The terrible horrors of being 'Loved Up'

Update : Of course the other explanation could be that I find nice, normal, uncomplicated, sincere, happy people scientifically inexplicable and dull as ditch water.

There used to be a BBC Common - either a cheerful Cockney forever on the verge of a Tommy Steele impression even when required to look sad and/or peeved by burning issues typical of his lot like drugs or abortion; or a dewy, lovely stage school ‘gel’ doing her Cockney, who would soon move on to a corset role in the millionth adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

There was also a BBC Ethnic. In comedies he (in all genres it was mostly a he unless an arranged marriage was in the offing – although nowadays girls are essential for the wearing of headscarves) was silly in line with the clichés of his ethnic origin, or simply stood there silently his skin colour being the punchline. In dramas they would get angry and anguished about racism (God knows they weren’t going to discuss anything Mr and Mrs Average Briton hadn’t heard of) or they would mug a pensioner before dealing drugs to his grandson. These actors had to perfect the highly tricky skill of entirely eviscerating any signs of an internal life while maintaining intense eye-contact. Much like all modern T.V. acting.

The BBC Gay had the same comedy/drama divide. The comedy version was sardonic and camp and sneaked in from the pier end of the Music Halls. The drama version was a repressed, almost fully human, Establishment figure, his wife was a fragrant semi-shrew who didn’t understand him and would go nuclear when she found out (probably played by Jane Asher) and the torment of his life was a monosyllabic piece of rough trade who dressed like one of the twins from the 80s band ‘Bros’.

There was BBC Regional : och aye, eee bye gum, ooh arr, it’s grim up North, it’s warm and funny up North, the peasants will burn you in a giant Wicker Man if you don’t repeal the Corn Laws… Up North.

And while actresses everywhere in British culture tend to be Dames, Totty, Char ladies or Totty Char ladies, or Totty Dames, or Dame Char ladies, recently the BBC has given us a new  – and unexpected – female type, the BBC Bimbo.

She’s a presenter. She probably went to University or trained extensively in Z-list public appearances. She sits or stands next to a grumpy male presenter (or Bruce Forsyth) reacting to his every witticism. She has almost no thoughts, interests or opinions of her own. Sometimes her voice gets so shrill you can’t even hear the inane comment she’s tried to interject and it makes no difference to the show. She’s anything from 20 to 50 but the strain of trying to look young (even while young) leaves all of them with the same crow’s-feet covered up by the same light-reflecting foundations. They have sleek or spiky hairdos sprayed on like Helmets and their clothes are expensive versions of the polyester darted bedazzled monstrosities Human Resource Managers buy from Next.

No amount of sparkle can hide the anxiety in their eyes. They’re interchangeable and disposable and they know it.

The question is why?

Drama is a complex thing to produce. Clichés and stereotypes become landmarks in potentially hostile unexplored territory. But presenting should be a matter of charisma, intelligence and sensitivity. Qualities female presenters managed to possess in all past eras. So what terrors are stalking the backrooms of the BBC leading to this near extinction of smart – ageing – women?  Because even 70s Totty had more depth than the blank spaces they’ve gazelled onto the ‘The One Show’ sofa.

BBC Breakfast needs Hammer Glamour

'och'

Sometimes when I look at Scottish Culture (which isn’t that often if I’m truthful) I feel like a dress-maker staring at a gaggle of mismatched bridesmaids all aiming to be stuffed into the same style and thinking ‘but how?’.

We’ve got some unnaturally happy mostly adorable slightly suspicious Nats in a Celtic Twilight Braveheart Tartan Kailyard.

T.V. raised suburbans steeped in London and L.A.

A post-industrial sprawling Glasgow that mentally lives in The Steamie and remembers when they got an inside loo (for once I’m too young).

Some children of the Manse – somewhere.

Calvin! – he’s in the bones.

Catholicism! – back like Cronus.

A bright indie scene of student hipsters who get old down their local without updating their retro shirts.

English Arts administrators padding round the press clippings.

Militants and cranks.

Irish-heritagers (I’d call them plastic paddies – but sometimes a snappy phrase is too nasty and mean) who flit between being fiercely tricoloured and mildly bewildered (like me – the bewildered part).

A ton of incredibly visible yet totally submerged Irish Protestants still motivated by the strictly taboo Scullabogue Massacre.

Lost soldier types tagging along and never fitting.

Serial killers.

Gangsters (although they’ve been out-gunned recently by London and Dublin).

Italians!

Chinese people who prefer not to be noticed.

Asians – mostly from the home of my childhood icon Benazir Bhutto (the eyeliner!).

Poles etc (unless they’ve left already).

Africans! – mostly from the right true countries that approve of fat girls.

An Aristocracy who prefer not to be noticed.

Drunks.

The mentally ill.

Weird crimes - like threatening someone while smeared in mince.

Crofts!

