If you want an accurate picture of Britain in the Seventies, forget Dominic Sandbrook. Look instead for an archive of Nationwide or of TV commercials from the decade.
As everyone is so young these days, this post probably needs a link to something about Derek Nimmo. What this obituary doesn't say is that, along with Clement Freud and Nicholas Parsons, he was part of the Just a Minute cell of Liberal Party supporters.
This just in from our Trivia Desk...
His father, Erwin, had arrived in Glasgow in 1939 after fleeing Hungary. Erwin Knopfler was a chessplayer & was runner-up in the Scottish championship of 1953.
— Douglas Griffin (@dgriffinchess) September 19, 2020
(Credit to the formidable Alan McGowan for establishing the identify of E. Knopfler in the cross-table below.)
(2/2) pic.twitter.com/xIqc2bmN6x
And a word too for James Aitken, who not only won the title that year but beat all the other competitors in doing so. As well as winning this championship on ten occasions, he was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the war.
"It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal. But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves." Peter Oborne warns Britain not assume that it's immune to global trends.
Gemma Gould tells the story of her journey as a child through the care system.
Stephen Parsons gives a detailed account of the challenge offered by LGBT students against the dominant culture among evangelicals that assumes the gay-affirming position is inevitably wrong.
"The city’s leaders were still determined to rehouse as much of the population as it could within the city and, in seeking to do so, the eyes of the leaders of the politicians and planners turned upwards! Glasgow was to embrace like no other city, high-rise housing development." Gerry Mooney on the rise and fall of Glasgow's Red Road Flats.
"We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, 'If there’s something you’d like to try - Astley, Astley, Astley', which I thought was fantastic." Rick Astley sings The Smiths.
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.
A report from The i explains:
Labour is demanding a police investigation into possible breaches of electoral law claiming an Official Monster Raving Loony candidate was used to help unseat a shadow cabinet member, i can reveal.
In one of the shock results of the election, Jonathan Ashworth who was tipped for a major role in Sir Keir Starmer's government, lost his seat to an independent candidate who campaigned against Labour’s policy towards Israel.
Mr Ashworth lost the Leicester South seat by fewer than 1,000 votes after a campaign by rival Shockat Adam focused on events in Gaza and Labour’s reluctance to demand a ceasefire.
An i investigation has learned that an occasional campaign volunteer for Mr Adam, Amaar Suliman, also ran against Ashworth as the candidate for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party under the name Mr Ezechiel Adlore.
As Mr Adlore, Mr Suliman spent almost £2,000 producing and distributing thousands of leaflets across the constituency during the election campaign criticising Mr Ashworth.
Mr Suliman’s fliers attacked Mr Ashworth’s 13-year record representing the constituency. They were headed "Missing MP alert" and asked voters "have you ever seen this man?".
Labour say they want the police to investigate the relationship between Mr Adam, now Leicester South’s MP, and Mr Suliman as they believe it raises questions over the accuracy of Mr Adam’s election expenses.
The i goes on to say that both Adam and Suliman deny any suggestion of wrongdoing and Adam has described any claim the two worked together as "bizarre and false".
h/t Mark Pack.
Here's another memory dredged up from the singles charts of the Seventies, and one that has to fight not to be overwritten by Billy Joel's Uptown Girl.
Randy Edelman is a successful composer for film and television who, as a young man, recorded several albums of his songs. Several of those songs were later recorded by major artists.
He had his biggest hit in the UK (no. 11) with an inferior cover of Concrete and Clay, but The Uptown, Uptempo Woman, his own song, reached no. 20 in September 1976.
Listening to it today, it's a pretty but very simple song - just verse, chorus and repeat, with no instrumental break.
And the lyrics are about a man who is walking out and is, of course, in the right. But that was the Seventies for you.
This is a new high in the club's history:
"Sir Robert Peel! Richmal Crompton! Guy Garvey! Peter Skellern! Gary Neville! Phil Neville! Tracey Neville! Neville Neville! Can you hear me, Neville Neville? Your boys took one hell of a beating! Your boys took one hell of a beating!"
Paul and Rebecca Whitewick take us to Oxenhall and Ashperton, the two abandoned tunnels on the Hereford and Gloucester Canal.
For more about this lost waterway, see the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal Trust website.
I've been moaning about the way the BBC is presenting Young Musician of the Year this time. It's being treated as though it were The X Factor or Master Chef.
Give it a couple more years and the contestants will all have stories about their dying granny's wish that they should play the bassoon and cry when they are put through to the next round.
But there's something even more depressing at work this year, as Richard Morrison points out in an article that has somehow escaped The Times's paywall:
None of the six semi-finalists for the UK’s most famous instrumental competition studies at a state school. Two are at private schools, two at the Royal College of Music, and the other two attend specialist music schools.
The last are fee-paying too. And although the government offers bursaries to help exceptionally talented children from less wealthy families to attend them, most parents still need to fork out a hefty sum to send their child to one.
