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.