Shadows of the Sixties

Last Friday night when surfing my Freeview, I landed on a much-neglected channel named Yesterday. I had oft landed upon it before and found little reason to hang about, but this night I found a sixties’ party in full swing. At first I thought it was a spoof. Surely that wasn’t Helen Shapiro, resplendent in pink trouser suit, singing Walkin’ Back To Happiness? What threw me was that her clothing and the dancers that she was surrounded by looked all too right; the mini skirts, knee-high boots and headbands, the hood-like hairstyles and ‘Cleopatra’ painted eyes. It was as if a filmmaker had hired a designer to authenticate every detail. But as the show wore on, I realised that this was no director’s fantasy.
The dancers were too pale and plump to be even considered for onstage work today. The outfits of the performers were without irony and most significantly, apart from the main players, there were no individual ‘looks’ screaming for attention. Nope, this was the genuine article, the paisley-patterned decade itself. We saw a monochrome Tom Jones sing Delilah, then Cilla Black in a full length, bright yellow shirt waister rendering Anyone Can Have A Heart for all her worth. The Shadows treated us to one of their guitar-strumming instrumentals, then were joined by a young Cliff Richard singing Batchelor Boy and Congratulations. It ought to have been hilarious, yet it was somehow refreshing to hearken back to a time when young people sought to dress uniformly, instead of the eternal clamouring to be an ‘indivudual’.
The four Shadows wore identical suits and the movements of their three guitarists were spookily well synchronised. Pertinent question: why were they called the Shadows? Sure, they were Cliff’s original backing group but after he had long flown, they continued to perform as a group, with no-one coming to the fore. Even today, I can’t name a single Shadow – maybe that is my lack of nous? There was much more to the sixties, I suspect, than free love and home-grown mushrooms. However, this was the calm before the storm in the form of the sequinned, psychedelic seventies when young men donned tinsel and giant spectacles in order to look different. That, as they say, is another story.

In the Night Garden....

It’s no use. I have tried and tried but I can’t hold back on this one any longer. Since its launch three years ago, I have been busting to write a piece about In the Night Garden, the Andrew Davenport created children’s TV series. But a certain sense has always held me back, the sense that a fully-grown and matured adult should not be watching and enjoying a programme aimed at 0-3 year olds. However, I recently reviewed the ‘matured’ bit and decided that maybe I was qualified to comment, after all. In the Night Garden was first aired on BBC in 2007. Since then it has conquered 35 countries, including Norway and China, where book sales have reached 1.5 million. It is now a travelling stage show. So, what is all the fuss about?
The characters; Iggle Piggle, Makka Pakka, Upsy Daisy and many others, are designed as soft toys, the kind that any child might own. They inhabit a colourful, yet gentle world that is brightly lit at the beginning of each 30-minute episode, and slowly turns to shade as the story unfolds. At the end, the toys all go to bed in the same ritualistic way as childern do. Last to go is always Iggle Piggle who skips through the night garden swinging his red blanket, then is seen in a boat on a dark sea, floating away to a world of dreams.
Each episode is a complete story in itself, an essay into sound and colour, told by the action of the toys and narration by the honeyed tones of Derek Jacobi. The narrative also plays with the names of the toys, each name being definite but based on ‘baby babble’, again, the way a child names his toys. The toys themselves don’t use speech, but each has a unique ‘signature’ sound, a burble or squeak. Each toy also has its own character and behaves predictably within the framework of the story.
And that, I think, is what is so calming about In the Night Garden. The characters are as comforting and predictable as a child’s own toys. In addition to the morning and evening ‘bookends’, each episode includes at least one song and one dance – aaaaah! I can’t praise it highly enough. For me, watching the occasional episode of In the Night Garden has helped me bust through more mental blocks than all the ‘how to’ literature I’ve read, combined. With a start like that, there will be a crop of geniuses in colleges around the globe, in ten or twenty years’ time. Yes, really.

Runaway trains and ghostly machines...

Last weekend’s runaway train saga totally freaked me out. It just doesn’t bear thinking about; several hundred tonnes of rolling stock thundering through North London’s Underground network, only to be halted – human fashion – by the gradient of Warren Street station. The instance set me thinking of other minds with a machine of their own; Herbie the comic Beetle car and movie star, Steven King’s terrifying Christine, the dancing female robot in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926), and Hal the wayward computer, (2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Of course, our past notions of what a robot actually is was off-kilter, being not necessarily humanoid tin cans with high pitched voices, out-doing us in ‘logic’ at every turn.
The modern-day robot comes in many guises, is usually task-specific and is unlikely to be logical. There are those annoying freezers that ping like mad when you leave their door open for too long. There are the disembodied voices that you engage with on the phone many times – and wish you didn’t have to. And what about those ‘friendly, chatty’ horrors that you check out your supermarket shopping on? With more and more trains are becoming ‘driverless’, it would be enlightening to know who or what controls these beasts and how can we ensure ‘the above’ doesn’t happen again. Answers, please….

Pakistan needs development, not politics.

