Private Eye, Grief, Travelling Light, Hockney

PRIVATE EYE – STILL GOING AFTER 50 YEARS.  NO POSSIBLE SEGUE: THE NATIONAL THEATRE’S CURRENT OFFERINGS AND DAVID HOCKNEY AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

The other day I picked up a copy of Private Eye – and it remains remarkable to me how incisive and well informed it is after 50 years.  As they say on their subscription page however, things don’t change too much.  The 50^th Anniversary issue cover shows two pictures, 1961 – Harold Macmillan; 2011 – David Cameron.  Underneath the Macmillan picture it says: ‘Magazine pokes fun at Old Etonian Prime Minister surrounded by cronies making a hash of running the country.’  Underneath the Cameron picture it says: ‘Er...’.

There is so much to enjoy in the Eye.  One of their very clever and newer features is called Pseudo Names:  here are some of this week’s entries:

...After all the rich Christmas fare, it is a relief to get back to plain, simple food.

BRENDAN BUTTER

...To cap a bothersome year, Miriam and I look unlikely to be invited to Heather Mills’ again next Christmas.  This year’s festive prank went down VERY badly.

NICK CLEGG

Here in Venezuela, seasonal festivities certainly went with a bang!

CHRIS MASS (CARACAS)

I was wondering if you could help.  What language do Merkel and Sarkozy speak when they hug?

LYN GWISTIX

How dare the Bishop of Nottingham say that my 3-wheeler taxi isn’t suitable for Sherwood Forest?

FRIAR TUK-TUK

I keep sending you examples of witty names that I keep making up, but you never print them.  Am I wasting my time?

NOAH VALE

The problem with Pseudo Names is that they are not witty enough.  Now if you had only asked me to...(cont. p. 94)

HUGH JEEGO

You see what I mean?

Moving on from Private Eye it is now time to report to you on my latest 24 hours in the smoke.  The closing words of my friend Philippa Dickins’ report on Mike Leigh’s new play at the National, ‘Grief’, were ‘I don’t know why he wrote it really.’  Having now seen the play, I have to concur.  If you wish to study the double bind effect in the family, then Ken Loach’s 1971 film, ‘Family Life’, about the descent into madness of a young girl, scores 10/10 compared with this Leigh vehicle which perhaps merits 3/10.  The Loach film was heavily influenced by that Guru of the 1960’s, Ronald D Laing, the trendy psychiatrist, whose thesis was that the ultimate expression of the mad individual was a response to the external influences and pressures of the family.  In the film, one unconsciously recalls the most famous of Larkin’s poems and the line: ‘They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.  They do not mean to...’  The brilliance of the film is that one first of all discovers a pleasant normal girl, and then follows her deterioration, bit by bit.  In the Leigh play, this deterioration has already mostly taken place, and there is no opportunity to sympathise with the unfortunate girl before her downward progress.  It’s told in irritating little vignettes.  The acting by the entire cast is brilliant, and will I am sure be seen in Leigh circles as vindicating the quality of the play.  Looking at the sitting room however, where all of the action takes place, and remembering my Grandparents’ sitting room, and indeed our own for a time, there is one important thing missing: a radio or a radiogram.  In the 1950s, the only entertainment was the radio.  People talked about it all the time.  ‘Did you hear Hancock’s Half Hour?’  ‘Wasn’t The Clitheroe Kid funny?’  ‘What about Arthur Askey?’  One reviewer perceptively stated that he had the answer to all Mike Leigh’s characters’ problems: a television set.  Michael Billington pointed out that in this late period of the 1950s, more than half of the population had a television set.  My own family did not, but it was quite normal in those days to be invited round to friends to watch programmes, but Mr Leigh had evidently decided that this was not going to help his characters out.  Enough.  Mike Leigh – one reviewer called him the inheritor of Rattigan’s tradition.  What balls.  Leigh doesn’t draft out a proper plot as Rattigan or Priestley or any other dramatists do – he starts with the actors, no plot, and it shows.

