‘Hail To The Brummies!’
[Cut to a hundred people outside Aston Hall, speaking.]
‘Hail To The Brummies!’
[Then silence. Two narrative shots taking place at the same time, with cuts between them, like flipping back and forth between two really good programmes on two different channels. The first is a journey around the Inner Ring Road, a rear-facing camera strapped to the back of a car so you can see white lines dashing away, road being unfurled, office blocks appearing then shrinking, signs on the opposite carriageway directing drivers to Solihull… Coventry… Lichfield… Wolverhampton… Kenilworth… Bromsgrove… Redditch. The other narrative is a stationary camera in New Street with the Rotunda and the Bull Ring Centre in the background. The camera shows the faces of Brummies walking up and down the street. Oblivious poses, thoughtful expressions, fags in chops. It is a perfect one-two depiction of this fine city, and the two strands work so perfectly together, and in silence. Bob was right about the silence.]
[Cut to a music venue. Priory Square. It’s empty and a band are about to play. The Rationalists. They start to play their song ‘Outsiders’ live, then the action moves to inner-city Brum. Shots of Sparkbrook: sweet shops, curry houses, fabric warehouses. Witton: young people listening to ghetto blasters, men eating patties in the street, laughing. Soho Road: market stalls, exotic vegetables, exotic places of worship. Digbeth: the inside of an Irish pub, singing, dancing. Hurst Street: an Oriental supermarket, a small church, two men holding hands and laughing…]
*
I was so incredibly chuffed about her finding Hail To The Brummies – a programme I thought had been destroyed forever – that I went out to the shop in Moseley and bought some beers. Ayesha the checkout girl could tell that I was in a good mood when I got to her till.
I handed Kate a can when I got back and opened one for myself.
‘Something really funny happened in Berlin,’ I confessed, finally. ‘This woman. There was this woman.’
‘Christ, not ag—’
‘No, no, no. She was in the church. In Kreuzberg, where Bel and I got married. And she knew me. She knew Big Plans. She said she lived in Brum; she said they showed Big Plans in Germany.’
‘Große Pläne!’
‘Ha, well yes, look, that’s not the point.’
Kate snarled. ‘Große!’
‘Come on. Anyway she said she knew me, she said she was in my dreams, she said she was in all of my programmes. We walked and we talked. She seemed real. We sat down in the old airport at Tempelhof where there’s a little cafe and I went to buy her a mint tea and then… she just vanished.’
‘Jesus, you do attract the nutters. So who was she? I thought you said you didn’t see anyone else?’
‘The woman from the idents. The woman from my dreams.’
‘I need some weed if we’re getting into this kind of territory.’ Kate sighed, reaching for her mobile to text a drug dealer. Her voice sounded exhausted; her face looked drawn. ‘Well… point her out to me.’
‘OK, but we’ll have to keep our eyes open.’
‘How does she know who you are?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Is she in Hail To The Brummies?’
‘Who knows. We’ll have to watch it again.’
‘OK, sport.’
We chinked cans.
Kate went out for a cigarette.
I picked up the VHS Kate had accidentally put on earlier and rammed it into the machine.
Now it was time for Bullseye, the hard-hitting weekly current affairs show for the heart of the country.
*
‘Now it’s time for Bullseye, the hard-hitting weekly current affairs show for the heart of the country!’
[The titles burst to life: a blue background, the vaguely melon-shaped outline of the Midlands region drawn on a map in luminous yellow; it spins round a few times then rearranges itself via basic computer graphics to form the shape of a circle, then of a dartboard. Then, looking from a side angle, a spinning computerised dart drifts slowly across the screen towards the – now shown in profile – map, which again rapidly turns to face us, the dart flying away from us towards the board. It lands slap in the middle of the board. Random letters form into the word Birmingham and then into the word BULLSEYE.]
