You 'avin a laugh?

I've probably expressed my affection for British telly from the 60's & 70s more than once in my blog. At a recent press conference, John Cleese, in Sydney for the Just For Laughs festival (which I sadly missed because of study, disorganisation and poverty, though not necessarily in that order) damned the current state of British television as a sharp decline from its status as the 'least worse television in the world between to the 50s and the 90s'.

The UK TV of my childhood certainly provided a nourishing diet. I cut my comedy appreciating teeth on The Frost Report, The Worker, At Last the 1948 Show, The Likely Lads and Steptoe and Son. I was also, much to my mother's horror, a stalwart fan of the Carry On series of films. I must have seen them on telly as I can't imagine being taken to the cinema to see such coarse, crass entertainment unless my maternal grandmother became my enabler for this 'ever so common' form of entertainment as she did for seaside amusement parks and panto.

Somehow I recently became aware that the BBC had produced a series of tributes to the stars of this era, Legends of Comedy, and quickly adapted my online buying skills, usually dedicated to clothes and china, to tracking down the DVDs. The search became particularly tantalising when I discovered that its highest rating dramatisation, The Curse of Steptoe, had been withdrawn from sale because of a successful defamation action by the family of Harry H. Corbett's second wife.

Well Amazon came through for me, at least I found second hand copies of the DVDs on their site, but then there was some palaver about not being prepared to ship them to Oz. The tyranny of distance had not impressed itself so strongly upon me since 1969 when we arrived and it took 2 -3 weeks to receive an aerogramme and you couldn't buy Callard & Bowsers butterscotch or Branston Pickle for love or money.

The long suffering Harold Steptoe, Harry H. Corbett with a brindle pup that
looks uncommonly like our Stella.

Kind friends in the UK took delivery of the parcel and re-directed it to me here so I have now watched 'Hattie', a biopic of Hattie Jacques starring Gavin and Stacey's/Little Britain's Ruth Jones, 'Rather You Than Me', featuring David Walliams as Frankie Howerd and 'The Curse of Steptoe' with its inspired casting of Jason Isaacs as Harry H. Corbett and Phil Davis as Wilfrid Brambell. This review from The Guardian captures its tragic magic better than I could. If I have one tiny qualm it is that their lives look so unrelentingly miserable. They must have had one or two moments of fun being in the best written and acted comedy of the day and earning all that money. Maybe not, they certainly both seemed to have been lugging huge, mortifying albatrosses around with them!

The real Hattie Jacques and the divine Ruth Jones who recreates her with stunning aplomb in 'Hattie'.

Less depressing and a must-see is 'Hattie'. Behind the smirkiness and stereotypes of her Carry On roles Hattie was one classy, sensual broad who had the bittersweet fortune to fall passionately in love/lust with her driver (played by the delectable Aidan Turner from 'Being Human') while still in an affectionate but lacklustre marriage to John Le Mesurier. Ruth Jones strikes just the right note - mixing the excitement of newly realised sexuality with a thoroughly kind and admirable desire to harm no-one and see that everyone is looked after. Too tall an order of course. Your heart breaks for her and Le Mesurier trying to be civilised while living in the most unorthodox of domestic situations.

All the performances are great and the recreation of scenes from Carry On Cabbie, with a subtle commentary on the appalling limitations placed on roles for women, be they 'lookers' or matrons, work beautifully!

Must track down Eric and Ernie next.

ROFL (well, chuckle with) Roiphe

Just finished reading Katie Roiphe's Uncommon Arrangements - Seven Portraits of Married Life 1910-39. I can honestly say I romped through this book, my interest in what made these people and their relationships tick never flagged. Amongst the unions caught in Roiphe's amber are Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry, Jane, H.G. Wells & Rebecca West and Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge & Evgenia Souline. All her studies reveal exceptional, creative early 20thC minds consciously reshaping or replacing the institution of marriage. H.G. Wells was as much the charming complete bastard I had been led to believe, Radclyffe Hall was one controlling, tory mother f*cker and Vanessa Bell was a surprisingly coy boheme. The relationships that most challenged my received knowledge were those Vera Brittain had with her brother Edward, fiance Roland Leighton, husband George Catlin and long time companion Winifred Holtby.


