When the British Film Institute ran a Richard Attenborough retrospective back in the early 2000s, Sir Richard came to introduce every screening. The gesture seemed to capture his enthusiasm, modesty, kindness and warmth for cinema and audiences. At the screening of Seance on a Wet Afternoon he and the film’s director, fellow producer/actor Bryan Forbes, walked in together right alongside me with their wives and sat in a row.
Richard Attenborough had featured in the best of my many mad pregnancy dreams a few months earlier. (I’d dreamt my waters had broken as my husband and I were walking down a country lane, but Dickie appeared in his Rolls Royce and jumped out and said, “Don’t worry luvvie, I’ll get you to hospital.” He was brilliant.) Obviously none of this ever happened outside of my head, so as we walked in my husband quietly but firmly grabbed my arm and whispered, “You are NOT going to tell him about your dream.”
In introducing the film Sir Richard paid generous tribute to the talents of his co-star Kim Stanley, describing honestly, but kindly, the real problems with working with her. But what stood out was what he said next. Looking at his friends and life partner in the audience and gesturing with his arm towards them Sir Richard smiled and said something like: “Bryan Forbes is one of Britain’s most talented directors and filmmakers. He’s really not been given the credit he should for what he’s done for cinema, for British film. All these remarkable films he’s made. He’s sitting there with our wives. And I’m so lucky that he’s my best friend still after all these years and we have all been friends together and still are.”
It’s a memory I particularly cherish when I watch his convincing performances as twisted characters, in Brighton Rock, London Belongs To Me (a personal favourite) and as the serial killer John Christie in 10 Rillington Place. There was also a sadness in looking back to that screening, because of the loss of his daughter and granddaughter in the Boxing Day Tsunami a few years later.
For all the great films he directed, (Young Winston still resonates for its perspective on British military campaigns in Afghanistan) I will always have the softest of spots for Richard Attenborough, the actor, aged twenty four, playing the bright sixteen year old inner city youth sent on an experiment in social mobility to private school as The Guinea Pig.
One to One with the finest profile in British acting. At the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. That’s the original model for the stage set of A Taste of Honey.
This is one of the most read pieces on my website but the link had stopped working so I’ve re-posted it here. The interview is still available to listen on the iplayer One to One link just below.
For the third of my One to Ones for Radio 4 I wanted a Missing Angle on the golden age of British theatre and cinema — from the late 50s to the early 70s. You can listen to it here. I’d met Murray Melvin together with Rita Tushingham to talk about the 50th anniversary of their break through performances in A Taste of Honey and was struck by the openness of his sympathetic portrayal, of what was widely regarded as a gay man in the 1961 film version. He won the Cannes Best Actor prize the following year. This was at a time when Rank matinee idols like Dirk Bogarde were very much in the closet, and homosexuality was still very much a criminal offence.
Melvin in HMS Defiant (1962)
As a lifelong fan of 60s British film I was fascinated by Melvin’s journey through the cinema of the time. There he was climbing the rigging with Dirk Bogarde in the old fashioned epic HMS Defiant the year after Honey. It’s like watching some kind of post modernist mash up; the delicate black and white kitchen sink realist actor wandering onto the set of an unintentionally camp technicolor Napoleonic historical drama, trapped in the social and sexual mores of the pre-war age. An even more obviously subversive performance followed: Watch him as the sensitive best friend of misogynist Michael Caine in Alfie.
Melvin in Alfie (1966)
In our interview Melvin recalled how Bogarde told him he’d done more for “the cause” — more to promote gay rights — in one scene in A Taste of Honey, than the whole of Victim, Bogarde’s strangely evasive tale of homosexual blackmail. Though regarded as a hugely brave and important drama at the time, Victim doesn’t quite dare allow its leading man to be actually gay. The conversation took place at a BAFTA dinner. Both actors were nominated for their roles.
