the last book I read

A Question Of Upbringing by Anthony Powell.

Ah, schooldays. It doesn't take much for one's mind to be cast back there: the endless Latin verbs, trying to find one's best tails for evening prep, fagging for Blenkinsop major and getting a good thrashing if his crumpets weren't toasted to perfection, trying to grind various future Prime Ministers into a wall in the name of recreation, all the usual stuff.

Hmmm, well actually perhaps not everyone's schooldays were exactly like this, but those of our narrator here (who we eventually discover is called Nick Jenkins) definitely were. Cast back by a wafer-thin framing device (a page and a half or so at the start of chapter one) into a reverie of his schooldays, at an unnamed school which we're clearly meant to infer is Eton, he recalls friendships with his old chums and room-mates Stringham and Templer, various hilarious scrapes involving their po-faced housemaster Le Bas - including the arguably less hilarious prank of making an anonymous phone call which resulted in Le Bas' arrest - and some out-of-school socialising during the holidays including meeting Stringham and Templer's respective families and navigating complex hierarchies of relative wealth and social class, as well as some more primal stuff involving the first stirrings of feelings, you know, Down There. Nick decides, for instance, that he is in love with Templer's sister Jean based on no more then a couple of mumbly teenage conversations.

Nick also encounters another schoolmate, Widmerpool, during a holiday in France. Previously something of a figure of fun and target for derision, Nick starts to see Widmerpool in a new light after he brokers a truce between two of the other residents of the house they are staying in, a Swede and a Norwegian who have been refusing to speak to each other after a disagreement over a game of tennis, a girl, or possibly both.

And so, schooldays over, it is time to put away childish things and proceed to university, seemingly without having to do anything as tiresomely proletarian as pass exams or undergo any form of entrance selection process. Again, the university is coyly unnamed but is clearly Oxford. Nick is re-acquainted with Stringham, and also encounters Sillery, one of the dons, who seems to have a limited interest in his students' academic progress but instead focuses on establishing political connections, easing his various protégés into influential positions in politics and business. These protégés include Stringham, who, with some behind-the scenes string-pulling (no pun intended) from Sillery, lands a plum (if somewhat ill-defined) job with a prominent industrialist. Templer, who has skipped going to university, pops in to visit with a couple of his London friends, and Nick's sense that his school friendships are gradually unravelling is reinforced when Templer drives a tightly-packed car (Templer, his mates, Nick, Stringham and a couple of random girls they've picked up) off the road and into a ditch, thankfully without seriously injuring anyone. 

Nick, recognising that a fresh start is required, heads off into London to meet his Uncle Giles, the slightly murky black sheep of the family. Will Uncle Giles be able to help him redirect his life?

Well, the answer to that specific question is a shrug and a "dunno", because the book ends at this point. That will be no surprise to anyone vaguely-acquainted with 20th-century literature and Powell's work in particular, as A Question Of Upbringing is the first book of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time. In other words if you want to find out what happens next, check out book two (which is called A Buyer's Market). I'm not conclusively ruling out ever doing this, but if you view A Question Of Upbringing as a stand-alone novel in its own right you'd have to say that not a lot of note actually happens. And fair enough, it's not that sort of novel, and if you want explosions, freaky sex and zombie Hitler that stuff is all available elsewhere. It's dryly witty, and there are some sly observations about wealth and class here, and just a sense that our narrator is slightly less rich and posh than some of his schoolmates, although these are just inferences since we never get to meet any of his family. For all that, there is also the sense that Nick is somewhat blind to his own privilege, drifting from Eton to Oxford, and probably subsequently into a nice job somewhere, nice and comfortably without having to sweat too much or wonder where his next meal is coming from. Whether he is deliberately written that way or whether these blind spots are just inadvertent reflections of Powell's own blind spots (he too went to Eton and Oxford) I couldn't say, at least without reading another eleven novels to find out. Beyond this it would be hard to say we actually know anything much about Nick at the end of the book, something noted by John Crace in his Digested Reads column. 

A bit like The Alexandria Quartet, the A Dance To The Music Of Time sequence, whose publication dates range from 1951 (this book) to 1975, has faded a bit in critical regard over the years, though it was still well-regarded enough in 1997 for a four-part (i.e. three whole novels crammed into each episode) TV adaptation to be made. While the general theme here of oblivious posh people going about their daily lives, borne safely aloft on a cushion of unexamined privilege, raises my lefty hackles a bit, it is very readable and pretty short at a whisker over 200 pages. I'd always thought of it as a sort of upper-class English condensed (or perhaps summarised) version of Proust, and maybe it is, although I am ill-qualified to comment, since although I own a copy of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (in an English translation, obviously) I have never read any of it. Maybe this year? Well, maybe. Having now, after just over 19 years of this blog, cracked part one of A Dance To The Music Of Time, will I now plough on and finish all twelve? Check back in 228 years to find out!

spacelebrity doggylikey of the day

Just a quick one today - I have no idea what sequence of clicks sent me down the YouTube rabbit-hole that led to some detailed second-by-second analysis of the Columbia space shuttle re-entry and break-up, but I assume these are things that have been pushed a bit more than usual by the algorithm given the imminence (February 1st) of the 23rd anniversary of the disaster, and indeed the even nearer imminence of the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster (January 28th). Anyway, it struck me, and hear me out here, that the nose of the shuttle, from certain angles, is slightly reminiscent of Brian Griffin from Family Guy. 

the last book I read

Staying On by Paul Scott.