My understanding of Vera Brittain's suffering in love, emerging pacifism and feminist pioneering came straight from the 1979 BBC television dramatisation of her book Testament of Youth in which the delightful Cheryl Campbell created her as the most disarming of heroines. While there was lots to like and admire about the real life Vera Brittain, Roiphe, as she does with all the personalities examined in this book, paints a thoughtful, psychologically credible and drily amusing portrait of a complex human being. It is by no means always flattering but we certainly glimpse the myth making, compromises and to some extent, the self obsession, that can go into becoming a literary and political icon.

I thoroughly recommend Roiphe's book to anyone fascinated by the Edwardian era and the emergence of modernism in British society. You will enjoy hobnobbing with DH Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, discovering their noble and nastier traits and maybe Roiphe's dry humour will make you ROFL or at least enjoy a wry inner chuckle.

Here is a bit of light verse I dashed off after reading Roiphe's portrayal of Vera Brittain:

In youth Vera Brittain was terribly smitten

With brooding, bright Roland who died in the war

From his death, her brother’s and (implied) many others

She created catharsis

In her Testaments - one, two, three and four

(Last unfinished)

Passion less rattling she found with George Catlin

But privately thought him a great bloody bore

A new minted text she preferred much to sex

And domestication she came to abhor

Spared it thanks to Winifred Holtby

Vera’s fuelled tragic jollity

Gave her a persona the UK could adore

Freed from love’s dreary fetters, this left lady of letters

While a true self made woman, slightly chills at the core!

A Tree Grows in Fairfield

I've been to Fairfield three times this year. I think I had previously been to Fairfield only twice in my life. Once in the 70s, when I was about 13, my siblings and I were taken to Fairfield to meet my Auntie Elva and Uncle Arthur, and John, the only one of their four boys who still lived at home. My main recollection of that visit was that they had a sulphur crested cockatoo that shrieked 'Arrr... thur' in perfect imitation of my aunt! Then, in 1990, I went to Fairfield Library for the launch by the Hon Gough Whitlam of my mother's Fairfield - a Pictorial History. That she wrote a history of this south western Sydney suburb suggests some connection or relationship with the area, but in fact she just happened to be the freelance writer commissioned to write the book.

Mum's book published in 1990 for Fairfield's centenary and dedicated to the memory of my brother Nicky.

Facebook is the reason I've started visiting Fairfield more often now. Through Facebook I have re-connected with a branch of my family I hardly knew. So now I go to Fairfield to see my elderly Uncle Arthur in his nursing home and recently I went to see him with his youngest son, my cousin John. This is the same cousin John who was at home being an introverted teenage boy strumming his guitar while the cocky summoned his Dad so melodically back in the 70s. He now lives in Alice Springs. When he was last in Sydney we went together to see Arthur and to find a tree! In one of life's peculiar but abundant coincidences I had given John Mum's book to look at and amongst the memory jogging images he encountered therein was one of an enormous oak tree in Fairfield called Bland's Oak.

It turns out that back in the 60s when I was rambling about in the fields and woods behind our house in the Essex village of West Horndon, climbing the odd diminutive tree and occasionally falling in streams (subject for another posting), my four male cousins in NSW were hooning around the streets of Fairfield and climbing Bland's Oak. This tree is ENORMOUS, and it is enormous because it is really old. Not Californian redwood really old, but colonial-remnant-planting-on-previously-clear-felled-land old! It was planted, probably from seed, in about 1850 on the estate of prominent Sydney doctor and politician William Bland ( 1789 - 1868).

A West Horndon field and bit of vegetation.