Surveying death and filth: Oliver Reed with Melvin in The Devils (1972)
Melvin seems to have thrived on working with mavericks and outsiders, such as Stanley Kubrick and the late Ken Russell. He loved the discipline of Kubrick’s demands as he composed his images. And his elegant profile graced many of “Captain Russell’s” productions. If we look a little sombre in that photo at the top of this post, it’s because we’d just been talking about how he’s still haunted by the horror of smashing Oliver Reed’s legs in the torture scene in The Devils (just released in a remastered and restored DVD). Melvin said he threw up between takes.
Miss Littlewood and the Theatre Royal defy 60s urban planners.This photo hangs in the theatre bar today.
His affection for Joan Littlewood, who took him on at her groundbreaking Theatre Royal in Stratford in East London is undiminished. He refers to her in the interview as “Miss Littlewood”. She took him on as a general “dogsbody”, making tea and sweeping the stage. It’s a way in to drama that he regrets has all but disappeared. And who, he wonders, can afford to take a risk on un funded drama degrees now except the wealthy? We did the interview at the theatre, where Melvin is now curating the incredible archive. All her books on theatre are beautifully shelved and the one hundred year plus history of the venue is being carefully researched and preserved. Melvin has overseen the restoration of the grand Victorian bar and promotes drama courses there for local children, in what remains one of the most deprived parts of the capital. He remains loyal to her vision for championing inclusion and working class art. He talks with passion about the impact of government policy on the arts and the prospects for the young. A new generation of fans have discovered his breakthrough role since he played a memorable villain in Torchwood. One young man even came up to him at a Dr Who convention to thank him for the portrayal. And with that trained balletic poise he is still, to my eye, the most beautiful profile in British acting.
You can listen to my Radio 4 One to One interview with Murray Melvin here.
Before the urge to “engage” and “outreach” meant ripping out displays in favour of button pressing, funny animated character narrations (Stephen Fry as a “hilarious” gold bullion bar in the Bank of England museum is a particularly jarring example) and giant soft play areas, I loved the labyrinthine nature of old institutions: Glass cases full of giant crystals and meteorites that filled a whole Gothic gallery of the Natural History Museum; halls of terrifying and exotic Pacific island jade weaponry, conch shell armour and shrunken heads in ethnography collections from London’s Horniman to Newcastle and Berlin’s Dahlem Museums; and the strange diving bells and aircraft that still wait for the curious in the further reaches of the Science Museum.
It’s true, that far too many museums had musty rooms, testament only to a love of labelling ordering and collecting. Just how many scale models of merchant navy ships made out of matchsticks does any museum need? But in the race to draw visitors used to theme parks and video gaming, what has been lost? For every success such as York’s Jorvik Centre, purpose built with a “ride” complete with smells and sounds to bring Viking England alive, there has been a local museum which opted to replace rich collections of real objects that carry stories and histories, with lights and dial displays that broke within a couple of years and looked worn and tired.
So what could be more challenging than the once in a generation refurbishment and building of new World War One Galleries in London’s Imperial War Museum? A Museum of which it was once said its three biggest problems in attracting a broader audience, were the 3 words in its name. Designed by the same firm behind the atmospheric refurbishment of the fascinating Churchill War Rooms) the gallery combines audio and visual effects with objects carefully selected for purpose. I look at a large unscrolled map of Europe spread across a dark wooden desk. It comes to life: animated figures with the heads of beasts leap and fight across it; wearing imperial uniforms and helmets. It’s magical and satirical and engaging. It makes me want to know more about the complex imperial posturing and arrogance that sparked the war.
The IWM’s historian James Taylor says the display was inspired by the animations in Tony Richardson’s 1968 film of The Charge of The Light Brigade – a film which saw the new talents of British social realism turn their deference-destroying attitude to British history. Said Taylor, “The brief was this is not just putting a book on the walls”.
A grey military coat of the Kaiser stands over the map – an ominous symbol of his uniform-loving presence in the pre-war mind of most Europeans. In front of him, a clockwork dreadnought toy – a reminder of how Germany’s toy industry fed Britain’s middle class fascination with naval might and national power. Displays on the Home Front run in parallel to the front line displays. Carefully chosen and enlarged photographs of thousands of shells in a munitions factory – disappearing into the horizon emphasise the scale of the support and industry that kept the war going year after year.