It's the early 1970s, pretty nearly a full quarter of a century after Indian independence and the end of colonial rule. Lots of British people involved in the old system of colonial rule have packed up and gone home, there being no need for them to stick around among a population less inclined to consent to being subjugated and abused. I mean, where's the fun in that? Honestly, if you can't even find a decent punkah wallah to keep you cool while you're sipping a pink gin then you may as well be in Swindon.

Some have stayed, though, and will have a variety of reasons for doing so - maybe they have business interests in India, maybe they've married into Indian society, maybe they just like it there. For some it's more about having been in India for so long that they wouldn't feel comfortable in British society any more, and maybe because the cost of living over there is higher, plus the cost of getting there in the first place, plus perhaps a bit of laziness about uprooting oneself from a reasonably comfortable life and sailing off into the unknown. 

This latter category of people definitely includes Tusker and Lucy Smalley, eking out a just-about-comfortable existence, mainly facilitated by Tusker's military pension, living in the lodge attached to a fairly dilapidated old hotel in the small-ish town of Pankot. The hotel is run by the comically rapacious (money, food, sex, you name it) Mrs. Bhoolabhoy and her somewhat downtrodden husband; Mr. Bhoolabhoy maintains cordial relations with the Smalleys and occasionally enjoys a few drinks with Tusker, but Mrs. Bhoolabhoy regards them generally as an inconvenience and a potential problem should she wish to sell the hotel, something she has considered doing as profits have diminished since the building of a newer, swankier hotel just down the road.

Obviously during the Raj the social structure was nice and clear: the British are in charge and the natives do their bidding or expect a damn good thrashing. But 25 years later it's considerably less clear - some residual deference remains, and some residual expectation of deference remains in people like the Smalleys, both in their early seventies and fairly set in their ways. But for younger Indians in particular there's less of a sense that they should do as they're told by a bunch of elderly foreigners: after all, why should they?

The Smalleys' financial position is in a state of constant precariousness, not helped by Tusker's past unwise business dealings, some gambling problems and ongoing fondness for a drink or two. As befits people born in the early years of the twentieth century it's been Tusker who has held the financial reins with Lucy - objectively the more sensible and responsible of the pair - having precious little to do with it, and in a position of knowing very little about the details, including what her position would be if Tusker were to die, something that's been on her mind since he had a mild heart attack a while back. 

The Smalleys (mainly Lucy) maintain some correspondence with Britain, mainly people they knew from India who've now returned, or in some cases their children, and via this route Lucy learns that a vague acquaintance of an acquaintance, Mr. Turner, is visiting India and wants to pop in to say hello. This prompts a frenzy of excitement about what stuff they can get him to bring from home - with some it'd be Marmite, for Lucy it's a particular brand of blue rinse hair dye - and how they're going to make him welcome when he arrives, resources for lavish banqueting and the like being a bit thin. 

Meanwhile Mrs. Bhoolabhoy has seen the writing on the wall regarding the future of the hotel and has decided to sell up. This means that someone is going to have to write a letter to the Smalleys telling them that their tenure of their little lodge at preferential rates is at an end, and they'll have to find somewhere else to live, and that someone is Mr. Bhoolabhoy. And it turns out that it is the receipt and reading of this letter which is the thing that finally finishes Tusker off, his body being found later that day after suffering a massive heart attack, his hand still clutching the letter.

Paul Scott is of course most famous for the Raj Quartet, which is in turn best known for its 1984 TV adaptation, The Jewel In The Crown. Staying On is a sort of footnote to this series of much chunkier books, and the Smalleys feature as minor characters in the later novels in that series. I didn't know this when I bought my second-hand copy a few years ago and I can tell you that you have no particular need to plough through the quartet to appreciate this, unless you want to, of course, in which case have at it. Staying On, despite being written later, was actually adapted for TV first, in 1980, and the whole thing appears to be available on YouTube. It stars Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, more famous from Brief Encounter, as the Smalleys.

None of the great sweep of history that I imagine (possibly wrongly) features in the Raj Quartet here, just two fairly unexceptional people eking out the last few years of their lives (the last few days, in Tusker's case). No suggestion that Tusker was a particularly good soldier, despite eventually rising to the rank of colonel, nor a particularly effective businessman, nor even a particularly attentive husband, though he clearly does love Lucy in his own gruff and inarticulate way. There's an odd mix of comedy and pathos here with the two sometimes clashing with each other a bit, but you do feel a pang of sympathy for the Smalleys, desperately hanging on to the only life they've ever known while the country reinvents itself under their feet. I do agree with this Guardian review that Mrs. Bhoolabhoy is something of a grotesque caricature, but overall I enjoyed it; the 1977 Booker panel evidently felt the same way. Scott was unable to attend the presentation as he was already ill with the cancer that was to kill him a year later; he was also apparently a chronic alcoholic which probably didn't do much for his general health.

