A Taste Of Honey: 50 years on

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

I’m an extraordinary person! There’s only one of me, like there’s only one of you. We’re unique! Young! Unrivalled! Smashing! Bloody marvellous!” (Jo and Geoff in A Taste of Honey)

 “Now? We’d probably have to make it via reality TV.” Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin dive enthusiastically into the idea of looking back at the social and political legacy of their seminal film about troubled youth. Still with their beautiful, natural profiles, you immediately recognise Melvin’s poise and Tushingham’s girlish face-pulling. They often seem like giggling teenagers, recounting sneaking in to try to watch, as director Tony Richardson viewed the daily rushes, and falling downstairs. “We ran away!” Or recalling the time they were invited to the British Ambassador’s residence in Prague, and started impersonating parrots.

Tushingham and Melvin photographed at the British Film Institute, London Southbank Nov 1st 2011 (All photos copyright Samira Ahmed)

But they can be disapproving grownups, too. (Melvin is particularly appalled by the current fashion for pant-baring lowslung jeans among the youth of today). And 50 years on from the seminal kitchen sink drama, they’re scathing about what they see as the corrosive effect of modern consumerism on young people. “Does David Cameron know we’re here?” he jokes.

The tropes of kitchen sink drama – gritty Northern industrial landscapes shot in moody black and white and tales of unwanted pregnancy – have become so clichéd in the years since abortion was legalised, that the huge impact of A Taste of Honey could be forgotten. The original play was written by 18 year old Shelagh Delaney and became a huge hit on Broadway, too, starring Angela Lansbury. The 1961 film was X-rated. Set in Salford, the tale of Jo(sephine) a lonely, neglected teenager, tackled teenage pregnancy, mixed race relationships and feckless parenting (Dora Bryan and her dodgy boyfriend Robert Stephens). The most sympathetic character is Jo’s gay friend, Geoff, at a time when homosexuality was criminal. “But I wasn’t gay,” points out Melvin. “The Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t have allowed it. So it was all between the lines.” Melvin recalls pulling out of a South African production of the play when he found out the part of the black boyfriend was to be played by a white actor in blackface.

Murray Melvin had worked his way up from tea boy at Joan Littlewood’s famous Theatre Workshop Company at London’s Stratford East Theatre to play the role of Geoff on stage, reprising it in the film. Tushingham had similarly joined the Liverpool Rep as a backstage odd job girl after writing many pestering letters, graduating to playing such parts as the back end of a horse and a rabbit. Was it a working class rabbit? “It was a rabbit with a very large arse” she retorts. She turned 19 on the first day of shooting A Taste of Honey. Neither ever went to drama school. The demise of the backstage route is one they believe has eliminated entry to the trade for most working class youngsters.

Both agree that Rita’s character Jo, a lonely girl, who gets pregnant by a sailor, would probably be a lot younger today — maybe 12 — because of the much greater sexual and consumer pressure on children, but they believe the issues are just as relevant. “People still come up to me and ask if I was in A Taste Of Honey,” says Melvin. “People still relate to those class issues.”

“Because the [characters] are not in a time capsule,” Tushingham adds. “Younger people are touched by that now. 50 years ago you wouldn’t have had so many kids in that situation [teen pregnancy]. It’s so sad.”

Melvin declares: “If Shelagh’s play arrived on the director’s desk of the Theatre Royal today he’d have a look and say, “Pass it over to social services.” A Taste of Honey was political. The characters were carefully formulated, as you weren’t allowed to be openly gay.” The two exchange a list of homophobic slurs: “It was poof, pansy, queer – awful words.” Melvin recounts with fury a recent homophobic murder in London. His recent role as a villain in Torchwood has led to unexpected revelations about the enduring impact of entrenched homophobic attitudes:  “18 months ago I was at a Doctor Who convention when a teenage boy came up to me and said, “I wanted to come and thank you. You changed my life. I got A Taste of Honey on DVD and watched it and realised, I’m not bad am I?” I was in tears.”

Trailblazers as they were, the journey through the sixties after their acclaimed multi-nominated breakthrough was a challenge: “I was offered so many pregnant roles,” says Tushingham, with humour. “And I was offered so many poofs,” adds Melvin. “I told them all, “I’ve done the ultimate one.””

Tushingham and Melvin got to have some fun in the George Melly-scripted Swinging London parody, Smashing Time with Lynn Redgrave. Interestingly it’s theCannes-award winning The Knack and How to Get It (whichseemed a similar play on her innocent in the big city to ATOH) that now looks like a period curio, complete with jokes about rape.

As for Melvin: “What was I doing in Alfie?!” I suggest perhaps it was deliberately subversive to cast him as the best friend to Michael Caine’s macho misogynist. Melvin credits director Lewis Gilbert for not stereotyping his young actors. “He put me in HMS Defiant with Dirk Bogarde and Alec Guiness,” he smiles. Watching the big historical epic, released just a year after ATOH, gives you a sense of the seismic shift taking place in British theatre and film making.