A case of simple rifles with bayonets, of the kind used at the Somme, seems a rare old-style display. And then Taylor points out how they’re carefully arranged in sight of a massive German machine gun, to show their uselessness in the face of mechanized slaughter.
WW1 trench (photo copyright Imperial War Museum)
The walk through trench (above) is carefully stylized; not an “experience”. It uses silhouettes, a giant tank and sound to emphasise the claustrophobia and the greyness. At the end footage of shell shocked soldiers plays on a small screen. Wide-eyed men twitching and shaking, hiding under their hospital beds.
Of all the objects one stood out: The Manchester Guardian’s giveaway map issued to lucky readers at the start of the enthusiastically-supported Gallipoli campaign. For anyone who has felt unease at some of the plucky Tommy nostalgic commemorative news coverage of recent months, the Imperial War Museum, is proof of how these institutions can still tell us so much through the objects they keep.
My bicentennial Limited Collectors’ Edition JLA VOL5 NO C46 AUG-SEPT 1976
Originally written for a recent Radio 4 programme pilot about “masked men”.
In bicentennial year 1976 on first trip to the USA, I first confronted the conundrum of Wonder Woman and masks in three comics I bought.
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While most of her male superhero colleagues were white collar middle class drones, hiding their Don Draper-ness behind masked all in ones, Wonder Woman, with no mask, in her garish stars and stripes pants seemed to be hiding nothing and everything.
An illegal immigrant from some mysterious place. Only Superman shares an understanding and a mask free disguise in a pair of geek glasses. Wonder Woman’s mask was being smart and plain. Apart from a brief 60s Emma Peel style experiment as a karate kicking mod boutique owner, her alter ego Diana Prince was, depending on the era, a drab military intelligence officer, a multilingual interpreter at the United Nations, and only in the mid 70s getting some status as a deputy to the male head of the UN Crisis Bureau. A talented worker bee in a state hive. In an office full of male colonels or detectives Diana Prince is often in the background, quietly overhearing crucial information.
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Aged 8 I first saw Wonder Woman in a mask. In one comic, a white mask sent by an enemy attaches itself to her face. But in the companion issue, a reissue of one of creator William Marston’s original bondage themed stories from 1943, Wonder Woman is tied up in a leather gimp mask and heavy chains to try to escape from a tank of water; Houdini Style. It’s all for charity. A twisted and schizophrenic society girl, Priscilla Rich, aka The Cheetah, ties her up with her own unbreakable lasso.
Wonder Woman escapes of course, tearing off that leather mask with her teeth, and maintains a kind of chaste innocence throughout. Like a lot of women who began work in World War Two, she just gets on with things, whatever the male idiocy around her. And a battle is set up in the comics of controlled and seething female emotions that can be unleashed for good or ill. There is plenty of testosterone-fuelled madness, too. But in the hands of its male writers, Wonder Woman’s mask-less Amazonian super power is balanced by her alter-ego: an invisibility mask of ordinary female-ness. And a lot of bondage imagery.
We reviewed the opening night of Monty Python Live (Mostly) on Radio 4’s Front Row on Wednesday with journalist Stephen Armstrong. You can hear it (top item) on that link for a year. This is some of the stuff we couldn’t fit in about its aesthetic and my theory that it’s worth comparing to a concept album.
From the moment you see Terry Gilliam’s magnificent red velvet outsize Victorian music hall set design the association with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the visuals of Yellow Submarine is fixed. About the only facts in the jokey programme seemed to be the Pythons’ birthdates –making them pretty much the same age as the Beatles and formed by the same aesthetic influences: music hall songs, the fading Victorian detritus of theatres and costumes, green one pound notes, bowler hats and those weird knotted handkerchiefs British men would wear on their heads at the beach till the 1970s. They now exist only within the nostalgic bubble of the Monty Python TV show. The show is the period piece and acts as a kind of last collective act of living memory.