I won’t spend too much time on Travelling Light either – also at the National, just opened.  The play was by Nigel Wright, the adaptor of ‘His Dark Materials’.  It seems to be a vehicle for Anthony Sher to get into Topol costume in a Shtetl in Eastern Europe, but not to do any singing.  There is some soulful Yiddish background music and a short piece by a young violinist, but that is it.  One reviewer wrote about the excitement of the characters discovering techniques for splicing film together to create a story, but I have to say, it was terribly contrived.  The early Jewish pioneers of cinema also don’t emerge well from an autobiography published by the last survivor of silent cinema, Frederica Sagor Maas who died this week aged 111 years.  She wrote screenplays, and saw most of her work appropriated by others, reworked with no attribution, and diddled out of what was her due.  The book was called ‘The Shocking Miss Pilgrim’ and may perhaps now be reissued due to the interest in silent film that the new movie ‘The Artist’ has engendered.  In ‘Travelling Light’ I had hoped that when the action moved to Hollywood in the second act that it might improve, but no, pretty soon we were back in the Shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof land.  The gentleman sitting next to me didn’t applaud at all.  I think he was Jewish (quite a lot of the audience were).  He observed that he couldn’t understand why Jakob (Anthony Sher) had a Russian instead of a Yiddish accent.  We agreed that the characters were cartoon characters, and not real people at all.  Another gentleman with a Yarmulka and a Glaswegian accent observed that it was a Polish accent.  Oy veh, does it matter?  No, I think is the answer.

Our brief stay was redeemed by a visit on Sunday morning to the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy.  This uplifting exhibit of a huge number of Hockney works will do wonders for tourism in East Yorkshire, and particularly the Yorkshire Wolds.  Most of the work is landscape of one sort or another.  Many in oil, some in watercolour, and most of the recent works done on an i pad.  These i pad paintings are wonderful.  With many of his studio works done from drawings and from the use of imagination, the vibrant colours suggest a modern day Van Gogh at work.  A review suggests that what Constable has done for Suffolk and Turner for the East Kent coast, Hockney has now done for Yorkshire.

That’s enough for now, folks.  ‘Got no bags and baggage to slow me down; I’m a-travellin’ so fast my feet aint touching the ground; Travellin’ Light; woh woh woh... woe is me.  Oy veh.

Egypt by way of Richard Madeley

There is no one broadcasting on British radio at the moment who is quite as asinine as Richard Madeley.  I will try not to listen to him today (Friday January 6^th, 2012), but the fact remains that one has to wake up to something, and these days my something is Radio 2.  In the distant past it was the Today programme on Radio 4, but the great days of John Timpson and Brian Redhead, with their wit and acid commentary on all things pompous have gone.  For many years John Humphrys ruled the Today airwaves, then Brian Naughtie, but the programme, when last I listened to it consisted of grumpy interchanges with politicians who were schooled in evasive answers of platitudinous plausibility.  Then came the Radio 2 era of ‘Tel’, Terry, latterly Sir Terry Wogan.  Now Wogan is a man of far greater intelligence than one would give him credit for.  Together with his sidekick, straight man, and producer, Paul ‘Pauly’ Walters, who had near immaculate taste in quality music, Tel had the brains to realise that the cleverest people involved with the programme were the listeners.  Collectively they became known as the Togs, or ‘Terry’s Old Geezers’.  Writing from improbably named places such as ‘Atlantic View, Norwich’, with epithets such as Mahatma Coat, Lucy Lastic, Tansy Whitebytts, and Crooked Old Man of Bangor Town aka Crookey, the Togs displayed a wit and wisdom that allowed Terry to just bumble a little, between music and contributions from the listeners, and with occasional interjections from Lynn Bowles (the traffic totty) and Fran Godfrey, the newsreader, the programme virtually ran itself.

