Ooh Vicar! Or how I learnt to love smut and realised early in my life that Donald McGill, Max Miller, Julian Clary, Humphrey Lyttelton and the rest are our true British heroes

A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre. So the barman gave her one.

If 1) You don’t understand what’s going on; or 2) You do understand what’s going and think I should be ashamed of myself, this blog entry will certainly not be for you. But if 3) You do understand what’s going on and smiled, sniggered, chuckled or perhaps even laughed, read on.

NB This entry and the four soundfiles below will be of especial use to all those learning English and/or who are not British but are keen to gain a deeper understanding of the British psyche. Here are four soundfiles which together make up a recent 30-minute edition of a Radio 4 programme called Word Of Mouth. (It is split into four parts because that was the only way I could post it here).

I listen to it regularly because I find the English language and the myriad facets of it fascinating. The most recent edition is called Rude Health and was presented by the actor Arthur Bostrom who played the Captain Crabtree in ’Allo ’Allo!, a British spy in occupied France during World War II who has a very poor command of French. In it he talks about our British predilection for double entendre. Give it a whirl.

NB The soundfiles will not play in Opera (Edit Feb, 26, 2022: they might do now), but do play in other browsers, most certainly Firefox and Safari. I would, of course, like to add that there is a serious purpose to this post, but there isn’t. Sorry.

Happy sniggering.


First part


Second part


Third part


Fourth part

Donald McGill is mentioned in the programme, and here a couple of examples of his postcards. At the bottom is one produced by the Bamforth & Co Ltd of Leeds. They are in a similar vein, but often the entendre is not very double, though I find them just as funny.

My lad and his pride and joy

A few months ago, I recorded that my son had asked for a dog for his birthday, and that I had put my foot down and firmly told him ‘no way’.

I was wise enough to realise that my role in life is to pay the household bills but otherwise stay as quiet as possible and that the only local decision I am allowed to make is when and where to take a dump. And I predicted in the piece that when I returned home from London the following Wednesday from my weekly four-day stint playing my part in keeping the world free by battling for the Truth To Out as a member of Her Majesty’s Press (Puzzles and Tea rounds), there to greet me would most certainly be the puppy I had insisted would never, but never be a pat of our household. And so there was.

Russell, as my son has called him, is a Jack Russell - Russell, geddit - and is a lovely little thing. I soon realised, of course, that my wife also wanted a dog in the house (I’m obviously not enough for her on that score) so the deal was done long, long ago. I must admit I like dogs and I like cats.

My objection to us acquiring a dog is that they are not like some ten-a-penny object which can be bought, broken and tossed out on the same day, but a living thing which deserves as much care as, well, a young child. I kept insisting that a cat should be the answer if we were to have a pet. Cats are simple: after the initial house training, you feed them, and that is about all the care they need. They don’t need to be walked, look after their ‘exercise’ themselves, don’t slavishly run up to you for a bout of affection every 30 seconds and generally are the kind of pet this pragmatist prefers. But it was not to be.

So below is my son and young Russell.

He is still in the early stages of being house-trained and I for one still don’t recognise the signs he gives out when he needs a pee, but generally he has settled in well. He is not the sharpest blade in the box - what dog is except those trotted out on daytime TV who can perform some stupid trick with a box of tissues and a jug of water? - but he has real character and I have taken to him.

It’s all happening now: Vladimir Putin confesses he’s a Kate Bush fan, some of his soldiers lose their way, Boris and Nigel are still irrelevant, despite what they might like to think, and Rotherham police and social service demonstrate that at the end of the day they don’t give a flying fuck about much, really, least of all 1,400 children who complained of being raped

Well, where does a lad start? In no particular order: Boris Johnson (aka Korky the Kat) and Nigel Farage both announce they will be standing for Parliament at our general election next May; Britain wrestles with the question of whether or not to pal up with Mr Assad of Syria to launch a joint effort to see off the thugs who dare to call themselves Muslims aka Islamic State (or whatever they like to call themselves today); assorted seasoned Russian troops apparently get lost on the Russian/Ukrainian border and find themselves in Ukraine - didn’t they have a map? Obviously not, but at least they will have had a bottle or five of vodka; a report is released detailing the rape and torture of an appalling 1,400 young and older children in just one town - Rotherham - over ten years but they claims weren’t taken seriously, possibly because the sadists who did it were largely Asian and we don’t want to be accused of racism now, do we

