Aliens, abortion and baby machines: HG Wells & John Wyndham

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Samira Ahmed
Woman’s Hour ran a fascinating interview today with novelist Kishwar Desai, about India’s burgeoning  surrogate baby industry. Her exploration of this massive business (an estimated 20,000 babies produced  each year) seems to differ from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale only in that she is chronicling a dystopia that already  exists. This piece is updated since it appeared last week in The Big Issue, exploring the connection between  science fiction,  political and market forces and women’s fertility.
Why does some science fiction still chill and engage us while other works are obsolete almost before they are finished? Take two tales of aliens landing on the village green and, after an eery silence, wreaking havoc on Middle England. HG Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of The Worlds, sees Martians landing on Horsell Common in perfectly-evoked late Victorian Surrey. What is timeless and haunting is the horror of humans finding themselves puny against cold and ruthless invading forces, the evocation of mass panic as tens of thousands of Londoners attempt to flee the city under aerial bombardment, and the rapid collapse of civil order in wartime.
Despite an almost identical premise, The Midwich Cuckoos, written almost 60 years later, by another prolific science fiction writer, John Wyndham, proved obsolete within a decade of its 1957 publication because of its central premise — that a pregnant woman in the modern world could under no circumstances have an abortion. It’s been filmed twices as Village of the Damned.
In the novel, aliens land, wipe the memory of the entire village before they depart, and leave every fertile woman, to her extreme distress, impregnated — from the middle aged lesbian to the youngest teenage girl. Once born, the alien babies, acting with a hive mind, quickly reveal terrifying powers.

Village of the Damned (1960)

The book is superficially full of challenging moral dilemmas. Much of it is taken up with the male authority figures — doctors, generals, government officials — debating at great length the ethics of murdering the growing children, or bombing the whole village, including the innocent locals. The intended shock is, to a modern reader, completely undermined by the characters’ inability to consider the more obvious and in some ways simpler ethical dilemma of abortion.
10 years after publication of the novel, the 1967 Abortion Bill was passed. Political pressure for the change would have been building for years. Safe abortions were available to the rich and privileged. Sympathetic critics say censorship at the time meant Wyndham has to bury hints in the text — a couple of women clearly attempt to harm themselves to abort the foetuses. But overall the book is trapped within the rigid social framework of its time. Perhaps the most chilling aspect of The Midwich Cuckoos is its cold vision of a Britain in which middle class male bureaucrats do the thinking, while women are regarded as  helpless incubators, who must carry their alien brood to term.They are watched by a collection of scientists and government officials, who seem more concerned with The Official Secrets Act and keeping it out of the papers.
HG Wells by contrast was all uniquely aware of the dangers of people being trapped in the ideological mindsets of their own time. He invented futurology in a famous 1932 BBC radio interview. Instead of the academic obsession with history, he called for universities to appoint “Departments and Professors of Foresight” — to ponder every possible impact of scientific advance — the known and the unknown unknowns, if you like.
Many moralists warned of disaster where many other Britons saw benign progress in abortion rights and the world’s first “test tube” baby. Could professors of foresight have helped avoid some of the uglier results? What would Wells and Wyndham have made of a world in which the opening up of communist states to free markets often coincided with a drive to crack down on abortion rights, as in Poland? A world in which ageing couples from prosperous nations such as ours, buy eggs and rent wombs off poorer younger women (often in less regulated countries, such as Russia, Spain and most notoriously India) in pursuit of a “natural” family of their own. Indian novelist, Kishwar Desai, who previously tackled abortion and infanticide, has turned the spotlight on the poor, often illiterate women exploited as surrogates  for wealthy and often Western consumers. (See further reading/listening link below) The backlash in the UK against ending blanket sperm and egg donor anonymity revealed the power of the adults who felt human rights applied only to them or their patients, not the children, created by such technologies. This technology’s ability to keep alive foetuses as young as 22 weeks, has also created ethical challenges to the term limits of legal abortion as well as the ethics of “saving” extremely premature babies, left permanently brain damaged or disabled as a result.
Most importantly, it  has revealed that many supposedly civilised people  are willing to throw ethics away very quickly when offered a chance through fast developing technology coupled with poor state regulation, to exploit the vulnerable and buy what they want.

I imagine Wells, a prominent feminist, would probably have noted with a wry smile the hypocrisy of the North’s obsession with the “right” to have children, while fretting about the “overly” fertile South. The respected naturalist David Attenborough is only the latest public figure to again express his grave concern at overpopulation. Educating women in the developing world is welcome, he recently told one interviewer, because they will have fewer children. In an interview about Ray Bradbury last night, Margaret Atwood told me how both Fahrenheit 451 and her own The Handmaid’s Tale made the link between illiteracy and control. One way or another, women’s role as incubators seems to be an enduring scientific and political obsession.

