In which Liberal England is quoted (but not acknowledged) on the Today programme

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This morning's Today programme ended with an item looking forward to today's government reshuffle. (It starts at 1:23:44 on this recording if you are that interested.)

At one point, suggesting that the reshuffle would have little effect because most people know so little about politics, Tim Shipman from the Sunday Times says brightly:

"I was very struck the other day on an episode of Pointless..."

and then goes on to quote exactly the figures I blogged on Saturday.

Ideas can occur to people independently, as shown by the fact Alwyn Turner made the same point about Pointless more than four years before my first post on the subject.

So maybe Tim Shipman did come across a repeat of just that episode of Pointless on an obscure channel and carefully noted down the same figures.

But, Occam's razor and all that, I rather suspect he got them from this blog.

Thanks to the people on Twitter who alerted me to this.

Parson Latham’s Hospital, Oundle

From the Parson Latham’s Hospital website:

Parson Latham’s Hospital is an Almshouse managed by a board of Trustees situated in the heart of Oundle, an historic market town in East Northamptonshire. 

A charitable organisation established in the 1600s, it offers independent living for up to 11 senior Residents in an adapted Grade I listed building with a beautiful garden.

Stubby Kaye: Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat

Yes I remember the Sixties: the Beatles in the charts, Saturday Morning Club, Simon Dee.

But the music I remember being played incessantly in those days did not come from the great British groups of the era. It came from the big musicals.

Turn on the radio and the odds were you would hear 'Get Me to the Church On Time' from My Fair Lady, 'If I Were a Rich Man' from Fiddler on the Roof or 'Food, glorious Food' from Oliver!

I came to dislike them intensely just because I had heard them so much.

There were some songs from the shows I liked. I had a friend at school from a hippyish family whose parents had the cast album from Hair. Being cool kids, we always played it.

And I remember hearing two songs from musicals on the radio for the first time and thinking they were wonderful.

One was 'Jubilation T. Cornpone' from Li'l Abner and the other was this one from Guys and Dolls.

Both, I later discovered, had been sung by the great Stubby Kaye.

A Weston by Welland road sign

At least it could still be found in that Northamptonshire village when I photographed it in 2013.

The League of Gentlemen talk about their recent series

Recorded at BFI Southbank on 12 December last year.

As they discuss the real-life inspiration from some of their characters, I should mention that the Legz Akimbo Theatre Company (or someone very like them) came to my school in 1974.

Chapter and verse from Pointless on how little interest most people take in politics

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A couple of days ago I wrote that the television quiz Pointless reminds us how little most people know about politics.

After I had done so, the admirable Alwyn Turner sent me the link to a post he wrote back in 2013 making the same point:

An edition of the TV game show Pointless this week had a round based on 100 people naming as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010 ...

It's not a scientifically selected sample, but even so the results suggest just how completely uninterested in politics the public are.

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. Then came:

Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100
Ed Balls - 13 out of 100
David Miliband - 12 out of 100
Jack Straw - 7 out of 100
Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100
Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100
David Blunkett - 4 out of 100
Clare Short - 2 out of 100
Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100
Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

Alwyn rounded off his post by quoting from Pamela Hansford Johnson's 1962 novel An Error of Judgement:

"Could it really be that I am the only person in the world bored stiff, bored pallid, by politics?" a character asks, and is immediately put straight by another: "'No, we all are, those of us who aren't politicians. That's why we're the prey of the silly men, the posturing men. They don't get bored, not ever. We are the victims of their professional excitement."

Wood. Flower. Concrete.

Taken with my camera last May.

Six of the Best 758

Kirsten Johnson sees loneliness as a political problem: "Loneliness is a huge problem, but much of the solution lies in small, local solutions. To give one example, one of my villages came together to buy an old chapel which is now called The Hub. It is a space for coffee mornings, clubs, exercise classes and toddler groups. The Hub has combatted loneliness on many different levels."

"The number of people who have had their lives turned upside down by these accusations grows every day." Amelia Tate explains how the alt-right wields and weaponises accusations of paedophilia.

"Whether in the city or in the suburbs, I believe we’re not meant to raise children in nuclear families without the support of a community. We’re simply not wired for it," says Frederic Laloux.

Christopher J. Ferguson and Cathy Faye on the long history of panic over children and entertainment technology.

English cricket is in danger of breeding and encouraging mediocrity, says George Dobell.

What lies beneath New York? Andrew Berman takes us to the city's forgotten and hidden graveyards.

Former Eastenders actress Tracy-Ann Oberman slams 'pretentious' restaurant after husband accidentally eats napkin

Thanks to the Evening Standard, we have our Headline of the Day.

