The Joy of Six 1558

"Someone who attended a private school in London or the South East is 24 times more likely to become a permanent secretary than someone educated at a state school in the North. For a seat in the House of Lords, the gap is 23-fold. That is not class inequality plus regional inequality. It is what happens when they multiply." Nick Harrison asks if No 10 North will change who runs Britain.

Janice Mak says American schools are increasingly questioning whether every student needs a laptop: "This distinction between passive consumption and purposeful use is increasingly shaping school policy. Updated policies also reflect an emerging emphasis on age-appropriate screen use, student well-being and ensuring that technology can support, rather than replace, direct instruction and student collaboration."

Adam Sherwin reports on the plans to turn off Freeview television and the threat that poses to Talking Pictures TV.

Scott Barry Kaufman argues that the role of luck in successful lives is far greater than we realise.

"Do not be lulled into complacency by the family-film aesthetics. When Mom the Sheepdog instructed Babe the Pig to dominate other animals by abusing them, demeaning them, and telling them what to do, and Babe refused because disrespecting another living creature would be wrong? That moment might have radicalised a generation." Roxana Hadadi discusses the politics of Babe (1995).

"From the end of the Victorian period, Broadstairs was strategically marketing its Dickensian connections through postcards, guide books and festivals. In 1897 Alfred Harmsworth (founder of the Daily Mail) was one of the organisers of a ‘Dickens Village’, which recreated scenes including Defarge’s wine shop, Peggotty’s boat, the Great White Hart at Ipswich and the Old Curiosity Shop. The festival was successful enough to be repeated the following year." Carolyn Oulton on the long history of Dickens tourism in Broadstairs.

The Mouse That Roared (1959)

I had somehow avoided seeing The Mouse That Roared until a few weeks ago. Perhaps because I'd seen its sequel, The Mouse on the Moon, I expected a gentle comedy where the action all took place in the fictional European statelet of Grand Fenwick. So I was surprised to find that much of the film is set in New York.

That was not the only surprise. With its satirising of Cold War thinking and the multiple roles played by Peter Sellers, it looks forward to Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove. Grand Fenwick declares war on the USA, reasoning that when it is defeated it will reap a fortune in American. Only it wins the war and brings the US's deadly new Q bomb back home from New York.

Sellers gets good support from the welcome faces of William Hartnell and Leo McKern, and – remarkably – Jean Seberg has a prominent role too. It's one to watch next time it's on Talking Pictures TV.

Susan Stranks on appearing in the 1949 film of The Blue Lagoon

Talking Pictures screened the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon the other evening. It was an adaptation of the 1908 novel of the same name by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, which tells the story of a boy and girl marooned on a desert island. Nature takes its course, as nature will, and they grow up to have a baby.

The Talking Pictures screening reminded me that The Blue Lagoon was previously adapted for the screen in 1949. This was a British production, and the girl (played as a young adult by Jean Simmons) was played by Susan Stranks, who grew up to be a presenter of Magpie, ITV's would-be rival to Blue Peter.

And Susan Stranks can been seen talking about her experience of making the film in this British Film Institute video from 2021.

I was going to make a joke about the British children never taking their school uniforms off, but in fact our films were noticeably more relaxed about That Sort of Thing than was Hollywood in the Forties. In the Fifties, not so much.

Oh no! Here comes a minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago.

Minor celeb from a Channel 4 clips show of 20 years ago: We watched Magpie. Blue Peter was for posh kids.

Liberal England replies: Clear off.

By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite

I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.

Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.

As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.

Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.

The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.

But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.

The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.

What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:

This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.

The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.

And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.

John Wood: From silly-ass curate to world-weary genius

One of the great pleasures of Talking Pictures TV is spotting, with or without the aid of IMDb, British actors in their early years.

Take this vicar and silly-ass curate from the opening of Live Now Pay Later, a 1962 film that was shown the other day and is currently on the channel's online catch-up service. The vicar (on the left) is unmistakably Andrew Cruickshank, but who is his curate?

The answer is John Wood, a celebrated stage actor who paid the bills by taking small parts in a dozen British films of this era.

He then made an unexpected screen return, playing the world-weary genius Dr Stephen Falken, who has to be persuaded to try to attempt to save the world by Matthew Broderick, in the teen film WarGames.

I don't know how he came to be cast in a Hollywood film, but he was perfect for the part.

After that he appeared in a run of good films (Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ian McKellen's Richard III, The Madness of King George) and died in 2011 at the age of 81.

Live Now Pay Later, incidentally, tries so hard to entertain you that it becomes irritating. But you can see Ian Hendry (with hair) in the days when he got top billing, a miscast John Gregson and a generous handful of other British actors you can try to name.

Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South (1966)

 

The town's newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Josh Babarinde never misses a chance to repeat his claim that Eastbourne is the sunniest town in the UK.

So it's a shame that Talking Pictures TV is showing the short film Eastbourne: Sun Trap of the South from 1966 at 4.40 tomorrow morning - an hour when, Lord Bonkers maintains, all new MPs should be in bed.

The film will probably be available afterwards on the channel's catch-up service TPTV Encore. But in case it's not, I am posting Sun Trap of the South here for Josh and everyone else to enjoy.

Giles Watling vs Nigel Farage in 1964

Before he entered parliament, Giles Watling, the Conservative MP for Clacton, was an actor. His most prominent role was Oswald, the vicar in Bread.

And before he was an adult actor, he was a child actor. At the age of 11 or so, he played Malcolm Gideon, son of John Gregson's Commander Gideon of Scotland Yard, in the television series Gideon Way. The series is now a staple of Talking Pictures TV.

One of the best episodes of Gideon's Way was The 'V' Men, which dealt with a right-wing demagogue and the problems he and his supporters caused for the police.

In that episode, young Malcolm Gideon is fighting a school election and watches the demagogue for tips.

I have posted this clip before, but it seems newly relevant. I hope his childhood experiences will help Giles Watling in the weeks to come.

World War II film fatigue in the 1950s

When I was taking my MA in Victorian Studies at Leicester, I was told that it was enlightening to look at what contemporary reviewers had made of classic novels when they came out.

The lecturer who mentioned this was fond of quoting such a verdict of Vanity Fair. It said, in so many words, that Thackeray's libel against womankind in the book was not Becky Sharp but Amelia Sedley, because she was so wet.

More support for my argument that the Victorians were much less Victorian than we imagine.

We have the picture we do of 19th-century England because we are so influenced by Edwardian writers who, so modern and liberated themselves, were keen to make fun of their parents and grandparents.

The 1950s have suffered in the same way. The writers who came after them were nearly as modern and liberated as the Edwardians and so were equally anxious to blacken the name of their forebears.

I thought of this when I went to the British Newspaper Archive to look what reviewers made of The Intruder, the film I blogged about the other day, when it came out in 1953.

M.H. of the Picturegoer (24 October 1953) began his review:

Hold your groans about yet another war film. This one really is different. The war flashbacks are just the frame for an enthralling postwar story about an ex-soldier who goes to the dogs.

What turns a good combat-man into a bitter delinquent? Colonel Jack Hawkins makes it his conscience-stricken duty to find out.

And to make sure you had got the message, M.H. concluded:

If you're tired of war films, this is the one to kill the yawns.

And M.H. was not the only critic to comment on how few women there are in the film, though the brief turns by Susan Shaw and Dora Bryan are both excellent to my later eyes.

But the good news is that you can judge The Intruder for yourself. Talking Pictures TV is showing the film again at 2210 on Thursday 11 January.