Subsequently, the programme changed dramatically, with the arrival of the frenetic Chris Evans, an extremely astute and clever presenter, who, once one has got used to him, is a brilliant broadcaster, with a great eye for the interesting stories of the day.  There is only one rather toe curling feature which Chris brought with him from his afternoon show, and that is the (mercifully) short sequence in which some child between the ages of 6 to 11 is interviewed by phone in order to let them tell the listeners what it was that they did for the first time the previous day.  Very often the children do not understand what Chris is trying to ask them, and despite his new, repeat, parenthood, Chris is not great at asking the simple questions which would draw a response.

Passing over this however leads us on to Richard Madeley, who seems to have been the stand in for Chris’s holiday absences.  Madeley had a successful morning TV programme with his wife Judy Finnigan.  He is a man who takes himself so seriously that, in medical terminology, ‘there is activation of the Central Nervous System’s CTZ – chemoreceptor trigger zone’ – or put simply, he makes one want to puke.  Allow me an example: Yesterday Madeley, in his unbelievably portentous and pompous way, pronounced that the record he was going to play was a magnificent way to sign off a magnificent career.  It emerged that he was talking about Glen Campbell.  ‘This is right up there with Wichita Lineman’ asserted Madeley.  He then played a somewhat trite and underwhelming ballad, which is probably Campbell’s last recording because he is suffering from Alzheimer’s.  Richard Madeley is uniquely able to have us believe that without his imprimatur, poor old Glen would be sunk without trace.  The reason that this ridiculous preamble to my blog exists at all however is that I want to tell you about an experience which gave me goosebumps.  But first, let me allow Richard Madeley to tell you in his own words, about his experience.  Please note that this programme was being broadcast on about the 4^th of January 2012:

‘Now somebody has rung in, and this is really strange, in fact this gives me goosebumps.  Can anybody explain this, this is really weird?  (Voice of female sidekick).  Now just listen a moment, wait:  Take the last two numbers of your birth year, OK?  Now, are you ready?  Add your age.  Right.  You’ll find that no matter when you were born, it adds up to one hundred and eleven.  Right , now my birth year is ...1956, so 56, and my age is –  57, OK – one hundred and eleven.  Isn’t that amazing?  If there’s anyone out there who can write in and explain it, would you please get in touch?’  Shortly after this exposure of the woeful lack of understanding of simple mathematics, the newspaper reviewer, Fiona Phillips, born 1-1-61 discovered jointly with Madeley that this rule didn’t work for her.  Sadly, even this little prompting didn’t appear to enlighten Madeley.

So, unfortunately, it seems that complete ignorance of conceptual mathematics is enough to give you goosebumps.  I had been thinking of goosebumps prior to this, because I wanted to try to explain the effect of walking into the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, and standing in front of the paintings on the walls.  These were done nearly three and half thousand years ago, but it looks as though they were only completed last week.  There is a descriptive sequence in Somerset Maugham’s ‘The moon and sixpence’, where Dr Coutras makes his final journey to the cabin of Charles Strickland in Tahiti.  Strickland is the name Maugham gives to his character who is in all but name, Paul Gauguin.  Inside the ramshackle hut are Strickland’s last works:

‘His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and now he was seized by an overwhelming sensation as he stared at the painted walls. He knew nothing of pictures, but there was something about these that extraordinarily affected him. From floor to ceiling the walls were covered with a strange and elaborate composition. It was indescribably wonderful and mysterious. It took his breath away. It filled him with an emotion which he could not understand or analyse. He felt the awe and the delight which a man might feel who watched the beginning of a world.’  In the following chapter, in Maugham’s wonderful prose, he describes the paintings in more detail.  When I read Somerset Maugham I feel that I should never write another word.  The level of skill on which he operates is so far above me that I cannot conceive of how anybody would want to read a single word of what I have written.  Never mind.

So it is, that the experience of standing in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings of the West bank at Luxor, is really beyond my powers to convey in simple words.  One cannot photograph the images.  We did buy some cards, and here is a scan of just one of these.

Although these have now been deciphered, there is a sense of reading a book, the language of which one has not been able to learn.  Something beyond…  How far we have travelled from Richard Madeley.  Please let us forget him.

