Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

by Nick Hornby

  ‘If you can live with the intimacy that implies,’ she says.

  And then I woke up.

  I am always on the verge of giving up smoking, but my habit has resulted in my meeting both Uma (as I now think of her) and Kurt Vonnegut. Where’s the incentive?

  Amanda and Finola sign an agreement with Sony Classics in the Virgin lounge at San Francisco airport. When we get home we are told that An Education won the Audience Award, and a prize for John de Borman’s cinematography. Nothing from the Danish juror, though.

  Kidding Around

  Halfway through Iona Opie’s primary-school journal, The People in the Playground, she describes a couple of minutes of break time that make one wonder how the transition from childhood to adulthood – to taxi-driving and chartered accountancy and dental hygiene – is ever effected.

  ‘The freckle-faced horror had a different boy in tow, and said, “I want to introduce you to the Dog of Liverpool. He’s a sex maniac. He takes nude ladies to bed with him.” The Dog looked embarrassed, so I took an interest in his Deep Water Fisherman’s badge. “Did you write all that down? His name is Jonathan Price. What’s his name? What’s your name? Mary Jane. Where d’you live? Down the drain. What’s your shop? Fizzy pop. Boom, boom!” He kicks in the air and exclaims “Boom, boom” whenever he makes a joke, having picked up the habit from the television puppet Basil Brush.’

  If there is a creature odder than a child, one would not want to have to meet it.

  Opie’s fascinating and frequently hilarious book is full of these high-speed riffs, which can be as opaque and as allusive as an Eliot poem. What they signify is anybody’s guess, and Opie (who, with her late husband Peter, wrote the pioneering The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, as well as The Singing Game) very rarely makes any attempt to decode her raw material. The People in the Playground offers straight, minute observation of complicated, minute people: Opie watches children’s games, listens to their songs and endures their jokes, and writes absolutely everything, every bodged punchline and every raspberry, down in her little notebook. Indeed, some of the book’s charm comes from the relationship between the child and the notebook. ‘’Ave you written that down? You never!’ cries one little boy with appalled admiration, after he has entertained his public with a witticism about dog’s muck and bumholes.

  ‘Oh, ’eck, you’re not going to write down that I did that, are you? Bloomin’ ’eck!’ another splutters, after he has claimed, with easily deflatable braggadocio, that his hobby is flicking large elastic bands at girls. ‘If you can’t spell starkers, just put in the nude,’ suggests a third helpfully, as Opie struggles to record yet another long and frankly disappointing story about a naked lady.

  If the children frequently give the impression of telling fart jokes first and regretting them later, they do turn the tables on their chronicler occasionally. One boy taunts Opie, the eternally hopeful bluestocking archivist, with his own modernity: ‘Do you know my favourite hobby? Watching TV! He he he he!!’ There is an impish and knowing point to this hilarity, as Opie ruefully observes: ‘He must have known how irritating this pronouncement would be to a devout folklorist.’

  Postmodernism has not yet managed to penetrate the world of children’s folklore, however, and The People in the Playground is not, despite these incidental attractions, a book about its own creation. And nor, despite Opie’s best efforts, is it a book about games or rhymes, the sophisticated patterns of which seem to have evaded the journal format. (It is, however, nice to see that games such as British Bulldog, Stuck in the Mud et al. are still going strong, or were between 1978 and 1980, when Opie made her study.)

  Most of all it is a book about jokes. Why did the orange go to the doctor? What’s green and barks? What would you give to a sick pig? Why was the policeman up a tree? What’s the highest building in town? Did you hear about the cowboy who wore paper clothes? (Because it wasn’t peeling well; a Grape Dane; oinkment; he belonged to the Special Branch; a library, because it’s got the most stories; he was arrested for rustling.)

  There are jokes about every conceivable bodily function, every member of the animal kingdom, every nationality, every television programme, even every chocolate bar. Jokes positively gush from these children who beg Opie to jot down ‘just one more’, who ask her whether she ‘takes’ Irish jokes as if they were a dodgy foreign currency.