To cap it all Kate Bush - look up her name in the AA guide to has-been pop stars if you can’t immediately identify her - as started a month of concerts for the first time in just over 67 years. Let’s start with Kate Bush: with the exception of just one of her many songs - Babuska - I have never liked her music, find her voice thoroughly irritating and so am obviously totally out of the loop with my fellow geriatrics. She strikes me as the Lib Dems of pop music, what with vegan recipes and vegan songs.

I’m liberal enough - with a small ‘l’ I hope you realise - to acknowledge that many do like Kate and her music, but then a great many people also think the British cuisine leads the world (purely on the basis that several well-known French chefs have made Britain their home and you can now get a half-decent meal in London if you have the money). So that, I hope, puts Kate in perspective.

A similar irrational attitude comes into play when folk talk about Boris Johnson, all tousled blond hair, Latin phrases and what is regarded as a disarming charm. He has made no bones about the fact that ‘he wants to be Prime Minister’, but the Lord help us if he ever gets a sniff of the top job. It would be pertinent to ask: what does Boris stand for (and he is one of the few politicians who get instant recognition even if you only refer to him by his christian name)?

Well, I don’t know, except the greater glory of Boris Johnson. In my book he is firmly in the Total Nine-Bob Note drawer, but there is a sufficient number of folk who seem to believe his British version of ‘aw shucks, I’m just an ordinary guy’ and the mop of tousled hair plus those incomprehensible Latin quotes he comes out with are enough reason to think he might run the country less badly than recent Labour and Conservative politicians.

As for Nigel Farage, well I’ll grant that he is popular, not least with many folk who think of themselves as Labour, and seems to articulate the feelings of many as regards the EU and what is always awfully vaguely referred to as ‘immigrants’. But despite the claims that the party he leads, UKIP - the United Kingdom Independence Party - is a ‘growing force’ in British politics, he is, as far as I can tell and going on the performance of his fellow Ukippers, about the one sane man among an otherwise worryingly wacky gang of folk who don’t have a policy to pursue between them. You might gather that he won’t be getting my vote.

As for the Russian chaps who accidentally crossed the border into Ukraine, well, just how careless can you get, especially in view of all that’s going on in eastern Ukraine? I am tempted to observe that Ukraine is a country of which we know little and of which we would like to know even less, but the situation there is dire, especially as the West’s attention is now firmly elsewhere, worrying about how many more thousands Islamic State will behead, bury alive or execute in more humane ways before the UN finally gets its act together and passes a very, very, very strong resolution telling ISIS, IS or whatever it is today: ‘Look, you can’t do this sort of thing, it really isn’t done, and if you carry on, we’ll be forced to pass another very, very, very strong resolution. So watch it!’ Under the circumstances that might sound like an unbearably facetious thing to write, but it isn’t far from the truth.

The big question being asked now - and dividing the West as only the West knows how to be divided - is to we co-operate with Syria’s president Assad to try to put an end to Islamic State. From where I sit, the answer is a very reluctant, yes, of course, but not much is going to happen soon and in the meantime those pseudo-islamic thugs will get stronger and stronger, and murder more and more folk. Maybe Kate Bush should write a song about it all.

Maybe Boris knows how to sort it all out. Maybe Nigel Farage will declare that we most certainly won’t grant any of them visas when UKIP is in charge. But while the West dithers before dithering a lot more, one Vladimir Putin will quietly be beavering away thinking up more mischief.

. . .

On the question of Russia, Putin and Ukraine, what puzzles me most of all is just what exactly does Putin want? The real problem, of course, is that we judge other cultures by the standards and values of our own. That was the fatal flaw in the policy which was said to underpin the invasion of Iraq. The West - well the US and Britain - seemed to believe, arrogantly, that once we had got rid of Saddam Hussein and had shipped in several thousand ballot boxes, the grateful Iraqis would embrace democracy like a man dying of thirst will gulp down several pints of water. They did in a sense, but in another sense they were no nearer democracy. It might be more honest to say, democracy, shmerocracy, what people really want is not to be treated like shit. And being treated like shit happens all the time in even the most pristine-looking democracies. As for the Middle East, we seemed to have no conception of the Arab mind and our ignorance allied to our arrogance is doing no one any favours at all.