Ralph Marks: ‘It’s the fourth of April, 1984. From the centre of the country, from the heart of your region… it’s Bullseye! With me, Raaaalph Marks. Tonight… it’s chocks away! For Birmingham’s new airport! We look round the self-consciously space-age self-service lunch buffet… [cut to still picture of a mug of tea, beef stew and peas, and bread and butter on a beige plate, on a cream tray, on a red table], the high-tech architecture… [cut to still picture of a car park and crane], and the maglev technology that will be taking us from Birmingham to every city in Britain by the year 2000…!’
[Cut to still picture of a sign saying SORRY – MAGLEV IS STILL IN TESTING PHASE. PLEASE TAKE REPLACEMENT BUS TO BIRMINGHAM INTERNATIONAL STATION.]
*
I pressed the power button on the remote control.
Kate came back in from the garden. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘What do you mean? That’s a big question. A Sunday night question.’
‘I mean it. What are we going to do? We all know Mids is going to shit. How much longer it’s going to last I don’t know. The life is draining out of it – and the city.’
‘Nah, it just seems that way. I think. There’ll always be something. Right?’
‘I’m not so sure. And anyway, spending too long in the same place is unhealthy.’
‘But you’re a Brummie.’
Kate smiled. ‘So are you. I don’t know. The world is so big. There’s something… I don’t know. Something that feels… draining here sometimes, a melancholy in the streets. Even your garden is depressing. I can hear those bloody trains going past, to somewhere more exciting. But I can’t see them over the fence. They’re taunting me.’
‘You want to know where they’re going?’ I answered. ‘Worcester. Great Malvern. Hereford. Are you still jealous?’
Kate flopped down on the sofa beside me. She rested her head on my shoulder and sighed. ‘TV’s for young people. I can’t be bothered sometimes, with the competition and the long hours and the shit pay and the nights in motorway service station hotels, and the 4 a.m. filming starts. And is any of it worth anything? If we go for job interviews in London no one will have seen a single one of the programmes we made, Don, because no one at Mids has bothered crowbarring them onto the network schedules. It’s such a waste.’
I lied: ‘It’s not a waste. We’ve done some good stuff. It’s taught us things…’
‘What has it taught us? We’re just scratching the surface of all these different things – mocking them or else making them seem more noble than the reality of it ever was.’ Kate drank some beer. ‘What would you have been if you weren’t a TV writer?’
‘A proper writer? Or an explorer in a safari suit. You?’
‘I wanted to ride horses. Or be a fashion designer.’
‘This is last week?’
Kate exhaled. ‘I think I’m a bit old for those little-girl magazine fantasy jobs. I’m basically a fucking PA, Don. I sort other people’s mess out.’
‘No, come on. You edit things. You book people. You run the show. You’re almost a producer. You’re a better producer than Bob!’
‘So why don’t I get the cash or respect Bob gets?’ Kate sipped more beer. ‘And why are there no men in Brum? No nice ones. I don’t want any more fucking guys who love cars and football and know nothing about anything else.’
‘That’s everyone in this city discounted, I think.’
‘Well exactly! It’d be different if I moved to London.’
I wanted to argue with Kate, but she was right. It would be different. We’d be nobodies from the regions. Rather than basically running an entire fading television channel together we’d just be some other schmucks workin
g on some other show and living on some other council estate because it was the only place we could afford to rent. I looked around my front room. I didn’t want to leave. I liked the big mirror slung over the fireplace. I liked the paintings Bel had put up – the abstracts and the psychedelic dot paintings from the 1960s. I liked the blue sofa. I liked the green carpet. I liked the door to the stairs which actually looked like a door to a cupboard.
‘It’s exhausting.’ Kate rubbed her head against my chest. I sensed she was on the verge of tears. A long silence. ‘I’m lonely, Don,’ she said. The words sat awkwardly in the room, suspended in the air for all to see, written up in big capitals. Statements of intent, saying so much with so few letters. Words said in the English language but words not allowed in the English culture. I could feel Kate’s heart vibrating in the silence, throbbing, embarrassed. Waiting. For me?
I stroked Kate’s hair. Tears trickled down her right cheek, leaving slick trails which caught the light. It made me cry too. ‘I’m just… really lonely.’ I rubbed the moist lines on her cheeks with my thumb, erasing the emotion. Perhaps.
