Painters and Paintings

Posted on by Steve Higgins

A couple of things inspired this week’s post which is about artists and their paintings. Artist David Hockney is eighty something years old this year and has just opened a new exhibition of his work in Paris. He was invited by the art museum, Fondation Louis Vuitton, to mount a retrospective of his work focussing on the last 25 years of his artistic output as well as featuring some of his early works and some new ones too.

I remember once watching a documentary about Hockney many years ago with my father and it featured some of his paintings which were done in a rather childish way and my dad looked at me and asked ‘were these what he did as a child?’ Clearly, David Hockney didn’t do it for my dad.

My favourite works of David Hockney were actually not paintings but his Cameraworks in which David took numerous pictures of his subject and then created really inspired collages from the prints.

On 15 November 2018, Hockney’s 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. Hockney will be 88 in July of this year.

LS Lowry is a northern painter who is famous for his stylised pictures of Salford and Manchester and their mills and factories. He spent most of his life in Pendlebury in Salford and I remember reading a story about him years ago in which another north west painter took Lowry on a visit to the countryside. They set up their easels and brushes looking out on a beautiful rural scene and began to paint. After a while the painter, it might have been Sheila Fell although I’m not sure, got up to look at Lowry’s canvas and was surprised to see not the beautiful surrounding countryside but a northern street that might have been Salford or Manchester.

Clearly, you could take the man out of Salford but not Salford out of the man.

Not long ago I heard about a new film starring Tomothy Spall as Lowry and Vanessa Redgrave as his mother. The film was called Mrs Lowry and Son and to be fair, I found it rather disappointing. It’s not Lowry’s life story but focusses on his relationship with his mother who according to the film was bed bound and was looked after by Lowry who then went up to the attic to paint when she had gone to sleep. She died before her son found fame as a painter.

Today, his name is remembered at the Lowry Art Gallery in Salford Quays where many of his paintings are exhibited.

Jack Vettriano was a painter who I had always thought was an American as his paintings have a sort of cinematic style which I mistakenly assumed came from the USA. In fact, Vettriano was a Scottish painter and gained international recognition with his work The Singing Waiter which became one of the bestselling art prints in the UK. Liz bought me a framed print for a Christmas or birthday present some years ago which hangs in our dining room in St Annes. According to Wikipedia, the original was sold in 2004 to a private bidder for £744,500.

Vettriano was a self-taught artist and his paintings frequently show elegantly dressed figures in ambiguous or intimate settings and his works have met with a mixed reception with some critics dismissing him as populist, whatever that means. Personally, I have always loved his work and my art page over on Pinterest is filled with many of his pictures. He himself said his paintings were inspired by “25 years of sexual misbehaviour”.

Vettriano had homes in Scotland, London and the south of France and he passed away at his home in Nice earlier this year on March 1st.

Many people have compared Vettriano’s work with that of another artist, Edward Hopper. Hopper was an American artist. He was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York. He studied at the New York School of Art where he developed his particular style with an emphasis on solitude, light and shadow. I’ve always thought that his work has a sort of art deco style, similar to magazine illustrations of the 1920s.

Hopper made his first sale in 1913 when he was 31. He hoped this might have been the start of numerous sales but his work took many years to catch on with buyers. His most famous work is Nighthawks which he finished in 1942. He worked for many years as an illustrator for magazines and advertising companies. In 1918 he was awarded the US Shipping Board prize for a war poster titled Smash the Hun. Sales began to take off in 1923 and the resulting financial stability enabled Hopper to continue to create art. He died in 1967.

An artist that suffered criticism in the same way as Jack Vettriano was Margaret Keane. I think I had seen her pictures floating about the internet but I knew nothing about her until watching a film about her life. The film Big Eyes starred Amy Adams as Margaret who is an illustrator at a furniture factory. At an outdoor art show she meets painter Walter Keane. The two hit it off and later marry. Keane rents wall space in a nightclub to exhibit his and Margaret’s paintings but he gets into a fight after finding the paintings are displayed by the bathrooms. The fight becomes headline news in a local newspaper and the resulting publicity brings people in to see the pictures that started the fight.

The newspaper stories mistakenly credit Walter as the artist responsible for the popular pictures of people with oversized eyes. Walter convinces Margaret to go along with the deception as he thinks he can market the paintings better while Margaret creates more. The two open a gallery together and sell cheap prints of Margaret’s paintings which are hugely popular. Later the two split up and Margaret has to sue to be recognised as the artist of her Big Eyes pictures.

The film was directed by Tim Burton who is a great fan and collector of Margaret’s work. Like Vettriano, some in the art world have been critical of Margaret’s work but it has been praised by none other than Andy Warhol saying “I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good, if it was bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”

Margaret Keane died in 2022 aged 94.

I think I might finish with a few of my favourite pictures.

I’ve always rather liked this painting of Lenin by Isaak Brodsky which shows Lenin in front of the Smolny Institute which was a girls’ school until taken over by the Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution. Brodsky was born in 1884 in the Ukraine and painted Lenin and many other Soviet politicians.

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 and painted the famous picture known as The Scream in 1893. The Scream has become a hugely powerful image symbolising the anxiety of the human condition.

The-Scream-1893-National-Gallery-Oslo-Edvard-Munch-creative-commons

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch painter born in 1853 and described in Wikipedia as one of the most influential figures in western art. He died in 1890 after shooting himself in the chest. The wound was not immediately fatal but he succumbed to infection. His last words were apparently ‘the sadness will last forever.’ My favourite of his paintings is Cafe Terrace at Night painted in 1888.

Finally, I wondered what must be the most famous painting ever and it surely must be the Mona Lisa. The artist was Leonardo Da Vinci and it was produced sometime between 1503 and 1506 and is a portrait of an Italian noblewoman named Lisa del Giodono. According to Wikipedia it is “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about and the most parodied work in the world.”

creative commons

It currently hangs in the Louvre in Paris.

What is your favourite painting?

Thanks to Wikipedia for all the facts and figures used above.

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Driving the Bus (A Few Nostalgic Bus Driving Memories)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Just looking back through some of my old posts I see I have quite a few that involve bus driving anecdotes. My life working for the bus company was in many ways a major career mistake but what the heck, there isn’t anything I can do about it now and it gave me a lot of material for my novel and various short stories.

I think it was round about 1977 when I first got a job working for the bus company. I had packed in my job as an insurance clerk and left to tour Europe for the summer. After a month in a place called Lloret de Mar in Spain I got fed up and returned home. My dad wasn’t happy about me doing nothing all day and not coughing up any rent money so I went for what I thought would be a short term job as a bus conductor.

I spent a few weeks at the GM Buses training school in Ardwick which I loved. We had lots of fun learning how to use fare tables, learning fare stages and giving out tickets. It was a little harder when we began to do it for real but there was a great feeling of camaraderie at the bus company and that was cemented by going to pubs after an early shift and playing cards, pool and snooker as well as drinking lots of beer.

After about a year as a bus conductor I was sent back to the training school to learn how to drive a bus. In those days we trained in old back loader manual gearbox buses, sat in a small cab at the front and steering with a huge steering wheel and having to double the clutch to change from first to second gear as those old gearboxes weren’t fully synchromeshed.

The moment I climbed up into the cab I felt at home and I loved my time in the driving school. Every morning we used to check the bus over and top up the oil and water if required. Then our trainer would choose somewhere in the vast Greater Manchester operating area for breakfast. We might have a drive to perhaps Oldham garage or bus station. I’d start off and our trainer Bill sat behind me in the first seat. The window to the cab had been removed and Bill would give directions and off we would go. His main instruction particularly on narrower roads was to ‘ride the white line’ because our big bus needed the room, car drivers in smaller vehicles didn’t.

Bill knew all the canteen staff in all the canteens in Manchester. Sometimes we might just have a tea and toast for breakfast because on the next run Bill might designate Stockport as our next destination as the new canteen there always served up something good for lunch. To be honest though, I always preferred a breakfast. Back in those days the GM Buses canteens served a breakfast special which was egg, sausage, bacon, a slice of toast and a choice of either beans or tomatoes, all for a pound. My own breakfast favourite though was two eggs on two toast with beans and a sausage which is still a favourite today.

When my fellow trainee had taken the wheel we would motor down to Stockport or somewhere and I’d fill in my crossword as I listened to Bill calling out ‘drop down into third!’ or ‘watch your back end!’ and various other instructions.

I remember friends telling me when I started on the buses that my social life was finished because I would be working shifts. In fact, the reverse was true. My social life just boomed. After our early shifts my colleagues and I would go down to the busman’s club and play snooker and pool in the afternoons. After late shifts we would go to a late night drinking venue that was a bit of a dive but they used to let us in wearing our uniforms. Sometimes we would even take a change of clothes and after work go to a smart night club.