Well, the invasion of Iraw is water under the bridge, not to say several hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and buried because of the unbearable vanity of George Dubya and his simpering acolyte Tony Blair, but we might try to learn the lesson and try a lot harder to understand the Russian psyche. So what is it that Putin wants? What would he regard as his prize? Is it really to get back Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Russian fold? Surely he must realise that that is never going to happen and surely he must realised the risk there is of war if he pursues that objective.

It is now futile to cast blame, but if I were to do so, I would firmly blame the West - the US and the EU - in meddling in Ukrainian domestic politics, which is what seems to have sparked the whole shooting match. I’ve asked what Putin is actually after, but equally one might wonder exactly what the West and the EU hoped to achieve by their meddling. I can’t seem to discern any grand strategy, especially if, as it has seemed for these past 20 years trade and the necessary co-operation to ensure good trade was the name of the game.

As usual, of course, I am just another blogger pointlessly adding his two ha’porth worth. But as I now have an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, I do get very angry that what strikes me as criminal incompetence is making the world far less safe, and for no good reason whatsoever.

. . .

As for the appalling sexual abuse of children in Rotherham, one horrific element is that way, in the phrase used by several reports - and you can read three here, here and here - social services and the police simply turned a blind eye to what was going on. They were fully informed, but as the majority of the perpetuators were Asian, they ‘did not want to appear racist’ and so ignored it.

As the report pointed out, the 1,400 children - 1,400! - are just those who had the courage to come forward. Just how many more were there who were too scared to come forward? And, for a moment, reflect on the hopeless bewilderment of those who might have considered coming forward but who realised it would be pointless because nothing was done about it. Then reflect upon just how many more there are in other towns up and down the country. And we still like to portray ourselves as a ‘caring’ country. Get to fuck!

Read the reports and make up your own mind.

I freeze my bollocks off and hope for warmer weather elsewhere in a few weeks, while Francois apparently hasn’t done the decent thing and it might not have been his decision anyway. As for that Vlad Putin: does he really have a plan?

Given the continuing interest of some folk in the love lives of Francois Hollande and his most recent squeeze actress Julie Gayet, and the claim that he was about to pop the question on his 60th birthday last week (August 12), these three pictures would seem to prove that if he did pop it, he didn’t pop it hard enough. For Francois has most recently been pictured on holiday – alone. And Ms Gayet has also recently been pictured on holiday – but not alone. The chap in question is said to be finance management lawyer Pierre Puybasset (so he won’t be short of a centimes or two, and if there’s one thing woman like, it’s a chap with deep pockets).

Here we have Francois getting stuck into his newspaper at (so I am informed, but it isn’t obvious from the picture0 a poolside. Well, where else would you expect to find him in mid-August?

Then there are these two snaps: in the first Julie (as we must now call her) emerges from a dip in the sea with Pierre (as we must now call him).

Here, in the second, they seem to be saying goodbye, and for what it’s worth that kiss seems more a goodbye kiss between two friends than two lovers.

The obvious question is, of course, why did Francois go on holiday alone? Is Julie getting just a little fed up with all the attention?
The real question, of course, is: what the hell does it matter (which would make my posting these pictures here just a tad irrelevant). The world seems well on its way to Hell in a handcart in Syria, Iraq, Gaza and the Ukraine, the weather here in Old Blighty is bloody awful, Miley Cyris is pretending to be grown-up again, Manchester United still haven’t won a Premier League game in this new season (they were held to a 1-1 draw by Sunderland, although the way they have been playing it might be more accurated to describe it as United holding Sunderland to a 1-1 draw. And whether or not van Gaal, the apparent deus ex machina who is proving to be nothing of the kind is capable of Ferige-style ‘hairdryer’ tirades in the dressing room which at least ensure United kept on winning is anyone’s guess).