Would young viewers realise that today? That until the 60s regional and working class actors had to talk with Received Pronunciation on screen and stage?

Melvin says:“[Joan Littlewood’s] Theatre Workshop Company was the first to put working class regional voices on stage. To give the working class back its dignity, so we were no longer just PC Plod or figures of fun.” Tushingham gurns and mimicks a skivvy.

“Joan would not let you put on a [posh] voice.,” he continues. “Because Shelagh sent that play to Joan, [then based in Manchester] they heard that music in the dialogue.”

“Osborne was starting,” says Tushingham. “But something like ATOH allowed us all to happen. When you look back at the 50s we wouldn’t have been in any of the shows. Remember when we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Tony Richardson at the Royal Court and the critics were floored by it? All those regional accents, like James Bolam’s.”

In a way both feel they were luckier than young actors starting out today.

“The Establishment have fought back now,” declares Melvin, as we discuss how films like Fish Tank are labelled and confined to the arthouse circuit while middle class TV critics wallow in Downton Abbey’s strange nostalgia. He remains actively involved with the Theatre Royal Stratford East, where he’s currently compiling an archive of its 120 year history, and has arranged screenings of ATOH for local schoolchildren.

Etonian PMs then and now

Tushingham says of the early 60s: “It was a welcoming time. There was an energy. We need to do more to encourage young people to discover what’s inside them. The consumerism is not the point…50 years on we still have the same emotions as we did then, but we are being sold more.”

This post was originally written for The Spectator magazine blog. Photos copyright of Samira Ahmed. No reproduction without permission.

Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin will be at 50th anniversary screenings of A Taste of Honey taking place in Liverpool this weekend and London’s BFI Southbank  on Monday November 7th. Book BFI tickets here

Further reading:

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

Stereotypes in Northern working class drama (2009 Guardian theatre blogpost)

 

Posted in Children, Culture, Film, Theatre, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

St Paul’s can hear the alarm bells ringing.

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Photo copyright: Jonathan Savage (@SavageLDN)

1pm GMT The latest statement from St Paul’s confirming that they are NOT going to take legal action against the protest camp.

St Paul’s Suspends Legal Action Against Protest Camp St Paul’s, 1 November 2011 (All Saints Day)

The Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral has unanimously agreed to suspend its current legal action against the protest camp outside the church, following meetings with Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, late last night and early this morning. The resignation of the Dean, the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, has given the opportunity to reassess the situation, involving fresh input from the Bishop. Members of Chapter this morning have met with representatives from the protest camp to demonstrate that St Paul’s intends to engage directly and constructively with both the protesters and the moral and ethical issues they wish to address, without the threat of forcible eviction hanging over both the camp and the church. It is being widely reported that the Corporation of London plans to ask protesters to leave imminently. The Chapter of course recognises the Corporation’s right to take such action on Corporation land. The Bishop has invited investment banker, Ken Costa, formerly Chair of UBS Europe and Chairman of Lazard International, to spearhead an initiative reconnecting the financial with the ethical. Mr Costa will be supported by a number of City, Church and public figures, including Giles Fraser, who although no longer a member of Chapter, will help ensure that the diverse voices of the protest are involved in this. The Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, said: “The alarm bells are ringing all over the world. St Paul’s has now heard that call. Today’s decision means that the doors are most emphatically open to engage with matters concerning not only those encamped around the Cathedral but millions of others in this country and around the globe. I am delighted that Ken Costa has agreed to spearhead this new initiative which has the opportunity to make a profound difference.” The Rt Rev Michael Colclough, Canon Pastor of St Paul’s Cathedral and a member of Chapter, added: “This has been an enormously difficult time for the Cathedral but the Chapter is unanimous in its desire to engage constructively with the protest and the serious issues that have been raised, without the threat of legal action hanging over us. Legal concerns have been at the forefront in recent weeks but now is the time for the moral, the spiritual and the theological to come to the fore.” ENDS

Posted in Business/Economics, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A very English coup at St Paul’s Cathedral?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Samira Ahmed
Do we have some kind of South American style regime change in St Paul’s Cathedral?
The governing Chapter of St Paul’s put out this “clarifying” statement this morning, to distance themselves from the announcement by the Corporation of London that they were proceeding with legal action to evict the protestors camped outside. According to BBC News, The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres,  has taken over running the Cathedral since the resignation of the Dean, who headed the chapter. The Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser had resigned last week. It’s understand that there’s deep division within the Chapter over the pressure applied by the Corporation of London, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson and the Home Secretary to clear the camp. Many Anglican priests, including The Bishop of Whitby have spoken publically about their opposition to the way the Cathedral has been handling the issue of the camp. Why is Bishop Chartres so strong willed over backing the Corporation of London? A question definitely worth investigating today.
St Paul’s Cathedral
MEDIA INFORMATION
For Immediate Use
1 November 2011
Point of Clarification
News reports this morning suggesting that the Corporation of London and St Paul’s Cathedral are serving notices on the protestors are inaccurate.
The Cathedral emphasised this morning that it is the Corporation of London and NOT the Cathedral which is serving notice today.
Members of Chapter met yesterday following the resignation of the Dean and are due to meet with the Bishop of London today.
The Chapter have not yet sought an injunction nor are they serving notices on the protestors today.
They are committed to a peaceful resolution at all costs.
Further announcements will be made in due course.
 
