The Archers: urban fantasy or just pie in the sky? Baby give birth to Elton John, plus the joy of self-delusion

Through an odd quirk of fate, one or two fans of The Archers might find their way to this blog to check up on whether I really do exist. Earlier tonight I was trying to help a colleague who was subbing what is referred to as ‘page eight’ (why page eight I really don’t know). In it, A.N. ‘Andrew’ Wilson did the business Mail style about The Archers and how it should be exciting but not too exciting, should contain ‘drama’ but no ‘melodrama’, and how, unfortunately, it had become a little too right-on for words. I was trying to find out when one of the characters (a Hindu solicitor called Usha Gupta who went on to marry the local Anglican vicar as our indigenous Hindus so often do in deepest rural Brtiain) first joined the list of folk in Ambridge engaged in their daily battle with a bad script.
My colleague said she had tried the BBC Archers website but couldn’t find the relevant page on the character (she should have tried a little harder) so as I already have an account with which to log onto BBC messageboards, I volunteered to post a question asking for an urgent reply. Well, for some reason that was a red rag to a bull (or rather a lot of them) and an excuse for a general slagging off of the Mail, newspapers, journalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Many, if not most, of the messages were pretty illiterate, many faux clever and almost all confirmed my suspicion that a great many Archers fans are a self-regarding bollockheads who are only too pleased to subscribe to an urban fantasy of rural life.
Although I work in London for four days a week, my home is in North Cornwall in a part of the country which could not get more rural, and believe me the rural life portrayed in The Archers is a kind of fantasy. It’s not that we don’t have gays – we had a gay publican – and it’s not that we don’t have drugs or any of the other problems portrayed in The Archers. But it's that we simply don’t have the sheer concentration of ‘issues’ aired in the soap. My brother-in-law is a beef farmer and another brother-in-law is a dairy farmer and both, although unlike in their interests (one is in the process of teaching himself the accordion) are pretty typical of farmers in our neck of the woods, and they are not interested in ‘cutting their carbon footprint’ and discovering ways of recycling. On the other hand this is exactly what libs up and down the country would like them to be interested in. What is so galling about The Archers is that quite apart from indulging itself and its listeners in a fantasy world, it runs a mile from the real world of rural life.
So, unfortunately, almost everyone I know is in favour of foxhunting whether they admit to having voted Tory or Lib Dem in the last election (and ironically I am not and also do wonder why so many people get their jollies by blasting shotguns at birds in the sky). But you do not hear that particular aspect of rural life aired in The Archers. So, dear Archers, fans in your urban towers, dream on.
In fact, given the recent spat with several Yanks on the IMDB message board, I am making something of a habit of upsetting idiots. It's all rather encouraging.

. . .

The breaking news of the day is that a baby in California has given birth to two men and that the three of them are destined to live happily ever after. The science of it all is still a
bit vague as there is no previous evidence of a baby giving birth to anything. (Strictly speaking, I should say previous reliable evidence as there is evidence that a baby born 2,000 years apparently ago gave birth to what, in time, became an overweening corporation worth billions of pounds which sold punters around the world the promise of everlasting life. That promise should not be mistaken for the pledges made by numerous lotions which claim to cure male pattern baldness, make your dick twice as long, or to make you irresistible to women – or men if that’s your bag – as they are apparently just a tad more respectable.)
The baby has announced it will call its offspring ‘Sir’ Elton John and David Furnish. There has already been a great deal of controversy over the news – quite apart from the unprecedented science involved – not least because the baby is denying completely that it was merely gaining two fashion

First picture of the baby's offspring (© Getty Images)

accessories which will be trotted out at showbiz parties and premieres. The three of them, the baby insists, will live as a ‘normal family’ and any suggestions to the contrary will be referred to its lawyers who will threaten such a legalistic shit storm if the allegations are not withdrawn that suicide by the guilty party would be the lesser evil.
In response to the news, forward-thinking organisations around the world (but not Nick Clegg apparently, who claims he has other things on his plate) insist it is every baby’s human right to give birth to two men if it so chooses and suggestions that it is merely an combination of consumerism and an unhealthy vanity which has taken a step too far belong in the Dark Ages.