So why are you and I wasting our time with speculating about the love life of a fat Frenchman who by 2017 will be less than a footnote in history? Because we’re stupid, that’s why.

. . .

In own life (as you ask) the next great event is a week in the depths of Valencia county or whatever it is called with my 80-year-old potter friend, Seth Cardew. I must admit I am looking forward to those seven days because it really is a question of doing fuck-all for 24 hours every day, and there are a few books I am looking forward to reading. I don’t know whether of not he will have any students for the week I am there, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m hoping that the temperature will be at least 10c warmer than it is here, which, for mid-August, is an appalling 11c. I’m told be those who take a far keener interest in these matters than I do that we even had a ground frost in Cornwall a few nights ago. Well!

(NB Just looked at the weather forecast for the week I am there, and apart from a thunderstorm – for surely t-storm means thunderstorm – on the day I arrive, it looks like sun, sun, sun all the way with temperatures around 30c. Thank the Lord!)

And there isn’t even a government department we can complain to and claim compensation from! Talk of bloody democracy! I blame the EU! Lord, knows what it’s up to! No wonder we are getting freezing temperatures in August! Makes you bloody sick! Well, what do you expect! Look at the pig’s ear they made of Ukraine! All we want to do is station a few hundreds tanks on its eastern border and have some of our fighter jets parked discreetly in some of its military airports, but look at the fuck-up they have made of that! Makes you bloody sick.

. . .

One of the better and more persuasive observations I have heard about the whole Ukraine fuck-up (and it still is being conveniently overlooked that this new chap Peroshenko is about as legitimate as nine-bob note given how his predecessor was ousted in a coup) is that Vlad the Lad Putin has rather miscalculated: no one denies that his popularity rating is soaring in Russia, but he seems to have painted himself into a corner: the crowd want ever more of this Mother Russia triumphalist shite and so to keep them happy he is obliged to supply it.

Yet the only way out of this must be negotiations, a route he might suspect he can’t take for fear of looking weak. That, at least, is the view of two former British ambassadors to Moscow, pronounced independently. And one of them opined that Putin is at heart rather a cautious man and is not the master strategist many would think him to be (perhaps even Vladimir himself) after the easy, easy way he annexed Crimea.

Snaps, snaps, pictures, and snaps / just for a laugh, just for the craic

When I was younger and still idealistic, I developed an interest in photography. It began with trying to take pictures with whatever crap camera was around, and in those days they were crap, with folk even making do with 110mm format film, which for quality was even worse than the old box Brownie. But because the pictures most folk took in those heady days of holidays on the Spanish costas - horribly posed group shots of folk gurning as though their life depended on it just to prove what a good time they were having, or pictures of beautiful sunsets which turned into underexposed photos of nothing - were crap anyway, it really didn’t matter if the resolution was appalling.

My pictures were the same, but I was disappointed again and again and wanted to create the pictures I had intended, which I never did, and bit by bit got deeper into photography, inch by sorry inch. I was, however, a slow learner, though I did eventually teach myself developing and printing, which meant I wasn’t spending an arm and a leg getting some lab to develop my films and I could now reproduce the pictures on 10 x 8 paper.

I finally decided I wanted to ‘become a photographer’ in the dangerous time in every man’s life when they decide to throw over the traces and do what they think they were put on this earth to do. It happens when they have turned 30; I have no idea what similar existential crisis women face. Perhaps it is that they finally decide they want to have babies (if, of course, they don’t already have them.) Some think it is to ‘write my novel', others fuck off and open an antiques shop somewhere, others still decide to re-invent the wheel. So I threw over my job as a sub-editor and enrolled on a photography course at West Bromwich College. (As for ‘writing my novel’, I must pass on Peter Cook’s story. At a party of some kind he met some guy and asked him what he was doing. ‘I'm writing my novel,’ the man told him. ‘No, neither am I,’ said Peter Cook, who was nothing if not honest. Well, at least I’ve done it. It might be complete shite, but at least I’ve done it.)