Another one of my colleagues was a guy called Neil. Now Neil was a nice fella but he was also a very rum turkey indeed. Way back then there were conductors like me who were honest, well reasonably honest. There was always the passenger who paid right at the last minute as he was getting off the bus and there wouldn’t be time to snap off a ticket. Those few pence went into the drivers’ and conductors’ brew fund and when we stopped at the next canteen (back in the late seventies and early eighties there was always another canteen on the horizon) I’d get the brews in with those few pence.

Of course, there were conductors who made a habit of approaching customers who were just getting off the bus and they made a regular brew fund out of those last minute bus fares. Others, those more dishonest ones, and I am sad to say Neil fell into that category, went out of their way not to give out tickets or even issued blank tickets.

One day Neil got his hands burned. He’d issued a blank ticket to a customer and who should board the bus but the fraud squad. They checked the tickets and pulled Neil up regarding the blank ticket. Neil went to a tribunal where he was accused of fraud and faced the sack but an incredible stroke of luck came his way. The fraud squad lost the evidence. They’d misplaced the offending blank ticket and Neil managed to hang onto his job with a stern warning. The fraud squad Inspector, a not very pleasant chap nicknamed Himmler, came up to Neil and told him in no uncertain terms, he had him in his sights and one day he’d get him.

Well, Neil went on to become a driver and then a one man driver and by then, as far as I know, he had left his nefarious past behind him. Still, you never could tell. Some busmen took fare fiddling to a fine art form and it wasn’t always the ones like Neil who were the perpetrators. One guy, I’ll call him Arthur, spent a pretty uneventful life working for the bus company. He never upset anyone, was always on time and was rarely off sick. He was very good with money and apparently invested his bus driving pay packet well. Then again, he was one of the first one man drivers and on a good wage.

Anyway, he did really well for himself and owned a nice holiday home in Prestatyn. Good on him you might think. Then he dropped dead one day of a heart attack and a few weeks later his widow came into the depot with Arthur’s spare ticket machine. Spare ticket machine? What spare ticket machine? Nobody had a spare ticket machine! Has the penny has dropped yet? Arthur was issuing tickets and taking fares for himself! Somewhere along the way Arthur had ‘acquired’ another ticket machine. Nice scam. No wonder he had a holiday home in Prestatyn! At least the Depot Inspectors didn’t tell the wife.

Vintage GM Bus flyer

Anyway, back to Neil although first I have to tell you this. On the A6 in Levenshulme, we had a small busmen’s canteen and if you were on the Manchester to Stockport service you usually stopped here for your breakfast or lunch. Now if you were going towards Stockport the canteen was actually just by two double yellow lines. Just past the canteen was a turn in to the bus parking bays but if you were due for a meal break and your bus was carrying on to Stockport you had to go through the traffic lights and stop in the lay-by, leave your bus and then walk back to the canteen.

Now, what most people did was stop on the double yellows then shout into the canteen for the new crew. It was wrong but that’s what we did and no one made a fuss. Anyway, one day an Inspector’s job came available. Various people applied but the guy who got the job was Neil and he decided that his first order of business as an Inspector was to stop buses parking on those double yellow lines! He did so and made himself a very unpopular fellow indeed. He’d wait by the canteen door and report any driver stopping on the yellow lines and plenty of times myself and other crews would be coming along, ready to stop and we’d see Neil waving us on so we’d carry on, through the lights and on to the lay-by.

Now here’s where Neil’s past caught up with him. In those days a new appointment was probationary for six months and Neil went along to an Inspectors’ meeting chaired by one of the senior Inspectors who just happened to be; yes, you’ve guessed it, it was Himmler. Himmler took Neil to one side. Asked what he was doing in Inspector’s uniform and by the end of the week Neil was back driving his bus and someone else was in charge at Lloyd Road.

Neil of course, had upset many people in his short term as an Inspector and he had forgotten the golden rule: Be nice to people on the way up because you might meet them on the way down. No one ever spoke to Neil again and he cut a sad figure, shunned by his workmates and always sitting alone in the canteen. Shortly after he packed the job in.

When I was a bus conductor it was pretty easy to spot the fare fiddlers. They would never look directly at you. As I strolled down the bus asking for ‘any more fares please’ I knew who had paid and who hadn’t, after all, I had usually just watched them get on the bus. One scruffy guy got on one day and went straight down the bus, sat down and set a fixed gaze out of the window. Ok, I was chatting to other passengers at the time but I still knew he was new to the bus and I wanted his money.

“Fares please.” I called. Nothing. So then I turned directly to him and asked “I don’t think I’ve had your fare mate?” He finally turned away from the window.

“Where are you going to?”

“Levenshulme” he said.

“Thirty five pence please.” The guy thought for a minute, reached into his pocket and pulled out a can of soup.

“Can I pay with this?” He asked. The answer was no. He was asked to leave. After all it was pea and ham soup, tomato might have been another matter.

In my book ‘Floating In Space’ I wrote about another odd ball passenger.

A harassed looking girl boarded in Stockport. There was something about her that I couldn’t put my finger on. She asked for a single to Manchester and did I require identification?

“Identification?” I asked.

“Only I don’t have my credentials on me at the moment. I’ve got to be careful.”

“Careful of what?”

“Well my boyfriend’s a nuclear arms salesman. I’m being watched by the CIA and God knows who else. MI5 have probably got the scent by now.”

“Right, we’ll keep a low profile then.”

“Probably best if you know what I mean.”

She was a Nutter.

Conductor 2265: Licensed to issue tickets

The rest of the trip was pretty unremarkable. When we finally reached Albert Square in the city centre the nutter came storming towards me down the centre aisle and yelled at the top of her voice “If my boyfriend’s not a nuclear arms salesman then how did I get CIA Clearance?”

She charged through the open door and on into Manchester. An old chap behind her departing at a much slower and more sensible pace said, “Answer that one then!”

There used to be a guy who never boarded our bus but spent his time hurtling through the traffic on his bike cutting up cars and buses alike. How he was never run over I do not know. My colleagues had dubbed him simply ‘The Levenshulme Nutter.’

One day, some years later when I made been promoted from bus conducting to the lofty heights of bus driver, I was driving through Levenshulme on the 192 service when the Levenshulme Nutter cut across me and I nearly ran him over. I stopped next to him at the traffic lights, opened my window to give him some abuse then, noticing his outsize spectacles with their purple lenses said, instead “I like your glasses!”

He popped the glasses up on his head and said “Yes, but it’s the man behind that counts!” And cycled away. I never saw him again.

Career wise, working on the buses was a major mistake. I had a lot of fun back then but even so, I always regret not going round to the Manchester Evening News and trying to a get a job doing something I really loved doing; writing.

What was your big career mistake?

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4 Showbiz Stories

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I started this post off with three ‘showbiz’ autobiographies of actresses/comediennes of the stage and screen. Despite trawling through my book collection I couldn’t see a fourth so I added one which is the odd one out; a biography, rather than an autobiography and a male actor/comedian rather than a female. Either way, all four are stars who made their respective names in the 1950s and 1960s era of radio, TV and film and together make up a quartet of much loved British comedians.

Fenella Fielding: Do You Mind If I Smoke?

This is an autobiography by Fenella Fielding, co-written with Simon McKay, and the title comes from her part in Carry On Screaming when she played a seductive character, possibly derived from the Adams Family, Valeria. In one scene Valeria tries to seduce Harry H Corbett standing in for the absent Sid James as a detective. Valeria asks ‘do you mind if I smoke?’ and then rather than smoking a cigarette, a cloud of smoke seems to arise from her body and envelop her. Harry H Corbett adds ‘just when I was trying to give it up’ before embracing her in the smoke.

Simon met Fenella at a London Pilates class in 2011. The two became friends and began meeting regularly for coffee. McKay realised that Fenella was a wonderful raconteur and asked if he could record her stories. Fenella agreed and later they used the transcriptions as the basis for a themed evening, An Evening with Fenella Fielding. Later the conversations became an audio book and finally this printed version. It was hugely enjoyable and rather than being a standard story of her life, the book talks about various things in no particular order.

Fenella describes her early life in Clapton and her first forays into the acting world. She won a scholarship to RADA but her parents, who were keen at first, don’t seem to have realised what RADA was, that their daughter was becoming an actress which they seem to have seen as just one step away from prostitution.

Anyway despite only completing one year at RADA, Fenella did manage to become an actress. After one particular success on the stage she began to pick up various small parts on television and on film and as I mentioned above, her most famous part was in Carry On Screaming. She devotes a whole chapter to Kenneth Williams who of course could be a very difficult man to work with. She also played a part in Doctor in Clover and was heard as the village announcer in the TV series The Prisoner. In fact a great deal of her work was voiceovers for various things especially TV adverts.

This was a lovely read and came over as very chatty and talkative, based as it was on recorded conversations.

Liz Fraser …. and other characters

In Fenella’s book above, she mentions that she hoped her book would not go the way of a lot of other showbiz autobiographies, interesting at first but then dissolving into lists of plays and films and other celebrities. Sadly, that seems to be the way this book does go, even so I enjoyed it.