Viking parades! (if Shetland goes to Norway taking their lovely money with them – we’ll either laugh at the Nats or get Iceland to invade and wave quota fish at them).

Sheep!

And a kind of Mandarin Class whose exact working life could be replicated in any city on Earth.

Everything that is us is too us; everything else could be anywhere.

I’m sure all the materials will be fabulous once I work out what to do with them.

Unless it looks like this :

Tragic

When I was a budding writer of about fourteen I saw a documentary about Leni Riefenstahl.  Leni was the glamourous actress who became an innovative film-maker in 1930s Germany. She was a genius. By the time of the documentary she was an angry old woman raging that her career had been derailed by her association with the Nazi regime. She vehemently denied being a Nazi even though her most famous film ‘Triumph of the Will’ is an aesthetically gorgeous chronicle of the Nuremburg Rally.

Being an idiot I believed her.

I started to fret uselessly about two issues :

1. Being a hostage to fate and circumstance. What if I never get to be a writer because I’m in the wrong place in the wrong time surrounded by the wrong people? What if I get to be a writer and then my luck goes and I’m cast out like a demon?

2. Accidently writing stuff that ruins the world. What if – like Leni - I’m busy making a film about elfs and my gypsy extras are getting shipped off to concentration camps and I don’t even notice. And the fascists doing the shipping love my elfs?

I fret so much I hardly have time to write anything. I’m too busy scrutinising Scotland/Britain/The world for signs that it hates me. I’m too paranoid that fiction has a negative effect on readers and audiences. My lack of faith and trust is near total. I panic at the drop of a hat. I could die of shame just thinking about it.

I’d feel safer with something nice to consciously push. But I can’t think of anything guaranteed to have no negative consequences. Christianity kills people, Marxism kills people, Buddhists kill people!

Of course now I’m old I realise that Leni was a lying liar who either was a Nazi or didn’t care who they hurt as long as it wasn’t her.

Art has consequences. It shapes who we think we are, what we think is good, what we think is evil, who we don’t like. ‘Birth Of  A Nation’ led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. ‘Braveheart’ led directly to me hearing a bunch of over-excited teenage boys yelling anti-English abuse in the woods next to my house. But these manias come out of the culture the film-maker was steeped in. Or the culture the film is seen in. They trigger emotions that were waiting to be triggered. Our tendency to witch-hunt, to lynch, to righteously condemn is part of human nature. I couldn’t not know what I was doing. But without Leni – I might have written a hate story without caring it was a hate story. I might have thought they deserved it. I might have thought it was helpful. I might have cared more about being rejected and thwarted by anti-nazis than I cared about millions of people being murdered.

I’m glad I minced about treating fiction like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with myself as the potential Whore of Babylon…  I just wish I could stop it.

Hitler & Leni

Sarah Brightman is one of my showbiz obsessions.

For a start she looks as if she had a conventional upbringing in a nice part of the Home Counties. I could imagine her with a pony, or learning ballet or the violin. Just like in ‘The Bunty’.

Then she joined the risqué disco dance group ‘Hot Gossip’ and had a mega-pop hit with ‘I fell in Love With A Starship Trooper’. She lived in London – had a short, glam, brief early marriage - and probably lived in a flat with a peacock chair and a Macrame pot plant holder hanging from the ceiling. Thus her teen years were inspirational.

Next – she’s cast in the musical ’Cats’ and some other musical that Andrew Lloyd Webber went to see forcing him to exclaim ‘she was in Cats for a year and I didn’t notice her!’ before immediately falling in love and writing ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ for her and Frank Spencer. Phantom was a giant global monster and Sarah furthered the Victorian Sloane Ranger look first championed by Princess Diana and the heroines of Dame Barbara Cartland. Tragically the glory that was Gemma Craven in ’The Slipper and the Rose’ was eclipsed until Gemma won a memorable cameo in an episode of ‘Father Ted’.

In the 90s Sarah divorced Andrew and became a recording artist. After a short flirtation with folk rock she teamed up with German producer Frank Peterson of ‘Enigma’ fame and created a series of themed Operatic crossover albums with titles like ‘Dive’, ‘Fly’, ’Eden’, ‘La Luna’ and ‘Harem’ at the same time playing to billions at events like the Olympics and as a spokesperson for huge brands like Panasonic, taking herself from local girl, to British icon to living embodiment of a screen saver in less than two decades.

There have been flaws.

Hot gossip danced as if their choreographer had died in a freak gym accident and with her dying breath had said ‘just pick up my tiny hand-weights and wiggle’. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals were exactly like Ken Russell musicals but with all the sex, satire and decent music removed. And Sarah herself often looked and sounded like an innocent chipmunk scared into emitting a series of random high notes before joyfully discovering that her tormentor was a friend all along.

The flaws, however, can never outshine the triumphs.

