporter Leslie Dunn, who was also regular on the BBC's Archers radio serial at the time.

Dunn played Christine's husband Paul, who deserted her and was later killed in a helicopter crash.

Six of the Best 642

"Labour should have the courage to stand up for what is right for Britain, which will be welcomed not just by the bulk of the 48 per cent (including most Labour voters) who voted to remain, but also many of the 52 per cent who are entitled to say that what is happening does not match what they were promised." Richard Corbett is right, but it became clear today that his party's leaders do not agree with him.

"Ed Balls’ performances on Strictly Come Dancing shed more light upon politics than is generally appreciated," argues Chris Dillow.

Martin Thompson offers a short biography of the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.

Freda Cooper reviews Magnus, a film about the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen who is currently defending his title in a match against Sergey Karjakin.

The actor David Troughton talks The Archers, Doctor Who and cricket with Heather Neill.

Radiolab explores why Americans were once terrified by quicksand but are not today...

The Archers: Rob Titchener and Neville Heath

I have just read Handsome Brute, an account of the life and crimes of Neville Heath. Apparently a charming RAF pilot and playboy, Heath murdered two women in a way that horrified and fascinated the British public in 1946.

My defence of true crime books, and this is a very good one, is that they depict the details of everyday life - clothes, food, furnishings - in a way that no other books do.

Handsome Brute, for instance, paints a picture of genteel Bournemouth in Word War II that changes your view of the town. Piers dismantled; beach mined; the hotels filled with civil servants from evacuated ministries and recuperating servicemen before it became a centre of preparations for D-Day; severely bombed by the Germans.

Handsome Brute is written by Sean O'Connor, and if the name sounds familiar it may be because he has edited The Archers for the past three years.

And listeners to that radio soap will be familiar with another handsome brute: Rob Titchener. I wonder if by any chance he and Neville Heath are related?

BBC denies that The Archers is becoming too like EastEnders

Nancy Banks-Smith on Helen and The Archers

The wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith has written a piece on The Archers for the Guardian. I assume it will be in tomorrow's G2.

She begins:

My grandmother – now, we’re going back a bit – used to describe pregnancy delicately as "being confined". It’s a phrase that suits Helen very well. Ever since she became pregnant, she has been a wraithlike presence, a pale face at the window of Blossom Hill Cottage, lank-haired and wearing the charity-shop clothes her husband, Rob, prefers, making occasional disconcerting distressed forays into an oblivious Ambridge. Wilkie Collins would have spat on his hands and whistled. 

This sorry situation burst into flames recently when a toad-in-the-hole caught fire. Who Torched the Toad escalated into a full-scale fight, with Helen showing a flash of spirit, Rob hitting her and five-year-old Henry, entering into the spirit of things, shoving a small school friend called Xanthe. Though, frankly, I think any child called Xanthe is just asking to be shoved.