Liz was brought up in Southwark, in London. Her mother ran a small shop, one of those shops that used to sell everything that Tesco might sell these days from bags of coal, wood bundles to fresh food. Her father was a travelling salesman but died in 1942 aged only 40.

Like Fenella, Liz attended RADA and afterwards won her breakthrough part in I’m All Right Jack which starred Peter Sellers as a union official. She tells the story of playing minor parts in small plays and eventually got some walk on parts on TV. One day her mother said to her “Was that you last week, walking past Peter Cushing?” It was!

Liz worked on TV shows that were live back in the day. On an episode of Dixon of Dock Green she forgot her line but the crew had a ‘cut key’ which cut out the broadcast sound while they called out the line to the hapless Liz.

To get the part in I’m All Right Jack Liz had to lie about her age as the producers wanted someone younger which led to a career long confusion about her age.

She appeared with Peter Sellers in various films and she reveals that although she liked Sellers she had to fight off his amorous advances several times. Liz shares lots of anecdotes about various people she worked with including Tony Hancock, Benny Hill and Sid James.

She tells about appearing in a few of the Carry On films but like many others is critical of the producers. There was only a one off payment for each film and despite the enduring popularity of the Carry On films, the actors earned nothing from their later success on TV. In later life Joan Sims had a lot of financial difficulty but was helped by actors’ charity organisations. Liz herself was very thoughtful, investing in property and stocks and shares which sustained her during the times when acting work was thin on the ground.

She doesn’t share much about her personal life although her first husband features in a chapter called I Married a Thief. Peter Yonwin was something of a fantasist and their marriage soon broke down.

One shocking disclosure was an incident one night after appearing in a pantomime. Liz took an acquaintance home thinking she could deal with any problem man only to be raped. She doesn’t expand on the incident but seems to just mention it quickly and then move on as if perhaps by talking about it however briefly she could perhaps exorcize this dreadful ordeal.

Liz’s second husband, a TV producer, died of cancer and Liz suffered with cancer herself. She enjoyed fast cars and finishes by talking about her old age.

Liz Fraser died in 2018 aged 88.

According to Dora

I do love my showbiz biographies and autobiographies and one I picked up a while back was an autobiography by Dora Bryan. I love Dora from her many appearances in British films but my favourite film is probably A Taste of Honey. The screenplay was by Shelagh Delaney and director Tony Richardson, adapted from Delaney’s own play which she famously wrote when she was only 18.

Dora Bryan gives an outstanding performance; at times comic but always supremely natural. Dora grew up on an Oldham housing estate. She was a great performer as a child and so her mother took her to dancing school and further encouraged by her mother, she joined Oldham Repertory before moving to London to develop her stage career. She had a great career on the stage as well as on film and TV and appeared in many successful West End productions. The first part of the book is very interesting but then as I mentioned earlier, this becomes one of those books in which the latter part seems to wander off into lists of productions and theatre and TV personalities. Even so, it was a lovely read.

When the Wind Changed (The Life and Death of Tony Hancock) by Cliff Goodwin

This final book is the odd one out in this quartet of British comedy stars. It’s a biography rather than an autobiography. I don’t think Tony Hancock ever wrote one.

Back in his day Tony Hancock was a giant among television performers. Pub landlords complained that their establishments used to empty because people would drink up and rush home to watch Hancock’s Half Hour. I can’t even imagine that happening today to any contemporary comedian not withstanding the emergence of TV recording devices.

Hancock’s half hour was first broadcast on the radio in 1954 and then transferred to television in 1956.

Hancock’s co star on television was Sid James and Hancock decided to part with Sid believing that the public had begun to think of the two of them as a sort of double act. His final comedy series for the BBC was called Hancock but even without Sid James, it was a great success.

An interesting TV interview at this time saw Hancock as a guest on Face to Face, an intensive interview which revealed Tony Hancock to be a different man to the bumbling buffoon of his radio and TV shows, in fact the entire transcript of the interview is repeated in the book. Many felt that this interview made him more and more self-critical which led to him dispensing with many who were important to his professional life such as Sid James and his scriptwriters Galton and Simpson.

After a minor car crash Hancock had to use an autocue for perhaps his most famous TV episode, The Blood Donor. After that, he used the autocue more and more finding it too hard apparently to continue to learn scripts.

His drinking increased. He left his wife for his mistress Freddie Ross who worked as his publicist. Freddie and Hancock eventually married but their relationship later broke down also.

Hancock committed suicide in 1968. He took an overdose of pills and left behind a note which said ‘things seemed to go wrong too many times.’

This is such a fascinating and well written book and if you are interested in actors and performers as I am, it is well worth seeking out.

There are a couple of postcripts to the book but one was so intriguing I have to mention it here. George Fairweather was a great friend of Tony Hancock. When Hancock was delighted to find he had been chosen for the royal command performance he told George that he wished his late father could have been there to see it. George commented that perhaps his father would see it and Hancock replied dismissively that ‘only spirits come out of bottles’.

22 days after Hancock’s death, George received a typed letter with no name or address. It said simply that the writer had received a message from Hancock in the afterlife and wished to pass it on. The message is reproduced below.

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Desert Island Discs

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I know I’ve said this before but now that we are in the digital age, having a shed load of TV channels does not guarantee that us, the viewing public, will find anything worth watching.

The other day, after a troll through channel after channel I finally found something I thought might be actually interesting. It was a documentary on BBC Four about the long running radio show Desert Island Discs. It was actually an edition of the Arena documentary series and was first broadcast in 1982 which was the 40th anniversary of the programme.

The documentary featured some of the celebs who had been ‘stranded’ on the island and revealed some of their musical choices as well as some sequences staged for the camera.

One featured Roy Plomley reenacting the moment when, just as he was getting into bed he had an idea for a new radio show. Not wanting to forget his idea, Roy jumped up out of bed and began tapping away at his typewriter with his thoughts and ideas.

In case you have never heard of the show the format is pretty simple. Roy interviews various celebrities and asks them to choose 8 records to take with them onto a desert island. They are allowed one luxury and one book apart from the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare which are already there.

I can’t say I listened to many episodes and as a youngster I much preferred a rival show on either Radio One or Two hosted by Brian Matthew called My Top Twelve in which a celeb, usually one from the pop world, chose his 12 favourite tracks.

What I particularly liked about Roy Plomley was his measured even voice and how he would gently prod his guests towards each new record. He would stay quietly firm when they insisted on having something that is not part of the format, like a set of books instead of just one book

Paul McCartney was one of the guests featured on the programme and one of the records he chose was Beautiful Boy, a track by John Lennon from the album Double Fantasy. Did he really like it I wondered or did he just want to play tribute to his murdered boyhood friend and fellow Beatle, John Lennon?

Some of the other celebs featured in the Arena documentary were comedians Frankie Howerd and Arthur Askey. I’ve always found both comedians to be particularly funny. Frankie Howerd died of a heart attack in 1992 and his home, Wavering Down, in the village of Cross in Somerset, was turned into a sort of museum by his partner and manager Dennis Heymer displaying Howerd’s personal effects and memorabilia. I found it fascinating to learn that most of Howerd’s comic asides to the audience were actually planned and rehearsed in advance.

Arthur Askey was the star of numerous radio shows in the 30s and 40s. He was also a regular on television until his death in 1982. He had numerous catchphrases including I thank you and Hello playmates!

Another guest was John Kenneth Galbraith an American economist who served in the administrations of various presidents from Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. He appears frequently in the classic documentary series The World at War. One of his musical choices was California Here I Come sung by Al Jolson. Film director Otto Preminger was also a guest and his 8 musical choices were all soundtracks from his own films and the book he chose to take to his desert island was his own autobiography.

Track 1

What would my 8 records be? Well, some time ago I did try to work out my all-time top 12 but the fact was, I could only whittle my choices down to 100. For this post though I’ve managed to choose 8 tracks although by the time this is published I might have a completely revised list.

For my first choice I’m going to go with Rock Your Baby by George McCrae because it was the track playing on the jukebox on my 18th birthday. I was working at the Refuge Assurance Company on Oxford Rd in Manchester and my colleagues took me to the pub for my first legal alcoholic drink back in 1974. Every time I hear that record, I think about that day and about the pub we went to. It was called the Salisbury and despite many changes in Manchester since then, the pub is still there. The inside has changed a little but on the outside, the Salisbury looks just like it did in 1974.

Track 2

Looking at my top 100 I was surprised to find Rock Your Baby wasn’t listed even though I had chosen nine other tracks from 1974. However, another record that I must include in my eight desert island discs is How Long by Ace. The lead singer of Ace was Paul Carrack who went on to work with other bands as well as working solo. In 1996 he released an updated version of How Long which I think is even better than the original so I think I’d choose that for my second track.

Track 3

Getting back to Paul McCartney I put one of his songs into my top 100 which I think I’ll have in my desert island discs. It was Listen to What the Man Said from when Paul was with his band Wings and was released in 1975. In 1974 I saw Paul and Wings live in concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The ticket cost me only £2, can you believe it?