To quote Brenda Pittard in Fairfield - a Pictorial History:

Mark Lodge was built by Captain John Horsley in 1814... and stood on the site now occupied by Fairfield Hospital...William Bland bought Mark Lodge from Horsley to use as his country estate... (On his death) his estate was broken up and by the 1930s all that remained of the magnificent property that had once been Mark Lodge was the oak tree that Bland had planted. In 1930 during a violent storm the tree's trunk was split because of the enormous weight of the wet leaves. Fortunately the knowledge and careful attention of a tree expert saved the tree though now supported by metal bands and frames.

And so it still stands, heritage listed and protected, propped up by iron struts on Bland Street, Carramar in a reserve beside Prospect Creek and on the site of Mark Lodge, called Oakdene Park. Despite being split asunder it is still a sprawling giant approx 13 metres in height and 30 metres in spread.

Bland's Oak

The official heritage listing that can be viewed on Fairfield Council's website (click on link under photo) notes that this is not the common deciduous British oak tree but a rarer species, Quercus Virginiana, that may have been a the gift of one of Bland's botanically minded friends such as William Wentworth. Interestingly, to again quote Mum, '(this) evergreen oak is found mainly in southern and central England'. And so, the inter connectedness of things continues...

Cousin John up Bland's Oak, 2011.

I must be into a life (with a foppush bottom)

Thinking of making this my new blog ID (from the ENGRISH site)

Thank god we got "The Kennedys"

Barry Pepper & Greg Kinnear as two charismatic, over achieving, highly sexed Irish boys watch 'Leave It To Beaver' to get a few tips.

So, Sydney finally got to see 'The Kennedys' (Sunday nights 29 May, 5 & 12, June). There are two versions of the story behind its delayed screening. Both acknowledge that the US/Canadian History Channel commissioned the series, filmed over two years, at a cost of $25 million US, but abruptly dropped it in January of this year with the statement: "this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand", The first story says they responded to pressure from Kennedy associates and admirers to walk away from the series. The other version is the same except that the reason given by its proponents for the History Channel abandoning their project is that they realised the series was 'completely f***ing terrible' and that the Reelz Channel who eventaully aired it did so because 'they didn’t care that it is completely f***ing terrible' (source: Best Week Ever TV).

Casting doubt on the first explanation is the fact that the series contains nothing that hasn't been public knowledge for aeons i.e. Joe Kennedy was anti semitic and not above rigging a ballot or two, Rose Kennedy was a manipulative and controlling fanatical Catholic, JFK had a bad back yet consistently put it about a bit (well, a lot), Bobby was uber fertile and unflinching, and, in cleaning up one of his big bro's messes, pretty tough on Marilyn Monroe... None this is exactly bombshell material, but perhaps still heresy for canonising Cameloteers.

The charge that the series is simply bad TV centres both on the characterisation and on the dialogue, lampooned as clunky, melodramatic and pregnant with 'prophecy'. This seems a little harsh. 'The Kennedys' isn't a documentary and let's face it no aspect of the actual story of the dynasty, the Rat Pack, the Mob, Cuba, the USSR, the civil rights movement, Dr Feelgood's magical injections, J. Edgar Hoover, the paparazzi etc and of course, the shocking assassinations, themselves is easy to downplay. I expected a certain chilling profundity of tone for these BIG themes and subjects and that's what I got. And what if some of the writing and the portrayals are a bit self conscious? Setting out to capture iconic figures and moments it would be hard to be otherwise. However perhaps that is easier to feel that way when I come to the series as an Australian via the UK and was 6 years old when JFK was assassinated. I wonder if I would be so ready to suspend disbelief if the story were part of my national heritage, perhaps a dramatisation of The Dismissal with say, Garry MacDonald as one of the reporters on the steps of Parliament House. Hey, wait a moment... .