. . .

The mutual shilly-shallying on The Archers messageboard reminded me once again how innocently prejudiced are many people who wouldn’t think of themselves as prejudiced in a million years. Many people bang on about the Mail being ‘full of hate’ and ‘racist’, yet, as I pointed out in one of my post on the messageboard, if you want the full Monty of hate-filled splenetic fury, just visit the Guardian messageboards where you will get more than you can handle. I remember once coming across a post hoping that ‘Thatcher will die of cancer’ and various observations along the lines of ‘Tories? Hanging’s too good for them. They should be dragged through the streets bollock naked, then hung drawn and quartered’. Yet I suspect that, if questioned, those who post such drivel would regard themselves are rather intelligent liberal types who see themselves as ‘broadminded’ and who ‘care’, though about what is rather vague. I suspect that, at the end of the day what they really care about is being thought well off by their peers.
If I were to write – and I think I have recently – that our capacity for self-delusion is infinite, the obvious riposte is ‘your capacity, too?’ and I would be obliged to agree. The trouble is that by its very nature quite in what ways I am deluding myself will always be rather hard for me to spot. To others it might be blindingly obvious from one hundred paces, but were they to tell me, I should imagine I would find it hard to believe I am guilty of what they suggest. If I had more integrity, I would undoubtedly spend the next ten to fifteen minutes reflecting on in what possible ways I am deluding myself. But, to be honest, I can’t be arsed. And I suppose admitting as much is a kind of integrity in itself. An example of self-delusion might well be how all the self-appointed great and good in Britain have, as one, united behind the cause of Julian Assange. Yet to my knowledge none of them has said a dicky bird about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army squaddie who made it all possible, but is now looking at 200 years in chokey for daring to upset the American establishment.

The only thing merrily ringing out are the shop tills

Why is it that I can get irritated by how Christmas is regarded as just another ‘business opportunity’ by manufacturers and our shops, and as an excuse for a consumerist orgy by everyone else and his dog, yet consider the story behind Christmas - the birth of a chap called Jesus - as just so much claptrap? It puzzles me. I should say, here and now, that if someone has a faith, whether they call themselves Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or even Devil worshippers, I leave them to it, because with one or two irritating exceptions (ever been smugly told by someone or other ‘I’m a Christian’ with the implication being ‘I’m better than you because you don’t share the faith’? I have, rather more than once) I consider those who have a faith to be rather luckier in many ways than those who don’t and studies have shown that, in general, they enjoy better health than the faithless - I should say ‘studies are said to show’ as I can’t find any examples off-hand), but I believe it is ‘having a faith’ which does the trick rather than the specific faith. (Incidentally, six years ago, a British sailor insisted on his right as a Devil worshipper to while onboard a Royal Navy frigate on got his way. For further accounts try here and here.)
Were anyone to ask me whether I believed in God, I would honestly reply that I did, but I would leave it there and excuse myself from any subsequent discussion. As for Christianity and Roman Catholicism, well, we went our separate ways years ago, and I somehow doubt we shall ever be re-united. But there is no denying that celebrating Christmas was initially based on the Christian religious festival which marked the anniversary of the birth of the chap Christians believe to be the son of God, though you’d be hard pushed to be reminded of that in Britain at least (officially utterly godless). I know Christmas in Germany is rather more of a religious festival, and I suspect the same is true of the U.S. where a far greater proportion of its citizens attend church every Sunday. But even in those two countries the overarching imperative is to buy, buy, buy and bugger the consequences. But why, given my views on Christianity, do I find that so offensive.
I really can’t tell you. I was, admittedly, brought up a church-going RC (and wanted to be ‘a priest’ until puberty came and I discovered ‘girls’. I remember often sitting in church, spotting a rather pretty girl, imagining her naked, immediately praying to God to forgive me, but even while I was praying, doing a little more imaging, so praying even harder - the whole thing is just thoroughly ridiculous) and for us Christmas was more a religious festival than for others. So perhaps echoes of that upbringing are the basis for my irritation. But irritated I most certainly am. The whole shooting match of Christmas advertising starts in mid-October, which spoils the whole run-up and when you come across Christmas puddings on sale at that time, you do wonder what the bloody hell is going on. Oh, well. I don’t for a moment imagine this is a new phenomenon. I think historians and archaeologist have long established that greed is millennia old. Certainly, the Victorians were pretty acquisitive, especially at Christmas. Just look at Charles Dickens’s novella Scrooge. (Great name, by the way.)