‘I am too,’ I said, softly. ‘We all are… inside. We all are. Everyone I love has died – my wife, my parents… my fucking dog.’ I heard a stifled giggle squeeze its way between Kate’s sobs. ‘You better not die too. Promise me?’
She rubbed a tissue against her nose. ‘I promise.’
Something could have happened in that moment; it had once before – a very long time ago. But some moments sit so sweetly poised between happening and not happening, and this was a moment where nothing happened. We sat there for a while longer. Kate’s breathing slowly returned to normal, and eventually she seemed less agitated. I put Hail To The Brummies back on, and we mocked it – picking out the people with the worst haircuts and the funniest clothes. Kate fished a small bar of dark chocolate out of her handbag, snapped it in two, and we ate it like grinning kids. She stared up at me as she sucked at the melted bar, and I leaned over to kiss her on the forehead.
‘Remember Nottingham?’
I nodded. A banana grin lit up her face as she chewed on the chocolate and stared at the screen. Nottingham was a one-off though. A long time ago. A different lifetime.
*
Ten Brutalist Buildings
By Belinda Schneider
Chapter Eleven
The final countdown: my beloved Brum
Birmingham confused me at the start. It teased me occasionally; mostly it seemed utterly indifferent to me. Was it even a city? Most of the places you went were just in the suburbs. The place where it felt least like Birmingham was in its core. In the main markets the shoppers talked in that delicious, sugary accent which I could spoon into my tea.
But I was soon hooked. And it wasn’t just the accent that hooked me. When I was away from the centre, in these weird suburbs, the city was flighty and enigmatic. Roads stretching every bloody way, roads with two lanes, three lanes, four lanes. Rows of shops, sheds and small factories and lamp posts and fences and scrubby bits of park, and fire stations and railway stations and police stations and fried chicken shops and some clusters of tower blocks and some cul-de-sacs for the people who were better off. And this motley collection, repeated in different variants and different shapes and different colours and different quantities all over the city. This is what Birmingham is. A road and a school and five cul-de-sacs of semis here; a warehouse, some terraced houses and a corner shop there. Infinite varieties of suburbia spread across heathland that sometimes pokes up and out at you. You know the heath is there because of these gentle contours – not flat, not hilly, in between. Gentle slopes and gradients a child would ski down.
Now you might think these suburbs could be in Manchester or Leeds or Sheffield or Southampton or Leicester or Bradford. But if you love something you listen to it, you look at it. Now look again at those Birmingham suburbs – spot the road names, the road signs, the bus stops, the 0121 phone numbers on the shop signs. Connoisseurs will recognise that there’s something uniquely Brummie about the shape of these suburbs; there’s certainly something uniquely Brummie about the scope of them (aside from London, these are the most sprawling suburbs you can find in Britain).
Why am I talking about suburbs now? I’ll try to explain. I wasn’t a fan of these suburbs when I first visited them. They seemed parochial. They are – in a way. I wanted the drama and excitement of streets in the sky, of city centres. I still do. But Brum is systematically knocking all of those streets in the sky down, knocking all its great city-centre brutes down. All of those sweet 1960s edifices are biting the dust. I should have known it would all end in tears: the city’s motto is ‘Forward’. So as Brum turns its city centre from a brutalist playground into a catwalk parade of skinny glass-clad supermodel blocks of apartments, how about – and I know this sounds crazy – looking to the suburbs?
I have this feeling that people might want to start reimagining the brutalist aesthetic and the brutalist ideology. But it isn’t going to happen anywhere where the land value is so high that idiotic developers can plonk down a great glazed block of offices or shops. Maybe it’s going to happen in the suburbs. Maybe people will club together somehow – I’m putting my futureglasses on here – and realise brutalist villages at key points in these aching, yawning suburbs. Maybe they’ll build little connected blocks of flats, shops and services, schools and anything else. And maybe the architects will want to design in concrete, extrude the living fuck out of the stuff, craft these space-age shapes to go with the exciting townscape that courts and mixed-use buildings and walkways and balconies create. We can learn to live together, right? We don’t always want to have a semi-detached house with a car in the driveway? Maybe there’ll be more cycle lanes then as well – so you don’t have to risk life and limb when you’re making a right turn off the Bristol Road on your way home from the university.