  After a while, the joke-telling starts to resemble a bodily function in its own right: jokes become something that must be expelled at all costs from the infant mouth into the nearest human ear, regardless of their quality, meaning or length.

  The frequency with which the tellers bungle their jokes suggests that the children do not always understand their own material. There is a long Irish story which suffers somewhat from the absence of an Irishman; the old ‘When is a car not a car?’ is ruined by the selection of the wrong verb – ‘When it goes into a lay-by’ is nowhere near as funny as ‘When it turns into a lay-by’.

  And one does not wish to appear too naive, but some of the racier stuff, involving Durex and improbable masturbatory aids, is surely a little sophisticated for primary-school children. Any scatalogical content is prized, even if the sense is out of reach. (Opie, incidentally, remains touchingly and sportingly unshockable throughout; she points out that one of the fart jokes is to be found in Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a piece of information that reassures as much as it illuminates.)

  It becomes clear that jokes – in essence easily, if occasionally partially, remembered short stories – have an important social function. They allow children to take the floor, develop narrative skills and hold attention in ways denied them elsewhere in life. Opie points out that the children often enter a story-telling state, a sort of comedic coma; they stare off into the middle distance and adopt a different tone of voice. Reaching the punchline without tripping up and spilling the lot is obviously of much greater importance than actually making anybody chortle.

  One does not really need any stuffy pedagogical justification to read this book, however; indeed, to come at the book from this angle would be to miss its point, and its joy, entirely. Read it because it is very funny, and read it because children are intrinsically daft and invariably fascinating; read it also because Opie is a deft, engaging and dry observer of their foibles.

  Last week, while in the middle of reading The People in the Playground, I went to see Arsenal play Southampton. During the second half, a young substitute named Paul Dickov came on to the field; before very long, one of the spectators behind me, a man in his thirties, was quite helpless with mirth, and remained so for the remainder of the game. ‘Dickov!’ he kept exclaiming amid snorts and splutters, headshakes and tears. ‘Dickov!’ Opie will know better than anybody that the transition from childhood to adulthood is never effected quite as thoroughly as one would wish.

  The Goons

  At the time of writing, my iPod contains 13,056 songs. Hundreds of them – tracks by Elvis and Little Richard, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis – were recorded in the US during the 1950s; hundreds more – and you can take an educated guess at the artists concerned – were made in the UK during the 1960s. But I do not own a single song recorded in my own country in the 1950s, the decade in which I was born. What was there to own? In 1958 an English Elvis imitator called Cliff Richard, who went on to spend more time in the UK charts than anyone else apart from Elvis himself, had a hit with a rock ’n’ roll song called ‘Move It’ – but if you’ve ever heard anything that Presley recorded in the first five years of his career, then you’re not missing much if you don’t know the song. (Indeed, it might even confirm any prejudice you might hold about Englishmen being a little uptight.) The first genuine English rock ’n’ roll classic – ‘Shakin’ All Over’, by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, later covered by the Who on Live at Leeds – didn’t arrive until 1960. There was really nothing else from around then that has any place in a history of rock ’n
’ roll. The reasons for this are obvious enough: rock ’n’ roll, its fusion of black R&B and white hillbilly music, had to be American before it could be anything else, and those boats carrying the first examples of that fusion took a long time to get to Liverpool. So what was happening in the UK that got people excited? The Goons were happening, that’s what.

  The Goons were a group of comedians – Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine – whose radio show, broadcast on the BBC between 1951 and 1960, was heard by seven million people every week; two of its biggest fans were the Queen’s eldest son and John Lennon. Charles is still the honorary patron of the Goon Show Preservation Society; Lennon reviewed a collection of scripts for The New York Times in 1972, and Yoko gave him forty hours of old episodes on his thirty-seventh birthday. ‘I was twelve when the Goons first hit me. Sixteen when they were finished with me,’ Lennon’s review begins, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect: when he was sixteen, he was ready for other influences, and more to the point, those other influences were ready for him.