Basically, like US critic Linda Stasi in the New York Post I experienced the series as 'one of the best, most riveting, historically accurate dramas about a time and place in American history that has ever been done for TV'. And as well as being riveting historical drama, the series was a wonderful showcase for some fine character acting from Diana Hardcastle, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Kristin Booth and, most of all, the wonderful Tom Wilkinson. Katie Holmes was even surprisingly adequate as Jackie but I wouldn't put her in their class.

Mean cartoon from US satirical TV Review Publication Best Week Ever TV).

So, thumbs up for 'The Kennedys'. Damn fine apple pie in its own right and definitely superior to its main competition on those Sunday evenings, that tedious re-evocation of 'Upstairs Downstairs', 'Downton Abbey'.

M'lud experiences a twinge of angst or dyspepsia when a telegram tells him that The Titanic has sunk, the domestics want a living wage and he will need to install a safari park to meet death duties.

L'IL OLE MO(A)NA ME

Is it the best of museums, is it the worst of museums? It is certainly the quirkiest of museums!

I visited Hobart's new and much lauded MONA (Museum of Old & New Art) on Monday. Actually I visited it on Sunday, but that isn't as alliterative. Mid long weekend, with an extra injection of tourists because of the volcanic ash cloud, we should have expected queues. What we didn't expect was that they would be longer at the coffee shop than for admission! Just an aside on the cafe industry in Hobart, it is best to phone ahead if there are more than 4 of you. Large numbers of paying customers upset the staff. They make this clear by being disdainful or agitated or both.

Any way, we posted two of our outrageously huge group of 7 in the entry queue and went to order takeaway coffee. In the next 20 minutes our advance party twice relinquished the opportunity to enter MONA to stand in the brisk breeze awaiting their cappuccinos.

MONA - popular!

Visitors are admitted in lots of 14 so again, when we reached the head of the queue, we and our scouts stood back until we could proceed en masse. Inside we were given an orientation talk by one of MONA's youthful staff to the effect that there is no signage in the museum, you use a touch screen MP3 player and headset to locate yourself and access information about the exhibits. You relinquish these when you leave so forgive the lack of any identifying details about the art and artists in this post*.

I have been able to find little online about the building, its site or history but a security guard told us that a European immigrant planted a vineyard on the land (at Berriedale, beside the Derwent) some time in the 20thC, that in the 1980s a house designed by the 'architect of the National Gallery of Victoria' (guess that could be Roy Grounds, Mario Bellini or Peter Davidson & Donald Bates) was built and that MONA's impressive central chimney/spiral staircase structure is part of the original house. At some point all that became the property of enigmatic billionaire David Walsh who has excavated around and under the house to create his subterranean 'anti-museum' or 'subversive adult Disneyland'!

Crikey's coverage of MONA's opening in January 2011 emphasised that the museum echoes Walsh's Darwinianism and belief in life's essential randomness. We all experience, but generally fail to confront, at least in a public gallery, just a few constants i.e. that 'we seek sex, we defecate and we all die'. MONA, with its mixed media, un-labelled, un-chronological exhibits that include Egyptian mummies, taxidermied and skeletal animal remains and a simulated giant human digestive tract certainly make these shared facts inescapable.

Descending 3 floors from the ground level entry to the basement, where it is suggested you begin your tour, juggling your MP3 player and headphones (and in my case your spectacles as well) you notice two more beverage/food outlets whose existence causes you, appropriately enough, to begin an acknowledgement of randomness that will continue for hours to come.

MONA is almost totally underground. That means that there is no natural light. It has an eccentric floor plan and a feeling of being outside time, disorientation sets in quickly. This arguably puts you in the right frame of mind one of the first installations you encounter, a version of Roselands' raindrop fountain propelled into the nihilistic 21stC with the words like "mafia", "Jesse James" and "American Idol" forming in its cascades.

Nearby, between heavy burgundy velvet curtains, is a stuffed raven suspended over a real or reproduction 18thC cabinet containing an urn of human ashes - my MP3 player said human hair was also involved but I couldn't spot any unless it was of a Rapunzel-like strength and supporting the raven.

