celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:

all right, smart alec

You might recall that when I reviewed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here a while ago I mentioned that I'd seen the highly-regarded 2011 film (starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley) in the cinema when it came out, and furthermore that I'd never seen the 1979 TV series, which famously starred Alec Guinness as Smiley. 

Well I'm just checking in here to tell you not only that the full seven-part series is now available on BBC iPlayer, but that I have spent a few days, as I believe the kids say, binge-watching it. I mean, a proper binge-watch would have done the full thing in a single five-hour sitting breaking only to occasionally go for a wee and buy more Pringles, whereas I managed about an episode a day for a week.

Anyway, you'll be wanting a verdict, I imagine. It's worth making the point first that order is important here, and mine is: 2011 film, book, 1979 TV series. Obviously the TV series, occupying over twice the screen time of the film, has a bit more space to stretch out and luxuriate in the detail, and even include some stuff from the book that the film didn't have time for. As far as the actors go I'd say Mark Strong is a better fit for Jim Prideaux, Ian Bannen being a bit too old and not physically imposing enough, and Colin Firth's Bill Haydon has a slightly more brittle and less reptilian charm than Ian Richardson's. Yes, yes, but what about Smiley? Well, Alec Guinness is slightly more twinkly and charming than Gary Oldman, and you get more of a sense of his penetrating intelligence. Oldman's Smiley is grey and cold almost to the point of anonymity, which of course is what makes him such a dangerous adversary. That said, and with the caveat that Smiley's age in the various books he appears in is a bit elastic, Guinness was probably a bit older than the book's version of Smiley. Of course both versions can exist without either detracting from the other, or there having to be a definitive verdict about which one is better. On the other hand, this is the internet, so people will of course get all aerated about it. 

The other Alec Guinness series, 1982's Smiley's People, is also available on iPlayer. They missed out the second book in the loose trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, apparently for cost reasons, presumably because it features some exotic overseas locations that they couldn't afford to film in. I have some tentative aspirations to read all three books so I may defer watching that series until I've done so. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and our current deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and, hem hem, adult entertainment performer Lauren Phillips (that link is safe, search for anything else and you're on your own). I mean, obviously it's mainly the hair. Anyway, one of them has regular encounters with Black Rod, and the other is a British politician; I expect you can make up your own jokes.

Leaving aside the knob jokes for a moment, I suspect Ashton-under-Lyne is one of the most commonly mis-spelt British place names, in that many people will assume it mirrors the form of the slightly better-known Newcastle-under-Lyme and therefore put an "m" in it. Ironically both suffixes seem to derive from words meaning "elm", in this case presumably elms on a hill, since the "under" conjunction usually (as you might expect) denotes that the thing after it is either the name of a nearby hill or a prominent thing on a nearby hill. 

There are quite a few place names of this type in Britain, some hyphenated, some not, including the splendidly named Weston-under-Lizard, which, like Newcastle-under-Lyme, is in Staffordshire, and not, as you might imagine, Cornwall. 

Anyway, other easily mis-rendered place names include Mevagissey (which is in Cornwall this time) which I genuinely spent a good chunk of my life assuming was called Megavissey, which not only rolls off the tongue more easily but also allows me to adapt the joke I made here and here and suggest that you get there by going through Millivissey and Kilovissey; if you get as far as Gigavissey you've gone too far. There is also the strange case of the Scottish town of Dumbarton (with an "m") being in the county of Dunbartonshire (with an "n") which can only be a cruel joke designed to catch people out. 

the last book I read

Candide by Voltaire. 

So there's this chap, erm ... *checks notes* ... Candide. A minor relative of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, living happily as a minor member of the household at their castle in Westphalia until he contrives to piss on his Spätzle by getting a little too friendly with the Baron's winsome daughter Cunégonde. Before she can get fully acquainted with his Bratwurst the Baron rumbles them and banishes Candide from the castle. 

Candide immediately falls into the first of a series of adventures when he is press-ganged into army service, flogged and forced to fight. Escaping amid the carnage of battle, he makes his way to Holland where he encounters his old philosophical mentor Pangloss who tells him of the terrible fate that has befallen Thunder-ten-Tronckh (destroyed) and Cunégonde (raped and murdered) at the hands of the same people Candide has just been fighting for. 

Pangloss and Candide then head for Lisbon, where they are immediately shipwrecked and caught up in the aftermath of an earthquake, but manage to meet up with Cunégonde and her elderly lady-in-waiting, who are, it turns out, not dead after all. Pangloss, a little too free with the old philosophical discourse, is hanged for heresy and Candide and the ladies decide that a sharp exit is called for and board a ship for Buenos Aires. Unfortunately when they get there the local governor takes a fancy to Cunégonde and Candide is forced to flee when he is pursued by the local rozzers in relation to a couple of wholly regrettable but necessary killings he did back in Lisbon. 

Candide and his new sidekick Cacambo head off via Paraguay to El Dorado, a paradise of peace and tranquility where the streets are paved with precious stones, but rather than kicking back for a bit Candide decides that he is missing Cunégonde and they head off northwards towards Surinam with nothing more than a colossal stash of priceless diamonds to sustain them and pay for their passage back to Europe. 

After further adventures in England, Paris and Venice, during which he is reunited with Cacambo, and, more surprisingly, Pangloss (also not dead after all), Candide makes his way to Constantinople where Cacambo has located Cunégonde, sadly no longer the fresh-faced girl she once was but worn down by being raped and almost-murdered at the castle and then rented out to a series of men in Lisbon and Buenos Aires before being enslaved by a Transylvanian prince. Candide purchases everyone's freedom with the last of his diamonds, marries Cunégonde and they all set up home on a farm outside Constantinople and devote themselves to the simple life. 

There's a lot going on here, especially in a novel amounting to only about 95 pages (the various notes and appendices in my Penguin Classics edition mean the whole thing is about 190 pages), and just as with Gulliver's Travels (a novel Candide resembles quite closely) there's a sense that a lot of barbed satirical points are being made about specific people and that a full appreciation of them is probably lost on the modern reader 250+ years later. Probably the main thing being satirised here is the notion, espoused by Gottfried Leibniz in real life and by Pangloss in the novel, that the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds. The extraordinary abuse and indignity Voltaire visits upon his characters is an attempt to refute this idea - where this involves the repeated rape of the principal female character it's quite reminiscent of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Pilgermann.

Candide is the second book in this series to be the work of an author who went by just a single name - the first such author to feature here was Trevanian, only a few months ago. Needless to say Voltaire wasn't his real name; that was François-Marie Arouet, and while Candide is his most famous work he was a prolific writer and campaigner for civil liberties, freedom of religion and speech, and lots of other good and commendable stuff. 

Anyway, this is all highly enjoyable and very short, though if you keep a finger in the footnotes section at the end and consult it as you go you will find this slows you down a bit even as it keeps you in the know.