Ends
Posted in Politics, Religion, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Kate’s State of the Nation Wedding Dress

Posted on October 19, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

I was  one of a number of designers and writers asked to contribute a piece on this image of Kate Middleton’s wedding dress for the first issue of a new pop culture  journal by student Xanthia Hallissey from the London College of Communication.

As a woman, rather than a journalist, there’s my purely personal view first. I find white wedding dresses intriguing because as a child in an Asian home I had a gut feeling that I would never wear one. In fact I’m sure my decision to take First Holy Communion at Catholic school, was partly because I knew it was my one chance to put it on. The modest simplicity of Kate’s dress was fabulous; much classier than either the strapless column that has been the recent vogue (taking no account of one’s actual shape) or the frumpy crumpled meringue, as worn by poor teenage bride, Princess Diana. So you get a lesson there straight away in how much more aware and sophisticated Kate is. I noticed that a prominent makeup artist told Radio 4’s Midweek that he felt she was wearing rather too heavy makeup. I also wondered if she shouldn’t have put here hair up? There’s something about that mane that is quite little girlish, when surely one should be proud to be grown up?

As for the veil, it’s just part of the dressing up. Ask Lady Gaga. Like the virginal white, it’s just about playing the role, enjoying the tradition. It’s not had any meaning in Britain for ages compared to Asian culture. In Indian and Pakistani weddings the bride often has a very heavy veil covering her head. When I was young brides were supposed to be so shy that they would keep their eyes closed all the way through the ceremony and reception. Guests would come up to meet the couple, seated at the reception and lift the bride’s chin and veil for a look at her face (and beautiful wedding makeup and jewellery), and then lower it again. She’d keep her eyes closed throughout. I used pretend to be an Asian bride in childhood games with my friends. It was just something we accepted, but also thought was fun. It was a big deal in the mid 70s when cousins would stop doing that and even dance at their own weddings. I don’t think many middle class Asian brides do it now so the veil is losing its meaning there too.

Anyone politically aware would question the message sent out by wearing such expensive couture lace at a time of real economic hardship, in a way that I don’t think we did so much in the early 80s.  It wasn’t made by child workers in a Bangladeshi sweat shop, but the account of its stitching at The Royal School of Needlework seemed an odd thing to boast about. The Daily Telegraph reported that “conditions were so stringent that the embroiderers were required to wash their hands every 30 minutes to keep the lace pristine, and the needles were renewed every three hours.”

What concerned me most as a feminist was informed by my status as a journalist. Most women work, most women do not regard marriage as a career in itself. But most mainstream reporting of Kate Middleton’s preparations for the wedding — including the dress — seemed to infantilise her (publishing photos of her as a child) and fabricate “facts” about women’s status in society (being a Housewife is apparently now “sexy”). Reading the coverage as a working wife and mother I imagine it was rather like how it must have felt to be black in the 1950s and read newspaper coverage of “the coloured problem”.

Further reading

Capes, Wedding dresses and Doctor Who: Wonderful blogpost by science fiction writer Sophia McDougall about the wedding dress and female and male heroes/heroines.

 

Posted in Culture, Design, Media, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fighting press unfreedom: Lessons from the Iron Curtain for the Arab Spring

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Copyright: Amr Dalsh / Reuters

The name “Arab Spring” suggested to Europeans and Americans that the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa shared much with those in the Sovet Bloc that ended more than 40 years of Communist rule. But do they? And how do you go about reporting the news in newsrooms where old informers are still working and where the newspaper or radio and tv station may be closely associated with the old corrupt regime?
For 2 days in Brussels this week, in a disused art deco cinema called the Albert Hall, more than 150 journalists from Eastern Europe and the Middle East met to share lessons from the revolutions of 22 years ago. I was lucky enough to be chairing the event and these are some of the insights.

Konstanty Gebert was part of the Polish dissident movement, for whom the underground newspapers were a vital means of building support and educating citizens for a freer society. Like Sergey Strokan from Russia’s Kommersant, he was wary of the way in which much Western reporting had suggested the power of short term bloggers. With internet connections still the preserve of a privileged, educated, mostly urban middle class in many of these Middle eastern countries, both men argued that journalists should not ignore the power and importance of building a strong independent  newspaper and radio/TV news output. Gebert said the undergound press had instilled a tough work ethic over many years — the stakes of getting caught were so high; something worth developing, even if the conditions for an underground press had disappeared.

Reporters from Tunisian and Algerian state broadcasters and newspapers expressed their frustration in feeling they had always tried to do the best reporting they could, but were at sea in a new world, where they were regarded as the machinery of the old regime. As Gebert put it: “How can you turn a stuffed bird back into a living creature?”