. . .

Christmas Day went off rather well in the Powell household. As I said, the extra money I have been earning putting together the Mails’ puzzle pages allowed my to push the boat out a little this year, so Wes got his Xbox and Elsie a - titchy - iPod Nano. Lord is it small, but she is happy with it. I went round to my stepmother’s to cook her lunch (she had fillet steak with chips and salad) and later we went up to see my father-in-law who chose to spend Christmas on his own. He is now a widower, although I can’t remember whether my mother-in-law died one year or two years ago. My wife’s family are rather an emotionally stunted bunch (my wife’s grandfather was something of a Methodist religious fanatic who would even allow alcohol in the house and who lived until he was 96 in his son’s household, which couldn’t have been easy for his son. It’s pretty much the case that mean don’t really come into their own until their fathers die - it was most certainly true in my case), so I stayed on for an hour after everyone else had left and he seemed to relax a little bit. Poor chap, he does miss his wife a great deal and doesn’t enjoy being on his own.
We didn’t stuff ourselves or fall over drunk, so in that sense it wasn’t a traditional British Christmas, although Elsie did make a point of watching the hour-long EastEnders Christmas special, which, as usual, was full of loads of shouting, crying, tears, unhappiness, recrimination, accusations and I don’t know what else. Why do people enjoy such garbage? I know I have admitted that The Wire, The Sopranos and Mad Men are soaps by another name, but none is filled with the unremitting misery which is fucking EastEnders. I just hope Elsie doesn’t grow up thinking that kind of lifestyle is normal or even usual.

Pretentious? Moi? Or so some believe. And a Lib Dem safe pair of hands fall flat on his keister

You’ll hear it here first: I am narcissistic, pompous, arrogant, pretentious, condescending and stupid, or, at least, that is what some members of an IMDB message board would have the world believe. We have been batting insults back and forth for a few days now, but our feud is getting nowhere. My transgression was to post a new thread on the message board in response to seeing the latest Scorsese film Shutter Island, in which I suggested that at every level the film is purposely ambiguous and that Scorsese had eschewed a conventional resolution to the film where loose ends are tied up and ‘this is the explanation’ and had intended it to remain thoroughly ambiguous. Boy did that seem to irritate a lot of people. No, they said, you have got the wrong end of the stick entirely, there is no ambiguity and you really don’t know what you are talking about. It would be tedious to try to summarise the film. I just started trying, but after a few minutes decided I couldn’t be arsed, but I should tell you (he wrote in a way extremely similar to summarising) that the film turns on whether a US marshall who arrives at a bleak mental facility on an island off Boston to investigate an apparent mysterious disappearance is being stitched up because he believes he has discovered evidence of brain experiments being undertaken on prisoner or whether he is an inmate of the facility on whom doctors are trying an innovative treatment.
If I am right, and Scorsese did intend to leave everything completely ambiguous, then Shutter Island is a great film which pulls off a remarkable trick. If I am wrong – and my oppos on the message board are right and the whole film falls neatly into place at the end, it is merely quite an ordinary, not to say rather clichéd film, nicely filmed, well acted and so on, but, sorry, no cigar.
Well, both sides have been tooing and froing for several days arguing the toss. What I found so frustrating was the apparent inability of the other side (no one was on mine) to see my central point: I wasn’t arguing for one interpretation of the film over another, I was arguing that Scorsese had deliberately left everything unresolved, and not only that, but had constructed his film so that both interpretations held up completely at every point, although they are mutually exclusive. Well, they weren’t having any of that. And things got a little out of hand when I wrote, rather provocatively, that I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t quite cotton onto what I was trying to saying because – well, not to be overly delicate – subtlety was not a great American virtue. And I did add one or three more or less equally rude points along similar lines.
Well, none of this cut any ice at all, and my apparently gratuitous attack on the great U.S. aroused the other side to ever greater fury. That they expressed their anger in badly written, illiterate, badly spelled and often incomprehensible English should, of course, be neither here nor there, but I do find it pertinent. Years ago, I came across a dictum that ‘muddled writing betrays muddled thought’ and, mainly from my own attempts to write something, I find it to hold true almost every time.
All of us involved in this utterly pointless ‘debate’ are guys - or I am pretty certain we are guys - so this thing will run and run until one side or the other will fall off his horse utterly exhausted. Between you and me (and I hope to God none of the other side comes across this blog), were I to be totally honest, I think I am onto a loser, but I’m buggered if I’m going to give up quite yet without a fight. It’s just that I find I loathe anyone these days who uses that non word ‘awesome’, and although, to be fair, none of the other side has done so yet, they strike me as being exactly the kind who would and it can only be a matter of time.