This is adapted from a column that first appeared in The Big Issue magazine

 Further reading/listening

BBC R4 Woman’s Hour interview with novelist Kishwar Desai on India’s surrogate baby industry (June 7th)

Made In India documentary website

Posted in Books, Children, Culture, Film, Politics, Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What the hell’s the Presidency for? Re-assessing LBJ

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

With Dr Martin Luther King

This is based on my interview with  author Robert Caro and fellow American writer, Michael Goldfarb for BBC Radio 3 Night Waves on June 6th. You can listen to the programme here. (last 18 minutes)

Which US President won an election with the largest ever popular majority? Lyndon Baines Johnson, who took 61% of the vote in 1964. He went from powerful Senate majority leader to powerless and humiliated Vice President to towering statesman in 6 years. This is the story related in Robert Caro’s new book on LBJ. The Passage of Power, is the 4th volume in his biography, covering the most remarkable period in his life — from 1958 to 1964, through the 1960 presidential election, John F Kennedy’s presidency and assassination through to the passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation. It was warnings against Johnson’s plan to try to push through such bold legislation that prompted his famous riposte, “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”.

When Caro embarked on the biography, in the 1970s, LBJ, who had died in 1973, was a huge figure in American politics. Nearly 40 years on, as the myth around the Kennedys has continued to grow, and fascination with Tricky Dicky (Nixon) endures in popular culture, Caro has observed his subject shrink and disappear from the national memory. The timing of the book is a fascinating reminder of what we forgot to remember and of lessons for modern American politics. Caro says the more he researched LBJ, the less he believed the adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. “Power reveals,” he believes. Johnson, in his view, revealed himself in office to be a man who seized the opportunity to make America a fairer nation.

LBJ spent time in great poverty in Texas. He picked cotton as a child. His education was limited to a Texas teacher training college, which he had to leave early, and he held a job  teaching Mexican American children. He was acutely aware of being the least educated person in  JFK’s government. While he often voted with other Southern Democrats against Civil Rights while in the Senate, when it came to the chance to change his nation, he proved powerfully committed to desegregation.

But only after LBJ found his own presidential ambition apparently destroyed. Brought on board as Vice Presidential candidate to secure JFK’s victory, he was sidelined after the election and humiliated. A national joke. Caro reminds us how the TV show Candid Camera went out voxpopping New Yorkers about who Johnson was — not one knew.

Regarded as a great reader of men,  who was king of the Senate for a decade, Caro says LBJ totally misread John Kennedy. Intimidated by the cultured and brilliant Kennedy brothers (Bobby was Attorney-General) and their East coast privileged circle in cabinet  (LBJ called them the “Harvards”) Caro argues LBJ failed to appreciate the greatness of JFK. So a moving part of the book is Caro’s detailed account of John  Kennedy’s remarkable heroism in World War Two. When the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolds, it is the Kennedy brothers who calmly restrain the overwhelming urge to bomb. LBJ was among those — when he wasn’t excluded from discussions — who talked tough.

For Goldfarb, who was 11 when the assassination took place,  there was a new level of horror in reading the detail of how close America came to launching a nuclear war. For those too young to remember the loss of innocence of that time, the book has rather chilling detail about the scale of vote rigging and corruption that Johnson  exploited to secure that narrow 1960 Democrat victory.

Taking the oath of office on Airforce One, with Jacqueline Kennedy to his right

Caro will say of the assassination conspiracies only that “I am convinced LBJ had nothing to do with the assassination” and that the Warren Commission was set up in good faith.  But in the book he explores the idea that Bobby Kennedy was crippled with guilt, believing the murder was “blowback” for either CIA attempts on Castro’s life, or Robert Kennedy’s own campaign as Attorney-General against the mafia and organised crime.

What dominates this volume though, is LBJ’s mutual hatred of Bobby Kennedy which is explored in fascinating detail. There is a Shakespearean power in the telling of the drama that unfolds; their personal battles and the assassination in Dallas which is movingly chronicled. Caro reveals how isolated LBJ was in those first few hours and days, setting up his own government from scratch. But, in an account that cannot help but force a comparison with Shakespeare’s Richard III, he successfully woos each of President Kennedy’s heartbroken Cabinet within hours of the killing, telling each one — many who hated him — “I need you more than he did.”

Although his political voting record would mostly suggest otherwise, Johnson, as Senate Majority leader  had pushed through the first modern  Civil Rights bill in 1957. After JFK’s assassination he prioritised a major Civil Rights bill, to abolish segregation and enable Black Americans to vote, with the declaration “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”

Caro points out all JFK’s core “dream” bills — civil rights, federal education funding and tax cuts — looked doomed to failure, until LBJ used his masterful knowledge of the Senate’s workings to get them through. It looks now like a rare window of opportunity in a gridlocked system which has continued to kill legislation. Witness the mauling of Obama’s healthcare reforms.  Johnson’s State of the Union address (see link above), in which he promised a War on Poverty is a remarkable piece of oratory. His own background meant, argues Caro, that he instinctively identified with the poor and the dispossessed.