Then I was mesmerised by a video depicting a young woman undergoing various ophthalmic, surgical, immersive and electronic procedures in a kind of laboratory/conservatory/natural history museum setting - later another woman dismembered a piano and another showed great flexibility on a trapeze. The imagery recalled Paul Delvaux and Louis Bunuel. I would like to have made a note of whose work I was viewing and to record a reaction a little more complex than 'LOVE'/'HATE' but my full hands, the limitations of the MP3's programming and, I'm sure, Mr Walsh's intentions, made that impossible.

The diversity and unorthodox juxtaposition of works I saw over the next 2 hours proved both exhilarating and frustrating. The no signage policy meant I completely missed a Brett Whiteley painting in one of the only parts of the gallery with natural light. I stumbled upon a Russian video triptych quoting mannerist paintings and delivering a truly poignant and chilling Armageddon message. I loved that (and could tick 'LOVE' in all conscience) and also a work I have since heard is called 'Cunts and Other Conversations' which comprised casts of over 100 sets of female genitals. I didn't ever find the much publicised excreting digestive tract or any animal carcasses which form exciting parts of the MONA collection.

MONA is must see. It is very probably unique; there are some amazing exhibits with promises of additions and changes to come. I'm over 50 and do not consider myself a complete luddite. I did however struggle with the touch screen MP3 player as I hadn't used one before and found the earphones competed with the MP3's lanyard about my neck. I only remembered to consult the floor plan when I found a stray copy on the floor towards the end of my visit. I know I was being conceptually challenged and asked to experience art in a fresh way without curatorial interpretation but I can't discard my existing art knowledge and wanted to make connections. I would also rather put my energy into experiencing the art itself rather than into trying to operate the technology. I kept thinking of the Powerhouse where technology is used more sparingly and is much more interactive and user friendly. I don't know what they do for people with actual disabilities but the glasses on, glasses off thing I had to do to find out where I was and what I was looking at was an effing pain.

You can't see the collection in one day nor is it desirable to, but I do feel a bit as if I have only rehearsed for my visit and now need to have the real experience. As our departure from Tassie was not delayed by the ash cloud that opportunity won't come for some time.

Really keen to hear what others who've visited MONA have to say.

*Post script - I am informed I could have saved my tour and tracked it later. Oh, well, I'll know for next time.

Everything more is more again in Dusseldorf!

It's Eurovision time again. We just watched the second night's broadcast, billed as the semi finals. The finals are on SBS 1 tomorrow night (15 May). Last year Eurovision was disappointingly bland but this year the excess and tenuous musicianship we have come to love were back in spades! Here is a run down of some of the acts that made the biggest impression.

There is always a strong soft porn aesthetic to the pop music business and Eurovision presents its own special version. Maja Keuc of Slovenia went the bondage/thigh high boot route with her costume for 'No One' (or 'No Win' as I prefer to think of it) and had a group of girl backing singers that look like a Supré window display come to life. One of these young ladies appears to be adjusting herself in the pic above.

Former (1998) Israeli winner transsexual Dana International seemed a strong contender when her song 'Ding Dong' was announced, standing as it does in a long line of silly Eurovision song titles: 'Boom Bang-a-Bang' (UK, 1969), 'A-Ba-Ni-Ba' (Israel, 1978), 'Bana Bana' (Turkey, 1989) and 'Bourn Badaborun' (Monaco, 1967). Perhaps on reflection though the choice of consonant may be ill advised. Any way the song, her performance and couture were so dull (see below) that they made one long for Fran Drescher's sense of style and vocal projection!

From Romania came Hotel FM with their clicky, clappy, catchy 'Change' a contender despite its un-Eurovision defeatist lyric 'I can't change the world alone'. We liked their Romanian pianist much more than their English lead singer so here (below) is the only picture I could find which shows he snacks healthily as well as vamping appealingly.



