The Joy of Six 1398

Denis Mikhailov, a Russian dissident lawyer now exiled to Poland, explains how Trump’s generosity to Putin only entrenches his tyranny: "For Putin, this meeting was not a platform for negotiations, but above all an instrument of political legitimisation. On the one hand, it was an opportunity to show the world that he is still being received, that he is capable of holding dialogue on equal terms with the President of the United States, despite the warrant of the International Criminal Court and his de facto political isolation."

"Your politically engaged supporters inhabit the networks where these narratives form. They populate the WhatsApp groups, the comment sections, the office conversations where political meaning gets made. When you demoralise them, you surrender these spaces to your opponents. The passionate few shape the context in which everyone else encounters politics." AE Snow discusses the government's failure to get its message across. 

Magda Osman says that though laws are being introduced across the world to reduce 'psychological harm' experienced online, there is no clear definition of what it is.

"Pubs help people feel connected to a local place. When they close, they can become sites of mourning, a painful reminder of change and decline. One resident of a former colliery village in Nottinghamshire said of the pub she had once worked in – now derelict, fire damaged and vandalised as it awaits redevelopment – that despite her wish that it had remained open it was now better to 'knock it down' to 'put us out of our misery'." Thomas Thurnell-Read and Robert Deakin have researched what is lost when pubs close.

"As editor of The Nation in Trinidad during the 1950s, C.L.R. James campaigned for the Barbadian Frank Worrell to be appointed as the first full-time black captain. The selectors' 'whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain', James later wrote in Beyond a Boundary." Tim Wigmore on race, cricket and the history of the West Indies.

Dave Haslam champions a forgotten film  - The White Bus: "Scripted by Shelagh Delaney in 1965, it’s directed by Lindsay Anderson. The cast includes a very young Anthony Hopkins, and Arthur Lowe who had already played a role in Coronation Street but would go on to star as Captain Mainwaring in the hit TV series Dad’s Army."

Shelagh Delaney is interviewed by an alien in 1959

The latest Backlisted podcast is a great edition on Shelagh Delaney and her 1958 play A Taste of Honey. It was her first play, written and produced before she was 20. It was then filmed in 1962 with Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan and Murray Melvin.

As the Backlisted blurb asks:

How did a Salford teenager change the face of British theatre? Nearly 70 years on, why do the play's themes and characters continue to resonate in the 21st century? And what did Shelagh Delaney do for an encore (and why do so few people know about it)? This show will open your eyes.

The show certainly reminds us that the modern world did not start with the Beatles. Take the interview above from 1959, which you can hear in it.

Delaney comes over as a thoroughly contemporary figure, while the interviewer sounds like an alien. Where did he learn to pronounce the world "play" like that? 

It would be comforting to think his assumptions that Delaney must had help to write the play and faint derision for her "native Lancashire" are equally strange to us now, but I'm afraid I often hear echoes of such views.

I can't recommend this edition of Backlisted highly enough. Listen out for an anecdote about an exchange between Dirk Bogarde and Murray Melvin during the filming of HMS Defiant. 

And let's end this post with a piece of A Taste of Honey trivia from 2003:

Earlier in the day Home Office Minister and Salford MP, Hazel Blears, revealed that she appears in kitchen sink classic, A Taste of Honey, shown at the Festival. "They filmed it at the bottom of our road" she recalled "And I was in one scene wearing bunches and a little kilt. My brother sang `The Big Ship Sails On The Ally Ally O'..."

I dreamt about you last night - fell out of bed twice!

Embed from Getty Images

In the latest London Review of Books podcast Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her 1958 play A Taste of Honey.

Delaney was a female, working-class dramatist. She put Black, female and working-class characters into her plays not as personifications of social problems but as people in their own right.

She is often lumped in with the Angry Young Men, but there was little that was feminist about that movement.

Happy Shelagh Delaney Day

Today is the first ever Shelagh Delaney Day,

That BBC report reveals that Morrisey's lyrics owe more to her play A Taste of Honey than I had realised.

The lines "I dreamt about you last night/and I fell out of bed twice" in Reel Around the Fountain come from it, but the report lists several other borrowings.

I posted a terrific profile of the writer from 1960  - Shelagh Delaney's Salford - back in July, so here is a clip from the film of A Taste of Honey with Dora Bryan, Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin.

Shelagh Delaney's Salford (1960)

After I posted a clip from A Taste of Honey as a tribute to Dora Bryan, a reader kindly tweeted me the link to this short film.

Shelagh Delaney's Salford was made by Ken Russell and broadcast on 25 September 1960, when I was precisely six months old. She comes over as a striking and attractive figure.

The story of A Taste of Honey is worth retelling. Michael Billngton did so after Delaney died in 2011:

Shelagh Delaney ... was almost as important for what she symbolised as for what she wrote. She was, as Jeanette Winterson wrote in the Guardian last year, "the first working-class woman playwright". And even if nothing she later wrote achieved the success of her first play, A Taste of Honey, Delaney proved that an 18-year-old Salford girl could breach the walls of what, even in 1958, was still a mainly middle-class, male-dominated British theatre. ...

Delaney had been taken to see Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme at Manchester's Opera House and came away convinced she could do better. So, in little more than a fortnight, she banged out a play about a feisty Salford girl, Jo, who is left alone by her flighty mum one Christmas, goes to bed with a transient Nigerian sailor, gets pregnant and is lovingly tended by an effeminate art student. Having written the piece, Delaney had the nous to send it to Joan Littlewood, who had turned the Theatre Royal, Stratford East into a vibrant home of new drama. 

In her autobiography, Littlewood made no bones about the fact that a lot of work was needed to knock Delaney's play into shape. She liked the sparky dialogue but felt many of the scenes were undeveloped and the plot anecdotal. So she got Avis Bunnage, as Jo's mum, to use her talent for direct address and brought in a jazz quartet, consisting of trumpet, drums, guitar and sax, to set the mood. Delaney's slightly artless script quickly became a critical success.

Her career never reached these heights again. In some ways she was a female version of Leicester's Colin Wilson, who was taken up by the critics for his first book The Outsider and butchered by them for his second.

And I do like the comment in the original theatre programme for A Taste of Honey, as quoted by Rachel Cooke:

She is the antithesis of London's 'angry young men'. She knows what she is angry about.

Six of the Best 204

"The one thing missing from today's housing strategy will be an outright acknowledgment that lower house prices would be a good thing. It's still too much of a political taboo. But ministers know that it's exactly what the younger generation need." Good sense from Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent.

Index on Censorship examines government plans to ban demonstrations during the 2012 London Olympics.

A Dutch MEP claims European politicians have been gagged over the sharing of passenger information with the USA, reports Computer World UK.

"Tea drinking fills the public house, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon as they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel… the girl that has been brought up merely to boil the tea kettle, and assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to fix his affections upon her." Ms B-d's School of Venus reminds us that William Cobbett had no high opinion of tea as a beverage.

The Daily draws together some of the tributes paid to Shelagh Delaney, who died on Sunday.

"Two archaeologists ... collecting plants in Greenland, made the chemical discovery: 'Some of their samples were unusually rich in nitrogen-15, and subsequent digs revealed that these plants had been growing above long-abandoned Norse farmsteads'." BLDGBLOG speculates on the uses of plants in archaeology.