Previous Booker Prize winners on this list are: G. (1972), The Siege Of Krishnapur (1973), The Conservationist (1974), Midnight's Children (1981), Hotel Du Lac (1984), The Remains Of The Day (1989), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), The God Of Small Things (1997), The Sea (2005), The Gathering (2007), Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012). The Siege Of Krishnapur, Midnight's Children and The God Of Small Things also feature in the list of books set primarily in India, a list that I would have expected to also include a few others off this blog, but the only one I can think of is A New Dominion; novels that tangentially feature India would include The Marriage Plot and Around The World In Eighty Days. 

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.

we are family; here's a list arranged in a tree

One thing I did find myself occasionally doing while reading Dalva is referring to the Northridge family tree to remind myself which of the various John Wesley Northridges was married to whom. As it happens there isn't actually a family tree printed in Dalva, but as luck would have it there is one in The Road Home which I took a handy snap of with my mobile phone just for quick reference. Here it is:

Not actually a massive number of people in total, but some confusion possible nonetheless owing to the multiple marriages and occasional out-of-wedlock sexy sexy times going on. Anyway, this set me to thinking - very much like the occasional list of books featuring explanatory maps, most recently Tokyo Express, are there any other books that have family trees in them? My gut feeling here is there will be considerably fewer of these, as in most cases there isn't a need. It's really only sprawling family sagas with gigantic casts of inter-related characters that justify including one, and the only examples on this list I could find (The Road Home aside) were Hilary Mantel's two Thomas Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both of which contain similar family trees representing the Tudor royal family and the various pretenders to the English throne. 

Outside of books which have featured on this blog the only other one which sprang to mind was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude (recently serialised for TV), which contains the family tree below; a bit like The Road Home, part of the usefulness of this is to distinguish between multiple characters who have pretty much the same name. 

incidental music spot of the day

Hey, we haven't done one of these for a while (three-and-a-half years or so in fact), but I was struck by the loose yet funky tune that plays over the latest Haven Holidays advert, as it was highly recognisable to me as Can You Get To That by Funkadelic. My recollection is that I discovered Funkadelic off the back of some sort of Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time article in a music magazine that pointed me to Maggot Brain, which certainly fits the bill as it is essentially a ten-minute guitar solo courtesy of guitarist Eddie Hazel.

That in turn led me to the album of the same name, and thence a few of the other albums from their early/mid-1970s heyday, including my favourite one Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On which not only was a fixture in the CD player in the RV we hired for our honeymoon in Canada in 2011, but also provided, in Sexy Ways, the first dance song at our wedding in June 2011, a choice I absolutely stand by 14 years later, even as I largely disown the improvised dance moves I came up with to accompany it.

As an aside, if the Stone Roses hadn't heard the title track of Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On before they wrote the lengthy funky stop-start outro to I Am The Resurrection then I'll eat my hat. 

smallebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are my son Huw and 1970s yellow cartoon weirdo Bod. Small skinny-legged person, three-letter name, voluminous upper garment coming down below waist level, profile view that makes them appear to only have one leg.

A bit of context for both halves of the image: the thing Huwie is standing on is a groyne (no, stop it) on Southbourne beach where we were last weekend, and the thing Bod is looking at is, and I quote: "an enormous bowl of strawberries and cream". This is from the episode Bod's Dream which can be seen here. The thing people who grew up in the 1970s forget about Bod is that the animated bit was only the first 4-5 minutes of a 15-minute show, and the rest of it was filled with some stuff-spotting puzzles, random songs and the interminable adventures of Alberto Frog And His Amazing Animal Band, culminating in the impossibly thrilling climax wherein Alberto chose a flavour of milkshake for a reward (for solving some mystery or other) from a shortlist of about three. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

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. 

our father who art in heaven, I lost my mess in pew eleven

One other thing, also tangentially book-related: we went to a family gathering last week and it was held in the Community Centre in the village of Acton Trussell, which we've been to before as it's conveniently located near to several of Hazel's extended family. I see that I mentioned it briefly once before, as the book I was reviewing (William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows) was one that I'd acquired from their quite extensive shelves on a previous visit. I see that at the time there was an honesty box in place; this seems to have gone now, probably as a result of no-one carrying small-denomination coins around any more post-COVID. Instead there seems to be some sort of loose book-swap scheme in place where you're encouraged to swap in a book when you take one out. Sadly I didn't come armed with any spare books, so I am now in credit to the tune of a couple of slim paperbacks and need to redress the balance on my next visit. 

I was also musing over the name of the village in my head on the drive up as it seemed faintly reminiscent of something I remembered from somewhere else, and it finally came to me in the latter stages of the journey (somewhere on the M6 I'd guess) - the name of the fictitious village of Stackton Tressell inhabited by cross-dressing comedy duo Hinge & Bracket in their various radio and TV programmes (and the occasional sherry advert) in the 1970s and 1980s was (a bit of Googling revealed) based on the real-life village of Acton Trussell, which just happens to have been where Patrick Fyffe, who played Dame Hilda Bracket, was born. George Logan, who played Dr. Evadne Hinge, was born near Glasgow, since you ask. Dear Ladies, which ran on BBC2 from 1983 to 1985, is the particular Hinge & Bracket vehicle that I remember - I would describe it as gentle comedy evoking the occasional wry chuckle rather than any pant-wetting hilarity.