This private-school dominance of the arts and sport is becoming a real problem in Britain. When I was writing about the film Last Resort last month, I said of Paddy Considine:
I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.
And amid the Guardian's celebration of Leonard Rossiter, it's a sobering thought that, obliged to go out to work at 18 after his father's death in wartime bombing, it's unlikely that he would have made it as an actor today.
I don't know how unusual this is for the TRG, but their statement is strongly worded:
As the home of One Nation Conservatism since 1975, the TRG is committed to being radically moderate, values-driven, and focused on the future. Throughout the contest, we have sought to engage extensively with all the leadership campaigns in order to understand the views and approaches of the candidates. Unfortunately, we have been consistently disappointed by the lack of engagement from the two candidates chosen by MPs.
TRG members were consulted throughout the process, and the results clearly show that neither candidate has secured widespread support from the majority of our membership. Both have used rhetoric and focused on issues which are far and away from the Party at its best, let alone the One Nation values we cherish and uphold. Therefore, the Board of the TRG has unanimously concluded that we are unable to endorse either candidate. ...
While the TRG will continue to advocate for those values as part of the Conservative family, we will do so by urging the final two candidates to recognise where the values of the British people lie, and to work for positive change rather than try to divide us.
Look our for speculation - well founded or not - about moderate Conservative MPs joining the Liberal Democrats.
If passed, reports the Independent, the Bill would compel the government to adopt climate and nature targets, including "limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels".
Ministers would also have to draw up a strategy with yearly targets in a bid to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, halt oil and gas exploration and imports, and reverse nature decline so it is "visibly and measurably on the path to recovery.
The Independent report also quotes Roz:
"I’m really, really feeling that groundswell," Ms Savage ... told the PA news agency, adding she had already spoken with Labour MPs who have indicated their support.
"Every day really does count and it feels like since this Bill was first tabled, there’s been such a growing awareness of these twin crises of climate and nature that … its time has come.
"There’s such public demand, if my mailbag is anything at all to go by, I have had so much correspondence from people urging me to pick up the Climate and Nature Bill."
Similar bills were promoted in the last parliament by the former Green leader Caroline Lucas and the Labour MPs Olivia Blake and Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley), but none became law.
Joe Ware on the campaign by Chris Packham and other celebrities who have challenged the Church Commissioners to rewild 30 per cent of their estate to "give British wildlife the salvation that it desperately needs".
Rebecca Jennings says that whether you want to be a published author or professional artist, you have to market yourself of social media: "Self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to 'build a platform'; we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream - working for yourself and making money doing what you love."
"Although the judge has no sympathy for Black Power, he can’t help to some extent at least to be won over by Darcus. The courtroom just erupts in laughter when Darcus and the judge are trading quips." The Mangrove Nine were black Londoners tried for protesting against police harassment in 1970. They were acquitted, marking the first acknowledgment of racial bias in the police. Now, reports Richard Sudan, a recording of Darcus Howe's closing remarks in his own defence has been found.
Pat Nevin remembers his hero Pele: "Then there was the lay-off for the fourth goal in the final, scored by the captain Carlos Alberto. The build-up is phenomenal, and then it comes to Pele. He doesn’t just pass it, it’s the languid way in which he knows exactly where his team-mate is and he just strokes the ball so comfortably."
"Fiction discourse is a wreck, and we can't look away." Chris Winkle and Oren Ashkenazi offer a glossary of bullshit writing terms.
It was published after Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the play that made Rossiter's reputation arrived in the West End:
In a way he achieves some of his Hitler effects by taking his own nervous tenseness and exaggerating it into farce. The tense posturings of Hitler derive perhaps from the angular way Mr Rossiter holds his own arms, from the stiff clasping of his own hands. Hitler spends the evening on stage in a seething fuss which is mostly Hitler but part Rossiter.
And, says Coleman, the play went on at the Saville Theatre "where it succeeded a long run of Danny La Rue’s female impersonations." That must have been Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty, which I went to see as an eight-year-old.
I saw The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the spring of 1979. A review in The Stage (19 April 1979) reveals that the Phoenix was threatened with closure and there were fears it might be the last production put on there:
Nigel Bennett, grim-faced throughout, improves with success, as Ui. The gestures, the passionate outbursts, the deep gloom, and the unpredictability of the paranoid dic tator are evident. He misses the chance to ridicule the shabby gangster's early bids for power. ...
The entire open stage war trans formed into a vegetable market by designers. Peter Ling and Patsy Pearce. Slides succinctly outlining the Nazi rise to power intelligently anticipated that the younger generation could be unaware of its odious intricacies. But the extremes of menace and humour were not exploited sufficiently.
Reviews in The Stage often turn out to have been surprisingly sniffy, but I still remember this production 45 years on.
