PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
TV to-do
If you come home after 11pm these days and switch on television, likely as not you will think you have hit a doctor's surgery, such is the array of flesh.
Not so long ago -- and I have been trying to erase the vision ever since - a lady ran-across my TV screen, clothed only in blushes, her flesh reduced to such a bobbing and shaking that she seemed in danger of losing control of her forward motion, like a blancmange in a gale. She reminded me, for some reason, of the remark of another lady, "When she takes off her bra, all the lines go out of her face."
This was not an offensive film, It was a very good film. But it occurred to me, having viewed such nakedness, that the cinema is about to deal TV a mortal blow, and somebody should tell them.
Which films can TV now buy to screen before 9am? That is the question. For a couple of decades or more, my hazy memory tells me, the cinema has been creating films loosely based around 30ft buttocks and other bits of flesh, so that the long, white mac - so beloved of Alan Ladd - has come into its own in the audience, and decent citizens have stayed at home.
At home, we have, up to this point, been comfortable with the sort of film that can be summed up entirely in a few .phrases: "OK, buddy, you asked for it." "Mama, the squire did it, "' Darling, the war can't last for ever." "There's the fort, sir, but there doesn't seem to be any life." ""Don't touch that glass," and, "Bite on this if it becomes' too painful..." You can sleep peacefully through films like that.
The well has plainly run dry. We've seen all the comfortable films a dozen times so that we can recite all the dialogue. Now, all TV has to go at is 25 years of pure sex and the truth must be slowly dawning on BBC and ITV that there's more cleavage than footage.
I suspect that the next movement in the ploy is that all the film-makers will create good, long, intelligent films which will denude the fireside of viewers. We will all be back in the cinema enjoying our £5 tubs of ice-cream and wondering whose knee we're sitting upon. Game, set and match to the film lads and it is no skin off my buttock.
I would be glad enough to get back to the old cinema stuff where Noel Purcell, dreased in a white shirt and a long beard, keeps groaning and dying; or where Alan Ladd moves the little muscle in his right cheek, the only indication that he is still acting; or where John Wayne slows the action to the point where it is virtually stopped by the slow plod of his homely vowels, .
In my cinema days, long gone, if four lips were within inches of each other, they did a slow fade and Spencer Tracy appeared, dressed as a priest, ready to unite the owners the moment contact was made.
By coincidence I was closely concerned with the only clean film I remember in twenty or more years: Railway Children. The actor Lionel Jeffreys directed and at one point, a retreating camera caught him by the right nostril and. bore him to the floor, giving the impression that it had developed a mind of its own and was getting its own back.
"Lionel," I said when he had regained both his nose and his composure, "they will be showing this film every Christmas for 100 years." He seemed surprised.
I believe I'm right. I hope TV won't be showing 30ft buttocks for 100 years because if they do, I might not stay around. I'll be back in the reformed cinema for sure - probably the one at Burnley where a chap used to come around with a long pole shouting, "Show one hand, " and belting on the head those who could not.
I wonder whether Burnley's very own Alistair Campbell knows that. I bet his dad does.
Television humour
It occurred to me, as I watched late-ish television that I no longer know what humour is. I see two chaps talking nonsense, and while the studio audience is rocking with laughter I am stranded with a straight face and a sudden inclination to go to bed. Once there were comedians. I understood those. Mort Sahl. Morecambe and Wise, Hancock, the late Queen Mary. I understood Laurel and Hardy and still laugh at them when, by accident, I meet up with them again on morning TV. But then came a generation which left me cold. And another after that which left me colder. I met Alexei Sayle at Liverpool Lime-street station, he with his bicycle, me with my incomprehension, and we regarded each other, I think, as life forms from separate planetst. He had just been "discovered." The BBC did not even have his phone number. They asked me for it.
Is it me? Or is this nation full of William Wordsworths? He made sure he was never funny. So he was funny, to me, although I have never met anyone who thought of him in that way. Late night television of the old variety would have doted on him and presented him as stooge to someone, Jimmy Jewell, perhaps - Billy of the Crags, vulnerable and motionless.
Consider this: he went to a friend's house, and after dinner, the sayings, doings and writings of Sheridan (who was funny) were mentioned. Awaking from his reverie, Wordworth said: "I do not think I was ever witty but once in my life." What could that be? "Well, well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, 'Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?' whereupon I said, 'Why, my good friend, I did not know till this moment that you had a wife.' " Those present realised that was it. The end. They generously burst into laughter, which Wordsworth accepted as a genuine mark of pleasure at his brilliance.
I have to delve back in time to find my own brand of humour. A perfect example came to me the other day -Oliver St John Gregory, 1878-1957, Irish writer and surgeon: "I said: 'It is most extraordinary weather for this time of year!' He replied: 'Ah, it isn't this time of year at all.'"
Now that is very Irish, as we all know, and Ireland is the world capital of incongruity. Brendan Behan was once swimming and another swimmer approached with the words, "I can always tell a Fenian by his little button nose." Lovely, that. Again Behan. He was walking down Fleet-street when he came across a number of blind men, so he roped them to him and towed them into a pub, saying, "Look at this, the blind leading the (expletives deleted) blind."
I was travelling in an aircraft when, from the net attached to the seat in front I fished out an airline magazine, which informed me that a Dr John Mahaffey, who taught Oscar Wilde, said: "I was only once punished as a boy and that was for telling the truth." His friend replied, "And it cured you, John."
Such, then, is my taste in humour, both manufactured and real. And of course, we are not all alike. The best of humour is often the most cruel. When Dickens wrote the death of little Nell, the nation wept. Dickens was inundated by letters imploring him to show mercy. But no...His readers were "drowned in a wave of grief." Thomas Carlyle, previously patronising about Dickens, was "utterly overcome." Waiting crowds at a New York pier shouted to an incoming vessel, "Is Little Nell dead...?"
And Oscar Wilde's reaction to all this? "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." . My own attempt at spoken humour is total: no boundaries. That is a dangerous concept. I was in good humour at a party, once, and said whatever outrageous things came into my head at the time. And one woman, a stranger, was among those laughing loudest. Until she reached a remark which offended her. And she turned sour immediately. We clashed violently. It was an awful moment, still vivid in my mind. You can not do that with humour.
If you choose to take one part of it seriously, and another part as funny, you debar yourself for life. I have a friend of more than half a century who has been the object of what I think of as humour for all of that time and he has never once been offended, because he recognises it for what it is ... well, humour. Nothing else. "At what stage," I once asked him, "did you become a vegetable?" . I had another friend who was excessively thin but with large feet. I said that when the wind blew against his trousers, he could be arrested for walking around without visible means of support. And as for the rest: "You must be the only point on earth where two feet equal one yard." No offence taken.
I find I can never be humourous about anyone I dislike. So it's all a mystery, this need to laugh. I find it is easy to give offence in emails these days. You can not see the other person's expression, or know his motives. He might be roaring with laughter, while you take him seriously. Violence erupts - a condition known in news groups as flame wars. Hence the little symbol -:). You have to actually show that you are smiling!
I expect television humour will revert back to my kind of humour eventually. To a degree, it has, since it recruited Peter Kay, who is excellent. . Meanwhile, I drift off with a vision of Eric Morecambe at his bedroom window hearing a siren and observing a speeding vehicle in the street below, and saying, "He'll never sell ice-cream at that speed." That's more like it.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
17 January, 2009