Also spotted on one of the notice boards in the main hall while I was there was this frankly mind-boggling bit of groovy-vicar desperate grasping at young-person relevance and engagement. I mean I genuinely think that if Jesus were with us today - and, in a very real sense, he is, of course - he'd be rolling about in a paddling pool full of custard, or whatever it is that Messy Church implies.

I mean, even if you can get past the Charlotte Church jokes, there's still a faintly sniggery element here, and it would be highly advisable for their promotional video segments to be a bit more careful about phrasing than they seem to have been about ten seconds in here; the phrase "people just coming in all their mess" would probably have best been avoided.

red is green and green is read, I've got this film stuck in my head

You might recall my doomed attempts to remember some identifying details about some long-ago and dimly-remembered TV advertising tag lines (details like what product they were actually advertising, for instance), and also this plea for assistance with some details of a half-remembered comedy sketch from the 1980s/1990s.

hi, #comedy Twitter. lots of old Smith & Jones sketches on #YouTube, of course, but the specific one I'm after has them sitting in a kitchen having a late-night drink; possibly a party. people keep getting up to leave and then coming back in concert-encore stylee. Irish accents.

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) May 17, 2019

I also put up a request for assistance in placing a film based on an equally vaguely-recalled single scene which had stuck in my mind for some reason, presumably after seeing it, or part of it, on TV a very long time ago:

OK tweeps: mystery film/TV memory time. Probably a movie, probably set during WW2, American guy captured by Japanese guys and taken to some sort of underground lair where they attempt to brainwash him. #films 1/3

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 28, 2019

Well, I came across the tweet above earlier by means of some search I can't remember the purpose of now, other than that locating this particular tweet wasn't it, and was inspired to have another go at solving the mystery. I'm not sure whether my Googling keyword selection skills have improved since last time, or if the page I found didn't exist when I did the original search, but whatever the reason I'm pleased to be able to say that I have located the film in question, and it's called Battle Beneath The Earth, a fairly absurd-looking science-fiction thriller from 1967. I mean, some of the details I'd recalled above were pretty clearly wrong - it wasn't set during World War II, the dastardly Oriental villains were Chinese, not Japanese, and I'd remembered the hypno-brainwashing mantra slightly wrong - instead of this:

the new sun rises in the east; the west is dead

it's this:

red is green and green is red, the east sun rise(s) and the west is dead

But, you know, pretty close - crucially, close enough that using "the west is dead" as a search string and excluding the word "witch" from the results to get rid of all the Wizard Of Oz stuff reveals the existence of this page which contains both the quote (slightly misquoted, to my hearing of the original anyway, but good enough) and the title of the film. 

Pleasingly, I was able to validate that this really was the film I remembered by looking for the specific scene on YouTube, which has the full movie, for anyone interested in camp 1960s vaguely-racist paranoia. The specific brainwashing scene I'd sort-of-remembered is here. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Red Bull Formula 1 head honcho Christian Horner, currently *cough* in the midst of some, erm, personal issues, and Scottish comedian and internet provocateur Limmy, whose current incarnation as a video game streamer on Twitch I find somewhat baffling but which clearly makes him happy and pays the bills, so it's all good. The longer-form TV stuff he used to do is pretty good, and the things like the compilation of short clips originally posted to Vine featuring his increasingly deranged plasterer is a thing of bleak Beckettian brilliance.

I hate you, leopard

I'm sure that you, like me, are a deeply tedious and unappealing person to be with at parties owing to your propensity for offering up "fascinating" trivia factoids at the drop of a hat: Birmingham has more canals than Venice, Gary Oldman is thirteen days younger than Gary Numan, et teeth-grindingly cetera. Those two do at least have the virtue of being true, though the Birmingham one is considerably less impressive than it sounds once you consider the relative sizes of the two cities. 

Another one that I've heard a few times is: did you know that Olive out of On The Buses was married in real life to Ape Being Attacked By Leopard from 2001: A Space Odyssey? This one is only really suitable for trotting out in the company of people old enough to remember On The Buses - a group, I should add, which actually excludes me as I don't think I've ever seen it. This is partly because I was only three when its original run ended in 1973 and partly because it was on ITV, which there was a largely-unspoken ban on in our house for reasons I've never quite been able to fathom in hindsight. Anyway, Olive was one of the main characters, requiring actress Anna Karen, in real life a slim occasional model, to don large amounts of padding, an unflattering wig and glasses. It's fair to say On The Buses doesn't see much repeat action these days as it's no doubt Highly Problematic in a whole variety of ways. 

Anyway, back to the claim - what is certain is that Anna Karen was married to a guy called Terry Duggan, from 1967 to his death in 2008. He was a comedian and actor who appeared with his wife in several things (On The Buses included). His Wikipedia page does make brief and slightly vague reference to him having also "learned acrobatics which led to film stuntman roles", but there is no mention of 2001 in his filmography. Go to IMDb, though, and you will see that he is credited with the role of "Ape Attacked By Leopard". So who is right?