Track 4

10cc were a great Manchester band and they recorded my next track, I’m Not in Love at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. It started life as an album track but fans were desperate to hear it as a single even though it was rather long for a single in those days. The track was famous for its multi-tracked backing vocals and was released in 1975 hitting the top spot in the singles chart soon afterwards.

Track 5

I love the film Back to the Future and one of my theories about successful films is that generally they always have a great musical theme or song and that is particularly true of Back to the Future. The film features the song The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. Huey even has a small cameo in the film when Marty McFly auditions with his band and Huey rejects them with the comment “you’re just too damn loud”.

Track 6

Moving away from the 1970’s my sixth track would be Walking in Memphis by Mark Cohn. The song is a tribute to Elvis Presley and the lyrics are well observed. My favourite verse goes like this:

Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue

Followed him up to the gates of Graceland

Then I watched him walk right through

Now security did not see him

They just hovered around his tomb

But there’s a pretty little thing waiting for the King

Down in the jungle room.

Track 7

A very long time ago when I was either a teenager or in my early twenties, my old friend Steve and I interviewed each other for our own personal Top Twelve favourite records. We recorded our interviews on tape and added the appropriate records. I used to play my tape quite frequently but I worried about it breaking so in later years I managed to digitise the whole thing and burn it to a CD. Later I decided to update the interview by adding new contemporary comments from myself. Looking back at the music my younger self had chosen I realised that my tastes had changed and so I cut a few tracks out and added some new ones. One of the new editions was The Way it is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

Track 8

So here we are, just wanting that final track. I thought about going for some more modern songs rather than the predominantly 70s tracks I’ve already chosen. I also thought about going for more of a soul track or something by a more folk or country singer. Eventually I thought I’d choose a song from one of my favourite writers, Burt Bacharach, Do You Know the Way to San Jose sung by Dionne Warwick.

Paul McCartney chose as his luxury item a guitar and in a similar fashion, George Formby chose a ukulele and Liberace chose a piano. I’m not sure what I would take but I would probably go for my laptop or at least a notebook and pen.

Which book would I take? Well, I thought about taking The Great Gatsby but even though it’s an absolutely wonderful read it’s a rather short book. I’d probably go for my favourite book which has long been Dicken’s David Copperfield. It is not only an amazing read but it’s a very thick book and would keep me amused if I was stranded for a very long time.

Roy Plomley died in 1985, 17 days after he interviewed his last castaway, Sheila Steafel. Roy had presented 1791 episodes of the show over a 43-year period. He was followed as a presenter by Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley, Kirsty Young and most recently, Lauren Laverne.

Over on the downloads page you can download an excel file of my top 100 tracks. If you use Spotify click this link to listen to my top 100 tracks: 

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4 Bad Films (But I Like Them Anyway)

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I am a great film fan as regular readers will know, particularly classic films. I do occasionally watch a film at the cinema but generally I reckon I am really your regular couch potato type of guy who tends to watch films in the comfort of home with a large cup of tea and perhaps a corned beef sandwich nearby.

Most people will have the experience of settling down to watch something good on the TV only to find that the film you have waited for is in fact, a load of old cobblers. What can you do but flip through the channels and try and find something else to watch. The big problem there is if you are watching during the evening, most films start at 9pm so if you have to flip over twenty minutes into a dud film, you’ll have missed the first twenty minutes of the good film that started over on some other channel.

Yes, it can be a hard life for us dedicated couch potatoes, that’s why I like to have a good DVD on standby to rescue the evening if things go sadly wrong.

According to Wikipedia: globally, film production varies significantly by country and year, but in 2023, China produced nearly 780 feature films, while the UK saw 207 films go into production, and the US and Canada saw 569 movies released.

To be honest, looking at those figures it’s hard to understand why a bad film actually gets made. Look at the process a bad film has to go through. Someone has an idea for a film, then they either write a screenplay or pay someone to write one. The screenplay comes to the attention of a producer and he says something like “I bet Brad Pitt would be good in the lead, and, what about Jennifer Anniston for the female lead”.

Scripts are sent out, a budget is raised, directors, cameramen, sound people, set designers and all manner of people come on board. The film is made and released. The critics go to see it and think, wow, this film stinks. Nobody comes to see it and a few weeks later it’s suddenly on Sky cinema with someone hired to write a whole lot of (lying) complimentary stuff about it to make you watch it.

People do watch it, realise it’s bad and twenty minutes later they change channel and are now watching a re-run of Star Trek that was made in 1968. Why didn’t someone way back down the line say ‘hang on, this is rubbish, let’s scrap it and film something else?’

Of course, one man’s Oscar winner is another man’s straight to DVD seriously bad film.

Here’s the crazy thing though, sometimes those bad films are so bad that you actually like them. Anyway, for this week’s blogging entertainment, I thought I’d list a few examples of rubbish films that I kind of enjoy.

Uncle Buck.

Uncle Buck is a complete load of old tosh but I just seem to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Never seen it? Really? OK it’s a sort of variant on the film Home Alone and in fact one of the characters is played by that kid from the Home Alone films, Macauley Culkin.

In this film a couple have to leave home because the wife’s father has had a heart attack. Who can they get to babysit the three kids? No one is available so the no-good bum of a brother-in-law is roped in, you guessed it, Uncle Buck.

Uncle Buck is played by the late John Candy and he has to contend with kids he doesn’t even know including, as well as young Mr Culkin, two screen sisters, one of them a teenage girl with a big attitude problem. She is completely embarrassed by her uncouth uncle and his smoke screen producing old banger automobile and even though the film is just a notch above rubbish, it’s actually quite fun in parts.

Buck sorts out ‘Bug’, the teenage girl’s cheating boyfriend and in doing so finally makes friends with his teenage niece. Uncle Buck is a great film to watch when you’re tired and not really paying attention and I always get the feeling it was written by a sort of committee of writers. (Probably the same committee that wrote Home Alone and Three Men and a Baby and so on.)

The thing about Uncle Buck is that the star, John Candy is actually pretty funny (in parts) and there are some actual funny elements to the film. Believe it not, even though I once hated this film, I’m beginning to warm to it.

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves

There have been numerous film versions of the Robin Hood legend and for me the stand out one is the Errol Flynn version with Errol as Robin, Olivia De Havilland as Maid Marian and Basil Rathbone playing the villain. In this rather dire version made in 1991, Kevin Costner plays the legendary English hero with an accent that would not be out of place on the streets of New York.

Costner, as the noble Robin of Loxley, returns from the crusades to find that his father (not a bad performance by British favourite Brian Blessed) has been hung and his home laid to ruin by the Sheriff of Nottingham, played in a villainous but slightly camp way by Alan Rickman, whose performance was universally praised. Robin was accompanied by Azeem, a Muslim who feels he has to repay Robin for saving his life.

The film featured the hit single Everything I Do, I Do it For You sung by Bryan Adams and also had a small cameo from Sean Connery playing King John. The exteriors were shot in the UK and one particular location was at Sycamore Gap, just by Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. The tree used in the sequence became known as the Robin Hood tree which featured in the news in 2023 when it was cut down by vandals.

The film does start out fairly seriously with Robin escaping from capture in the holy lands and then making his way back to England. Alan Rickman’s performance later in the film gives the story a lighter sort of tone and although I’ve always preferred other versions of the Robin Hood legend, over the years I’ve actually begun to like this one.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

So what have we here? A young American lad (Matthew Broderick) decides to have a day off school by pretending to be sick. He calls over his hypochondriac friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and gets him to call their school with the fake news that his girlfriend’s grandmother has died so she (Mia Sara) can also get a day off and the three decide to have a little fun by going out in Cameron’s father’s beloved Ferrari.

The headmaster of the school (the Principal as the Americans call them) knows something is up and is determined to catch Ferris in the act of truancy.

The whole thing is a load of old rubbish but like the other two films mentioned above, it has somehow wormed its way into my affections.

The Vikings

I thought I might finish with that classic rubbish film, The Vikings. The Vikings is a 1958 epic produced by Kirk Douglas who also starred in the film. Douglas and Tony Curtis star as Viking half brothers and if my memory serves me right, they don’t actually know they are brothers. They do a lot of raiding and pillaging over in England and it turns out Tony Curtis might be the heir to a Kingdom in England and Kirk Douglas might be the heir to the Viking leadership. To be honest I’ve never been really sure what the score is even after looking up the film on Wikipedia but the finale ends with Kirk Douglas about to bump off Tony Curtis but hesitates for a moment having been told Tony Curtis is actually his half brother and then during that second of hesitation Curtis manages to bump off Kirk, or was it the other way round?

Anyway, the whole film is a mildly entertaining load of old tosh and my brother and I used to watch it as children and try to imitate the rather catching musical theme.

Once again, despite this being a completely dire film, I always tend to watch it for reasons completely unknown to anyone, especially myself.

What bad films do you enjoy?

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Book Bag: John Grisham

Posted on by Steve Higgins

In my last few posts about books, rather than publish my usual Book Bag posts, I’ve incorporated book reviews into other types of posts; holiday memories and posts about books made into films and so on. During my last few holidays, I always seem to either have a couple of John Grisham books with me or found some in the places, usually rented villas, where we have stayed. I thought it might be an idea to write a John Grisham themed book bag post. Who actually is John Grisham then?

Let’s go over to Wikipedia and see what they have to say:

Born February 8, 1955 John Grisham is an American novelist, lawyer, and former member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his best-selling legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 37 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three anglophone authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.

Pretty impressive credentials, aren’t they? Most of the inside back covers of my copies of his books say pretty much the same thing and in the back of the last Grisham book I read, The Racketeer, there are extracts from an interview with Grisham in which he mentions his favourite book is A Time to Kill, his first book and apparently the most personal of his legal thrillers.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the books that I have read.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham

As I said earlier, this book turns out to be Grisham’s first novel and he says in the introduction how proud he was of finishing it, as back then he hardly ever finished anything. It also contains some autobiographical elements; Grisham used to be a street lawyer, similar to the character in the book.

The book is set in America’s deep south where there is or was a great deal of racial prejudice. Two white guys decide to kidnap a young black girl, tie her to a tree and repeatedly rape her. They drive her away and dump her like garbage but she survives and the police arrest the two scumbags responsible. Next, the young girl’s father Carl Lee Hailey decides to take a rifle and shoot the two guys. He is arrested and put on trial for murder and street lawyer Jake Brigance takes on the case.

The case ignites the small town of Clanton Mississippi. The Klu Klux Klan become involved as do various other groups and the stage is set for a tense murder trial which goes on while the police and the National Guard try to keep order.

It’s a very exciting read although the ending was a little underwhelming and if you find the N word offensive then this is a book which is not for you as that particular word appears numerous times on almost every page.

The Client

This book was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the man kills himself (he is a lawyer defending a known murderer) he tells the boys, Mark and his little brother Ricky, where his client has hidden the  dead body of a murdered US senator. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he wouldn’t tell them about the body in the first place. Of course, if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

This book might be the best book by Grisham I have read so far. The book opens with the murder of two US Supreme Court judges and this in a way plays into the hands of the President as he can now nominate new judges who share his political views. At the same time, law student Darby Shaw is having an affair with her law professor. She decides to look closely at the murders and develops a thesis, an idea about who may have done the murders and why. The thesis becomes known as the Pelican Brief and she passes it to the professor who in turn sends it to his friend, an FBI lawyer. It then gets passed up the chain to the head of the FBI and on to the White House where the President instructs the FBI not to investigate further.

Not long afterwards the professor is blown up in a car bomb which Darby narrowly avoids and from then on, she is on the run trying to evade death herself.

This for me was one of those unputdownable novels which was exciting and kept me interested all the way to the end.

The Firm by John Grisham

There is a process by which I choose books to take with me on holiday. I like to think it’s a thoughtful process combining different genres of books, some novels, maybe the odd classic, and some biographies and autobiographies. What actually happens is that the day before our trip I’ll just grab something near to hand that I know I haven’t read yet and shove it in my suitcase. Anyway, that’s how I ended up with The Firm. Last year I read The Rainmaker by John Grisham and I thought it was a pretty good read. I must have mentioned that to Liz so she filed that away and got me a stack of Grisham novels for my last birthday. The Firm isn’t a bad read and in my case it was a nice change of pace after reading some non-fiction books.

It’s a good story but like a lot of Grisham’s works, it’s more plot driven than character driven. The characters are sort of bland templates that I’ve recognised in a lot of his novels. Anyway, characters aside, this is a really original story about a young guy who graduates from law school and gets head hunted into a firm he has never heard of but which offers tremendous financial benefits, a brand new BMW, and an ultra cheap mortgage as well as other financial bonuses. The downside, as he comes to learn later, is that the firm is just a cover operation to launder money for a big mafia crime family and the FBI wants our hero James McDeere, to help them.

Verdict: Highly enjoyable and a great holiday read but nothing more, although that didn’t stop the book from becoming a best seller as well as a hit film in the 1990’s.

The Racketeer

This is another legal thriller about a man convicted of money laundering, which he denies by the way, sentenced to ten years in a federal institution. Naturally he is not happy but he hoped to get out by using rule 35 of the Federal Rules for Criminal Procedure which means that if the inmate can solve a crime which the federal authorities are unable to solve, then his sentence can be reduced.

The man, Malcolm Bannister, helps other inmates of the prison with their legal issues and in doing so has come across some information about the murder of a judge, in which the Police and the FBI have no clues about the culprit. He plans to barter this information for his freedom but it turns out that Bannister is actually double bluffing the FBI and has a scheme in mind in which he can gain his freedom and walk away with a considerable amount of money as well as a new identity.

Like most of Grisham’s books, this was an excellent holiday read but towards the end it almost feels as though the writer has become a little fed up with this increasingly complicated story and is rushing to get it finished. This was mostly a good read but the end was a little disappointing.

The Boys From Biloxi

This is a very oddball book indeed. It’s not a courtroom drama although courtroom battles do feature in the book. It’s actually a very long-winded story of two families, one on the wrong side of the law and one on the other. One family is part of a rough and ready area of town and owns saloons that have illegal gambling and prostitution on tap and the other family who hope to clean the town up.

A lot of the story is just reeled off like a sort of narration you might listen to in a museum (which is how one review I read described the text). The author just seems to recount a lot of the story in this same long distance way. Eventually the story becomes more fleshed out and detailed when a tornado hits the town and a lawyer with ambitions to become the district attorney helps the residents fight for compensation from insurance companies that do not want to pay out. His success with compensation claims help him to become the DA but he is murdered before he can bring the criminal family to justice. His son however goes on to clean up the town.

Again this was another great holiday read but if I had been reading it at home for twenty minutes or so before going to sleep at night, I reckon that after a few nights I would have perhaps picked up something else to read.

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My White Jacket and my 70’s Pop Star Heroes

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I really loved that white jacket although now I come to think about it, I only ever wore it once. Oh well, before we get to it, let’s take a quick look at some of my 70’s pop star heroes.

David Cassidy

I wasn’t so much a fan of David Cassidy, I just wanted to look like him. I always thought he was a pretty cool dude and although I didn’t rush out and buy his music I always kind of liked him. Cassidy was an unexpected superstar, the son of actor Jack Cassidy who crops up frequently in classic Columbo episodes.

image courtesy wikipedia

David began working as an actor and musician and was signed up by Universal studios in 1969. He worked on many TV shows of the time like Ironside and Bonanza until he was signed up for a part in a show called ‘The Partridge family‘. Cassidy and the show became a runaway hit and ten albums produced during the show’s run sold over a million copies each. David became a teen idol and his personal concerts were sell outs but a Cassidy mania, not unlike that experienced by the Beatles years earlier, caused numerous problems and culminated in a stampede at White City stadium where many people were injured and one girl fan sadly died.
In later years Cassidy was still singing and writing and appeared in many stage shows and musicals. You might even have seen him in a TV version of his life story, ‘The David Cassidy Story’.

On November 18, 2017, Cassidy was admitted to hospital with acute liver and kidney failure. He became critically ill and was put into a medically induced coma. He came out of the coma two days later in a critical but stable condition. Doctors hoped that Cassidy would survive until a liver became available for transplant, but he died of liver failure on November 21, 2017, at the age of 67.

According to Wikipedia, his daughter, Katie Cassidy, reported that his final words were “So much wasted time.”

Gary Glitter

Gary Glitter’s first big hit, back in the early seventies was ‘Rock n’ Roll’ parts 1 and 2, a double-sided single which on part 2 was mainly instrumental with group chants of ‘rock n roll’. Glitter followed this up with a string of hits throughout the early seventies with singles like ‘I’m the leader of the gang’, ‘I love you love me love’, ‘Do you wanna touch me?’ and ‘Hello hello, I’m back again’. His career faded afterwards but in the early 90’s his records were discovered by a new generation of record buyers and many modern artists have acknowledged that he was an inspiration to them in earlier years.

Back in 1976 my brother and I went to London to see him in concert. I’m pretty certain it was some sort of farewell concert but Gary soon made the first of many comebacks.

The late 1990’s saw his image become fatally destroyed by his arrest and conviction in 1999 for possession of child pornography. Some years later, in 2006, Glitter faced criminal charges and deportation from Vietnam after a court found him guilty of obscene acts with minors. Glitter was deported back to Britain and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life. These convictions turned Glitter from being one of the best-loved stars in British pop history, into a hated and loathed figure.

On 5 February 2015, Glitter was convicted of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13. On 27 February 2015, Glitter was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

On 3 February 2023, Glitter was released on licence after serving half of his sentence but on 13 March 2023, he was recalled to prison for breaching his licence conditions by allegedly viewing downloaded images of children.