Such a preamble is meant to explain, to some extent, the effect that Egypt has on the tourist.  While we English were painting ourselves with woad and trapping a few animals to use their fur to keep warm, something remarkable existed here.  Their sophisticated and symbolic language and scripts predated ancient British writing in Runes and Ogham by millennia.

While trying to engender a sense of awe, to return to the mundane, travelling, airports, hotels, seems out of place, so I will try to be brief.  We went to Egypt somewhat nervously.  The Arab Spring, and the revolt or demonstration in central Cairo which took place in January 2011 had subsided, and although the tourists had not really returned, it seemed a safe time to visit.  Just before we went, the demonstrations and indeed deaths in Tahrir Square caused us concern.  ‘You won’t be able to visit the Cairo Museum’ we were assured.  But things on the ground are never quite as the BBC or CNN show you.  Hoardings separate the business area of the square from the small road in front of the museum, and it is a simple matter for the taxis to approach the building from behind.  Once inside, our guide Mona began to explain the course of Ancient Egyptian history and things became clearer.  We began to understand the Old, the Middle, and the New Kingdoms, and the various dynasties which formed them.  Naturally, the highlight is the complete hoard of treasure which comprised the tomb of Tutankhamun, the discovery of which is the most famous event in archaeological history.  Like the doctor in Maugham’s novel, the very first exchange between Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon contains magical elements which produce goosebumps.  The first rock step down to what proved to be the tomb was uncovered by Carter’s men on 4^th November 1922.  Further excavation led to a doorway covered with seals of a recumbent jackal over nine foreign captives.  On the morning of 6^th November, Carter sent his historic cable to Carnarvon: ‘At last have made wonderful discovery in the Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.’  After the rubble had been removed, a second door was uncovered.  Carter prised out some stones and inserted a candle through the hole.  Here are the words of what followed, in Carter’s own account:  ‘At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold – everywhere the glint of gold.  For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, “Can you see anything?” it was all I could do to get out the words “Yes, wonderful things”.

I am sure it would bore you if I wrote at length of the pyramids, the Sphinx, the temples, the Aswan dam, and it would not be fair to inflict all of the adjectives which these sights merit upon you, when you can summon up the history and the images with a few clicks of a mouse.  But there are some recommendations I would make.  It is worth visiting the oldest pyramid, the step pyramid, and some of the ruins on that particular site.  It is worth visiting the museum containing the pharaoh’s boat, just beside the pyramids at Giza.  In some of the hotels, you may find some large glossy coffee table books of the ancient sites.  Together with them you may find some of the engravings and paintings of David Roberts, RA, from his journeys in Egypt in the 1840s.  I reproduce two below:

There are romantic moments.  Gazing over the Nile from the enormous room in the Winter Palace in Luxor, knowing that Howard Carter stayed there.  There are impressive moments – for instance it’s hard to take in the size of the Aswan High dam – through twelve turbines, the entire flow of the river Nile passes, and behind it the vast expanse of Lake Nasser.  I thought that having seen and read so much about Abu Simbel our trip there might reveal a hackneyed monument.  But as the plane glided in over Lake Nasser to reveal the cliff with the serene statues of Rameses II sitting facing Africa to the Southeast, it was a heart in mouth moment, the goosebumps felt on the back of my neck.  To walk a few minutes later around the bluff to come face to face with those figures, which have been gazing impassively out into the distance for over 3000 years is something that I will never forget.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  Here is a collage of the interiors of the Valley of the Kings Tombs:

And some further images:

The end.