. . .

Here in Britain we have a coalition government, unsurprisingly referred to as the Coalition Government (not the capital letters), which is made up of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It seemed to go well for a while, although one of the Lib Dem stars who landed a job in Cabinet, a guy called David Laws, and was hailed as being ‘brilliant’ - our newspapers are apt to do that kind of thing - came cropper within days after it was discovered that the man he was paying rent to (rent can be claimed on expenses) was his boyfriend. He resigned, although I suspect he was also rather glad his secret was out as it appeared he still hadn’t come out to his elderly parents.
Next came a scandal with Christopher Huhne who was discovered by the papers to be cheating on his wife with a bisexual feminist. Nothing much could be made of that, because Huhne came clean, left his wife immediately and, I think, moved in with the lady of his dreams.
Most recently, and in some ways most entertaining of the three although there is no sex involved, is the humiliation by the Daily Telegraph of Vince Cable. While still in Opposition - the Lib Dems never had a snowball’s chance in Hell of forming the government after Labour was ousted, but strictly, they, too were the Opposition - Cable was something of a darling of the Press. He was a former chief economist for BP and so could be said to know something about both economics and business, and was regarded as a safe pair of hands. That last virtue should be understood in the way that it is laudable that I have not once yet crashed a plane and have have a completely clean record in aviation. Oh, but I have also never flown a plane.
Just how ‘Cable’s’ hands proved to be was demonstrated a few weeks ago in the run-up to a vote in the House of Commons on
whether the fees students will be charged to attend university should go up to a maximum £9,000. The was government policy introduced by Cable himself, but that didn’t stop him revealing in a local newspaper which circulates in his constituency that he would be voting against the rise. (The Lib Dems had been against such a rise in fees while in Opposition, and were now being asked to go against their manifesto pledge to oppose it.) That made him look thoroughly ridiculous. But, extraordinarily, he has now managed to make himself look even more ridiculous. Two Daily Telegraph reporters (two young women, as it happens, chosen, I’m sure purely for their journalistic ability) attended Cable’s constituency surgery posing as two of his constituents. In the conversation which followed, Cable was excessively candid, boasting that he could bring the government down if he wanted to.
The following day, the Telegraph printed further candid comments by this former ‘safe pair of hands’ who, in his daytime job a Business Secretary was the chap in government set to rule on whether Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to buy up the parts of Sky TV he doesn’t yet own. After Cable pledged that he ‘would declare war on Murdoch’, his impartiality in the matter was, surprise, suprise, called into question. David Cameron didn’t sack Cable, and attracted the ire of his more right-wing MPs for not doing so, but removed the issue of the sale of Sky TV from Cable’s remit. In political terms that is more or less like removing Charlie Chaplin’s bowler, cane and moustache from all future performances.
The Telegraph pulled the same stunt on four other Lib Dems who are part of the Coalition governmnet, and naturally, all four were as candid and naive as only Lib Dems can be. One commented on Chancellor George Osborne’s capacity ‘for getting up one’s nose’, another ventured to suggest that David Cameron cannot be trusted (which will, ironically, go down rather well with the right-wing Tory doubters), a third compared the Tories with the South African government under apartheid, and the fourth doubted whether Cameron was sincere, another issue which I suspedt won’t greatly upset the shire Tories.
None of this, though, will rock the Coalition. In my view the Lib Dems need the Tories more than they need the Lib Dems. This is the first sniff the Lib Dems have had of power in almost 95, and were the whole arrangement to go up in smoke over the coming few months, the Lib Dems would not be looking forward to a general election: they opinion poll rating has slumped dramatically and is now scraping along at something like 9pc. Anyway, they want to get voting by proportional representation accepted before they depart the stage for without it they will be in the wilderness for another century.

. . .

When stood for the local district council a few years ago and went out on the stump, I came across a few hardcore Lib Dems and they were not nice people. Middle-class to a fault, the ones I met were self-righteous and intolerant of any other view as only the smug self-righteous can be. Despite their cuddly liberal image, they are said to be the dirtiest of the dirty during elections. Their big faultline splits them into right-of-centre Lib Dems and left-of-centre Lib Dems. At present the left-of-centre lot are rushing off in the direction of the Labour party, where they will be greeted with false smiles, used, then abandoned.
During the party conference season, I heard a radio report from the Lid Dem conference (held in Sepember when the Lib Dems had been part of the Coalition for four months) in which one activist was heard to say in all seriousness: ‘I didn’t vote Lib Dem to form the government.’
I often get the feeling that for most Lib Dems holding onto their principled purity is more important to them than being in power with at least the chance to put their ideas into practice. In that way they can always hold the moral high ground and condescend to the rest of us.

. . .

Apropos nothing, I was reminded the other day of two very colourful English expressions. I’ll ‘share’ them with you:

Wedding tackle: a man’s genitalia, his meat and two veg.

Five-finger discount: shoplifting.

An unlikely stitch-up, but Assange gets all the glory while young Bradley is held out to dry

The Wikileaks/arrest of Julian Assange saga rumbles on. Assange has now been granted bail after well-wishers stumped up £250,000 surety and on condition that he lives at the house of one well-wisher and doesn’t leave. Although I am less than convinced by all the claims that Wikileaks is striking a blow for freedom, I still suspect that somehow Assange is being stitched up, or is in the initial stages of being stitched up by the U.S., which never takes too kindly to being made to look stupid. But having said that, just how they want to do it is not very straightforward. All the ingredients are there, but it somehow doesn’t quite hang together.
The ingredients: Assange is accused of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, but the charges are later dropped. He had reportedly asked to see the evidence against him, but none was provided. He reportedly asked the Swedish authorities whether he could
leave the country for Britain and they agreed. One alleged rape claim is being made by a campaigning feminist who had previously published on the web polemics urging women to ‘get even’ with men. She was the first woman Assange slept with in Sweden on a trip there. A few days later, Assange slept with another, who then contacted the first, and I must admit that the thought has crossed my mind that the first, the campaigning feminist was rather angry that Assange should have turned to a second woman so quickly. As to the rape allegations, here is an interesting article:
The new round of rape and sexual assault claims followed one Assange was in Britain, and Sweden then applied for his extradition and issued a warrant for his arrest. He has, I don’t think, yet been formally charged, but then I don’t think he can be until he is in the custody of the Swedes. Then, so the conspiracy theory would go, Assagne is extradited to the U.S. for a severe judicial bollocking before he is locked away forever.
There are reports from the U.S. that some congressmen are urging for the drafting of a law under which Assange can be charged. This seems to me rather arse-about-tip: it strikes me that revenge would be the prime motivation for doing that, which is understandly. However, revenge was never a principle in law.
Now for how it doesn’t really hand together: if the U.S. feels Assange has a case to answer, why not applied to have him extradited directly from Britain? They are seeking, in a ludicrous case, the extradition of a Gary McKinnon, another chap who upset them by hacking into the Pentagon website and thus demonstrating how poor its cyber defence was. In fact, hurt pride seems to play a major part in both cases, and it might easily be possible to show that America’s dented ego more or less drives its foreign policy.
Then there is also the fact that of all the European countries which might, in some theoretical conspiracy, be amenable to doing the U.S.’s bidding, Sweden, a liberal-democratic country with tendencies to left-of-centrism, comes rather low on the list. It is also quite unlikely that a campaigning feminist in that liberal-democratic country would feel inclined to help out the U.S. All in all, Sweden and the U.S. are unlikely bedfellows, and it does seem rather unlikely that they have entered into some unholy alliance.
Other aspects about the whole affair which strike me as rather odd are that Assange was held in solitary confinement while he was in custody in Wandsworth prison. Why exactly? Then there is also the angle that a certain Bradley Manning, the chap suspected of having provided Wikileaks with almost all of the batch of confidential cables, is in deep shit, far deeper at the moment than la Assange, but rather fewer people are getting their knickers in a twists about him.
On Radio 4’s Today this morning we had John Pilger, a prominent left-wing commentator of this parish and cheerleader of all things left, and Janet Daley, a prominent right-wing commentator and cheerleader of all things right. I’ve always thought of Pilger as something of a self-seeking prat who rather enjoys his status as journalism’s lefty. But on this occasion I am inclined with some of the points he made. But, damn it, I also feel obliged, in all honesty, to agree with some of the points Janet Daley made, although the piece on Today and the joint interview with both was rather spoiled in that two issues — Assange’s arrest and possible extradition to Sweden and then possibly the U.S., and the whole Wikileaks leaking were conflated, which didn’t lead to much clarity. For example, Daley made the point, one which on the face of it is quite reasonable, that just as journalists such as herself and Pilger are entitled to keep their sources confidential — and (although she didn’t say so this morning) just as Wikileaks is entitled to keep its sources confidential — so the assorted diplomats whose candid comments were published by Wikileaks are also entitled to some confidentiality.
I must admit that I have a gut feeling that Assange is being stitched up, although exactly how I really couldn’t tell you. And to put that feeling into perspective, I regard the guy as something of a pillock and Wikileaks, as far as some of its claims are concerned to be fighting the good fight, as a little more dodgy than they angels they profess to be should be. This one will run and run.

. . .

And what of Bradley Manning? Well, apart from knowing the guy’s name, I have just had to search the net for more details about him — apparently he is something of a computer whizz — which must speak volumes about the relative importance these two characters, Assange and Manning, have. One is ‘sexy news’,
the other isn’t. Why not? Perhaps Manning is better covered in the States — one report I found says that the ‘city of Berkeley (would that be the same Berkeley which has the famous university?) wants to proclaim him a war hero. Manning’s problem is that the U.S. really is the country where 99 year sentences for laughing at the president are commonplace — well, you know what I mean — so the future looks very bleak for him indeed. There was an interesting item on Radio 4’ PM programme last night claiming that a substantial amount of money Wikileaks had promised to donate to Manning’s defence fund had still not been paid. That, if true, only goes to show how much they value him.

. . .

I had included two pictures with this entry, one of Assange and one of Manning. From the picture I have found, Assange looks rather like an unpleasant sleazeball, and Manning looks like a naive idealist. We all know how photos such as these can be horribly misleading — there is any number of pictures of Adolf Hitler being nice to his Alsation dogs — so I merely make those comments in passing. But I know who I would prefer to spend a night in the pub with and it ain’t Assange. I really wish I didn’t feel he is being stitched up. But . . .

. . .