Leon Morse, from IREX – the US state department and Gates foundation-funded body that helps develop independent media in newly democratic states, said Arab countries had one huge advantage over the former Soviet bloc– they’d enjoyed relative media freedom, and a free press had not had to be built from scratch as in much of Eastern Europe. Crucially commercial funding, advertising revenue — essential for a strong news business — were also already up and running. The key, he felt, was to put the emphasis on strong, good content. A reputation had to be rebuilt or earned with trust over time. There was no substitute for providing quality information.

While superficially they were “free”, many Arab journalists said their newsrooms were still dominated by government informers. The machinery of the old regime was very much in place. Gebert acknowledged that it was important to speak out now and confront them early on, but there was always a level of injustice when you try to purge people.

Dagmar Hovestådt from the Stasi Archives, gave useful lessons from East Germany, where 180 thousand citizens actively but unofficially informed on their colleagues and neighbours. She said it took time and vigilance to start cleaning out collaborators from important positions. East Germany may have had a “short cut” to democracy because of the speed of unification with West Germany, but Federal Laws about investigation have been updated 8 times, extending the term for vetting officials in public office for Stasi connections till 2019. The public’s access to files (with careful allowances for personal privacy) was paramount. It was also ensured that the Federal Commissioner for the Archive had to be someone who had been persecuted by the Stasi. ‘The past cannot be left behind,” she said.

Most sobering were the lessons from journalists from modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia; 20 years on from glasnost and perestroika. Sergey Strokan said 40 % of Russian journalists admitted writing stories on the basis of payments from outside interests. Instead of overt and simply control, he said corruption and self-censorship was rife in Putin’s Russia. He warned that there was little public interest in supporting journalists,even in the face of violence and murder, because of the way in which so many outlets had become mouthpieces for corporate interests. It was a sobering reminder that things had not gone just one way since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Some of the older Arab journalists seemed primarily concerned about protecting their status — complaining about young bloggers undermining their special role, and demanding an official register of journalists. As journalists in Britain resist political pressure here, since Hackgate, to form just such an officially sanctioned register , one could appreciate there was fear, too for those who have always worked in closed and controlled worlds. That’s a fear many from the Soviet era  could understand.

“How do we know when we have true press freedom?” asked one delegate, as debate grew about whether Western journalists were lecturing Arab countries about how to define freedom. “There is no such agreed thing as press freedom,” suggested Gebert. “But we know what unfreedom is. We fight that.”

On the last day of the conference a news story broke, just as an EU Commissioner Stefan Fülle was giving a closing  address. A table of Ukrainian journalists jumped to their feet to secure the first question: “What is your response to the jailing of the opposition leader for 7 years?” They story transformed the mood of the conference. The Ukranians got a quote and rushed out to file copy. The discussions about media futures would just have to take a back seat for now, while they got on with just being newshounds. It was an inspiring moment.

Further reading:

A week in the life: Independent profile of Konstanty Gebert from 1999

The ENJN network and conference (European Union Journalism Network)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Afghanistan: NATO’s 10 year feminist experiment

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Afghan airforce servicewomen (March 2011) photo: NATO

This is some of the further detail from my feature for today’s Guardian that was not in the final edit. It makes reference to two major  reports on women and Afghanistan put out this week by Action Aid and  Oxfam.

It has been the obvious feminist cause of our times. We may have been sceptical about politicians and their spouses (notably Laura Bush) citing women’s rights as a key justification in launching the military campaign after 9/11. But the ingrained hatred of women apparent in many aspects of Afghan society is undeniable. Now, like the horrific details of a brutal crime, it seems journalists and politicians would rather look away, or at best, describe the gory detail of self-immolations, child marriages to powerful local drug lords, and bemoan the hopelessness of it all.

Neither attitude will do.

Filming my Channel 4 documentary Islam Unveiled about Islam and feminism shortly after the launch of the Afghanistan campaign, the global power of women hating clerics stunned me. In Egypt, Iran, Nigeria and Malaysia I found plenty of such influential men who would for my camera, happily justify female genital mutiliation, wife beating, and stoning for adultery. It would be easy to write off all those societies too.  But then I met the other side: Pakistan’s only female high court judge, who had helped fund a women’s refuge in Karachi, where doctors, lawyers and businesswomen all donated their services for free. In Malaysia, the Sisters in Islam group used lawyers and clerics of their own to challenge politicians and police who were arresting poor women for supposedly “unIslamic” behaviour, that had more to do with impressing male voters. So it is in Afghanistan, where brave trailblazing women, such as MP and prospective 2014 Presidential candidate Fawzia Koofi are trying to make those first steps.

Afghanistan brings all the ethical dilemmas of feminism together. First, the cultural relativism argument – (15 year olds at one of Britain’s leading girls’ schools asked me if domestic violence wasn’t quite the same in Afghanistan). There’s the imperial arrogance argument. By this argument opening up schools and enterprise schemes with military support is like the British empire’s abolition of sati in India – ritual burning of Hindu widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. They cannot be seen in isolation as a “good thing”.)