Well, closer examination of the Wikipedia edit history reveals that there was an update - fairly recently, in late 2023 - that removed that role from his list. There is an explanatory note which says that the role was indeed played by a bloke called Terry Duggan, but a different one, and links to this article. Lots of interesting stuff there related to the shooting of the Dawn Of Man sequence at the start of 2001, ending with the famous match cut from the flying bone to the spaceship, and in particular this:

Terry Duggan was a acrobat and stuntman born in Coventry in 1935 (no relation with Terry Duggan the comedian). Duggan had already worked with the Chipperfield's, a famous british circus, and later joined a member of the family, Jimmy, who had started a film animal business and at that time of the shooting of 2001 was operating Southampton Zoo. 

There is also a footnote, as follows:

(dec.11: the article has been updated with the removal of the picture of Terry Duggan the comedian, who was not the Duggan involved with the Chipperlfield's and 2001. As Mission Control would say, IMDB and Wikipedia are "in error" in saying that they were the same person. Source: Mr.Duggan' sister thanks to Jamie Clubb.)

There is a link to the blog of the Jamie Clubb mentioned in the footnote, and some relevant entries are here and here. This is the most relevant paragraph:

The bounce article referenced Terry Duggan, a wild animal trainer who worked with my two great uncles and my grandfather when they ran "Chipperfield's Circus". I am not directly related to the Duggans, but we share cousins and they have been connected to my family for a very long time now. Terry and my great-uncle, Jimmy Chipperfield, were involved with the prologue sequence of Kubrick's film, where a leopard attacks a member of a tribe of australopiths.

On the other hand, there is this page which purports to be written by a relative and which does make the 2001 claim in relation to Terry Duggan the comedian and husband of Anna Karen. So who do we believe?

My gut instinct is to believe that these were two different people; it seems implausible that someone whose day job was as an actor and comedian would be entrusted with the job of wrestling a leopard, still less be inclined to accept it. On the other hand, someone who worked pretty much full-time with circus animals would be an ideal fit for the job. 

So I think we tentatively conclude that this is a myth - that obviously shouldn't stop you from watching 2001, though you might want to secure 3-4 undisturbed hours and get lightly baked first. As for On The Buses, I couldn't say I'd recommend it, but you do you.

four candles

I tell you what, the life of a tedious atheist is not an easy one, especially at Christmas. I know I don't complain much about it on here these days, but only because the weight of the world has crushed my spirit and, you know, what's the point of anything any more, really? Nonetheless there is a fine line to be walked between going WELL ACTUALLY every time anything vaguely religious is mentioned and nodding along in acquiescence to all of it, just for a quiet life. 

A good example is Christmas carol singing, which I quite like, not because I am filled with religious fervour at celebrating the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, but because communal singing is quite a nice cultural tradition, especially when it's cold and dark outside. The difficulty here is that if you want to do it you will very probably have to put up with quite a bit of religious nonsense interwoven with the occasional carols, since in general even the Christmas Eve singing happens in the context of a religious service, albeit mercifully shorn of the really heavy-duty praying and sermonising.

We decided that it might be nice to take the kids along for a bit of a sing this year and so we decided to go to the afternoon carol service at a nearby church. This turned out to be St. Mark's, a short drive away, rather than St. John's just around the corner, purely owing to scheduling convenience. Both churches are affiliated with the Church in Wales, which is broadly the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England. St. John's does allude on its website to being "firmly in the Tractarian/Anglo-Catholic tradition"; fortunately I neither need nor desire to know what the fuck that means, nor how significant any of these minor doctrinal differences are.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, and they stuck mostly to the well-known favourites in terms of the carol selection, though disappointingly didn't finish will the usual cathartic bellow through O Come All Ye Faithful. There wasn't a huge congregation, probably 60-80 people at most, and so I did encounter the slight catch-22 situation you can find yourself in here, particularly if your voice is on the low side compared to the rest of the singers: you can't really work out if you're singing in tune without singing loudly enough to hear yourself, by which time it's a bit late. In a larger crowd making a bigger noise you can do it more discreetly, or at least conclude that it doesn't matter because everyone else will be carrying the tune along.

There were a couple of readings and a bit of slightly protracted audience participation in terms of populating the stable/manger diorama thingy they'd set up at the front of the church. Some odd differences in scale aside (tiny cow, mahoosive sheep, etc.) they stuck to the traditional animal line-up, rather than the wildly variable cast of characters you see at school nativity plays - fish, scuba divers, spacemen etc. 

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that after the main business of the service had concluded the congregation trooped over to the back of the church to participate in some bizarre voodoo ritual involving candles and oranges. Those of you who have been paying close attention to my Twitter feed over the years, or just generally know more about stuff than I do, will recognise this as a Christingle.

Nia went to a Christingle church service with her Rainbows group this morning. I have (at best) mixed feelings about the whole thing, as you can imagine, but mainly just bafflement about what #Christingle is. seems to be something to do with oranges. #voodoo #religion

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2019

"A Christingle" is the correct usage, by the way, as the term refers to the object itself, which is, as you can see, just an orange with a candle stuck in it and four cocktail sticks skewering some marshmallows and raisins. 