Hunted (1952): Dirk Bogarde and Jon Whiteley

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Tomorrow night at 22:20 Talking Pictures (Freeview 81) is showing the 1952 British film Hunted.

Thrill at an unshaven Dirk Bogarde on the wrong side of the law.

Break your heart at Jon Whiteley, the best British child star of the era.

Enjoy some great industrial landscapes, particularly in the Potteries.

As the blog Discovering Dirk Bogarde says:

The film starts off with a little boy (Jon Whiteley) running away from a burning house. He runs into an abandoned basement and finds Dirk Bogarde standing next to a dead body. Dirk Bogarde abducts the boy and sets out on the lam. 

The film is very dark and definitely has that distinct British post-war cynicism. But it's also incredibly touching. The little boy is an orphan, abused by his adoptive father. Dirk is a sailor with an unfaithful wife and a family that cares more about keeping up appearances than his own well being. Both neglected and hurt, the two forge an unlikely bond throughout the course of the film. 

I really love movies that show the human side of people who commit crimes. Too often a murderer or thief is portrayed in a completely evil light, with no reason, conscience or feeling. In this film, we see how Dirk Bogarde's character was led to commit his crime because of circumstances and environment, because of pride and honor. At heart, he is really a softy who just wanted a fairy-tale sort of life with the woman he loved.

Jon Whiteley, because he was retired early by his parents, avoided the unhappy fate of many child stars.

Growing up to become an art historian, he has worked at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for decades.

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The Campbell/Clegg pact in the 2006 Lib Dem leadership contest

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Mark Pack's latest Liberal Democrat Newswire (not yet in the newletter's archive) recalls the 2007 leadership election between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.

As it reminds us, Huhne might well have won if the pile of postal votes that arrived late had been counted.

Mark describes the two contenders:

The pair had been close friends and fellow MEPs; both were elected to Parliament for the first time in 2005. 

Strains in their friendship had surfaced when Chris Huhne had a tilt at the party leadership in 2006 after Charles Kennedy had stood down; Menzies Campbell had won, while Nick Clegg had sat the contest out. 

A year and a half later, Clegg and Huhne were direct opponents.

Blogging about Sarah Teather, I once recalled the 2006 contest:

At the first hustings ... she and Nick Clegg went everywhere together, apparently both unwilling to let Ming Campbell out of their sight - young cardinals bigging up an elderly candidate for Pope.

As Ming's leadership was not a success and rarely looked like being a success, this showed poor judgement on Nick's part. As I said at the time, he should have stood in that 2006 contest.

That post also reminds us that there was something of a pact between Nick and Ming at the time.

In the midst of the campaign, Ming told the Daily Telegraph that Nick would at some stage be "a very powerful candidate for the leadership".

As I said sternly in that post, "the next-leadership-but-one is not in Ming's gift".

It all seems a long time ago, but history tends to get rewritten if those who were around at the time do not write it down.

Does Pointless tell us something about why we voted for Brexit?

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Perhaps we are starting to feel we have had enough of Pointless, but it is a good quiz show.

This is not least because it requires contestants to be knowledgeable. You might think that all quizzes do that, but not so.

Pointless is almost a mirror image of Family Fortunes, which rewarded contestants for being average not for being clever.

Yet there are two subjects where Pointless contestants generally know little and find the thought they might know something to be so unreasonable as to be amusing.

One is British politics and the other is geography.

Maybe this shows us some gaps in what is taught in schools. Maybe it shows the decline of hobbies like stamp collecting and trainspotting that taught you where places are.

At least being a travelling supporter of a football club still teaches you that.

And I wonder if, deep down, these gaps in knowledge tell us something about the reasons the public voted for Brexit.

Later. I have written a second post with an example of this lack of political knowledge.

A portrait of the British film industry in 1973

The British film industry was in a bad way in the 1970s. Notoriously, the highest grossing British film of 1971 was On the Buses.

By middle of the decade only such TV spin offs and sex comedies were being made. In those years some quite distinguished actors appeared in some very undistinguished films.

But some people were still trying in 1973, as a contemporary documentary on the BBC iPlayer shows. Click on the still above to watch The Big Screen there.

Two of Britain's leading film directors of the period - John Schlesinger and Gerald Thomas, whose Carry On films were also declining into sex comedies by then - are interviewed. They talk about the anxiety, hopes and risks experienced by those involved in the film industry. 

We also see four films in production:

• the James Bond film Live and Let Die
• The Optimists of Nine Elms, which happily and unexpectedly stars Peter Sellers
• The Final Programme, an adaptation on a Michael Moorcock Jerry Cornelius novel
• The 14, the second film directed by David Hemmings

As it is the 1970s there is some gratuitous female nudity and everyone smokes all the time. But there are also some shots of street scenes and film studios that now have documentary value.

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"Like many Jewish journalists who reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, I spent the 2016 election being harassed by a motley crew of internet racists who coalesced around the future president. They sent me threats, photoshopped me into gas chambers and hurled an uncreative array of anti-Semitic slurs my way." Yair Rosenberg on why he helped create a bot to challenge Nazis on Twitter - and on how Twitter sided with the Nazis.

The philosopher Michel Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever argues Colin Koopman.

Emerging Technology from the arXiv presents evidence that online dating is influencing levels of interracial marriage and even the stability of marriage itself.

No Country for Old Men pays tribute to Gavin Stamp.

"Death pops up throughout the film but, essentially, it is marked with a ritual within the landscape." Adam Scovell examines Peter Greenaway's 1988 film Drowning by Numbers.

Rob Parsons tries to account for the inconsistency of the England cricket team: "Over the last few years, I have often heard commentators say after a bad match that England haven’t become a bad side overnight. I have never heard them say the opposite after a good match – you don’t become a good side overnight."

Evening Standard says Lib Dems could gain Richmond and Kingston in May's London borough elections

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Joe Murphy, political editor of the Evening Standard, has written a story about 'Tory election expert' Lord Hayward's predictions for May's London borough elections.

Of most interest to Liberal Democrat readers will be these two sentences:

The Conservatives look certain to be beaten in Kingston by the Liberal Democrats, who have grown stronger in the area.

And:

The Tories face a tough fight to hold off the Liberal Democrats in Richmond, where Zac Goldsmith won back his seat by 45 votes in the general election.

He later quotes Lord Hayward's own views:

The peer added that Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable would “need to do well” to beat the Tories in Richmond and predicted that the Lib Dems could lose seats in Sutton, the sole London borough under third-party control.

Of course, we also want to see the Lib Dems regaining a foothold on councils across London. At present our councillors are drawn almost entirely from affluent South-West London.

Setting out gingerly across the Tay Bridge

When I was a student at York there was a train that left at two in the morning for Edinburgh. A couple of friends and I decided that, after finals, we would catch it.

And so we did. I remember wandering around Edinburgh in the very early morning sun and then dozing for the rest of the day.

We got as far as Aberdeen, and this photograph must have been taken on that day in 1981. It shows my train setting out gingerly across the Tay Bridge. In those days it was commonplace to lean out of a train window and take a photograph.

The stubs of piers in the water beside it are the remains of the first bridge. This failed catastrophically in 1879, killing all 74 or 75 people aboard a train that was crossing it at the time. I am always aware of this when I make the crossing.

The disaster and their deaths were immortalised in the poem by Willliam McGonagall:

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

And so on.

The Tay Bridge was one of the five favourite bridges I once chose on this blog. (What are yours?)

As I wrote then:

When you take a train across it this does not feel like a bridge over a river or even an estuary. It feels like a bridge over the open sea.

James Davidson 1927-2017

At the time of his death last summer, James Davidson was the oldest surviving Liberal MP. Yet few Lib Dem members my age or younger knew anything about him.

Which was a shame, because he lived a remarkable life.

Davidson, who represented West Aberdeenshire between 1966 and 1970, is profiled in a BBC News feature on MPs who died in 2017.

And that feature refers us to his Scotsman obituary, where you can read more about him:

As he once observed, with a considerable degree of understatement, life is full of surprises – none more so than finding yourself on the wrong end of a Kalashnikov, dancing with the Queen and two princesses or being mooted as a potential leader of the Liberal Party. 

For James Davidson the first came courtesy of a period in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, by which time he had already served King George VI and family as a naval officer, the latter followed his election as MP for West Aberdeenshire. 

In a brilliantly multi-faceted life he also became a hill farmer, television presenter, organiser of Scotland’s premier agricultural event The Royal Highland Show, climbed the Eiger and was a single parent to three young children.

It goes on tell us more about his days in Moscow:

The handsome 25-year-old lived in a dacha in the Perlovka forest, constantly tailed and in the glare of anti-Western propaganda. His encounter with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier came one Sunday afternoon when, during a forest walk, he was held at gunpoint until 3am, accused of entering an unmarked forbidden zone and of being an “unacceptable” person. 

In Russia he saw Stalin both alive and lying in state, travelled widely taking discreet photos, including images of submarine construction on the Volga, and married Kit Jamieson, the beautiful secretary to the Canadian Chargé d’Affaires. In 1954 they were the first westerners since the Second World War to leave the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian Railway and Nakhodka, shadowed incessantly by an operative from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

'Fare-dodger' gets penis stuck in ticket barriers at Covent Garden Tube station

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The Evening Standard wins Headline of the Day on New Year's Day.