“It’s rather like the Rolling Stones performing satisfaction,” observed Stephen Armstrong when we discussed it. “No one wants a hiphop version by Mick Jagger. What you want is a note for note rendition of the 60s single you love.” The wheeled on giant boxes — sets of living rooms and offices for the usually sedentary sketches with the performers already seated within — are bell jar museum displays of long gone studio bound programme making: flying ducks on the wall, dragged up women in hair wraps and curlers, an arid 60s TV science show set. (John Cleese in drag as a strangely taciturn scientist is perhaps his best moment, invoking that gimlet stare for actual humorous effect.)
So the performance is a kind of concept album rendition. Some sketches had been segued quite beautifully – notably the Dead Parrot into the Cheese shop. Terry Gilliam’s surreal animations benefit from being blown up onto the giant screens either side. They still are remarkable art. There is the added poignancy of 4 old men doing the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch and Michael Palin stands out for genuine acting that creates unexpectedly moving moments — notably in the We’re Protestants sketch from The Meaning of Life in which Terry Jones in drag wistfully imagines an active sex life.
If the Dead Parrot sketch is the Python To Be Or Not To Be moment from Hamlet, Palin proves his acting skills again. It sounded totally fresh from him. And his comic timing — knowing exactly when to come in on the downward sweep of audience laughter before it’s quite apparent it’s passed the crest — is the mark of a serious professional we ought to see a lot more of in screen and stage drama.
Eric Idle showed a similarly impressive level of real acting skill (Nudge Nudge fresh and somehow sweetly sad rather than creepy now). Terry Jones seemed delighted to be there, and can still pull off a touching frustrated housewife. Terry Gilliam gurns with good will throughout and spills his guts impressively from a high wire. John Cleese corpsed a lot and struggled vocally with a hoarseness till well into the second half. Nerves? Recovering from a cold? Weak vocal chords? His strength: the roles that play to coldness and fear (I’m here for an Argument).
The Arlene Phillips dancers were slick but, the Sit On My Face Ballet apart, too often evoked the tired retro feel of Hot Gossip in their sexy underwear by Agent Provocateur as the programme carefuly listed. (All the technical support, in every sense, has been brought in from the most professional names.) Though the energetic young male singer leading the Finland number was rather a welcome youthful presence, as the once cute Pythons watched him and smiled as if at the ghost of their former selves.
The “camp” songs about mincing sailors seem to have (mostly?) lost their homophobic air. But is that more about modern Britain than about Python? While Carol Cleveland in the same carefully chosen and edited Dollybird roles has similarly neutralised the sometimes unpleasant sting of the originals.
The Blackmail song about the tabloid press and I Like Chinese, despite some updated lyrics about copyright and economic boom exposed their weakness. What after all is sparky about the Top Gear presenters being blackmailed for sleaziness in the face of Jeremy Clarkson’s mealy mouthed N-word “apology” expressed through his tabloid column? The best sketches were the absurdist or the high brow (the original philosophers’ football match was played out on the film screen).
The little insert with celebrity scientists filmed on the backs in Cambridge seemed a nod to the Oxbridge intellectual seedbeds in which Monty Python sprouted. The “merch-o-meter” animation that ticked on the big screen on the interval captured the whole apologetic tone of the set up and its money making that’s characterised this operation ever since the original press conference. A clever way — Boris Johnson-esque even — in playing the buffoon with a razor sharp focus on keeping on target. There was no shouting of punchlines, but they are under the skin of the national psyche. We were all thinking them as part of a giant mind cloud.
Stephen Armstrong: “The way they interacted it felt very warm to me. By the end when they come on in their white tuxedos [incidentally another image that evokes the Beatles – their Magical Mystery Tour film ] basically what it is: It’s 5 old men having fun in front of a bunch of people and it’s hard to be angry with that and it’s hard to be too critical. They’ve probably pulled it off – largely the same broad joke for the last 40 years.”
So it was a happening. A sixties’ “you had to be there” vibe. To see the guys do their thing. To remember Graham Chapman. And only the meanest curmudgeon could begrudge the gentle, nostalgic and generous mood of the night. In fact all you need is love.