The question you might usefully ask yourself here is: why does this tradition, apparently cooked up out of thin air by some guy in Germany (not, as you might have assumed, a guy called Chris Dingle) a couple of hundred years ago, seem so bizarre and the metaphors (the orange represents the world, the skewered sweets the four seasons, or possibly the four "corners" of the earth, etc.) so contrived, while the other stuff more central to Christianity's core belief system (the whole Nativity thing with the wise men bringing gifts, the resurrection, the subsequent water/wine business) is given, if not exactly a free pass, some nodding respect even by non-adherents? Any claim that the latter is different because it's based on stuff that actually happened is dubious at best, so you have to conclude that it's mainly about age. Two hundred years is not enough for bizarre shit to fossilise into unquestioned tradition, so I guess the Christingle thing is still in what I like to call the Scientology Zone. 

Anyway, the kids had a nice enough time without coming away filled with religious conviction. Nia is old enough to find the religion thing quite interesting, from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and we did have a conversation on the way home wherein I explained my theory of religion's persistent cultural "stickiness"; basically that it's useful for a community to have shared "stories" to help identify each other, and it's actually more useful for these to be fictitious than for them to be true. More on this here, mainly in the paragraph featuring the Captain Cavemen image, if you want to skip past all the stuff about Noel Edmonds. 

Overall it was quite nice, my squirmy discomfort with some of the more nonsensical elements aside, like being expected to intone a solemn "Amen" at the end of some craven pleadings to a potentially vengeful deity. I was, as I always am, conscious while singing of the absurdity of some of the lyrics - I definitely got a sideways look from Nia at "offspring of a virgin's womb" during Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and another one at "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see" a few moments later, at which I was presented with a mental image of Jesus wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Finally, that BBC link contains the following paragraph, inadvertently revealing of the charming innocence of the showbiz reporter in the face of smutty innuendo:

Slashed to the thigh, and featuring a cowl neck, the dress came with matching beefy boots, hat and meat clutch. "I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," said Gaga as she picked up her award for the Bad Romance video – perhaps unaware that Cher doesn't eat meat.

the last book I read

Endless Night by Agatha Christie. 

Mike Rogers is a little bit WHOOOAAA, a little bit WHEEEYYY; he is, in short, a geezer. Well, perhaps that's a little bit harsh, but he is very keen to transcend his humble origins and has done a series of jobs enabling him to get a sniff of, and a hankering for, the lifestyles of the rich and famous. While working as a chauffeur he has made the acquaintance of one Rudolf Santonix, noted architect, and so when wandering aimlessly in the countryside one day and spotting a crumbling property in some extensive grounds he spends some time imagining in his mind's eye the property replaced with one of his own design, made real by Santonix and his associates.

After a few conversations with people in the village it transpires that the house and its grounds are for sale, and moreover that the property is known locally as Gipsy's Acre and is rumoured to be cursed. But Mike buying anything like this, even at a relatively knock-down price at a public auction, is just a crazy fantasy. Almost immediately he meets American girl Ellie Goodman, also mooning around the property's perimeter gazing wistfully at it, and they strike up a tentative romance. It transpires that she is actually Ellie Guteman, heiress to the Guteman millions and on her imminent 21st birthday set to become one of the richest women in the world.

Ellie returns home for her birthday and Mike attempts some sort of reconciliation with his mother, who seems oddly cold towards him. On Ellie's return, Mike tells her that the Gipsy's Acre property has been sold, and she's like no shit, Sherlock, I bought it for us to build a house on and live in and I've hired your mate Santonix to do the job. Now marry me, you crazy fool.

They marry in a quiet ceremony, and as Santonix and his team get on with building their dream home Mike has to come to terms with the small army of hangers-on associated with someone fabulously wealthy: relatives, ex-relatives, lawyers and Ellie's personal assistant and general companion Greta Andersen, whose loyalty to Ellie regarding the secretive nature of the marriage leads to her getting fired by the family and taken on on a personal basis by Ellie. This results in Greta coming to live with them, an arrangement that starts as temporary but ends up semi-permanent, much to Mike's chagrin.

Mike and Ellie integrate themselves into village life and meet some of the locals - Ellie is a keen horsewoman, which helps, despite having to take pills to overcome an allergy to horses. Mike is down at an auction with one of the locals, Major Phillpot, one day, expecting to be joined by Ellie at the pub for lunch, and when she doesn't turn up he and the major (after finishing their lunch first, obviously) head up to the house to look for her. No sign of her at the house, but when they search the grounds they find her on one of the riding trails, on the ground as if having fallen from a horse, no obvious external signs of injury but clearly dead. 

A full-scale investigation is mobilised, and suspicion falls on the mysterious red-caped figure seen near the riding trail by one of the locals during the time Ellie was out riding. Could it have been the old gipsy woman from earlier? Or someone else? Meanwhile the full machinery of the legal apparatus associated with administering the Guteman millions grinds into action and Mike, as sole beneficiary of Ellie's will, is subject to much attention and advice, not all of it well-intentioned. He consults with Ellie's American lawyer, Andrew Lippincott, who undertakes to ensure that Mike isn't swindled but seems cold and unfriendly and tells Mike that he has sent him a letter which he will receive when he returns home.