Leonardo da Vinci: painter at the court of Milan

Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition, the National Gallery, December 31^st 2011

Having blogged about the theatre, it’s time to record some of the other highlights of our latest visit to London.  Chief of these was the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery.  Given the interest in this event, we were lucky to get tickets at all – booked virtually as soon as the show was announced many months ago.  Indeed a colleague suggested that if we were to sell our tickets on eBay we could recoup the cost of our next holiday.  A more jealous colleague dismissed our trip with the words, ‘Leonardo?  He was never my favourite turtle anyway.’  So there we were, 10am, with our tickets marked 10.30, with a huge queue of hopefuls alongside the pre-booked queue.  It took me back to the 1972 Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum.  Fortunately we were allowed in early, and it was packed to the gunwales.  In view of Leonardo’s quirkiness, he did not complete the majority of his paintings, so the conventional ‘artworks’, e.g. the Madonna of the Rocks, were rather few and far between.  This meant that many of the works displayed were drawings, doodles, and cartoons, remarkable enough, works of genius, performed in ink, charcoal, and red chalk.  Very often these were tiny, and thus in order to get a good view, it was necessary to queue, sidling round the walls of the room until one could get to inspect the works themselves.  In the run up to the exhibition, one commentator called into question the reputation of the Mona Lisa as the greatest painting in the world, asking, ‘Is the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, called ‘The Lady with an Ermine’, the most beautiful painting in the world?’  In answer to this question, although it is many years since I have seen the Mona Lisa, I would have to answer yes, it is immeasurably beautiful.  The remarkable ermine held in the lady’s hands is spectacular in itself, but the beauty of the face of Cecilia, the 16 year old mistress of da Vinci’s patron, Ludovico Sforza, is dramatic.  She has an expression which is at once innocent and knowing, with a pretty upturn to the left edge of her mouth.  One could criticize the strange length of the left side of her neck and the hand, but the artist’s attention has clearly been lavished on her face, and it is a very beautiful face, exquisitely painted.  In a later portrait, called ‘La Belle Ferronnière’, Leonardo extended his ideas of female beauty in creating an almost photographic portrait, the face and head forming a perfect oval.  These two paintings were created in 1489 and 1493.  In fact, although this was a large exhibition, containing nearly a hundred works, I counted only ten paintings by Leonardo himself, and even then the St Jerome was left unfinished.  The exhibition was complemented by a large room in the main part of the National Gallery containing some studies for the figures in the Last Supper, and included the copy of the original made by Giampietrino in 1520.  This huge painting was made only just over 20 years after Leonardo had painted The Last Supper on the walls of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie.  It is the most complete record we have of how the original looked.  Within a few years, much of the plaster fell off or the paint ran, and Leonardo’s unwise experiment in painting with his own mix of tempera and oil onto dry plaster was a failure.  Finally, a beautiful 20 minute film about the two commissions of the Virgin of the Rocks, and the Last Supper completed the experience.  It’s worth mentioning one unique feature of the exhibition:  at the opposite ends of one of the rooms stand the two Virgins of the Rocks, painted in 1483, and from 1491 to 1508.  One is from the Louvre, the later one from the National Gallery.  It is very likely that Leonardo never had this privilege: in other words, he never saw the two works together.

On the Friday afternoon, a quick visit to the RA.  Their main exhibition, ‘Building the Revolution’ is about architecture in post revolutionary Russia.  Perhaps predictably it wasn’t packed.  I have to admit to feeling a bit confused about expressionism, modernism, and whether they are similar to art deco or not, but one can recognize the unpleasant manifestations of Le Corbusier, who seems to have been favoured to design quite a lot of Russian buildings.  A further exhibition, very small, of drawings by 20^th century Academicians, was highly enjoyable.

Lindsay’s cooking is so good that we are rare and reluctant restaurant diners.  In London, perforce, we must.  The meal at the Mezzanine restaurant at NT was excellent, and we finished off our New Year’s Eve in fine style with the tasting menu at Atul Kochar’s restaurant, Benares, in Berkeley Square.  We were only able to get a reservation at 6.30pm, so we emerged at 8.40pm and decided to drive home to Poole, rather than stay another 3 hours plus to watch the fireworks.  By the time the spectacular display (to celebrate the start of our Olympic year) began, we were comfortably in bed at home.  An exciting visit to The Smoke.

And I still haven’t written about Egypt...