British railways and pop music from 1967-80

This is wonderful stuff. Footage of Britain's railways matched to pop songs, radio recordings and television theme tunes from the same year.

It is odd how some things date faster than others. I have a book about Romney Marsh from the 1960s that contains a photograph of the car park at the nuclear power station at Dungeness.

The power station itself still looks strange and futuristic today. The cars are laughably old fashioned.

Here I think that, in many cases, the railway footage appears more dated than the music sounds.

A pivotal year: Lord Bonkers in 2017

January

The year began with Lord Bonkers being told by a Well-Behaved Orphan that "chimbleys is awkward things", praising Dutch Mulholland and promising to build

an impenetrable, physical, deep, powerful, beautiful ha-ha. It will keep out invaders and, incidentally, keep in domestic staff.

He also met the Wise Woman of Wing:

Incidentally, while we were out in the garden it started to spit, but when I suggested we go indoors she replied: "I’ll do my scrying in the rain."

March

After GCHQ warned of the danger to British political parties of Russian hacking, I had to report:

Lord Bonkers tells me he "caught two fellows with snow on their boots going through the Shuttleworths" at a remote rural committee room during the Ripon by-election of 1973.

In the same month, in an attempt at intimidation, cabinet ministers took to sitting in on House of Lords' debates on Brexit:

I wasn’t having that so I stared right back. When that didn’t work I went through my full gamut of faces: the lovesick Frisian; the angry walrus; Roy Jenkins on the lavatory ... 

I took a party of Liberal Democrat peers (you may have noticed we are not exactly short of them) off to the tearoom for a spot of training in Hard Stares and pulling the aforementioned faces (though the Jenkins is not one for novices). 

I am proud to announce that, after I had left for home, one of my pupils made a junior minister cry.

The old boy also reported that Jeremy Corbyn is a deep-cover agent:

Years ago a drunken Tory confessed to me that his party has talent spotters at prep schools. What they look for goodness only knows – a winning way with the ablative plural, perhaps, or particularly clean knees ... 

Such deep-cover agents are not unusual – I expect my readers could name a few themselves – but to the best of my knowledge Jeremy Corbyn is the first Conservative to lead the Labour Party.

Having observed Corbyn's support for Brexit since then, I am forced to conclude he is right.

April

A Ukip candidate in Glasgow said she was sexually attracted to gorillas. I was reminded of a story Lord Bonkers once told me about Twycross Zoo,

May

Reminiscing about York and March's Liberal Democrat Spring Conference, my employer mentioned Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate. ("What a scandal that was!")

He was also proud when the party's press team came to the Bonkers Home for Well-Behaved Orphans to take a photograph for one of our general election posters.

You can see it at the head of this post,

July

Despite the best efforts of the Elves of Rockingham Forest, I turned up a photograph of Bonkers Hall I took before I met Lord Bonkers.

I also found conclusive proof that Freddie and Fiona work at the New European.

Lord Bonkers himself gave the inside story on the fall of Tim Farron.

September

Lord Bonkers accompanied the Well-Behaved Orphans on their holiday at Trescothick Bay in Cornwall:

Bathing, running barefoot across the sand, burying Matron... I had a high old time of it.

He also reported a successful 'Question Time' at the village hall:

There was our own Vince ‘High-Voltage’ Cable; the Wise Woman of Wing; the High Queen of the Elves of Rockingham Forest; and the Professor of Hard Sums from the University of Rutland at Belvoir. 

I was prevailed upon to join the panel myself and, best of all, there was not a member of the Dimbleby family in sight.

In his traditional foreword to the Liberator songbook, he discussed the perils of making music beside the sea:

How well I recall an early Aldeburgh Festival! Halfway through the concert, the hall was inundated by the North Sea because of an unusually high tide. 

Having looked about myself in the way I have just recommended to you, I was able to snatch up a passing double bass and paddle my way to safety – accompanied by Benjamin Britten on the piano.

November

The old boy displayed characteristic foresight in worrying about England's prospects in Australia:

Will it prove a tour too far for Anderson and Broad, who have justly been acclaimed as the Hinge and Bracket of English pace bowling? Why has no place been found for the Blessed Liam Plunkett when one of the Overton-Window twins from Somerset has been included? 

Should Mason Crane be on the ship at all? In my day a boy of that age who bowled a googly would have been sent straight to the Headmaster, just as surely as if he had used a semicolon in an English composition.

December

Lord Bonkers feared that the theft of the Liberal Democrat candidate for Cheltenham's bicycle was an attempt to sabotage his campaign, but I feared something even more sinister was going on.