One of the new MPs featured today is Manuela Perteghella from Stratford-on-Avon, who reminded the house:
Although I am proud to be the first female MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, I am not the first to bring Italian heritage to the role. That distinction belongs to another of my predecessors, John Profumo, who beat me to it - although I plan on a much quieter stay in the history books.
This gives me a chance to recommend Bringing the House Down, David Profumo's book about his parents - John Profumo and the actress Valerie Hobson.
Accounts of the Profumo Affair often suggest that John Profumo was a future prime minister whose political career was ended by scandal. But David makes it clear that his father was not a good minister and had done well to get as far as he had.
But John kept his sense of humour through it all. As Tim Adams' Guardian review of Bringing the House Down records:
He recounts a telling little story of wheeling his father into Edward Heath's memorial service not long before his death: 'It's the great and the good - and us,' Profumo senior noted.
From Scottish Legal News:
The Scottish Liberal Democrats have filed 40 parliamentary questions on Police Scotland’s proposed use of live facial recognition in a bid to force the Scottish government to explain how the measures are compatible with equalities and civil liberties concerns.
The party’s justice spokesperson, Liam McArthur MSP, asked the questions after Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell vowed to utilise artificial intelligence technology and live facial recognition technology as part of the service’s forthcoming six-year strategy, despite police services south of the border facing legal challenges over their usage.
Campaigners have identified a series of problems with the technology, from the possibility of misuse to the propensity for errors, particularly in misidentifying ethnic minorities and women.
Liam McArthur has spoken to the website:
"I am concerned that decisions that dramatically reframe the relationship between the police and the public are being treated as an inevitable consequence of the march of technology.
"There needs to be a compelling need, an appropriate legal basis and a proper public debate before the police can consider moving forward with measures like this. That simply has not happened.
"If the Scottish government share these concerns, then they have been awfully quiet about it. Certainly they are concerns that the Justice Committee heard loudly and clearly in the previous session of parliament.
"Ministers and senior officers need to set out why these decisions are being taken and answer for the consequences."
Liberty has a page on police use of live facial recognition technology with links to numerous briefings and resources.
Erica Lamberg introduces to the concept of 'resenteeism', where lack of advancement opportunities, a toxic corporate culture, an excessive workload and feelings of burnout lead to people feeling trapped in jobs they do not want. Not surprisingly, this affects productivity.
More evidence that nothing works properly in Britain any more because it's underfunded: We Love Stornoway reports on the end of the tourism service on the Western Isles.
Simon Matthews looks at the 1949 film Now Barabbas Was a Robber, which was based on a play by William Douglas Home: "There are flashbacks to their lives before jail, the corrupting effect of the war is shown (a topic of much thought at the time, with talk of crime waves and a much readier resort to violence) and, indeed much of it, with its succession of interior scenes and wardens, plays like a POW film. The dialogue, and acting, are impressive."
Jon Hotten remembers Brian Close, the controversial Yorkshire and England captain: "The length of time that Richards and Botham spent talking about Brian Close spoke of his influence on the game and on their lives."
"Witchcraft, and the threat of such could be found from the collieries of East Shropshire through to the Clun and the distant agrarian places, whose names feel like an ode to Middle earth. Witchcraft was the hidden threat, the force that you could not control but also that which you turned to for comfort, or help." Amy Boucher on an important aspect of the county's social history and folklore.
Ludgate Hill was a railway station in the City of London that was opened on 1 June 1865 by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway as its City terminus. It was on Ludgate Viaduct (a railway viaduct) between Queen Victoria Street and Ludgate Hill, slightly north of St. Paul's station (now called Blackfriars station) on the site of the former Fleet Prison.
North of Ludgate Hill station, Ludgate Viaduct continued to the Snow Hill tunnel to connect with the then recently opened Metropolitan Railway south of Farringdon station to enable main-line trains to run between north and south London.Passenger services through the tunnel ended in 1916, after which services ran only the few hundred yards (metres) to Holborn Viaduct station which had opened in 1874. Ludgate Hill became little used because of its proximity to the Holborn Viaduct and St. Paul's stations, and on 3 March 1929 Ludgate Hill was closed.
The platform buildings remained derelict until they were demolished in the 1960s but the island platform remained until 1974. Remains of the street-level buildings and traces of the platform and staircase lasted until the whole station area and viaduct were demolished in 1990.
Her flaws as a civil servant. such as a near-sociopathic desire for secrecy, are brushed over, and minor talents are hailed. "She's pretty ruthless at timekeeping," noted one portrait. Often the tone is of a primary-school teacher sending a report to a parent: "One Labour figure said Gray had been a good listener."
There's a term or two for this sort of journalism, as Timothy Noah wrote when it was the team around the newly elected President Obama who were being enthusiastically profiled:
This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why.
My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.
Armed with these concepts, judge for yourself the worth of an article that appeared on the Guardian website a couple of hours ago:
Who is in Keir Starmer’s top team at No 10 after Sue Gray resignation?