  It’s hard to think of anything else that Prince Charles and John Lennon might have had in common, but then, that’s one of the points of the Goons: that they were inclusive in a way that rock ’n’ roll, despite its obvious democracy, couldn’t be, didn’t even want to be. One of the points of Elvis and everything that came after was to create alarm and rupture; but The Goon Show couldn’t upset anyone even if it wanted to. BBC guidelines – and, by the way, there were no commercial stations back then – forbad any reference to, among other things, drunkenness, prostitution, infidelity, honeymoons, underwear or homosexuality; entertainers weren’t even allowed to impersonate Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, or two of our best-loved wartime singers, Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn, in case offence was caused. In other words, any subversion had to be done the hard way. The Goons managed to slip a few obscene references past the stern countenance of the BBC governors, through judicious use of rhyming slang and other knowing references. But mostly the Goons shook things up with a glorious, surreal gibberish, the missing link between the Marx Brothers and Monty Python.

  Not everyone got it, I’m presuming, but it wasn’t just the young and the restless who did. (Prince Charles was nobody’s idea of James Dean, that’s for sure.) And I suspect that this made a difference to the history of British pop music. For starters, George Martin’s experience recording comedy albums for Sellers and Milligan impressed Lennon and McCartney – the Goons helped Martin and the Beatles bond, despite Martin being fifteen years older than Lennon. And if Martin hadn’t ended up producing the Beatles, the recent cultural history of Britain would have been subtly different.

  But, less specifically, it meant that the first generation of English rockers had shared an important influence with their parents. In a way, this was unavoidable. The Second World War helped make the US rich, but it more or less bankrupted Britain. The 1950s in the UK wasn’t a time of plenty (food rationing finally ended in July 1954, ten years and a month after D-Day) and nobody was having much fun; the world depicted in American rock ’n’ roll songs was pure fantasy. English teenagers didn’t drive so, no, they couldn’t imagine how Chuck Berry felt / when he couldn’t undo her safety belt: English teenagers waited for buses in the rain. There had been no TV at all during the war, so the habit of listening to the BBC – with parents – during those dark, hungry, frightening evenings was deeply ingrained. When the dark, hungry evenings continued way into the fifties, the radio listening did, too. Whatever certain English right-wing commentators would have you believe, being bombed doesn’t mean that we’re morally superior. But it almost certainly means that the Lennon/McCartney generation in the UK was different, in profound ways, from the Dylan generation in the US. How could it not? Maybe the Beatles generation liked their parents more – maybe that’s why you can hear traces of old music hall in the songs of the Beatles and the Kinks and others.

  In 1963, right at the beginning of their remarkable journey, the Beatles played for the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Performance, a dismal show that usually consisted of impressionists, cheesy comedians and hopelessly blancmange chart singers. So the Beatles were a shock to the system … but not too much of a shock. (It was during this show that John Lennon exhorted those members of the Royal Family watching to ‘rattle their jewellery’.) How proud their parents must have been that night! And perhaps that’s part of the point. Families in the UK had all been through too much together for the kind of straightforward rebellion visible in the US, in the films of Brando and James Dean, and the music of Elvis Presley. British families had gone hungry together, got frightened together and laughed at the Goons together. The Beatles wanted to shake things up a little, but they didn’t want to piss anyone off, either.