David Bowie

Bowie is one of those stars who kept on making music throughout the years and constantly reinvented himself. One of the first tracks of his I ever bought was Life on Mars and a great early hit was Space Oddity. One of my personal favourites was The Laughing Gnome, originally released in 1967 in which Bowie sings with a ‘Gnome’ which was actually a speeded up vocal track.

Later Bowie created the character Ziggy Stardust and became one of the stars of the glam rock era. He changed style again with Young Americans, released in 1976. It was a big hit and even topped the US soul charts. In the 1980’s he had a hit with Under Pressure, a collaboration with Queen.

He also had numerous roles in the cinema playing an alien in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth and various others.

Bowie died while living in New York. He had contracted liver cancer and died on the 10th of January 2016.

Cliff Richard

Cliff’s career began in the 1960s and has continued almost to the present day. In the 1970s he had twice sung the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest and had his own TV show on the BBC.

I can’t say that I was ever a big fan of Cliff however in the late 70’s and 80s he had a string of excellent hits that I really loved, songs that included Devil Woman, Miss You Nights, Carrie and Wired for Sound.

Cliff was involved in controversy in the late 1990’s when he complained that radio stations were not playing his records and he went as far as releasing a dance version of one of his songs under a different name to prove his point. The record was popular but radio stations stopped playing it when Cliff was revealed as the singer.

In 2014, Cliff’s property was searched in relation to allegations which arose from the Jimmy Saville investigation known as Operation Yewtree. The allegations were unfounded but Cliff was unhappy that they were broadcast on the BBC news and later sued both the South Yorkshire Police and the BBC receiving substantial damages.

According to Wikipedia, Cliff is the third top selling artist in the UK behind Elvis Presley and the Beatles.  John Lennon apparently said of Cliff that before Cliff and the Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music.

Elton John

In 1967 Reg Dwight answered an advertisement in the New Musical Express. Liberty Records had placed the ad as they were looking for musical talent and when Reg arrived at Liberty’s offices, he was given a sheaf of lyrics written by Bernie Taupin and so Reg promptly began writing music to Bernie’s words. When Reg decided to perform his new songs, he decided to use a different name and so Reg became Elton John.

1973 was probably my first record buying year. Up until then I really had little interest in music. The Beatles had pretty much passed me by and I was more interested in TV and film music rather than the pop charts. For Christmas 1972 my brother and I received a shared present, a new stereo record player. Of course, having a record player meant that I needed something to play on it. That’s when I discovered Elton.

I bought lots of Elton’s records throughout the 70s but I lost interest in his music in his later years.

In 2001 Elton released the album Songs from the West Coast. The album was received warmly by the media and I remember hearing many great reviews saying how Elton had returned to his piano based roots and so on. On Wikipedia I see that the album was recorded on analogue tape as Elton felt that gave the sound a warmer feel. OK I thought, sounds like a good time to try some of Elton’s latest music. While I was waiting to pay for the CD in HMV I noticed another album of Elton’s, Made in England, in the reduced section so I grabbed that while I was there.

Anyway, Songs from the West Coast was a total disappointment for me and not only that, I thought the whole thing had a tinny sound to it, not a warm one.

A few months later I noticed Made in England lying unplayed on a shelf so I popped it into my car to give it an airing. I’m so glad I did because Made in England is the album that to me, sounds much like his classic 70’s stuff with some outstanding tracks. A fabulous album, just as good as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Since then, Elton has been part of the first same sex UK marriage when he married his long time partner David Furnish and has seen his life story made into the 2019 film Rocketman starring Taron Egerton as Elton which includes a good many of Elton’s hits.

His latest album, Who Believes in Angels was released this year.

Marc Bolan

Bolan was a pop singer of the 1970s and is credited with beginning the glam rock movement by appearing on Top of the Pops, the BBC’s flagship music programme, with his group T Rex performing the single Hot Love wearing glitter make up on his face. The single was a number one hit and was followed up with my favourite Bolan/T Rex track, Get it On which spent 4 weeks at number one. Bolan and T Rex had numerous hits including Ride a White Swan, Telegram Sam, Metal Guru, Children of the Revolution and Solid Gold Easy Action. Bolan was great friends with David Bowie and Marc’s producer Tony Visconti later went on to work with Bowie.

In 1977 Bolan was involved with his girlfriend Gloria Jones. They went out to a nightclub in London, both had been drinking and Gloria was at the wheel of her mini when they crashed in south London. Gloria was injured but Marc was sadly killed. A shrine at the spot where they crashed is maintained by the T Rex Action Group.

David Essex

David Essex was another performer who made his name in the early seventies although in his youth he had ideas of becoming a footballer. He played the lead in the stage musical Godspell and then went on to star in the film ‘That’ll be the Day’. I remember seeing his album in a record shop and thinking what a cool dude he looked dressed in a white suit. The album was Rock On and the single went to number 3 in the UK charts in 1973. The next year David released one of my all-time favourite tracks Gonna make you a Star which went all the way up to number 1. He also appeared on the double album Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and went on to star in many musicals such as ‘Godspell’ and Evita. In 2011, he joined the cast of TV soap ‘EastEnders’.

He is still writing, recording and performing today.

The White Jacket

When I saw David Essex singing ‘Rock On’ wearing a white suit on ‘Top of the Pops’ for the first time, I thought he was the epitome of seventies cool and it occurred to me that one way to transform my gangling self-conscious self into something better might be to get that very same white suit. I couldn’t afford a suit at the time so I settled for a jacket, a white jacket, and I well remember admiring myself in the mirror before my first Saturday night out wearing it, sometime back in 1973.

The first problem I encountered with the jacket came on the bus into town. I sat on the back seat and in those days, the back seats of our local buses were a little notorious for being dusty and grimy as they were over the engine and absorbed all the engine fumes. Also there were people who put their feet up on the seats leaving marks to which people like me (the twerp in the white suit) were highly susceptible. Another thing is that all my life I have been cursed with being clumsy and once I had met up with my friends I somehow managed to spill beer all down my sleeve. Anyway, the night went on, more or less successfully. I certainly remember having a good time although the white jacket failed in its primary function; that of attracting gorgeous girls.

Later on, we stopped at the kebab shop and somehow a sizeable portion of chilli sauce managed to attach itself to my jacket. Rather than feeling like David Essex, I felt a little like Alec Guinness in the film The Man In The White Suit‘, wanting to get away from everyone! I never wore the stained jacket again and it lingered sadly in the back of my wardrobe smelling of kebab, chilli sauce, beer and diesel fumes until my Mum, on a major clean up splurge, decided to throw it out.

Of course, it could have been worse: I could have gone out wearing jeans, a white t-shirt and a red jacket trying to look like James Dean. (Actually, that was another night!)

It’s only fair to mention that this post is a hugely updated version of one that I first published 10 years ago in 2015.

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8 Fictional Presidents

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Donald Trump, the 47th president of the US, has been in the news quite a lot recently. He’s cutting down on the number of federal employees. He has stopped federal help for electric cars, he’s made it known he wants the USA to take over Gaza and he is also negotiating with Russia to stop the war in the Ukraine. He doesn’t seem to have involved President Zelensky in these talks despite Zelensky being the president of the Ukraine. Trump has even cast doubt on Zelensky’s right to be the president as, because of the war, Ukraine hasn’t held any elections. This is quite rich really as Putin, the leader of Russia, has not only rigged the Russian elections but has changed the law in Russia so he can continue as president and has also allegedly bumped off Alexei Navalny, his major political opponent.

It’s a story that you couldn’t write and that got me thinking about fictional presidents so I thought I’d start with a book I’ve just read here in sunny Lanzarote.

President Duncan

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson has been a good holiday read. A helter skelter fast paced read but moves along quickly and has nicely laid out short chapters to enable me to pause, jump in the pool to cool off and then resume reading.

President Duncan has a lot of problems on his hands. His wife has recently died of cancer and he is suffering from some sort of blood disease. On top of that the Speaker of the House has started hearings regarding rumours that the President spoke to a known terrorist on the phone and even helped him to escape capture.

Not only that but the President agrees to meet an unknown woman who knows a secret password known only to the President and his trusted advisors. She asks the President to meet her colleague at a football game without security and the President agrees and dismisses the Secret Service. Happily the Secret Service are hanging about closely and save the President from an assassin’s bullet but now he has to deal with a threat concerning a computer virus that will shut down every computer in the USA including those that deal with nuclear strikes.

One of the reviews on the back cover was from someone who likened the book to the film Airforce One, and to be honest, I felt the same way, even picturing the President as Harrison Ford, who played the President in that film.

The book was a great holiday read although I did wonder what part Bill Clinton played in the writing process. Did he just provide background to James Patterson or did he contribute towards the storyline too?

Anyway, the book was a great holiday read.