Much news analysis to mark the 10th anniversary has rightly pointed out that women and children have suffered disproportionately in the drone attacks increasingly used by NATO commanders. Does it taint the value of civilian projects enabled by ISAF’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams? They have opened schools, banks, health posts and trained local paramedics. Five members of the Gereshk Council in Helmand are female. There are many who say it does.

So is what has been created in Afghanistan an unsustainable “bubble” of feminism?  The country now has more female MPS (27%) above the world average, girls make up 39% of children in school, and 5% of the army and police force nationwide, if not necessarily in the frontline. Political quotas are praised for changing entrenched cultural attitudes in such liberated bastions as Norway. Do they have no role in the future of Afghanistan?

And what is the alternative?

When the trail of young Afghan men making it overland to seek asylum in the EU was at its peak, little was asked about the women left behind. A British asylum lawyer told me her teenage clients often listed only their male relatives when first making a claim, because, in Afghan society women, didn’t count. Once they had leave to remain and could bring over close family, the young men would name their mothers and sisters but the authorities would understandably refuse, as they hadn’t been named from the start.

When ISAF pulls out altogether, could a moral philosopher argue that all Afghan women should have a right to claim asylum in the West?

Further reading:

British Army involvement in civilian projects MOD website

September 13th attack on US Embassy in Kabul in which attackers dressed in burqas

MOD obituary of RAF reservist Gary Thompson,51, who cited women’s rights as the reason he was fighting in Afghanistan.He was killed in 2008.

ISAF mission on the NATO website

Afghan women serve in the Air Force

Posted in Education, journalism, Politics, Uncategorized, War | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Half Blood Blues: Jazz, race and Nazis.

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

When I worked in Berlin in 1998 the trendy record store in the city’s gay-friendly Schoneberg district had a category called “schwarz”(black) music. It took up a lot of the shop and seemed a bizarrely useless generalisation, given the huge popularity of both imported and home-made Rap music. There was even a whole cluster of GI rap stars – African American soldiers who stayed on after their tour of duty because of the huge German market.

But the record shop captured something of the unsettling oddness that persists in modern multi racial Germany’s mono-racial insistence on labelling and categorisation. Nowhere in Britain could you advertise a “washes whiter” detergent with a very dark skinned African born TV star as you could in Germany in the 90s.

Yet the German authorities are passionate about trying to internationalise their arts scene.  In Berlin in particular, writers and artists from all over the world are encouraged, often with grants and programmes to come and work there. Ghanian-Canadian Esi Edugyan’s second novel, the  Booker shortlisted, Half Blood Blues, is a product of an extended stay in Europe, and combines her love of jazz with a less well known aspect of Nazi persecution.

It started out as a factual book about the Rhineland “bastards” – mixed race Germans born of relationships between German women and French African soldiers after the First World War:

“I was living in Europe at the time,” she says, “and being a black woman, feeling very visibly different…My thoughts turned naturally to wondering what became of those children during the fascist years.” She says while it wasn’t easy finding interviewees, she did correspond with an octogenarian who, as a child, had got through the Third Reich years by acting in Nazi propaganda films.

The novel tells the story of a Berlin based jazz band  — non-Jewish, Jewish and black. Two are African American and one – Hiero Falk – is a mixed race German, who is the most in danger as they flee Berlin for Paris. When the “Boots” march into the City of Light, Falk is arrested and disappears; his fate, for most of the novel unknown.

Edugyan in the end chose to write a book about musical passion, not the history of black Germans. Louis Armstrong appears in the novel, and the intense prose is an impressive attempt to evoke the power of playing jazz:

“And then, real late, Armstrong come in. I was shocked. Ain’t no bold brass at all. He just trilled in a breezy, casual way, like he giving some dame a second glance in the street without breaking stride.”

The idea is a great one. Mainstream films have created fiction about how the Nazis treated what they regarded as”degenerate” music and musicians; notably Swing Kids (1993) and the German feature The Comedian Harmonists (1997).

So, sold on its setting and a musical genre, it is a shame that Half Blood Blues is not more ambitious. While the players symbolically attempt a jazz version of the notorious Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel, the novel settles for an unsatisfying mystery,  glibly resolved after German Unification. Its narrator, Sid, is essentially Salieri to Hiero’s Amadeus in a retread of the Peter Schaffer play.

The most compelling aspect of the characterisation, though is the African American Sid’s awareness that he would rather stay in Europe, like Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker, than return to the segregated hatred of the Land of the Free.

The reader is left wishing for a novel with the meticulous research and emotion of Andrea Levy’s outstanding Small Island. Levy powerfully evoked the clash of cultures in the treatment of black GIs stationed in Britain.

There is in all of us, a part that wonders how would I – my ethnic group – have been treated by the Nazis? And equally importantly, how would my neighbours have treated me in those extraordinary times?