“My generation thought we’d fix the world for free. We were LBJ (Lyndon B J cohnson) technocrats.” Waiting for other guests to arrive for a radio programme, I’ve got chatting to the unassuming social scientist who is smiling at the memory of youthful ambition. Professor Steven Levitt is the economist half of the hugely successful Freakonomics partnership, with journalist Stephen Dubner, that’s spawned a range of global best selling books which have made economics cool and fun. I don’t think he’d mind being described as the geekier of the two. He’s also professor of economics at the University of Chicago and runs a consultancy that offers the Freakonomics style of advice to governments as well as corporations.
But we are discussing a dilemma. Levitt and I graduated the same year 1989 and he is wondering about going back to his undergraduate university reunion. It’s not any reunion either. It’s the 25th. And it’s not any University. It’s Harvard.
Harvard likes high achievers. Every year it produces a special bound leather volume – the Red Book – for which alumni are invited to submit their life updates. Then, those who care to, can buy a copy and play the Gloat and Envy game.
Levitt has always steered clear. He shakes his head and admits “I’ve never gone back.” But this year all his friends, his “geekiest” friends, say he should, he must. Because they love that he’s one of them and he made it. So what did the generation of ‘89 go on to do?
As at Britain’s elite universities, many of Levitt’s Harvard contemporaries went into high finance as Masters of the Universe on Wall Street or in the City of London. Levitt says highly lucrative corporate law was the biggest draw. But age and inner yearning do strange things. Levitt says, over the years, he picked up on the grapevine the sense that “corporate lawyers also seem to be the unhappiest.”
“You know what was most surprising?” says Levitt, recalling the expectation that they’d go off and change the world: “How many of my year went back to Cleveland Ohio. Or wherever and became lawyers and doctors and professionals in their home towns.”
Levitt was pinpointing, in an entirely positive way, the gap between the Harvard bombast students heard all the time from the institution, and the reality. To take a great education and use it in one’s community wherever that might be was something to be admired.
Those of us who distrust reunions, I suspect, were desperate to get away and uncover our possibilities in a larger world; and have a genuine dislike of being put back in a labelled box.
But others, perhaps those who’d been beauty queens and the coolest dudes, secretly mourn the loss of their student days. John Waters famously tracked down the buddy Deane Baltimore TV show high school dancers, still sharing that bond in their late 30s for a brilliant and sweet article for Baltimore magazine that inspired his film Hairspray. Less positively and yet to be analysed by the Freakonomists, has been the measurable Friends Reunited/Facebook effect since the late 1990s on divorce rates for those seeking an escape from middle age.
By chance I found myself at a reunion of sorts a few days after my conversation with Levitt. It was an award ceremony for alumni from my old girls’ schools association. Yet the highlight was finding myself not with the high-achieving grownups, but in a side-room gossiping with all the sixth formers; even though I am so old that, as one 17 year old told me: “I grew up from a baby watching you on the news!” Before I knew it, and without the excuse of being drunk, I found myself pouring out unrequested life advice for them, Kirsty Allsopp-style. They were polite and let me and I left with a smile for the life of possibilities ahead of them.
So did Levitt go to his Harvard reunion? It seems he did, where according to the website programme they got talks on parenting in a complicated world and from the eminent doctors of their generation on “How to stop things falling off” in your 40s. I hope he writes about it.
I prefer to watch reunions on the screen. The year I left school (1986) was luckily memorialized forever in two great films Romy and Michelle’s High school Reunion and Grosse Pointe Blank. And as Minnie Driver said in the latter: “Everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone.”
“To God there is no zero. I still exist.” – Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man screenplay (1957)
The summer solstice has just passed — marking the extreme tipping point of the earth’s axis and the longest day. It was the inspiration for this week’s Something Understood programme for BBC Radio 4. I wanted to explore the human urge to push at the limits of what is physically possible: In space, deep in the oceans and within the submicroscopic world, It was in the 50s and 60s that films and books seemed to revel in fantasies of inner space, in such films as The Fantastic Voyage and Richard Matheson’s book and film of The Shrinking Man. (Spoiler alert: The programme features a reading from the very end of the book.) You can listen to the music on this Spotify list.
There was even a theme park ride — Disneyland’s Journey into Inner Space — that claimed to shrink you inside a water molecule. Aged just 8 when I rode it, I remember holding my hand up in the darkness and wondering if it might really be true. It was the last time I was ever fooled by such a stunt.
The Shard in London proves a useful starting point to contemplate human arrogance. But The Tower of Babel from Genesis seems a more ambivalent story, about trying to block the instinctive human pursuit of knowledge, too. And pushing at the limits of human knowledge and experience is what the programme celebrates.
And the programme features music pushing at the limits of sound; played on instruments made of ice, and the vocal chords pushed to the outer limits: notably Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria from the The Magic Flute.
Hinduism’s use of stories to impart cosmic ideas about time and cycles of creation and destruction has an especial affinity with concepts of modern cosmology and particle physics. There’s even a statue of Lord Shiva at the Large Hadron collider in Cern. In the programme I explore the story of the 3 main gods of Hinduism – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva — searching for the source of a Pillar of Light that stretches vertically up into infinite space and down deep into the infinite ocean. Superficially it’s a simple tale of rivalry as Vishnu and Brahma race in opposite directions to be the first to find the starting point. But it’s clearly a cosmic lesson on the scale of the universe and man’s place in it.
Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Demeter brings us full circle to the promise and loss of the limits of the seasons as the earth tilts each way on its axis and her daughter, Persephone, emerges with the Equinox from the winter of the Underworld in the spring.
All photos (except film still) copyright Samira Ahmed. No re-use without permission
These are photos taken on location for Arnold of the Five Towns, my Radio 4 documentary about why this hugely popular and successful writer has fallen from fashion and why he still speaks to modern Britain. It’s on Monday 23rd June at 4pm and iplayer for 7 days after. Listen here with links to lots of the places we visited. And I wrote a feature about it for the BBC News website too, which features 5 recommended reads for those new to Arnold Bennett. The Clayhanger trilogy is probably my favourite, but I left it off a list aimed at newcomers. Apologies in advance for those who disagree.
I conceived the programme as a kind of sequel to I Dressed Ziggy Stardust and it’s also produced by the very talented Alice Bloch. Like David Bowie, Arnold Bennett seemed a man from modest roots who focused on making it in London. He dreamed big, taught himself art and music and literature, and became a superstar through talent and hard work; not connections or birth. I’d like to thank all our interviewees, (including those we sadly couldn’t squeeze into the final 27 and half minute edit) in Stoke-on-Trent and London and especially thank The Arnold Bennett Society and Alex Manisty for their time and advice. It was my English teacher at Wimbledon High School, the late Ann Kirman, who put The Old Wives’ Tale on her A-level list of Great English Literature for me in 1984, which 30 years later, inspired this programme. Thankyou Mrs Kirman.
I interviewed Don Johnson yesterday for BBC Radio 4’s Front Rowprogramme about his new film Cold In July. Two things that stood out — the way he deploys a disarming exaggerated twang to the end of phrases and words on screen and in conversation: “previous address unknooon.” And the down to earth, even detached attitude to the business.
It was an interesting meander around playing the ultimate male fantasy role, Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, the “ten days of sheer terror” when he started playing Nathan Detroit in Guys n’ Dolls on the London stage (“Oh God, I’ve made a horrible mistake”) and being a cult figure to Quentin Tarantino who remembers films that Johnson can’t even remember making. Johnson said it was “to do with a certain persona that men identify with in me. And there’s some men you can watch on the screen and they’re not threatening to you. They just embody all the things that either you want to be or are trying to be. It’s just an energy.”
We also talked about how he feels about his daughter, Dakota playing the lead in the film of Fifty Shades of Gray. He had an interestingly choice of words on that about actors just playing characters: “Sometimes they’re slavers and sometimes they are the slaves”. The interview also covers the issue of women’s roles in Hollywood as highlighted by the fact that the only female parts in Cold in July are abused hookers and a scared wife.