This is just an idea.
I think we need grand plans again. ‘Plans’ got a bad rap because plans didn’t always end with good results. Didn’t always. But did sometimes. They really did sometimes. So why can’t we dream big again, plan big again and build something exciting again? And do these places have to become sad or dystopian? Absolutely not – they can be extraordinary places for ordinary people: ordinary people like you and me, leading ordinary, happy lives, and sometimes lives that transcend the ordinary and become special. Brutalism can be a background for ordinariness or greatness. Seriously.
But that’s probably never going to happen, is it? Not while we have such dilettantes running the bloody show.
What I really wanted to say was more simple: Birmingham dazzled me. I feel like I’m saying goodbye to it for some reason, but that won’t ever happen. I love living in Brum and I will be here for the rest of my life – however long that turns out to be. There’s something about the place you live in, the place you love in, that draws you in. Brum might be an eccentric – and occasionally unforgiving – mistress, but I’m under its spell now. It doesn’t try to trap you. I hate feeling trapped.
As for its architecture, well, the older you get the more you realise it’s all a bloody big game, isn’t it? Men build because of their dicks – what you end up with is mostly crap. But sometimes, just sometimes, there are these little periods where everything falls into place – like falling in love, really – where you get some great buildings appearing that aren’t just giant cocks, but are actually something over and above that base need for spreading seed and constructing priapically. But Brum is a silly billy. It doesn’t know what it’s got; it never knows what it’s got. It’s a meat-and-potatoes town run by ex-businessmen and politicians that can’t make it in London. How different it would be if it were run by artists and academics. But artists and academics have got better things to do than sit in meetings all day, drinking tea, filling in forms and going on trade visits to China. That kind of life suits a particular older chap. There’s no taste at the top. I fully expect Brum to tear down all of its best buildings a
nd be left with hardly anything of merit. That’s already happening. All the great stuff from the 1960s and the 1970s will probably be gone by the time I am. Isn’t that crazy? Buildings can last 1,000 years, and these won’t make 100. But that’s Brum. It’s the kind of place that does that. Just like it ripped everything apart in the 1960s and started again. But that time, when it built everything back up it did so with pride and passion and a bloody belief in the future. A belief in itself. This time – well, you know. It’ll be bland. It always is. I’m past caring in some ways. I used to get angry but I see now that it’s just the great circle of life. Kids will pick up books in the twenty-second century and say, ‘Wow, that was what the future was supposed to look like?’ Because that was what the future was supposed to look like. Futuristic. What will the future look like instead? Bland. Controlled by technology and corporations. Safe – I hope. Clean and neat – probably. But nondescript. Our kids will live in a world that hardly even demands their attention because their attention will be on other things, like screens and themselves. And I suspect they’ll only come to the centre of Birmingham when it’s dark, to drink or shop or hang out with their friends at night. They’ll see lights but no sights.
And what will those young Brummies make of this rambling text? They’ll say, ‘She was being so bloody nostalgic, wasn’t she?’ And I am. Nostalgic for an era and an aesthetic, sure – whatcha gonna do about it?
But nostalgic for a city too, and that’s the point; that’s why – in a way – I don’t care what Brum does to itself. Because the act of doing all that stuff is very Brummie. Birmingham just moves on, doing its own thing. Funny how somewhere at the middle of the country is not really at the centre of anything. In the middle but outside the mainstream – and that’s why I like Birmingham. That’s why I love Birmingham. It’s an island; it’s not in step. Its little quirks and nuances dazzle me. I feel like a lovestruck teenager when I think about it. I feel like a lovestruck teenager when I walk about in it. It’s a mess, but it’s my mess.
The Wall in the Head Page 27