At the mansion in Wannsee, on the rural outskirts of Berlin, you can see the conference table where the Nazis planned and launched their Final Solution like corporate executives at a luxury retreat. Individual pages of statistics are placed at each empty place. Most chilling to British visitors is the typed sheet which lists the estimated number of Jews in Britain in thousands; broken down by region into England, Scotland, Wales.

There were few black Germans of the interwar years in the first place, and so few survive, that their true story is harder to tell though Edugyan’s bibliography names 2 factual books on the subject. The novel only really comes alive in the final third, with its evocation of the panic that engulfs Paris as it falls to the Wehrmacht. We’ve probably seen it in a film or a book before but, as in Spielberg’s version of JG Ballard’s, Empire of the Sun – it is the facts of the fall of Paris or Shanghai that are the most compelling.

Vikram Seth’s Two Lives is a deeply moving biography of his Indian uncle and German Jewish wife who met in 30s Berlin. She made it to London, but her family were murdered in concentration camps. Its power is in what the years of mundane research and interviews uncover. Half Blood Blues suffers by using the Third Reich, ultimately, only as a backdrop. When it comes to the Nazis, the truth is always more powerful than fiction.

This was originally written for The Spectator magazine website.

Further reading: Esi Edugyan’s Top Ten Tales of Americans  in Europe

Interview with Edugyan about the writing of Half  Blood Blues

 

Posted in Books, Film, Germany, Music, Uncategorized, War | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New York Fever: Strutting with Travolta

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

This is a talk I gave at the British Film Institute last night at the launch of a new book series on World Film Locations in major cities. The books pick 1 key scene and its locations from each film set in that city. I contributed 3 sections to the book on New York which is out now.

Unconsciously I chose a combination of women focussed films set in pre-feminist New York: The Best of Everything and Pillow Talk — both 1959 — and the epitome of macho swagger:  John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever (1977).

The Best of Everything has suddenly been noticed again, since the hit TV series  Mad Men referenced it so deliberately. The fact is that the original novel, just reprinted by Penguin, is poorly written schlock. The film, while equally prurient, but with the phone sex, promiscuity and abortions carefully sanitised, is much better. It is, as someone recently observed on Twitter, like being sexually harrassed non stop, while drinking martinis. Like Working Girl (1988) and Julie/Julia (2009) the insight into office sexual politics is fascinating. Especially in the book, Julie’s experience working for a government agency helping bereaved 9/11 relatives shows the women dealing with the draining emotional casework, while the male executives jockey for promotion.

The opening titles of The Best of Everything, the scene I chose to write about, draw you into a promised land or a fairy tale kingdom where dreams might come true. Hordes of secretaries emerge from the subways of Manhattan like pilgrims, or perhaps miners; an underclass of badly waged and exploited workers, in beautiful dresses and immaculately done hair to service the ruling class — men.

Hope Lange, Stephen Boyd in the Arena

Fact: Boyd knew, but no one told Charlton Heston that it was a gay love story

The office drunk is not the impotent ageing sleazeball of the novel, but none other than Ben Hur’s Messala (Stephen Boyd), somehow transported through time into a straight man in a sharp Don Draper suit with a broken heart; a worthy prize for our leading lady.

Saturday Night Fever is in its own way a film about being trapped by social boundaries and conventions. We could view it as a treatise that mirrors our current worries about low aspirations and the lack of social mobility for working class young men. Tony (Travolta)  works in a hardware store, where he can use his charm on the female customers, but isn’t going anywhere except to pour his earnings and his spirit into the tiny light up squares of the night club dance floor where he is Somebody.

Going through the famous opening titles — the Strut down the street — frame by frame, I realised that Saturday Night Fever was 3 films: One inside the next. First there is the public fantasy of what we thought the film was about in 1977 — an upbeat disco delight with still, I reckon, the greatest film soundtrack ever. Blue Peter’s Lesley Judd even showed a generation of children how to  do the Travolta moves. The “real” film which most of us never saw was an X (18) certificate profanity laden tale of hopelessness, gang violence, suicide and  sexual assault. Based on a supposedly “factual” Rolling Stone  magazine feature about the lives of young Brooklynites, writer Nick Cohn recently admitted that, like so much New Journalism, his piece was largely fiction.

But the third film is the one Tony Manero has constructed for himself. Like we all do, Tony, in the opening titles, is stepping out of the frame of his life — bullied at home, bored at work — strutting as the hero in his own movie. You notice the first shot of him is his red shoes, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz.

Anyone who’s ever been to New York City has experienced the strange hyperreality of feeling you know this strange city better than your own, so familiar are its streets and icons. Tony like us, knows that in New York, we are all in a living movie.