Almost all the songs we heard tonight were sung in English which I know is often contentious in the competing countries. But it matters little as most lyrics were incomprehensible any way. Thank goodness for SBS's Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang and their elucidating commentary.

Each song's title at least was generally left ringing in the ears. This was definitely so with the subtle 'I Love Belarus' (yes, Belarus's entry), Moldova's quirky 'So Lucky', Ireland's 'Lipstick' and Estonia's Rockerfeller Street. Rockerfeller Street was performed by 18 year old Getter Jaani (left), she is delightful, can really wear magenta and started her performance with a magic trick. The number's art direction was pretty cool using a graphic model cityscape, perhaps a bit too cool to be real Eurovision material - don't recall many lighting effects or pyrotechinics at all.

Irish entrant Jedward are twins John and Edward Grimes. They are very BOUNCY, suggesting Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon on acid. Their personal stylist clearly disdains gravity and has an open ended budget for hair spray. The way this hyperenergetic, Warholesque pair perform Lipstick is described quite accurately in Wikipedia as 'a dayglo wad of electroglammy bubblegum' (I'd love to credit that but Wikipedia didn't). They are a lot of fun and are through to the finals. Also high in the quirky stakes is Moldova's Zdob si Zdub with 'So Lucky' - their usual pub rock image altered by donning tall hats which the Eurovision website calls 'cosmic antennae' but looked more as if they came straight from the gnome section at the Garden Centre. However their ska influenced song and their unerring unicycling made them one of this year's more memorable acts!

While members of Zdob si Zdub were prepared, for their art's sake, to look as if home was Dingly Dell, we saw no costumes as grotesque as those of 2008's winner Finnish Heavy metal band Lordi's. Remember them? Sort of dinosuar bikers!

Pretty boy and barbie doll lead singers did abound however. Macedonia's Vlatko Ilievski is right out of a menswear catalogue but our focus readily wandered from his chiseled profile in disbelief to his stumbling Zorba-style backing dancers one of whom inserted an accordion solo seemingly randomly into the performance. More twins, female this time, from Slovakia teetered on 8 inch heels, the wind machine causing their golden tresses to play about their even more golden fake tanned shoulders and cleavages. Despite the fact that their song contained only 5 notes the girls managed to avoid all of them!

I could go on but I am spoilt for choice (and we only saw a fraction of the acts, go to http://www.eurovision.tv/ for the full catastrophe). There was the impressive lap of honour, guitar in hand and presumably still being strummed, done by one of the 3Js, boarding school pupils from the Netherlands who've formed a boy band. (Maybe some sort of Chariots of Fire homage?). There was Ukranian Mika Newton replete in angels wings, singing, appropriately enough, Angel, whilst projected behind her were images of pathos trickled from the hand of 'sand artist' Kseniia Simonovia. There was Musiqq from Latvia comprising a chubby boy (I think he is only 17) and an early Elvis Costello look alike - the ill fitting waistcoats there wore looked vaguely better on the Elvis clone. And did I glimpse the Swedish soubrette suffer a tiny wardrobe malfunction a la Janet Jackson towards the end of her act?

Definitely a return to form by the teeming mass of celebrity wannabes and pop chart hopefuls from the northern hemisphere. The electricity bill for special effects and online voting (or 'woting' as one of the Dusseldorf anchors referred to it) would take about 1,000 earth hours to offset and the ostentation of makeup and costuming on display means that none of us need ever feel overdressed again! And the winner is... who knows or cares? Eurovision has already delivered.

Jedward, like Ardal O'Hanlon on acid.

Stop Press: Ell/Nikki from Azerbaijan has won the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest with 221 points (pronounced 'pwants'). We didn't see this entry last night so just Googled the You Tube clip which begins with a lot of 'ooh, ooh' noises and a Golden retriever leaving the set. We know how the dog felt!