Caro describes the period as “a time of violent hope”. In our age of the e-petition and the small scale of the Occupy Wall St protests, the book is worth reading for a reminder of the scale and bravery of the protests that made the headlines, to create the national mood that shamed America into pushing through the laws. Rabbis, priests, preachers, students and local African Americans of all ages who volunteered, getting training on how to deal with a police beating.

Johnson followed up the Civil Rights bill with the essential Voting Rights Bill 1965. There was a federal boost for educating the poorest, Medicare, Medicaid, setting up PBS and NPR — despite threatening and blackmailing Texan media owners in Houston and Dallas to sack reporters or drop investigations into his own financially corrupt dealings around media ownership and advertising. Interestingly it worked then.  LBJ was to be the only Democratic presidential candidate  The Houston Chronicle  backed till Barack Obama. One feels the Press has become rather more free since 1963.

It was Kennedy and then Johnson who initiated taping of conversations and phone calls; Johnson on a significant scale, helping provide records for Caro’s detailed reconstruction of key meetings. Caro relates how, on moving into the White House one of Johnson’s daughters was relieved to find the White House phone system means her father couldn’t listen in on all her calls, as he used to at home.

It was Johnson who pioneered the relaxed and deliberately lowbrow “authentic'” American presidential style that has dominated the office ever since. Harvard-educated, Connecticut blue blood, George W Bush’s re-invention as a real cowboy owes everything to LBJ’s Texan barbecue hoe down for West Germany’s Chancellor Erhard over Christmas 1963. Johnson was the real deal and made a virtue of his difference from the elegant French cuisine and European-style of the Kennedys.

Reading the book from our perspective, long after the novel power of television defined Kennedy’s election, presidency and assassination, the corrosive effect of the media soundbite on political culture, in Britain as much as in the United States is freshly apparent. Perhaps the greatest puzzle about Johnson for our age is that he comes across as mostly a deeply unlikeable man, who perhaps only because of his intimate knowledge of the Senate’s dark arts, was able to push through into law the now cherished liberation of civil rights.

The shadow of Vietnam hangs over the book from the start and will occupy Caro’s next volume. It’s a developing problem in the early 60s.  Caro says President Johnson was the man whose time in office was bookmarked by two famous protest slogans; the first that marked his zenith — “We Shall Overcome” and the second “Hey, hey, LBJ,how many kids did you kill today?” — that destroyed his hoped-for legacy in the War on Poverty and marked his doom.

Further reading

JFK, sentimentality and TV satire from 1963 to now

The LBJ Library/Museum – for the official version

Robert Caro’s website

Posted in Books, History, Radio, War | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

No Children of Ours: Rochdale and conveyor belt grooming

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Heywood, Rochdale (Photo by Peter Byrne/PA)

Posted 2012

15 years ago the renowned filmmaker Peter Kosminsky made No Child of Mine, a controversial drama about a teenage girl in care who’d ended up being passed around by men for sex. The phenomenon was called “conveyor belt grooming”. The script was based on the experience of a real young woman.She was played in the film by Brooke Kinsella. It won a BAFTA in 1998 for best single drama, but the TV company which had commissioned it, threatened not to show it and there was a huge row about its content, with tabloid newspapers expressing outrage. The same papers which this week are outraged by the scale of such abuse. I asked Kosminsky today how he felt about the revelations from Rochdale.

You made No Child of Mine in 1997. How do you feel seeing the Rochdale case about large scale conveyor belt grooming?

 I think it has always gone on.  Occasionally, events occur which demand public attention but generally it continues in its sordid, vicious, destructive way, ignored by almost all of society.  Some men feel protective towards the vulnerable.  A minority respond with cruelty, greed and violence.  Guy Hibbert drew attention to this with his script No Child of Mine in the 1990s and the film caused controversy in part because its message was deemed so surprising.  But it ought not to have been.  Before that, there had been the Kincora Children’s Home scandal in NI.  And who knows what Squeers and his friends got up to at Dotheboys Hall?

What sense did you get at the time of how victims were perceived?

PK: When we were researching No Child of Mine, the victims – those that had the guts to speak up – were viewed with skepticism, ignored or accused of making false allegations to discredit individuals against whom they had a grudge.  The woman behind No Child of Mine was publicly branded a liar.  One national newspaper attempted to name her, in contravention of the strict anonymity guaranteed to rape victims.  And yet the research suggests that children very rarely invent such dreadful things.  It takes enormous courage to report an abuser despite the threats made against their family and themselves.  When they manage to do so, they should be protected, supported and, as a first response at least, believed.