Further reading

Interview with Pete Padone the original Odyssey Club DJ about the real life Saturday Night Fever (NY Times 2010)

The original Chick Lit –Excellent analysis of  The Best of Everything re-issued by Viv Groskop (Daily Telegraph 2011)

 

 

 

Posted in Books, Film, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Once Upon a Time When We were Coloured: Newsround in the 70s

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Samira Ahmed
Lucy Mathen reporting for Newsround in 1976

This article originally appeared in The Guardian newspaper on September 30th. I wrote this feature about meeting ex- journalist Lucy Mathen, 33 years after writing to her at the BBC’s children’s news programme, Newsround. A programme I still cite as usually running better news coverage on difficult stories than “grownup” news; notably how it handled the death of Children’s TV presenter Mark Speight.

There is a story I tell journalism students about how I got my first break and my first award at 10, when I wrote a report for Newsround in the days when it got 7 million viewers.

The presenters John Craven (yup, him off Countryfile) and Lucy Mathen (the BBC’s first Asian woman reporter) read out my letter and sent me a Newshound badge as a prize. Two decades on, as a Channel 4 News correspondent, I even bumped into John at a Foot and Mouth crisis news conference.  So far, so great an anecdote.

What I never dwelt on, over the years, though, was the detail of the “playground racism” recounted in my letter because I had buried my dissatisfaction at its handling on the programme. And then a few days ago Lucy Mathen got in touch and revealed she’d felt the same and had brooded over it all these years.

“I hadn’t realised you were the little girl who wrote that letter,” she told me. A long phone call followed, and then we met over coffee. “I always worried that we’d got it wrong.”

It goes back to the summer of 1978, when the National Front was a significant political presence. At a family party, a group of us British Asian children aged between 6 and 10 went off to the local playground on our own. Older white children arrived and started racist name calling, then pushing us around. It became more menacing. As the oldest I had an instinct that it might escalate and serious physical violence was possible. I told the others we needed to leave calmly. We started walking but as the troublemakers attempted to trip us up, we ended up running, with them in pursuit, hurling abuse. It wasn’t any more than that, but it was the only time in my life I’ve ever run away. I was furious.

So the letter I sat down to write to John and Lucy was full of a 10 year old’s righteous indignation. Even as I wrote my conclusion (“all playgrounds should have park wardens”) I knew my complaint didn’t have an easy solution.

“Has anything like this every happened to you, Lucy?” said John, after reading out the letter. My delight at watching my letter read out had passed. Now I was intrigued. It was the first time there’d been any implicit acknowledgement of Lucy’s ethnicity. She looked calm and thoughtful. They said they hoped I’d told a grownup. (Yes, but how about condemning the racism?). But they didn’t and I felt Lucy looked a little uncomfortable. 33 years later, it was a relief to hear she had been:

“I think I had said that people who are different in any way tend to get picked on, and it didn’t have to be because of race. When I got home I felt that I might have made light of the obvious distress that came over in your letter. Also..the fact was that of course, I had been a victim of prejudice many times.” With hindsight she added: “But there was I, a successful TV reporter, the first female British Asian on a high –profile programme and perhaps I didn’t want to draw attention to myself as anything else?”

I know the feeling.

I’d kept the letter which they’d sent me afterwards:


“Thank you for writing to us about your experience with the English children. I hope it does not happen again, but it is very difficult to stop children being rude to or attacking other children.”

Signed by John, it’s probably the use of the phrase “English children” that jumps out at me now. Lucy yelped in horror when I quoted the phrase to her when we met.

Like a repressed memory it helps explains why I’ve never been comfortable with the phrase “English” to describe national identity. Lucy reminded me that, at the time, we tended to be described as “coloured”, too, a phrase so quaint I realise how much closer the 70s was to the 50s in some social attitudes. You wouldn’t know that from watching deliberately racism-free 70s nostalgia fests like “Life on Mars”.

Racism? Shut it.

So how did our lives progress?

The next time I met strong racist abuse from children in the streets I was in my twenties, and on instinct, chased them, caught one, and calmly insisted on being taken home to meet his parents. (He was horrified and apologised. I doubt I’d try such a move now.) Throughout my career the 1978 incident helped inform my journalism. As Lucy had in the 70s I reported on the sectarianism  in Northern Ireland in the 90s. At Newsnight while filming a story on the abuse of Bosnian refugees re-housed on an East London estate, I felt a very strong flashback to the anger of my 10 year old self as I watched smirking children waiting for my camera crew to leave, so they could begin their torment anew while the police did nothing.

Lucy 33 years on (photo India Today)

After covering all the major stories of the day, with calmness and rigour, Lucy’s experience on assignment in Afghanistan led her to quit journalism at 36 and retrain as a doctor; setting up the Second Sight charity to cure blindness in northeastern India and writing a book about it – The Runaway Goat. Doing, as she put it, rather than just reporting and walking away. We made different choices, but we remain passionate about what we do. She remains my role model.

Further reading:

A Runaway Goat: Curing Blindness in forgotten India by Lucy Mathen (Available here via the Second Sight website)

She’s on twitter as: @LucyMathen

Lucy Mathen profiled by India Today in 2010

The history of Newsround website (Parental Guidance suggested for John Craven’s frilly shirts)

 

Posted in Children, journalism, Media, TV, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Noooooo Uderzo Nooooo: Asterix and the afterlife

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

This article originally appeared in The Guardian online on September 29th and in the print edition on October 1st.