  Wodehouse

  What, one wonders, would the critical reception for Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books be like were he to publish now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? (One has to suspend disbelief for a moment, and imagine that a beady-eyed young editor at a major publishing house would temporarily abandon his obsession with finding the next American Psycho or Trainspotting, and become besotted with the relationship between a titled chump and his prizewinning pig.) Judging by the bizarre recent reaction to another charming comic writer, Helen Fielding, Wodehouse might be in for a hard time. Someone would accuse him of setting back the cause of the landed gentry by fifty years. Someone else would point out that pigs really aren’t like that at all, and Wodehouse had got it all wrong. Yet another person would become so angered by the books’ popularity that he would threaten to hit their author. One doubts if anyone would mention, at any point, that Wodehouse was trying to make people laugh, and that he had therefore taken some liberties with the character of the Empress of Blandings (Lord Emsworth’s prize sow, for those of you unfamiliar with the Blandings dramatis personae) in the pursuit of this laudable goal. If it is hard to write comedy, it seems quite impossible to write about it, which is why some comic writers must endure the experience of being reviewed as if their characters had wandered out of a Hardy novel.

  Wodehouse understood, perhaps better than any other English writer, that to dedicate one’s life to comedy meant trying to be funny all the time. This might seem an obvious thing to say, but surprisingly few people actually do it. For a start, a lot of people want their books to be real, to be happy and sad – a legitimate and noble desire, perhaps, but one which means that there will inevitably be a dullish passage where somebody goes to work and observes all the faces on the tube, say, or a sad bit where the narrator’s boyfriend dumps her. Wodehouse isn’t interested in this kind of realism, because it comes at a price – joke-free zones – that he is not willing to pay. As a consequence, he is accused by some critics (those who delight in stating the clunkingly obvious) of being a lightweight. Well, yes. That is the whole point. He was a comic writer, and had no pretensions in any other direction. No doubt the same critics would point out that there is no record of Rembrandt being much of a singer.

  You can still hear echoes of that sort of peculiar nit-picking today. Sometime in the late 1990s, when the BBC broadcast – late at night, when they were sure no one was going to watch – two recent, and wonderful, American sitcoms, Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, there were frequent debates about which was better. As far as I could tell, the general feeling was that The Larry Sanders Show had the edge; it was, people said, ‘darker’, ‘more ambitious’, ‘richer’. Seinfeld, on the other hand, was famously ‘a show about nothing’. This is undoubtedly true; but, of course, all the time that the creators of Sanders spent on being dark and ambitious and rich prohibited them from being funny. Jokes were sacrificed for character development, and for bitterness, and the programme was paced more like a drama, thus giving its people and its themes room to breathe. In a way, it’s easier to be funny when you afford yourself the luxury of darkness. Seinfeld, meanwhile, was uninterested in anything but making people laugh
as frequently as possible – which was why, inevitably, it wasn’t ‘about’ very much. So, yes, The Larry Sanders Show was ‘better’ than Seinfeld, in the same way that Middlemarch is ‘better’ than Summer Lightning. Wodehouse would concede the point, but he would also suggest (modestly) that Summer Lightning has more jokes in it.

  There is a moment in Summer Lightning where, just for a moment, it looks as though Wodehouse is going to allow the real world to intrude. At the beginning of Chapter 7, he points out that prosperity and tranquility have softened Lord Emsworth, and equipped him badly for traumas such as the loss of a pig. ‘When some outstanding disaster happens to the ordinary man,’ Wodehouse observes, ‘it finds him prepared.’ The subsequent list of said disasters is instructive. Bearing in mind that 1929, when Summer Lightning was published, was the year of the Wall Street Crash, and financiers were jumping to their deaths from their office windows, one wonders briefly whether the author is going to allow a rip in his comic fabric, and tell us that, outside the Blandings Castle walls, the world is reeling from one horror to the next. We needn’t have worried. Wodehouse’s summary of the horrors that befall the ordinary man is merely another example of his comic single-mindedness: ‘Years of missing the eight-forty-five, taking the dog for a run on rainy nights, endeavouring to abate smoky chimneys, and coming down to breakfast and discovering they have burned the bacon again, have given his soul a protective hardness, so that by the time his wife’s relations arrive for a long visit he is ready for them.’ Some people might become exasperated at this point by the cosiness and privilege of Wodehouse’s vision, but we would, I think, be correct in hazarding that these people would not be very funny people, and we can, in this context, safely ignore them.