What was the reaction from the authorities — media executives and social services?

PK: An incoming executive told me “We don’t want this muck here” and promptly fired me.  But No Child of Mine quickly found a home with Meridian and ITV.  The execs there were incredible, (Vernon Lawrence, John Willis, Simon Lewis, Sue Hogg), brilliantly supportive both to their film-makers and also to the woman on whom our programme was based throughout the weeks of controversy.  Social services were defensive, imagining we were making a Jasmine Beckford-type exposé of social services failing.  But No Child of Mine was really more about the tragedy of conveyor-belt abuse than the shortcomings of any specific social services department.  And we had enormous support and encouragement from Childline, The Children’s Society, NCH-Action, Barnados and the NSPCC.

This week, the conviction of a Rochdale child abuse ring of Asian men who’d groomed and raped mostly white teenage girls has focussed attention on the race of the abusers. While an MP, Ann Cryer campaigned relentlessly against the misogynistic abuse of young women — Asian and white — either in forced marriages or sexual grooming cases. However it suited her political party, as much as council officials to play it down, for fear of being labelled racist or anti-Muslim. It seems the girls were worthless not just in the eyes of their abusers. Or at least, not as important and worthy of protection as good “community relations”. The Ramadan Foundation, to its credit, has been prominent in criticising the complacency and denial of “Muslim elders”.  As in Ireland, where it recently emerged Cardinal Sean Brady chose to cover up testimony from a number of children who had been abused by the Catholic church’s most prolific paedophile priest Brendan Smyth, abused children were the least valued people in the scandal.

Julie Bindel in the Guardian, comes closest to pinning down British society’s problem with the abused girls in Rochdale: a sweeping, unofficial assessment of such children as “troublemaking slags”. In that sense, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police has a partial point when he claimed the rapists did not target the girls because they were white. It was because they were worthless. In a hypersexualised culture in which footballer Ched Evans was convicted of raping a comatose drunk 19 year old while a friend filmed it, (and subsequently acquitted in a retrial) it was the victim who has been publically demonised on social media. This is a social environment of our own making.

The key difference in the successful prosecution  of the 9 British Pakistani men in Rochdale  appears to have been the determined attitude of the new chief crown prosecutor for the North West, Nazir Afzal, who reopened the case. His own experience as a teenager of police indifference to racism, and his track record on tackling “honour” based crime proved highly relevant.

If the latest convictions prompt a genuine social enquiry into why so many young girls are so vulnerable to exploitation and why so many ordinary men seem so unbothered about abusing them it will be a start.  But it will be at least 15 years over due.

This article was update in May 2017 to reflect the 2016 outcome of Ched Evans’ retrial. 

Further reading

The Rochdale Observer newspaper website –includes interviews with relatives of the convicted men

Interview with Peter Kosminsky about his career, including about No Child of Mine (Doc House Festival 2007)

You can follow Peter  Kosminsky on Twitter @KosmoSFL

Posted in Children, Crime and Justice, Media, Religion, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Mea culpa: But only after making the money

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Image by: London Loves Business

Sir Mervyn King’s recent admisson that he should have been “shouting from the rooftops” about the dangers of the banking system before the 2008 crash seems to add to my theory, written for The Big Issue about the number of influential people now willing to admit the bleeding obvious, after years of making a profit from it.

St Augustine once wrote: “Give me Chastity and Continence. But not yet.” He could  have been talking about the political leaders, advisors  and financiers who all saw trouble in the way the City was being run, before the subprime loan market imploded. Or about the senior journalists who knew their newspapers were engaged in illegal and immoral practices, but didn’t bother to quit or speak out about it at the time. All were happy to take home the pay cheque. Now they’re happy to express their outrage, often as paid commentators, at what was going on. But when should the lightbulb have gone on in their head? Could they have helped change the culture of their profession by making a moral stand. Or at least questioning it harder at the time?

Ferdinand Mount, has launched a blistering attack on the oligarchs of big business and the corrosion of British democracy in his latest book The New Few, says what most of us think. Banks should be broken up, the excesses of City bosses should be curbed, local government has been disastrously “castrated”, damaging civic life and public engagement in politics. As head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in No 10 in the early years of her premiership, he helped develop policies that stripped local government of much of their fundraising power, a decision, he told me when I interviewed him on R3’s Night Waves in April,  “that was only supposed to be temporary”.  Could he have done more to prevent the mess we’re in? “We weren’t sufficiently alert to the old human potential for grabbing what you can while you can.”

Lad mags — just part of our nomal culture (image by the Front Page Campaign.org.uk)

Terri White didn’t go to Eton and Oxford like Ferdinand Mount, but she had her own role in a major social anxiety. As a young working class woman trying to make it big in journalism, she saw her chance in joining the launch of Nuts — one of the new generation of lads’ magazines that boomed in the early 2000s and pushed sexual explicitness to new extremes, especially with their focus on “real girls”.  In a Mea Culpa in The Observer recently she admitted she regrets her participation in normalising that culture. “Would I do it all again knowing what I know now? No. We did too much damage.”

Her light bulb moment, she wrote, with hindsight, was when she found herself cutting the heads off photos of women who’d sent in their pictures, to publish a line up of their disembodied chests for readers’ judgement:

“We told a generation of young women..Just be willing to bare your breasts and look what you could win! A pot of gold! And a footballer! “

That’s essentially what a number of young men thought of the young victim of footballer Ched Evans. He has just been jailed for 5 years for raping a drunken, comatose 19 year old woman. A second man was cleared, but at least one friend had been filming it all on his phone. Now 3 people, including a fellow Sheffield United player are under investigation for allegedly identifying her on twitter (which is illegal) and attacking her reputation (which is not). They are only one of a number of young people who launched a blistering attack via social media on the victim as a gold digging slapper. 3 days later two university students aged just 24 and 19, were convicted of rape, after targeting a drunk 20 year old woman who had fallen asleep on a London bus. One offered to help her home, calling the other on his mobile to come and join him in the rape in an alleyway. It is the casual opportunism that is striking about both cases.

White has the satisfaction of knowing she left Nuts before the circulation of such magazines began to decline. Mount was out of politics long before Fred Goodwin and RBS needed to be bailed out by taxpayers.

Natasha Walter, originally interviewed Terri White, while she was at Nuts, for her book Living Dolls about the return of sexism, more than 2 years ago. She tells me now: “Obviously I’d have preferred it if nobody had ever done that job, but it’s vital that people who did help to create the hypersexual culture are willing to step up and join the debate…The circulation of those magazines has disappeared [but] the audience has just moved online and elsewhere.”

The government recently launched a public information campaign for young men, explaining that forcing a woman to have sex against her will is rape. However complex the social factors behind the rise in rape statistics, I think we could all agree that the need to even run such a campaign is a light bulb moment for us all.

Posted in Business/Economics, Crime and Justice, Culture, journalism, Media, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Halal wine and other spiritual dilemmas

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

There is a fabulous Moroccan cafe called La Provence round the corner from my old office, on Grays Inn Road in London, where my Dad would come and take me for lunch sometimes. My Dad’s an observant Muslim and would tend to order a smoked salmon bagel. One day the staff, thinking of my Dad, told me they had halal bacon made from turkey. The world of North African/Levantine pork substitutes is alien to many from Pakistani/South Asian backgrounds. To me it seemed like the tartrex pastes and textured vegetable proteins of 70s English vegetarian cookbooks that bemused Asian Hindus with their rich and often vegan cuisine- a technical solution to a problem that didn’t need fixing.

Like halal wine, which I tried today in the interests of journalistic research, these ersatz foods seems to encapsulate a spiritual and ethical dilemma. (You can hear the result on Radio 4’s Sunday programme at 710am on May 6th and i-player afterwards.)

Is the point of being an observant Muslim to follow the spirit, rather than the letter of the law? Does replicating the haram (forbidden) taste of pig meat break a fundamental tenet of faith? Scarred as I am from being served pork casserole with apple sauce on a play date at the age of 7, I was fascinated by the food experiments of a scientist.

Physicist Alom Shaha opens his intriguing new book, The Young Atheist’s Handbook (out in July) with an account of a thought experiment he conducted as a student: He ate bacon for the first time, after being challenged to do so in the canteen.  In the book he rightly focusses on the psychological power of the disgust mechanism in the human mind, and how successfully religious teaching can combine physical effect and  mental control.

Asif Choudahry is a young British Muslim who used to work for Blackberry. He got annoyed, as do many teetotallers, not just observant Muslims, at being offered nothing but orange juice or water at social gatherings. He’s now marketing what he’s got accredited as a halal wine. The White, made from Chardonnay grapes, is processed in some secret way. It smells like wine to me. It tastes like wine to me. As I don’t drink and don’t like the taste of wine its appeal is not for me. Kevser Tabak, the name of Choudahry’s brand, claims to be derived from Arabic meaning Spring of Wine – The literal interpretation from Surah 108 in The Quran. It refers to abundance and plenty. According to Massood Kawaza (the President of the UK’s Halal Food Authority) “the surah refers to something which Allah promises the believers to be out of this world”. The surah goes on to say “A heavenly fount of abundance in the hereafter if believers turn to their Lord in prayer and sacrifice”.

To Kawaza the point is Muslims shouldn’t want to mimic alcohol. According to some Islamic teachings, they should even shun gatherings where it’s served. It would be interesting to see the impact if it was lined up at the drinks table at a strict Muslim wedding.  But as Choudahry points out, there are plenty of young British Muslims whose want a scientific alternative to another oversweet bottle of fizzy apple. This wine you can cook with. Islam can be de-coupled from ethnic culture. In this case thanks to biochemistry.

At its heart halal wine presents a similar challenge about authentic observation as the concept of the Eruv; a Jewish Orthodox cordon within which certain Sabbath observation rules can be relaxed.  There’s a row in St John’s Wood in North London at the moment about plans to establish an Eruv around local streets, for orthodox Jews. If you want to be strictly observant, is the argument of opponents, then be strictly observant.

The difference bewteen the Eruv and halal wine, seems to be social impact.  An Eruv is to some Brits, a planning blight, with its wires and poles; forcing an opt out on people who don’t share those religious beliefs. I might pour grape juice or halal wine into a fancy glass to match everyone else’s, but it doesn’t affect them. In any decent sized Middle Eastern food store you can find dozens of Islamised versions of Western foods — cardamom-flavoured Carnation evaporated milk, as much as halal frankfurters and turkey bacon. The market is there.

Perhaps the comparison we should be making for some halal and kosher foods is to prawn cocktail flavoured crisps; tasting nothing like the food it’s nominally imitating, but enjoyed by its fans. And in his attempt to meet a perceived need, Choudahry’s venture shows a welcome entrepreneurial enthusiasm  and a most practical appliance of science.

Posted in Food/Drink, Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Fantasies of Youth

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Mazes&Monsters (1982)

Every generation has its teen moral panic exploitation movie. In the 1930s it
was Reefer Madness. In the 50s it was Beat Girl (the evils of Soho coffee bars and
bongos). For my generation it was 1982’s Mazes and Monsters in which a very
young Tom Hanks goes mad and (spoiler alert) DIES after being sucked into the
evil world of fantasy role playing games at university. The film, falsely claiming
to be based on a true story, was unconvincing even at the time. But it captured
the adult world’s distrust of adolescent escape fantasies.

In modern Britain it’s been easy to sneer at more recent cases of American
school districts banning supposedly-Satanic Harry Potter. JK Rowling’s retro
wizard school world is big business, despite its frustratingly lazy inconsistencies.
(I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard earnest 20 year olds
explaining away the holes in her plotting and rules of magic). For those unable
to get to Universal Studios’ Harry Potter world in Florida, Warner Brothers has
openined up tours of the HP sets at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire at the end
of March. They provide an enthralling insight into the passion and talent of British craftspeople and artists.

But that mass market example aside, a purer form of fantasy gaming is on
view on almost every major high street in the land. Games Workshop (not to be
confused with the struggling computer games retailer Game) is a quiet British
success story. It makes things. In a factory. In Nottingham. And it sells them
for money. Lots of money. As latest half year profits, to the end of November,
were up 40% to £9.5 million on revenues up by 5 per cent to £62.7 million. 70
percent of their sales are abroad, mainly in North America (where they have
a manufacturing and distribution base in Memphis, Tennessee) and in Spain,
Germany, France and Japan.

On an anonymous industrial estate, close to the centre of Nottingham, a giant
model of a metalled up space marine is the only obvious sign of the world within
that has understood the passion and loyalty of its hobbyists. Its owners don’t
advertise. They don’t do media interviews. Hobbyists come to play weekend
tournaments in a massive gaming hall. Its low techness is its charm. The passion
is in the detail: beautiful artwork, and detailed imagined worlds. More practically
I noticed the way the shop staff can bring cripplingly shy young teenagers out of
their shell with the enthusiasm of a shared world.

The escape it provides is not new. In Billy Liar, the the eponymous hero lives in
a fantasy world of epic scale. In the film he and Julie Christie dream of building a
secret model version of it in their attic. It struck me rewatching the film recently
and watching my own son and his friends playing table top games, that it is the
sense of control and enriched imagining that appeals first to adolescents.

Taking it off the table into actual costumed role playing is a bigger step. Though
the delightfully foul-mouthed comedy film Role Models is worth checking out
for its celebration of the passion of geekdom.

If you’re lucky you get to grow up and make a living out of that imagination.
Researching Warhammer 40K I was struck by the number of 20, 30 and
40somethings for whom table top fantasy gaming was a crucial rite of passage. X-Men comic writer Kieron Gillen, science fiction novelist China Mieville and dating and sex columnist, Andy Jones (who shatters incidentally the most
common slur hurled at gaming geeks).