In Obelix and Co, a devious young Roman general, Caius Preposterus (a thinly veiled Jacques Chirac) tries to corrupt Asterix’s proud Gaulish village by making the inhabitants compete for money and status. It is tempting to regard Albert Uderzo’s announcement that he will, despite previously insisting otherwise, allow others to continue writing and illustrating the Asterix adventures, as the equivalent of our ageing hero abandoning the village, and handing over Getafix’s magic potion to the Romans.

René Goscinny (left) and Albert Uderzo in 1967

But it’s rather more remarkable that Uderzo kept Asterix going so long on his own. Part Private Eye, part historical fantasy, packed with the harmless violence of “pafs” and “tchocs”, the world of Asterix was a unique dual creation. Multilingual René Goscinny brought the literary allusions – there’s an entire page of Caesar’s Gift where Asterix duels a Roman soldier in the style of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Uderzo matched him with meticulously researched and drawn landscapes, architecture and visual puns , such as the reference to Géricault’s painting The Raft Of The Medusa in Asterix the Legionary.

Because it looked as good, we ignored the fact that most of the stories, apart from a couple of notable exceptions (Asterix and the Black Gold, Asterix and the Great Divide) were much poorer after Goscinny died in 1977.

Like Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, Uderzo at 84 seems driven by a legitimate desire to consolidate the financial possibilities against a ticking clock, but with what some fans would regard as a disappointing disregard for the spirit of the original.

Just as Lee’s Marvel studios stopped selling their heroes to the big Hollywood studios, in favour of their own, sometimes just as dumb films and fast food tie-ins, Uderzo licensed the wild boar-eating symbol of French anti-imperial resistance to market Le Big Mac. It just seems wrong.

But then, like Marvel Studios wisely bringing in Kenneth Branagh to inject some Shakespearean grandeur into Thor, Uderzo has overseen a new lease of life for Asterix in live action films. No less than France’s most famous thespian Gerard Depardieu has returned to portray big, dumb loveable Obelix who fell in the magic potion as a baby.

Like Lee, too, Uderzo deserves recognition for the scale of his achievement; much of it in the longrunning Pilote comic, where Asterix first appeared. A master draftsman and a cinematic storyteller, in his use of epic set pieces, cutaways and closeups, he’s drawn 400 unique characters to date in Asterix alone.

Crismus Bonus

He revels in all the variants of Gallic physiognomy, (bullying Crismus Bonus in Asterix the Gaul looks unnervingly like Dominique Strauss Kahn) but Uderzo, born of Italian immigrant parents, also delighted in national types; the separate tribes who join together to fight the global corporatisation and arrogance of the Roman Empire. From the moustachioed, hot water-drinking Britons to the proud Corsicans with their dangerous cheeses, Albert Uderzo has gently mocked, but also shown affection for individuals who stay true to themselves.

So after so many years, would it have been better, wiser, to have said, it just ends with me, as Charles M Schulz did with Peanuts?

Renowned English translator Anthea Bell’s collaboration with Goscinny and Uderzo dates back to the 60s. She said last year that Uderzo had already cleared the principle with publishers Hachette that the Asterix brand would continue with new writers and artists. She’s said she has qualms about it, but that it’s none of her business.

Take a closer look at other “much loved” animated brands and we see how often something looks the same, but has been debased when the creator’s gone. Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men (their 40th anniversary was marked on the Today programme no less) grew massively after his death. Easy to draw, the brightly coloured smiling shapes on a carousel of “collect them all” books – prove only that you can make a fortune in children’s cartoons without content.

The Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s Thomas the Tank Engine stories fascinated tiny children. In the 1990s his heirs launched cheap and nasty cartoon toddler books, as part of a massive media and merchandising expansion. But Thomas has in little over 10 years gone through boom and bust. Now it’s just one of many once cherished British brands, including the Mr Men and Bagpuss, currently up for grabs in faceless international corporate firesales. Is that what lies in wait for Asterix?

We want Asterix to resist forever but that can only happen if the books stop. It’s time to break the sentimental link. The inhabitants of the Gaullish village can no longer hold out. Perhaps Preposterus was right. In the end it’s all about money.

This originally appeared here in The Guardian  on September 29th 2011.

Sources/Further reading

Jacques Chirac as Preposterus by Uderzo

http://www.asterix.com/encyclopedia/characters/caius-preposterus.html

Interview with Anthea Bell

http://www.connexionfrance.com/asterix-english-translator-anthea-bell-interview-10695-news-article.html

Charles M Schulz’s wishes for no more original Peanuts after his death is explained in FAQ

http://www.schulzmuseum.org/

Firesale of Mr Men and Thomas the tank engine brands

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/20/british-childrens-characters-could-move-abroad

Posted in Children, Comedy, Comics/graphic novels, Culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment