Nostalgia for an Age That Never Existed

Many years ago I sat in our lounge watching Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Trilogy with my Dad (or rather, I watched bits of it in between doing other things). In my mid-teens I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but then I couldn’t make head nor tail of most Dr Who stories until watching the repeat just before the new season was broadcast, and I seem to recall Mum objected to it on the same grounds of incomprehensibility and absented herself from family TV viewing while it was on.

Out of nostalgia I’ve just watched the whole thing again and can see what she may have been getting at. It is not true that there is no plot; in fact the plots of all three constituent series are rather involved, it’s just that they are shockingly unsequential and meandering and, rather like life, incorporate a spreading panoply of events connected only because they happen to occur to the same set of people.

It is not just this that makes the Beiderbecke Trilogy a delightful work of genius, though daring to write, produce and broadcast something that revels quite so much in unhurried and unworried pointlessness bespeaks a boldness that can only be imagined nowadays. The first episode of all is wondrous, playing with angles and camera tracking with a relaxation, again, that nobody today would dare; but it’s not that, even though of course the production can’t keep it up for that long. The endless puncturing of authority is fun, but it’s not that. At the conclusion of the final series, Trevor and Jill drive off into the sunset in his lovely, rickety yellow van after he has scorned the idea of them walking off into it on the grounds that ‘the sunsets round here’ ‘are miles away’; but it’s not the evident wit, either. 

No: the magic of Beiderbecke is its defiant championing of the inconsequential and the idling. This is a world in which a school is a place where everybody (apart from the headmaster) pretends to work; a police station a place whose denizens similarly occupy their time avoiding work (and even Inspector Hobson, who wants to be terribly modern and efficient, actually achieves nothing at all for all his scientific methods apart from getting his corrupt boss sacked in the first series); and society itself is seen as a vast network of getting-by, keeping-yourself-occupied, and time-wasting in the name of mild enjoyment, like bowls or listening to jazz, all done in the absolutely secure knowledge that none of it really matters. The key comes in the final episode, when Chief Superintendent Blake reveals to Hobson the true extent of Trevor and Jill’s ‘refugee’ lodger Ivan’s villainy – his real crime is not to be a financial fraudster to the tune of £3M (‘in banking terms a pocketful of loose change’), but to be an anarchist who isn’t actually interested in the money but who regards the whole international financial system as a joke. Compare this with Trevor’s insistence that only Bix Beiderbecke really counts (and, at a pinch, Bird and Duke) and that the world is divided into ‘those who hear the music and those who don’t’. He’s teaching woodwork to pass the time between records, and quite right too.

When I first thought about this blog post, months ago, I was going to write about how the series’ depiction of run-down San Quentin High, the Leeds school where Trevor and Jill both teach, revealed a gentler and less demanding world which, in the mid-1980s, Mrs Thatcher had only just begun to bite into, with her risible ideology that everyone compete and work hard. Oh, how all those people who believe that life is a serious enterprise about work and efficiency really ought to be isolated from everyone else for society’s protection. But there is a rub. And that rub is that this fair, fallen world contains real problems that need to be solved, real criminals, real sicknesses and disasters. It’s not all bowls and jazz. So I abandoned thinking about the world of Beiderbecke in historical terms. Instead I came to see it mythologically: this is a depiction not of Leeds in the mid-1980s – even a Leeds filtered through Alan Plater’s imagination – but of heaven. A peculiar sort of heaven, grant you, in which there are tower blocks and ill-tempered dogs and quite a bit of rain and where even silly jobsworths get to pretend that what they do really counts for something, but in which no harm comes to anyone as a result. ‘It’s all a game’, says Jill at the end. And so, in a rightly ordered universe, it would be. 

Exclusive Brethren

'I've just done a lecture tour in Greece', S.D. told me yesterday. 'The group included some Southern Baptists, Pennsylvania Methodists, a set of Roman Catholic nuns from Australia, and some Canadian Anglicans. Then there was a group from the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney who brought their own bishop. We all met for Morning Prayer at the start of each day, but they had Fellowship on their own. I thought this was a shame so I suggested the Sydney bishop might like to preside at communion on Ascension Day. "What's Ascension Day?", he said. Well, it commemorates Our Lord ascending to heaven. It's very Bible-based ... "When is it?" he asked. It's Thursday. It's always a Thursday. "No thank you", he said, "We'll keep our own fellowship". So I suggested he might like to preside on Sunday for our closing worship. "No, we prefer to keep our own fellowship." That is, of course, because they are Right and the rest of us are all, in our various ways and fashions, Wrong.'

Outed

The church's office manager is helping her former employer clear and refurbish a house in the road that adjoins the Rectory, and our bookkeeper is helping her. On Monday I got into a conversation with said bookkeeper about the former and current Rectories and how awkward it is to manage the stretching garden.

"How big is your garden?"
"It goes up the hill quite a long way."
"You know, someone's put this hideous thing in their garden, you can see it from the house ..."
"What kind of hideous thing?"
"It has pillars and a sort of roof ..."
"Ah, that'll be the hideous thing in my garden."
"Oh no! Well, I say, 'hideous', I meant 'unexpected' "

Innovation

During Eastertide, the Paschal Candle, carried into the church in the darkness of Easter morning (at least at Swanvale Halt) to represent the light of the risen Christ, stands by the main altar for every Sunday mass. Then, after Ascension Day, it moves down to the font where it remains for the days leading up to Pentecost, being extinguished and put away after that apart from baptisms and funerals. 

It was at Lamford that we felt there was something of a missed opportunity in the Candle's unremarked passage from the front of the church to the back, and at the end of the Ascension Day mass one year I and Il Rettore solemnly carried it and its stand to the font where it would remain for the next few days. Then it occurred to me that that little motion needed something to cover it, and so decided to chant a few lines from Psalm 47:

God is gone up with a shout of triumph,
the Lord with the blast of the trumpet:
sing praises to the Lord, sing praises;
sing praises to our King, sing praises. 

At Lamford the choir sang Gerald Finzi's anthem God is Gone Up to splendid effect, and I admit to pinching the first few notes of my little chant from that rather more extensive piece. This doesn't happen at any other church, so far as I know, but that's how liturgy changes - a lack is felt and something bodged together to meet it.

We are rather concerned about our Paschal Candle this year, which is burning down rather rapidly. I ended the Ascension Day mass with my hands spattered in green wax from the disappearing motif on the Candle, and I suspect the particular well-known church supplier we got it from will not get our custom in 2017. 

As You Were

Cuts to disability benefits were absolutely necessary and right both for financial and social reasons, said the Government; and then they weren't.

Imposition of the new contract for junior doctors had to proceed and the process had gone too far to be delayed, said the Government; and then it hadn't. 

Compulsory academisation of all schools was the vital step in freeing the education system from the dead hand of bureaucracy and equipping it for the future, said the Government; and now it's not. 

You will recall how exercised we were about this matter at Swanvale Halt Infants. Since then the scandal of Perry Beeches Academy Trust in Birmingham has neatly revealed the potential of academisation to pour public money in huge quantities into the pockets of those who run the academies. It will be an enormous relief that we don't have to waste time and energy on working out the details of Multi-Academy Trusts and get on with educating small children instead; but one major practical argument in support of total academisation, that the remains of the local authority-controlled system is now so riddled with holes that it can't practically survive, won't be going away. We will continue to struggle, as local authorities themselves struggle, with the pressures placed on them by government and the ludicrous rhetoric of austerity, and it will be no easier than it's been up till now.

Spring Fair 2016

The storm clouds skirted the field on Saturday for the Swanvale Halt church Spring Fair. We had a minute's shower at about 1.45 (just as the Infants School children were massing for their country dancing), but that was it, and for the rest of the time the sun and the clouds danced around one another, the former often taking the lead role. The field was always busy; we took more in stall fees from charities and organisations than for a good long year; and although it wasn't as warm as last year that didn't seem to put anyone off. At the Messy Church stall they made a massive model of Guildford Cathedral which was, shall we say, hard to miss. It was topped by Angel Barbie, fitted with plastic wings and a cardboard crown, and sprayed gold, just like the real thing. Possibly.

PJ Harvey, 'The Hope VI Demolition Project' (2016)

When I first heard ‘The Community of Hope’, it struck me as a hymn of praise to the determination of people to survive in a hard situation. Notwithstanding the reaction to that song from some political quarters in the US, I still rather think that. But the fact that it can be read in such violently divergent ways is indicative of the way PJ Harvey’s latest album has been received more generally. Reviewers have hit on entirely contradictory complaints as ways of expressing their dissatisfaction: is she opening up too much? or not enough?

Harvey’s talent has always been expressed (as I’ve pointed out before) through the adoption of masks: she is a ventriloquist, giving voice to imaginary souls. Even the wartime vignettes of Let England Shake, inspired though they may have been by the singer’s research, were works of the imagination. Paradoxically, though, you can only pull this off if your adopted voice makes contact with something inside you, and this gives an insight into the problem people have with analysing Hope VI.

Because here she tries something new, something of an entirely different order – to jet across the world gathering material which reflects the violence human beings work on each other, and to express it musically. The trouble is that her usual talent of ventriloquy is of no use in this project. To announce yourself as the John Pilger of Alternative Music (and Mr Pilger is mentioned in the sleeve notes) is grandiose enough: to ventriloquise the voices of the real, concrete people you may have met along the way would be grotesque presumption, and Ms Harvey doesn’t try, falling back, for the most part, on reportage and observation. Occasionally she takes words spoken to her as the starting-point for a song – as with 'The Community of Hope', or 'A Line in the Sand', which seems to hang around the statements of an aid worker in a refugee camp (perhaps) – but that’s also reportage rather than an attempt to inhabit someone else’s situation imaginatively.

Sometimes the observation she offers us is telling enough to make an impact – the Kosovan woman still looking after her vanished neighbours’ houses in ‘Chain of Keys’*, or the horrific ruin described in ‘The Ministry of Defence’, an image intensified by the brutality of the music that accompanies it – and sometimes it’s not. Even the weakest tracks on the album have great points of interest, such as the lovely lilt of ‘Medicinals’, almost like a medieval carol; but the vision only seems to clear, and the music take off, when Ms Harvey actually abandons reportage in favour of imaginative insight. That happens in ‘The Community of Hope’, which juxtaposes its euphoric title-line refrain against the bleak landscape of urban decay, and in ‘The Wheel’, where a group of playing children inspires a meditation on violence and loss which is both reticent and passionate. The points where she actually speaks in her own, unmasked voice, virtually for the first time musically, are the least successful of all. ‘Dollar Dollar’ describes an encounter with a boy beggar who appears by the car in which the singer is travelling and which is then whisked away before she can do anything: she finds it a haunting experience. There is no mistaking the plaintive, pained quality in the vocal, but it’s not exactly a startling insight, unless at 46 you’ve really never before experienced your own helplessness in the face of need.

Diamanda Galás once talked about the difference between an artist wanting to speak and needing to speak: Hope VI is definitely the former. Bits of it work, sometimes triumphantly, bits don’t, and its failures are, I think, down to its author deliberately turning away from her own genius: an absolutely bold, but not necessarily fruitful path to tread.

*The recording of chant from Decani monastery at the end places this in Kosovo; and I imagine the Father Sava referenced on the sleeve notes is Father Sava Janjic, Abbot of Decani and a leading voice for tolerance and reconciliation during the collapse of Former Yugoslavia and the period since.