Harry Potter's room under the stairs (photo by Samira Ahmed) Leavesden Studios

I can’t help thinking the Bronte sisters would have been great Warhammer
enthusiasts. As children, in the rigidly controlled confines of the Haworth
parsonage, they created the fantasy worlds of Angria and Gondal about which
they wrote detailed stories. They imagined characters and adventures for a set
of toy soldiers given to their brother Branwell. I like to imagine Anne playing the
Sisters of Battle (zealot warrior nuns with heavy weaponry).

At a time when young people are more than ever under pressure whether for
qualifications whose value is constantly tinkered with by politicians and profit
making exam boards, or for finding jobs and status in a time of shockingly high
youth unemployment, the temporary escape from a bleak reality seems more
valuable than ever.

Last year I watched the lame end of the Harry Potter saga in open mouthed
horror. Harry, Hermione and their chums, have lost countless friends and loved
ones in their battle against evil. But unlike the epic world of Warhammer 40K,
where planets and dynasties are at stake, the final proof of Harry’s “triumph”, is
turning up at Platform 9 3/4, a middle aged, middle class, home-owner with a
job, able to afford to have kids of his own. Now that really is a fantasy.

This column first appeared in The Big Issue in February 2012.

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A Smashing Time: Murray Melvin on busting taboos in the 60s

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

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.

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.

Further reading

A Taste of Honey: 50 years on. An interview with Murray Melvin and Rita Tushingham

 

 

 

 

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Can we laugh about this? Race on film

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) -- the angry heart of Imitation of Life

I spent an hour with the Film Club charity in Battersea Park School in South London today,(I’m a trustee) discussing the treatment of race and racism on film. It was Anti-Racism Day, apparently. I chose clips from a sample of my favourite films  and TV shows growing up, with some trepidation. I may be a Wandsworth girl by birth, but what would today’s school children, many relatively recently arrived from Eastern European and African backgrounds, make of Peter Sellers blacked up as a bumbling Indian actor, or Mind Your Language’s stereotypes? Would what a British Asian family thought OK in the 1970s and 80s prove timeless or merely shockingly dated?

Imitation of Life (1959)

Douglas Sirk was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. He was stunned by the segregation of the Land of the Free. And like Meera Syal, who once chose this as a favourite film at a BFI screening, I was deeply disturbed as a young child when I first stumbled across this deeply subversive film about American racism, masquerading as a glossy Hollywood melodrama about a glamorous actress. It felt like a film that was secretly speaking in a hidden voice to people who wanted to hear. The clip I showed has Sarah Jane, the daughter who passes for white, serving up food at a family party, with an exaggerated “black” accent, embarrassing her mother’s friend and hostess, Lana Turner. The students were intrigued by the shock of the embarrassment, and indeed the notion of “passing”.

The Party (1968)

Peter Sellers’ bumbling Indian actor trashes a Hollywood executive’s home in, what I explained to the students was an exercise in 1920s Chaplin/Keaton slapstick by Blake “Pink Panther” Edwards. I also admitted my extended Indian/Pakistani family loved this film. The students really enjoyed the clip, and felt that the key was his character, rather than the blacking up. This led to an interesting discussion around Richard Pryor’s comedy routine about different categories of black people, and the resonance with different audiences. When I suggested such Peter Sellers’ style blacking up would be impossible now, they reminded me of the later series of Little Britain and especially Come Fly With Me. Hmmm. A strange little cul-de-sac in early 21st century TV.

Hairspray (1988)

Considerably edgier than the saccharine musical film version, (I showed the clip of Mrs Pingleton trying to rescue her daughter from the “black” side of Baltimore) this delights in using the jargon of the time “Retards”, “Negro”, “mulatto”. Set around the  same time as Imitation of Life, it subverts in different ways.  Casting transvestite performance artist Divine as a Baltimore housewife and pop goddess Debbie Harry as a nasty racist it infiltrated Hollywood mainstream with John Waters’ gay outsider humour. Perhaps its success in doing so has diminished appreciation of its achievement. I went through a phase of watching this film once a week I love it so.

Mind Your Language (LWT – British television series 1977-86)

Ah, the 70s sitcom. After recounting my racist encounter that led to a star letter to Newsround as a 10 year old, the class looked a little bemused by my claim that this show remains hugely popular in the Indian subcontinent, where the DVD box set release was heralded in full page ads in the national press a few years ago. It was also apparently remade there in Hindi, with regional Indian stereotypes to replace the sexy French lady, the lecherous Italian and the bickering Indians (one of whom was Albert Moses in blackface and turban). So we explored the difference between the humour of warmth, which this show seemed to contain, in its own dated way, and the humour of hate. A clip of Love They Neighbour didn’t make it in time for me to illustrate this second kind of 70s “humour”, which is perhaps just as well. My mother used to storm into the living room and demand I turn off the telly when it came on. It provided an indelible memory of feeling callously excluded from mainstream culture.