President James Marshall

Clearly I have to follow on with Airforce One, an action packed film starring Harrison Ford as President James Marshall. In this film the President leaves Russia in his aircraft, Airforce One after a joint US/Russian mission to capture a terrorist named General Ivan Radek. Unknown to the President, a group of Radek sympathisers have joined the aircraft posing as journalists. They take over the Airforce One but it looks as though the President has got away in an escape pod. However, the President was unwilling to leave his family behind and he has hidden himself in the cargo hold. The film then unfolds in the manner of a Die Hard film with the President bumping off the terrorists and managing to contact the White House and also to free his colleagues pretty much in the way that Bruce Willis might have done.

Not a great cinema experience but I kind of enjoyed it.

President Jordan Lyman

Seven Days in May was a political thriller released in 1964 and directed by John Frankenheimer. Kirk Douglas plays United States Marine Corps Colonel “Jiggs” Casey who works for Four Star General James Mattoon Scott, a highly-decorated officer played by Burt Lancaster. Jiggs thinks that Scott might be planning a coup to remove the President who has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, a deal which is highly unpopular with the military. Jiggs discovers that a military group known as ECOMCON has been assigned to seize radio and television networks. He manages to see the President and convince him of the threat. The President, still somewhat sceptical, organises a small group of staff to investigate.

Interestingly, President Kennedy authorised the producers to film scenes at the White House. He had read the book that the film was based on and as he had dealt with critical members of the military himself, was perhaps worried that the fictional scenario could be a real possibility.

The President was played by Frederic March who was one of the great cinema actors of the 1930s and 40s. He was the original Norman Maine in the first version of A Star is Born made in 1936 and even starred with Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina in 1935.

Presidents Palmer, Taylor and Logan

The TV series 24 first appeared in 2001 on US television. Each episode lasted for an hour and is told in real time with a digital clock on screen updating the viewer. The first series is set on the day of the US presidential primary in California. Jack Bauer, a maverick agent of the CTU Counter Terrorism Unit, is detailed to protect presidential hopeful David Palmer from an assassination attempt. Palmer was played by Dennis Haysbert as a potential black US president.

Season 2 details how Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, must prevent a nuclear bomb from exploding and assist David Palmer, now the US president, in finding the culprits. Jack is assisted by a team of agents at the CTU hi-tech control room who are adept at computer manipulation, taking over feeds from CCTV cameras, hacking into other public computers and researching various information to help Jack.

Allison Taylor is the first female president of the USA. She first appeared in the episode Redemption which was a bridging episode between series 6 and 7 as series 7 was delayed due to a writers’ strike in Hollywood. Taylor was played by actress Cherry Jones and almost seemed to be a precursor to a real life female president. As it happened, Hilary Clinton was defeated at the polls and Donald Trump became the president in 2017. (Personally, I always like President Taylor. She always reminded me a little of Captain Janeway from the TV series Star Trek Voyager.)

President Logan was played by Gregory Itzin and first appeared in season 4. He was the Vice President but was later sworn in as President when the previous President was injured in a terrorist attack. As President, Logan becomes involved in the murder of former President Palmer and is eventually forced to resign. Later, he tries to help President Taylor with a peace treaty with the Russians but again, some dodgy dealings lead him to commit suicide. Some thought the character was inspired by real life President Richard Nixon. Whether that was true or not I’m not sure but Logan was a very tricky President indeed.

I thoroughly enjoyed 24. Jack Bauer was an uncompromising agent who was convinced that the end justified the means and would shoot anyone, threaten anyone, good or bad who got in his way. The series was a very slick hi tech espionage show which combined spies, shoot outs and computer science in an exciting TV series.

Presidents Kane and Kennedy

Shall We Tell the President was a novel by Jeffrey Archer first published in 1977. In the book Edward Kennedy has become the US President and FBI agents become aware of a plot to kill the President.

I read this book many years ago but recently came across this new edition, rewritten by the author himself. In real life Ted Kennedy never made it to the White House, his challenge cut short by the ghost of what happened to Mary Jo Kopechene at Chappaquiddick. In this rewrite then, the author puts his own fictional president, President Kane in charge at the White House.

The FBI learn of a plot to murder the President. A Greek waiter, an illegal immigrant, learns of the plot whilst working as a waiter at a restaurant in Washington DC. He calls the FBI and the two agents assigned to the case report quickly to their superior. Soon, one of the agents and their boss, as well as the informant are dead leaving only one agent who by chance has survived a murder attempt. He has six days to track down the assassins.

The book kept me interested but I can’t say it was a great read and I thought some of the dialogue was a little poor, in particular the FBI agent who kept referring to his new girlfriend constantly as ‘pretty lady’ was a little cringeworthy to say the least. Sorry Mr Archer but I’d have to give this one a five out of ten.

Just off the top of my head without using Google, that’s about all the fictional presidents I can come up with for now. Which was your favourite?

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Curry, Tapas and a Read in the Sun

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Over on the front page of this site you will find a whole lot of stuff about me. It tells you that I have always wanted to be a writer, that I enjoy writing as well as Formula One racing, classic cinema and books. In one segment it mentions that I like dining out, in fact it says that dining out is one of the great experiences of life and so I thought I’d start with that, great experiences and see where that leads me.

One of the great experiences of life, as far as I’m concerned anyway is a pretty simple one. It involves lying on a sunbed and relaxing on a hot, or even just warm day. Throw in a dip in the pool and that sensation of lying in the sun while you dry off is made even more satisfying.

Of course, doing that in the UK at any time of the year is not always possible, especially in February which is why for perhaps the last ten years, if you want to get hold of me at this time of the year, you’ll find me in Lanzarote.

What can I tell you about this place? Looking over on Wikipedia I see the Canary Islands emerged from the sea bed during a volcanic eruption about 15 million years ago. There is apparently some evidence the Phoenicians were the first settlers here although the first known records of the islands come from Pliny the elder, the Roman scholar.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, nothing is recorded about the Canary Islands until 999, when the Arabs arrived at the islands. In 1336, a ship arrived from Lisbon under the guidance of Genoese navigator Lancelotto Malocello, who used the alias ‘Lanzarote da Framqua’ which is where the island’s name comes from. Today Lanzarote is part of Spain.

When we first came here round about ten years ago, we hired a car and drove round the island. We visited the volcano which was pretty much what you’d expect a volcano to look like, although the drive down a very narrow winding road in a coach towards the centre of it was a little scary. Otherwise, apart from the usual touristy stuff, there wasn’t that much to see and we quickly realised that the Marina Rubicon in Playa Blanca is by far our favourite place. Our rented villa is on the bus route and only five minutes walk from both the bus stop and the local shop so renting a car is not a particular concern.

What else do I do on Lanzarote? Well I read a lot of books.

Crossfire by Jim Marrs

I do love a JFK assassination book and this is a good one. It covers pretty much everything there is to know about the assassination from Oswald to Ruby, the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the CIA, the FBI, the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on assassinations and everything in between. Who really did it? I’m not sure. Was Lee Oswald the killer or just a patsy? Again I’m not sure but a lot of the evidence against Oswald was compromised. The officers who found the assassin’s rifle said it was a Mauser, not a Manlicher Carcarno. Later all but one of the officers said they were mistaken. The one who said he wasn’t mistaken was later murdered.

Who were the people on the Grassy Knoll with Secret Service IDs when all the SS were in the President’s motorcade? The shells found at the scene where the fleeing Oswald supposedly shot officer Tippet  were marked by a police officer. Later, when asked to identify the shells, his marks weren’t there. I could go on and on. Maybe Oswald did it, maybe he didn’t. Perhaps he was a patsy as he claimed. Will the records which President Trump will release show what really happened? I doubt it but either way, the JFK assassination is such an fascinating mystery.

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

I absolutely loved this book. I mentioned it last week in a post about detectives but it really is a fabulous read and the film with Humphrey Bogart follows it closely, especially the dialogue.  If you have never read it or seen the film, it’s about Sam Spade, a detective who happens on a group of people all after the mysterious Maltese Falcon statuette worth untold millions and at the same time seeks to find his partner’s murderer.

The only real difference between the film and the book is that in the book, Caspar Gutman’s daughter makes a brief appearance but not in the film. In the film Gutman infers that Miss Wanderley has stolen a thousand dollar bill and Bogart as Sam Spade demands that Gutman confesses to stealing it or stands for a frisk. In the book, Spade surprisingly thinks Miss Wanderley has got the note and forces her to strip naked to show that she didn’t steal it. Only then does he challenge Mr Gutman.

I have to say I have found the works of Raymond Chandler a much better read but this particular story I loved almost as much as the film.

Another book by Hammett, The Thin Man, wasn’t as good. Detective Nick Charles is no longer a detective but many others seem to think he is and he seems to feel compelled to look into a case of murder, even though he doesn’t seem that interested. Perhaps that was why I lost interest early on and kept putting this book down in favour of others.