Mike has some time to reflect on all this as he returns home by sea, the ship having to navigate around some MASSIVE PLOT SPOILERS on the way. Mike reflects that this business has all been rather trying but at least he's returning home to be with the woman he loves. WAIT A MINUTE, you'll be thinking, didn't she die a couple of chapters back? Well, no, because the woman Mike is referring to here is (dramatic orchestral stab) none other than Greta Andersen, who is, it turns out, the real love of Mike's life and the co-hatcher of a fiendish plan to ensnare an heiress, bump her off and then have it away with all her lovely money. 

So, yes, Mike, who we'd thought was nothing more sinister than a bit of a directionless chancer made good by marriage to a sweet and obliging woman (who also happened to be, y'know, a millionairess), turns out to be the murderer, managing to be somewhere else when the murder occurred by poisoning Ellie's horse allergy pills, knowing she was intending to ride that day. It also transpires this isn't even the first time he's killed someone, having offed a childhood friend by pushing them under some ice (stealing his watch into the bargain, the swine) and then finished off an army colleague, seemingly just for psychopathic shits and giggles, after he'd been stabbed. 

Mike returns to Gipsy's Acre and Greta but imagines he sees Ellie as he approaches the house, and finds Greta less than receptive to the idea of staying on and making the place their home - she favours selling up and scarpering, which seems, on balance, a better idea. Mike's precarious mental stability is further undermined when he finds and opens the letter from Lippincott and discovers a newspaper cutting featuring a photograph of him and Greta in Hamburg dated well before he and Ellie ever met. So Lippincott knew!? Or knew something dodgy was afoot, anyway. Greta shouts at him to pull himself together but he responds by strangling her, at which point Major Phillpot and the police arrive and the jig is up.

I read what must have been about twenty Agatha Christie novels in what must have been my late teens and early twenties after we inherited a large stash of them from my grandmother. This one is one of the last novels she wrote, in 1967 (she died in 1976 at the age of 85) - the "classic" Christie period is the subject of some dispute but is generally regarded as running from the early 1920s when she started writing murder mysteries to perhaps the very early 1950s. It's also unusual in the Christie oeuvre for not featuring any of her recurring detectives, most notably Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and for having all the murdering and revelations happening very late in the book rather than right at the start - Ellie's death is revealed on page 139 of a 191-page book and Mike only explicitly outs himself as the villain on page 173. The device of having the book's narrator also be revealed as the murderer isn't completely new, even for Christie - it's more famously used in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, a Christie I have, as it happens, never read. 

Endless Night is generally regarded as the best of the late Christies and it is suggested it was one of her own personal favourites. And it is very good, really more of a twisted romance slash psychological thriller than a murder mystery in the orthodox sense. Nonetheless as with all mysteries there are some implausibilities - Mike seems to have no trouble getting hold of some cyanide when he needs it (and no-one seems fussed about toxicology tests and the like after Ellie turns up dead), it's unclear how he and Greta engineered his meeting with Ellie, the whole business with the newspaper cutting seems a bit unlikely, and Mike's mental disintegration on returning to Gipsy's Acre seems a bit sudden, given the cold-blooded bastardry of the plot he's just engineered - but as always this isn't really the point, and some of it can be handwaved away with a weeeeell, unreliable narrator, whaddaya gonna do? There is also just a suspicion in the middle section describing Mike and Ellie's life after getting married and settling into life in Gipsy's Acre of Christie tapping her watch and going: have I written enough pages to get to the murdering bit yet? Perhaps I'd better throw in another vaguely sinister and possibly curse-related occurrence to keep the tension up. 

Anyway, despite its unorthodoxy as a murder mystery Endless Night has been adapted for the screen a couple of times - the TV adaptation contrived to shoehorn Miss Marple into the mix somehow, while the 1972 film kept a bit more closely to the book's plot. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I can't remember how I came across this video featuring former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic (among others, including Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil - a much longer version can be found here) but it struck me that firstly I had no idea what he'd been up to for the last 30 years and secondly that actually one thing that he evidently had been doing was turning into Hank Kingsley from The Larry Sanders Show, as portrayed by Jeffrey Tambor.

the last book I read

Last Bus To Woodstock by Colin Dexter. 

Meet Morse. He's a maverick Detective Chief Inspector with a thirst for real ale, cryptic crosswords and opera, or to put it another way, a thirst for not playing by the book - but, dammit, he gets results. 

And a result is what's required here, because there's been a murder: a young woman's body has been found in a pub car park in Woodstock - no, not that one, the one near Oxford. Her name is Sylvia Kaye, and she appears to have been dispatched, rather messily, by having her head caved in with a large tyre-iron.

Inspector Morse and his newly-assigned sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, do all the obvious stuff like questioning all the pub's customers, but since none of them does anything as convenient as breaking down and confessing, a wider enquiry seems to be called for. This enquiry revolves around certain questions: how did Sylvia get from central Oxford to the pub at Woodstock? Could she have got a lift? If so, with whom? 

Crazed flashes of inspiration brought on by intensive real ale and crossword consumption can only get you so far, though, and there comes a time when you've got to put in the legwork and do some actual police work, although there's always the option of delegating some of the more tedious stuff to Lewis. Anyway, Sylvia worked at an insurance firm in Oxford so the detectives start there: could it have been a disgruntled colleague? Her, boss, Mr. Palmer? 