I lasted just two terms because ran out of money, but my interest continued. I had, anyway, learnt quite a lot in the two terms of a two-year course I managed, particularly on the theory side of photography, most of which, of course, I have since forgotten. I also found a job working in an advertising photographic studio for three months, and although I picked up a bit more there (and dropped one particular howler twice when I and another assistant were allowed to use the studio after hours to do the girlfriend of a friend a favour).

After being unemployed for 11 months, I found another job, again as a sub, but I carried on with photography. This was all in the days before Photoshop and digital cameras (which don’t seem that long ago to me, but are probably ancient history to you), and I used to buy B&W film by the 30m can and load my own 35mm canisters. I also used to develop my own film and, naturally, print my own pictures.

I didn’t stick to B&W because I preferred it - and still prefer B&W pictures - but it was also a damn sight cheaper. I did do a little bit of colour printing at college and your more or less have to work in the dark, although your eyes do get used to the almost complete absence of light sooner than you might believe. I can’t say I am much good, but I do know enough to spot when a photographer does know what he is doing. There again the definition of ‘good’ is so flexible that as near as dammit a conversation about what is a ‘good’ picture and what isn’t is neigh-on pointless.

Yesterday my cousin showed me some of his pictures he has posted on a blog, and I thought that as I still have several knocking around, I would do the same. So here are some, although one picture in particular has mysteriously gone missing. I shan’t give much detail or any explanation. I am hugely sceptical of those photographic exhibitions of so-so pictures which are really nothing special, but which are acommpanied by an A4 sheet of explication, explanation and I don’t know what else justifying what is otherwise a pretty ordinary picture, usually about poverty in the Gambia, Aids in Rwanda, deprivation among the Australian aboriginals (can’t for the moment think of the PC phrase, sorry), inebriation among the Inuit (know that one, won’t catch me writing Eskimo) etc.

Of the following, all were taken between 1982 and 1990. How’s that for keeping up to date?

Here are some:

In a pub in Balsall Heath, Birmingham

 

My guitar, since stolen, in my house in the Maypole, Kings Heath, Birmingham

 

My neighbour in Kings Heath with her newborn. I like this picture because it is not just a picture of a mother and her child - one and a bit - but with the baby staring straight into the lens, it is a picture of two people

 

Somewhere in France, Bordeaux area I think. I used to take a look of natural light phtotography using fast film but balancing the different elements when printing up was a real bugger

 

Somewhere in Birmingham, at night (Never!)

 

My niece (now recently married and 31) feeding the ducks in a park in Cologne. She is the one who doesn't look like a fairy-tale witch

 

Very proud, very fat motorcycle cop in New York, June 1989. I think obesity was in in that year, at least a great many of the Yanks I saw were following that trend

 

North coast of Germany

 

North coast of Germany (I think)

 

St David's Hall, Cardiff. I snapped three rolls of film - 105 exposures - and got only three even halfway decent shots. I now have a great deal of respect for the sports photographers of the early part of the 20th century who used plate cameras and had about eight plates with them

 

My cousin from Hamburg, taken when I went to stay with her

 

New York, June 1989

 

North coast of Germany

 

Although all these pictures are monochrome, they all seem to have a slight brown tinge. That, I think, is because they have been tucked away in folders for these past 20 or 25 years. Just for the craic, here are two pictures taken more recently.

BMW in London (a city in the United Kingdom)

A  door in France with a can of Heiniken

 

Mind, does this look better. I must admit I prefer it, but as I am one of a dying breed who grew up in black and white, that’s not too surprising.

Same door without the colour. It's what we call 'desaturated on those rare occasions when there is someone around we would like to impress with big - well, bigger - words

. . .

 It’s not just the Daily Mail which has the obsession with ‘being middle-class’. It is shared by the Daily Telegraph. Take a look at this in the ‘middle-class’ Telegraph (motto: No Barrel To Deep To Be Scraped). Mind, given the most recent circulation figures, one does wonder exactly who the Telegraph is aiming this story at: according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, the Telegraph is now down to a pitiful circulation of just 514,592 copies in June 2014. This is down from 950,105 in 12 years, but to put it into even better context, not so many years earlier it was selling almost 1.5 million. That’s some plummet by anyone’s standards.