My concern has been that modern 70s nostalgia airbrushes out the racism, as in Life On Mars. (The producers admitted they knew “loveable” DCI Gene Hunt would not be loveable if he spoke like a real 70s copper. Some sexist banter was another matter of course). This led on to my thoughts on Downton Abbey, about which the less said the better,  but we ended with a positive discussion about Four Lions — a film the class, many of them from Muslim backgrounds — clearly enjoyed. It brought us full circle to discussing the power of film versus TV and humour versus melodrama to deal with dark themes. Four Lions had started out as a sitcom. Immaculately researched by Chris Morris, who spent many days in the Old Bailey watching trials, like that of the Operation Crevice fertiliser bomb plotters, it ended up not on TV (too dangerous) but as a comedy film as wickedly black and subversive as the greatest Ealing comedies. Knowing that films like this are being made and enjoyed by younger generations left me grinning, too.

 

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The Missing Angle on the Arab Spring: The Soviet Era dissident’s tale

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Recording One to One at Broadcasting House with Konstanty Gebert

I met renowned Polish Jewish journalist, Konstanty Gebert, from Gazeta Wyborcza at an EU conference for Arab journalists last year. His family had mostly died in the Warsaw Ghetto, his mother survived to take up arms with the Communists and fight the Nazis, and he shared lessons from own experience in the underground press in Poland in the 70s and 80s. Not surprisingly I thought he offered an important missing angle on coverage of the so-called Arab Spring, hence the decision to feature him on One to One on Radio 4. He offered insights into how to exploit police officers’ homophobia (hiding papers in his underwear) and explained his concerns about the difference between building support through the underground press and social media organised protests. His particular worry was that informers and supporters of the corrupt regime should not be left to continue in their positions. A trial might not be possible for them all, he acknowledges:  “Even bastards have rights,” he says, “but they don’t have to be paid a government salary”.  My original post about him and his lessons for building a free press is here.

Further reading

Listen to the BBC R4 interview here

One To One interview BBC Radio 4 (First broadcast March 20th 2012)

Independent newspaper profile of Konstanty Gebert (1999)

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Don’t Go There, Lady

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Samira Ahmed

Medicine and football: Lucy Mathen’s passions (Recording Radio 4 One To One at her home)

I wrote to journalist and future doctor Lucy Mathen as a child when she presented Newsround. More than 30 years later we met. I wrote a feature about it for The Guardian. And as a result of learning about how she gave up reporting for medicine, and the charity Second Sight she set up, I chose to interview her for my series on Radio 4’s One To One. (Listen to it here). This is my review of the book she wrote about her charity.  Every penny from sales of the book goes to Second Sight.

A review of The Runaway Goat by Lucy Mathen

“Don’t go there, Lady”. The thought flashes through Lucy Mathen’s mind early on
in A Runaway Goat as she bites her tongue, dealing with another officious official, standing in her way. And it sums up the boldness, the energy and the humour with which she’s made her remarkable journey through life. She has gone where others never
tried or gave up. Mathen was one of the main inspirations behing me going into
journalism. A pioneering young reporter who just happened to be Asian and
female, Mathen powered her way into the ranks of BBC news and current affairs
in the mid 70s, challenging prejudices and chauvinism every step of the way.

A Runaway Goat starts with the story behind her career change; realising
that reporting on the plight of women and children in Afghanistan and then walking away was no longer enough. Told with wit and humour, Mathen’s journey aged 36, through medical school into opthamology was to lead into an even more unexpected world – that of challenging major NGOs on how they delivered aid, supposedly to “transform” the lives of the most disadvantaged people in rural India.

Her lively tale is packed with moments of righteous indignation at the Kafkaesque illogic of big charities and government departments, here and abroad, that make you gasp – the charity which tells her it’s better to leave expensive surgical equipment gathering dust than send Western doctors (at their own expense) to use it to cure blindness. It’s not “empowering” a DFID official tells her.

With all the skills of a TV journalist who knows that when it comes to words less can be more, the book balances a narrative of building up the story of the Second Sight charity, with the character portraits of the medics and workers, in India and in Britain, who quietly get on with changing lives. Along the way she seeks out potential donors from kindly rock stars to India’s super rich, has to deal with rich, corrupt and self serving government officials, arrogant charity administrators; but also tells honest tales of the remarkable men and women, old and young whose lives are transformed by simple cataract surgery. Her recognition of the importance of a rural girls’ football team near one of the hospitals proves a symbol of her lateral thinking, energy and spirit. In one sense it should be required reading in governance and business schools as a case study in how to get things done.

At a time when more and more attention is being focussed on the gap between the First World aspirations of developing nations and the poverty of a huge proportion of their citizens, A Runaway Goat is a warm and inspiring tale of how journalistic persistence , investigative skills and powers of persuasion can transform lives, one person at a time.

Further reading: buy the book

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