Nothing especially conclusive emerges here, apart from the suspicion that the icy and enigmatic Jennifer Coleby knows more than she's letting on, so the detectives' focus moves to how Sylvia got from the bus stop where she was spotted by a member of the public to the pub car park where she was killed, and to the identity of the other young woman who was with her at the bus stop. No-one saw her subsequently take a bus, so the suspicion is that she, and possibly her companion, hitched a lift with someone. But who? Are they the murderer? And what happened to the other woman, whoever she was?

Local university academic Bernard Crowther soon emerges as the driver of the car, but claims no knowledge of the circumstances of Sylvia's murder. In any case, there's a logjam of other suspects to choose from, including Jennifer Coleby, Mr. Palmer, local porn-addicted ne'er-do-well (and Sylvia's occasional boyfriend) John Sanders, and Jennifer Coleby's flatmate Sue Widdowson, a local nurse who Morse meets when he falls off a ladder and injures his foot and promptly decides he is in love with.

Things ramp up a notch when Morse receives letters from both Bernard Crowther and his wife Margaret, both claiming to have been the murderer, a situation further complicated by Margaret turning up dead shortly afterwards, having stuck her head in the gas oven, and Bernard turning up nearly-dead shortly after that, having discovered her body and suffered a massive heart attack. Morse is convinced, however, that neither of them actually did it, despite each having evidently been convinced that the other did. Morse is convinced that the identity of the other young woman at the bus stop holds the key to the mystery, and he is, eventually, and after a few wrong turnings, correct.

The Morse series of novels (Last Bus To Woodstock is the first, published in 1975) is probably most famous these days as the source material for the Inspector Morse TV series starring John Thaw as Morse. While many of the 2-hour episodes were directly adapted from the novels (Last Bus To Woodtsock being one of them, though the episodes are in a different order from the books), some are not - there were 33 episodes and there are only 13 novels.

Morse as portrayed here is pretty close to how John Thaw portrayed him in the TV series - intellectual, irascible, thwarted from higher promotion by his attitude and personal habits but perhaps uninterested in promotion anyway, a bit too keen on the ale and whisky but capable of flashes of insight denied to most, though this doesn't stop him from being wrong about the answer several times before eventually being right. He is also apparently irrepressibly horny, and very much inclined to ill-advised liaisons with female suspects who turn out (*cough* SPOILER ALERT) to be the murderer. 

I enjoyed this, as much for the re-acquaintance with a familiar character as for the resolution of the plot, which (like many detective novels) favours the aha-you-never-saw-that-coming revelation over sense-making and plausibility. This being the mid-70s, the revelation that Sylvia may have been raped as well as murdered (it eventually turns out to have been consensual) prompts some light-hearted BANTZ about it from various characters that might be seen as a bit, hem hem, problematic these days:

pando moany mum

Here's one for the COINCIDENCE? OR IS IT?* files: 

Adjourn to bed and pick up my current book (featuring trees prominently as a narrative theme, it must be said) and literally on the next page what do I see but this 2/2 pic.twitter.com/E0O3M34xEh

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 16, 2023

It can now be revealed that the book I was reading at the time was The Overstory - there is in fact further reference to these aspens later in the book that makes it clear that it is specifically the massive Pando colony that's being referred to. 

The quaking aspen colony is named because "pando" is Latin for "I spread"; it turns out it's also quite a widely-used brand name for a variety of companies doing a variety of things. Once again, though, my instinctive reaction is coloured by my recent experience as a father of three young-ish children and my immediate thought was of Bing's panda friend and his disinclination to wear the yellow shorts he always starts off an episode wearing. 

Huwie was quite into Bing a couple of years ago and I see I tweeted about it an embarrassingly large number of times. It does seem to be a thing that generates strong feelings among parents, as this Mumsnet thread demonstrates.

* as always: yes; yes it is.

unn believable

A couple of footnotes to the last post - I have no idea how likely Siss and Unn are as names for young girls in 1960s Norway (The Ice Palace was published in 1963) but as a father of still fairly young children I can still vividly recall our nightly appointments with In The Night Garden and its cast of weird squishy nonsense-spouting primary-coloured characters, including the Tombliboos. Those are the three stripy mofos with the spotty trousers (source of much oh-no-we've-all-got-each-other's-trousers-on confusion and hilarity) who live in, and I quote, "an extraordinary bush". Stop sniggering at the back there. Anyway, their names are Unn, Ooo and Eee, for reasons which I assume are obvious. It wouldn't really have been in keeping with The Ice Palace's rather sombre tone for Unn's two sisters to have suddenly shown up and started playing the drums and having comical trouser mishaps, but the thought did briefly cross my mind.

Another example of inappropriate hilarity at serious moments was provided last weekend when the girls decided that we should watch The Railway Children for our Saturday night movie. Anyone who's seen this will know that the last scene (it's actually not quite the last scene, but you know what I mean) is a legendary not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house moment (unlike some other Jenny Agutter movies which demand a ready supply of tissues for different reasons). To guard against succumbing to this I was idly imagining whose appearance out of the smoke (i.e. in place of Iain Cuthbertson) would be most amusing, and I came up with Mr. Blobby; cue me ruining the scene for everyone with some most inappropriate guffawing. Here is roughly how I imagined the scene; you'll have to supply the sound effects yourself.