Going back to the thing I mentioned earlier, the one about dining being one of the great experiences of life, well, only a few minutes walk from our rented villa, just next to the shop I told you about is a really fabulous Indian restaurant. No need to get the bus to the Marina or the centre of Playa Blanca as we can just walk to the restaurant. The funny thing is, Liz and I are part of a curry club and once a month we meet at a curry house in St Annes and settle down for a curry and some chit chat. I was actually thinking of perhaps going every two months or even leaving the curry club altogether. Well, I like curry but I’d had all I really wanted to eat in that particular restaurant and, nice though it is, I perhaps fancied going to the Chinese on that day or the local Italian.

Now however, I seem to be once again hooked on curry. Our local curry house here in Lanzarote, The Indian Gourmet, is a very friendly place. We have established our favourite table. The staff know that Liz hates coriander and they have marked us down as preferring medium rather than hot as regards curry strength. The chef always comes out to see if we have enjoyed his creation and always recommends what we can try next time and so on. The curry house then has become our sort of go to place if we want to eat out and don’t fancy travelling far.

The Client by John Grisham

Time for another book and this one was a great holiday read. It’s about an eleven year old boy who witnesses a suicide but before the lawyer kills himself, he tells the boys -Mark and his little brother Ricky- where the dead body of a murdered US senator has been hidden. The senator was the victim of a mob ‘hit’ and Mark won’t tell the police or the FBI about the body as he is concerned for the safety of his mother and brother. When he and his mother are in hospital staying with his brother Ricky, as he has gone into shock, Mark contacts a lawyer and a big legal stand off begins with the FBI. Things eventually get settled but I can’t help wondering why the boy wouldn’t trust the FBI or even why he would tell them about the body in the first place. Of course if he had then there wouldn’t be a story. Either way this was a great holiday read and the narrative kept me interested all the way to the end. I didn’t realise it was also made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon which I must remember to look out for.

Another of our favourite places is the Berruga Tapas bar which we have been visiting for years. Sadly, a lot of our favourite staff members have moved on in the intervening year since our last visit. The boss is still here though, Juan who always remembers us and greets us warmly and the food is still the same mix of Spanish tapas and English snack food like burger and chips and so on. It’s a rough and ready sort of place but it’s also a lot of fun. And we do like the freebie at the end of the night; a shot of vodka caramel in an ice cold glass.

So, what will we be having tonight? Tapas or curry or something new perhaps?

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Underwater Adventures

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This week’s theme is about underwater adventures. I’m come up with a few films, TV shows and books on the subject so, to start, I’ll have to cast my mind back to my childhood and remember what underwater TV series caught my imagination back then.

Stingray

Stingray was a puppet TV series created by producer Gerry Anderson and his wife Sylvia and it was the first of their shows to be filmed in colour. Stingray was a submarine in the service of the WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and was captained by Troy Tempest and his colleague ‘Phones’ who was a master at using sonar equipment. The duo discover an undersea kingdom where King Titan holds sway over his people, the Aquaphibians. Troy and Phones rescue the mute undersea girl Marina who joins them onboard Stingray. Most of the characters had sea related names like, Marina, Commander Sam Shore and his daughter, Atlanta. Atlanta was voiced by Lois Maxwell who played the original Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond films.

Stingray was probably my favourite of Anderson’s TV shows. I particularly loved the opening sequence in which commander Shore exclaims ‘Anything can happen in the next half hour!’ As a child I used to own quite a few Stingray models. One was a plastic kit I had to put together and another was a plastic Stingray shaped water pistol.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Voyage started out as a film made in 1961. It had some big stars including Peter Lorre, Walter Pidgeon and Joan Fontaine. I actually saw the film after the TV series so I was never impressed with seeing the submarine Seaview without what was to me, its regular crew of actors. The film and the series were produced by Irwin Allen. The film version is about an amazing new submarine, the Seaview, which travels to the Arctic and finds that the sky is on fire! It turns out that a flaming meteor has set the Van Allen belt on fire and Seaview must fire a nuclear rocket into space to blow out the flames.

That has always seemed a bit silly to me but the TV series was much superior. Richard Baseheart played Admiral Nelson and David Hedison was Captain Crane. The crew met with various undersea aliens as well as sea monsters and many of the episodes had espionage and cold war themes.

In the TV series, the Seaview was equipped with a mini submarine which could also fly and was dubbed the Flying Sub. Looking over on Wikipedia, I see the flying sub only appeared in the later seasons but like Stingray, I also had a plastic model kit of it.

The show lasted for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and in many ways was a sort of undersea forerunner to Star Trek. Producer Irwin Allen went on to make three other TV sci-fi shows, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau

This was a documentary series about the undersea research done by Jacques Cousteau and he travelled the world’s oceans in his research vessel the Calypso. I remember it from the late 1960’s although over on the internet I see that the series ran from 1968 to 1976. Jacques and his team studied underwater things like sea turtles and coral reefs and I always found it very fascinating. The series was narrated by Jacques himself as I remember it but over on Wikipedia they claim that Richard Johnson narrated the BBC version. Perhaps it was a mix of the two with Jacques stepping in to talk about particular elements.

Thunderball

Thunderball was a novel by Ian Fleming and was one of the adventures of his hero, James Bond 007. The novel and the film were subject to litigation as it was based on a film script on which Fleming had collaborated with Kevin McClory. McClory wasn’t happy that Fleming had used the screenplay for the basis of his novel and the result was that after suing Fleming, McClory won certain rights to the story which is how a rival Bond film came to be made in 1983. Never Say Never Again appeared as a rival to the official Eon production Bond films.

Anyway, in Thunderball, a Vulcan bomber with two atomic bombs on board is stolen by SPECTRE and they blackmail the UK government for their safe return. Bond finds the Vulcan underwater in the Caribbean. SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo has a wonderful boat with an underwater hatch through which an army of frogmen descend on various underwater vehicles to hide the bombs. 007 and his colleagues engage in an underwater battle with Largo and eventually get the upper hand.

The Spy Who Loved Me

This film was the one that appeared in competition to Never Say Never Again. Numerous legal issues surrounded the film as producer Harry Saltzman was in financial trouble. Various issues arose with his fellow producer Cubby Broccoli but eventually the two owners of the Bond franchise managed to come to agreement and Broccoli bought out Saltzman.

Another issue with the production was that Fleming was so disappointed with his original novel he had stipulated that the film producers could use only the title and not the story. Various writers were employed to come up with a new story which eventually revolved around villain Karl Stromberg who wants to create a new civilisation under the sea and at the same time destroy all terrestrial life.

To film this, Pinewood studios created a new stage, the 007 stage in which to accommodate the interior of Stromberg’s super tanker which manages to swallow numerous submarines.

Another interesting element was Bond’s car, a Lotus Elite which was able to travel underwater. This was achieved by the special effects team using various mock ups as well as models. One version was towed out of the water using hidden ropes when Bond, played by Roger Moore, calmly opens a window and drops out an errant fish.

Ice Station Zebra

I’ve written a few posts in the past about the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and it just so happens that his favourite film was Ice Station Zebra. Hughes had a projector and watched the film, presumably on 16mm, many times in his blacked out suite in Las Vegas. The film is a cold war story based on a novel by Alastair MacLean about a satellite which crashes in the Arctic and has photographed various secret sites in the Soviet Union as well as the USA and both the Americans and the Russians want the film from the satellite. A major storm has locked in the Arctic so a submarine is sent under the ice ostensibly to rescue anyone stranded at the eponymous research station. Rock Hudson starred as the submarine captain and Patrick McGoohan as an agent whose secret mission is to retrieve the film from the satelite.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

This was a novel by the celebrated author Jules Verne, first published in serial form in a French magazine in 1869 and published in book form in 1871. The book is highly regarded as one of Verne’s greatest works and features a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, years ahead of its time. The story concerns an American expedition to capture or destroy a huge sea monster terrorising shipping. The expedition meets the monster but professor Aronnax, a French marine biologist and master harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard only to find the monster is actually a submarine. They are taken aboard and meet the ship’s commander, Captain Nemo.

The novel was made into a film in 1954 starring James Mason as Captain Nemo.

Finally

Many years ago, I decided to try and become a certified scuba diver. I joined a club and went for lessons at Warrington baths in Cheshire. I completed the course and it was a lot of fun, pottering about underwater with oxygen tanks in the baths. The final part however involved taking your mask off underwater, filling it with air and replacing it back on your face. I tried and tried but I could not do it; every time I ended up thrashing about having swallowed half of the water in the swimming pool. I even tried it a few inches under the water in the shallow end but sadly I always managed to inhale water so unfortunately I failed and never managed to gain certification.

Years later I bought one of those little action cams with an underwater housing and managed to make a short film about me swimming, not in a beautiful underwater coral reef location as I would have liked but up and down in a French swimming pool.

I’ve probably only scratched the surface on this fascinating subject. I could have mentioned the films Titanic and Raise the Titanic or even The Abyss. What was your favourite underwater film?

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