In a report in the Guardian newspaper, Saeed Shah contrasts the feeble behaviour of President Asif Ali Zadari with the much stronger performance of the Pakistani military in relation to the ‘rescue’ of the victims of what has been described as ‘the worst floods in the country’s modern history’. It is not difficult to understand the tone of rage behind Shah’s report. President Zadari is sojourning in this part of the world, a trip including a ding-dong with our own David Cameron and a ‘drop in’ on his, Zadari’s, sixteenth century chateau in Normandy.
At the same time, six million Pakistani people have been drowned, gone missing or left homeless, hungry and destitute by the floods. The military is particularly strong in Pakistan, the country having been under military rule for more than half of its 63-year existence. Shah quotes Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political analyst based in Lahore: the military got an opportunity to demonstrate its organisational and technical skills. The military knows they have public support, so they can pursue their own agenda.
The ‘agenda’ that Rizvi refers to is, according to Shah, the possibility of its sliding back into political power because of the recent demonstrable weakness of the civilian government, that is, its inability to cope with the floods. It seems a shoddy thought at such a time, and yet, I suspect Rizvi is barking up the right tree. However, it is for all the wrong reasons.
The annual monsoon is not an unexpected event like an earthquake or tsunami. It arrives every year, on cue. The people most at risk are always the poorest; their homes and possessions swept away, their crops and cattle lost. Being still in development, vast swathes of the 200 million-strong Pakistani population are at risk from this type of devastation. The last thing it needs is to be held as pawn by a tussling military and government, presided over by an indifferent president.
What Pakistan needs is a programme of infrastructure; shorings and dammings, runnels and rivulets, designed to ally the worst effects of an unexpectedly heavy monsoon. If the government won’t or cannot provide, then the world bank must explore ways to raise the billions needed to help the country develop fully. It would be less expensive in the long run, financially speaking. After all, the cost of the topographical travesty known as Palm Jumeirah only cost $12.3 billion.

East Angular, Hills Road and Boris-biking!

It just so happened that the launch of Boris’s bikes coincided with my very first trip to Cambridge. When we arrived there, the first thing that struck me – not literally – was the presence of cyclists in tandem with the absence of gradient in the topography. At this point, I’m busting to mention that by an odd quirk of nomenclature, the thoroughfare from Cambridge train station to the town centre is called Hills Road – aaah!
These happy people are not in need of a cajoling municipal official, a sponsoring big business, nor a set of ‘docks’ alongside a non-existent set of underground stations. In short, cycling is what comes naturally to the good folks of this East Anglian town, with its scaled-down locales and even roads and pavements. I hate to knock a project before it gets off the ground (sorry!) but I cannot see how London will ever be a cyclists’ city in the same way as say, Amsterdam.
Alright, there will be the odd sod who, by virtue of living near an underground station, who doesn’t have to spend more than thirty minutes cycling to work nor negotiate steep gradients, and whose domestic set-up excludes parking space for a bike, make those cycling charges more than offset what they would have spent on other transport, making ‘Boris-biking’ fit comfortably into their lifestyles. Indeed, in a metropolis the size of London, that could amount to a sizeable number of people, enough to make the project as it is now, worthwhile. But at the end of the day, cycling will only ever be the embroidery on the tablecloth. A few thousand more cyclists on the road will never rule out the need for a well-financed, integrated network of trains, tubes, trams and buses. Enough said.

Erin, the electrician...

Out of curiosity, I looked into How To Build A Nuclear Submarine (BBC2, 27 June, 2010) and was not surprised at what I saw; men, young and older, engaged in a boys’ own strategy of bonding, machine-building, cutting and welding, and team-playing. What did take me by surprise was Erin, the young apprentice electrician at the Barrow-in-Furness based operation.
When Erin is finished her training, the voiceover said, she will be one of an elite corps of skilled technician. Not only that, Erin is young, blonde, pretty, a real role model for young women, everywhere. Forget the Wags, and make way for this new take on Rosie the Riveter. Forget the Beckhams, the Coles and the Rooneys. Manolo Blahniks have had their day and a Masters’ Certificate is the new cool.
And the beautiful end-point of the work? Each Astute submarine costs £1 billion build. Each is the length of a football field, can circumnavigate the globe without surfacing – it won’t have to refuel for 25 years – and is possessed of sonar so powerful that one in the English Channel can detect one leaving New York harbour.
Great, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to – I mean, isn’t the Cold War over? And what about all those marines (submariners?) who will spend months underwater, in cramped conditions? Only the captain of the sub will have his own quarters, see.
It all smacks of the ‘sixties television series, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, underwater answer to the stellar Startrek. I relished the series, although I never knew exactly what that crew were up to, either. It was all great adventure stuff, as no doubt it will be for the Astute submariners. And in her hub of activity, productivity and sense of common purpose, how I envy Erin the electrician…

Beam me up, Scotty, please...

Of all the inventions that they promised us and that were never delivered, the one I miss most is teleportation. You have definitely heard of it, whereby a man that needs to get from A to B need not bother with train, plane or automobile, bike nor bus, but a “dematerialisation” chamber at point A that beams him to point B where the reverse process takes place. His journey is done, over.
No more being held in thrall to Icelandic volcanoes, French air traffic controllers or Irish low-budget airlines. No more missing luggage – it can travel with you, see! Goodbye to lousy food and dratted engineering works. Why are the scientists taking so long to invent it? Personally, I blame George Langelaan for writing his short story The Fly in 1957, in which scientist Andre Delambre suffers a shocking accident when he experiments with a disintegrator –integrator, the “dematerialisation” chamber I wrote of earlier. The following year Kurt Neumann gave us the first screen version of the story, followed by David Cronenberg’s The Fly in 1986.
If it wasn’t for Langelaan and his discouraging developments in technology, airports would be obsolete by now and the debate over the third runway would never have happened. Oh, yes, there is always the danger of fusing genes with a mouse or with Boris Johnson, but technology has always been hazardous – don’t forget BP. The benefits of teleportation to the environment would be so enormous that the odd, unlikely fusion would hardly matter. Indeed, one or two might be an advantage – how about merging David Cameron with Nick Clegg? They are two of a kind, anyway. Stripy horses already exist in nature; how about furry fish, feathered goats and horned kittens? Come on, scientists! Take a few risks, make travel less miserable and we’ll be one step closer to whizzing untrammelled about the universe...