Finally, it is with a great deal of sadness that I have to report that Britain is back where it was last year, in snow hell, also ‘dubbed’ ‘by the nation’ Snowmageddon. But, do not despair, the world is heeding us in our hour of need: there have been food parcels from Siberia, several tons of socks from the good folk of Switzerland, the Austrians are saying special Masses and as I write there are very reliable reports that womenfolk the length and breadth of Scandanavia have formed knitskalga, the traditional knitting groups so beloved by the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians (though not, apparently, by the Dane who are far more concerned with writing petitions to the Vatican pleading for the immediate canonisation of Julian Assange), to turn out around-the-clock woolly sweaters in a variety of colours and sizes which will then be flown into Britain by the Red Cross (the Red Crescent will be making the deliveries of special halal sweaters to Bradford, Blackburn, Leicester and other towns where our Muslims brothers have taken up residence). It’s at moments like this that it is a joy to be alive.

The horror that is Wagner and Shutter Island

One could argue that a feature of great art is that it can be hugely divisive: some think it’s great and others think it’s not. An example would be the music of Richard Wagner. And I chose it because to my ears it is excruciating bombastic nonsense verging on complete tosh. Sure, he has some nice tunes, but if you whistle the particular melody you like - try The Flying Dutchman - you’ve finished the relevant bit in about five seconds. Then you have to put up with another 20
minutes of supercharged bollocks. (Thomas Beecham once observed that Wagner ‘had his moments - about one every 15 minutes’. Someone else said that you can listen to an hour of Wagner, look at your watch and find only five minutes have passed.) I would prefer to have my fingernails torn out one by one than be obliged to sit through one of his interminable operas, and I am not alone in that view (I heard a novelist called Susan Hill saw more or less the same thing on the radio just two days ago). What is supposedly great about Wagner’s music eludes me utterly. Perhaps I have cloth ears. Perhaps I don’t. As a rule I am more attracted to baroque music than all that Sturm und Drang Romantic stuff, and Wagner is that to a bloody T.
Yet I am also bound to admit that there are many who do feel he is great and that his music is great, and they flock along to a performance of one of his operas in their thousands and - very odd - enjoy the experience. Then, of course, there is the man himself, an appalling anti-semite, a parasite who until he finally began earning money when he became famous, was happy to live off others and have them pay his bills, a man who would often seduce the wives of those friends and colleagues, and a man who was insufferably vain and conceited who, literally, believed the world owed him a living. Unfortunately, none of that has any bearing on his music either way.
I mention this because I recently saw on DVD a film which I regard as great art, but which has divided critics and the public alike. The Daily Telegraph’s reviewer, Sukhdev Sandhu, wasn’t at all impressed and gives it just two stars. The Daily Mail’s film critic, Christopher Tookey, on the other hand, gives it an almost unprecedented five stars and cannot praise it enough. And I am firmly with Tookey. The film is Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese, and I would urge everyone to see it. What I think is so great about it is that it pulls off a trick which is fiendishly difficult to pull off. A clue: the very last line spoken in the film pulls the rug from under your feet and throws you right back where you started. And the line is spoken just after another line which is highly ambiguous, pointing the film both in one direction and its opposite.
Shutter Island has been criticised for being obvious, with many claiming they spotted ‘the twist’ after a mere ten minutes. Well, if they did, they weren’t paying as much attention as they thought they were. What I feel is unique about Shutter Island is that there simply is no conclusion, no resolution. And to produce a film which has none, but which still leaves the viewer - well, this viewer at least - feeling that he has not been cheated is a remarkable achievement.


. . .

OK, I will admit that I’ve heard - on the grapevine, that kind of thing - that musically, Wagner was in some ways innovative and that there is some ‘magic chord’ which he came up with which - well, according to some, music was never the same again. (I bet it wasn’t). The point is that despite my crude, opinionated, ever-so-right-of-centre outlook (see entries passim), deep inside me beats a tiny liberal heart which quite often persuades me to be just a tiny bit more open-minded than I care to be. And at this moment, that liberal heart has persuaded me to concede that in musical history - I’ll put it no stronger than that - Wagner is said to have been something of a milestone. There, I’ve said it. However, that doesn’t in the slightest alter my view that his music is nothing but a god-damn awful racket and if a never again heard a single note written by him, that would still be too soon.