Lost in the edit was when I asked about discussing career choices with fellow dude’s dude co-star Sam Shepard. There aren’t many rom coms in Don Johnson’s IMDB listing. Would he have liked to have been in Steel Magnolias? (Shepard played Dolly Parton’s husband). Don Johnson laughs and deploys that twang. “Noooooo, Too much oeeeeestrogen.”
Incidentally I also liked the way he said Fuck, YEAH” with relish as he took his first sip of black coffee. But that wasn’t going to get on air right after The Archers either.
The Generation Game 1974: The conveyor belt (start at 6.30″)
You’ve won a crystal decanter and glasses! (Big ooh from the audience). Back in the 1970s and 80s when the Independent Broadcasting Authority capped the value of commercial tv gameshow prizes at a few thousand pounds, this was a classy win. It’s easy to laugh at now and films such as Time Bandits (1981) mocked the materialist obsessions of Britain at the time. The young hero’s parents are more interested in decanters, two speed hedge cutters and blenders and the Devil’s parody show Your Money Or Your Life.
But reading about Intervision – the Communist Bloc’s answer to the Eurovision Song Contest recently, I was struck by the same prize turning up there, too. At the 1977 Intervision Contest – 19 year old Roza Rymbaeva won a decanter and six glasses, courtesy of the Baltic Shipping Company. “That was my first ever trip to Europe,” she recalled to the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in 2012. “It was a huge responsibility representing such a giant country as the USSR. To return home without a prize would have been very unpleasant.”
The prize represented something different for those trapped in the world of Soviet propaganda. And yet was capitalist aspiration as it existed in Britain in the 70s, really that far from socialist dreams? Think of the wide-eyed delight of couples watching that conveyor belt of home accessories on The Generation Game. Or BBC1’s Double or Drop on Crackerjack where children answered questions while clutched teetering piles of British made Spears Games and cabbages.
Game show prizes he observes, “were more than just the stuff that they are now. They were passports to a new life. Decanters were for wine in a depressed island swilling with Watney’s Red Barrel…A music centre that played vinyl albums would have been considered a companion for life.”
Meanwhile behind the Iron Curtain the authorities combined contempt for this “decadent manifestation of American TV culture” with a need to incentivise the public and reward effortful service to the Motherland; starting with contests to celebrate sport, or best engineer or factory worker. TV shows, says Potter “had names like Festival Salute and Sports Family. Rounds of the gameshow involved things like learning languages from phrasebooks well enough to communicate with a visitor from communist Cuba, or devising helpful new systems of signage for traffic. They actually sound fantastic.. As if Dragon’s Den were about society-wide benefits, not individual entrepreneurship.” Ah the modern British obsession with entrepreneurship. Let’s come back to that later.
“And the prizes!” says Potter. “They were almost invariably without consumer value: Scholarships, medals, ranks, certificates. There were garlands of flowers “for the lady to go home with”. There were small wooden and metal trophies… emblems…monogrammed wearables..” Decanters and glasses.
Which brings me back to not so much Dragon’s Den, but The Apprentice. Potter and I wonder how did we get to a situation when winning a job – a job!? — via humiliating manipulations, is a grand prize?
There’s something quite poignant about how Blankety Blank (launched in 1979) mocked the idea of big cash wins, and indeed banking, with its booby prize fake cheque book and pen. But today finding an affordable home to rent or buy is like entering some kind of extreme stakes gameshow. Like Time Bandits we are all trapped in a rigged game; encouraged by some politicians to think of ourselves competing with dodgy immigrants, benefit scroungers, in fact anyone except the banks and big business interests. Perhaps it’s time to take our eyes off the prize and focus on who makes the rules of the game.
This article first appeared in The Big Issue magazine. Buy from street vendors or subscribe via the website.
“What is this witch going to ask me next?” Oliver Stone
“We chose Samira Ahmed as MC of #thetestaments launch at National Theatre, webstreamed to 1500 cinemas worldwide, for her expertise and high professionalism. She was flawless. She is a star!” Margaret Atwood
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