Peter Davison as Albert Campion in the 1989 BBC tv series

Albert Campion is the private detective created by Margery Allingham who made his sleuthing debut in ‘The Crime At Black Dudley’ in 1929. Only he wasn’t the detective, and he didn’t sleuth, he was one of the suspects. He was a sort of bumbling, slightly sinister, cross between Bertie Wooster and Raffles. Allingham’s American publisher Doubleday felt the same way about Albert as I do and requested a promotion. He returned in 1930 in ‘Mystery Mile’, a book that put in place most of the ingredients that would make up his 39 year career; he was described as owlish, foolish, blank; he was part detective, part action-adventurer; the crime was partly murder and mostly the hunt for a mystically English object needed to restore to, or keep a family in, their rightful social position; his emotional life was romantic, repressed and (until he was married off) unrequited. 

I can’t explain what it is that made me love him. The first Campion book I read was ‘The Fashion In Shrouds’, about a series of society murders centering around his fashion designer sister Val (all of Campion’s closest friends and relatives would regularly turn up in his stories). For whole chapters the mystery would simply disappear, making it a novel of manners, a study of a small creative group of friends, like a less biting Evelyn Waugh. I thought it was terrible, I thought I was bored, but somehow I bought another book. Then I bought another. After about a month of raiding second-hand bookshops I had to admit – I was addicted. I’m not sure his author felt quite so strongly. It’s rumoured that in his early years he was a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. He was an aristocrat, although he was also estranged from his disapproving family; he found a wife and partner in Amanda Fitton just as Lord Peter found his Harriet Vane; Lord Peter had a valet, his ex-army buddy Bunter, Campion had an ex-burglar buddy called Magersfontein Lugg. 

Harriet Walter and Edward Petherbridge as Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey.

The early Campion adventures were larks. Even the sadness was youthfully bright. He was part of the roaring 20s, the depression didn’t seem to matter. England was a kind of Ruratania. He would battle jewel thieves, blackmailers, larger than life criminal masterminds. He would pose as Royalty, he would fight to the death, he would crack jokes about dead bodies, like a less macho, less focused, James Bond.

During the Second World War he changes. He becomes more serious. Allingham lived on the Essex coast. The county spent most of the war preparing for an invasion that mercifully didn’t come. Both the creator and her creation realised the value of home, and the pain of potentially losing loved ones. Although Albert would make the odd fatuous remark and many of the post-war books would have a holiday tone, he would never again be glib about death. In fact, he became quieter and more humble. He often stepped aside for the police. In his most acclaimed adventure, 1952′s ‘The Tiger In The Smoke’, he hardly features at all. The focus of the novel is on the crazed killer Jack Havoc, the tough realistic Inspector Charles Luke (a character reminiscent of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant) and the gentle, morally concerned, accidentally dangerous, Canon Avril. Having created the charismatic and fantastical Campion in pre-war conditions, it’s almost as if Allingham realised he was out-of-step with post-war reality, and unlike Dorothy L. Sayers, who fought Lord Peter Wimsey’s corner to the end, regretting the marginalisation of his rarefied milieu, Allingham has more progressive instincts; the aristocratic bright young things are gone, and they’re no great loss. What’s most important is how to live in this new world.

Pip, Margery and dog.

It’s been an exciting time for Strathclyde Theatre Group. We haven’t ‘Saved The Ramshorn’ but we haven’t quite lost it yet. The water is turned off but the University is kind enough to let us sneak in now and then. I still have hopes that we’ll take over the building and run it as a community arts venue but so far that’s a pipe dream. Not that I actually do anything – I just drink lattes, chatter, day-dream, get a bit shy at bizarre moments, turn up late, booze, try to avoid photographs, gossip, eat snacks, write in my notebook, read novels, bitch about stuff, think about going home, tell dog-based anecdotes, look terrible in photographs, & occasionally press the ‘Go’ button on the lighting board.

But despite my chronic malingering NOW has been very busy.

Firstly STG has been involved in a theatre competition called ‘Stagestruck’ that will be shown on Sky Arts in the Spring of 2012. Its focus must be on theatre practice because they haven’t been gathering backstage dramas and they don’t seem to mind the participants blogging about who gets through to the next round. STG got picked for the first round – we sent in a video that was put on their website and the judges picked seven groups and the public voted for one group. Then we went to Northampton for round 2 (we had to perform a scene from the Cherry Orchard) and we got through to the semi-final in Stratford-Upon-Avon. In Stratford, the weekend a fortnight before the judging, we had a workshop with our acting mentor Dame Harriet Walter (who is one of the nicest, most knowledgable, talented actresses in the universe – I’m not exaggerating) and two workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company, one on movement and one on voice.

The Royal Shakespeare Company!

I’d try to be a reverse snob – but I can’t. They’re a fabulous organisation. Friendly, high quality, a bit quirky and fun. I’d die to work for them – if that wasn’t a complete impossibility (could I be their resident ghost???). My fat non-acting ass sat in the corner and the workshops were still gold-dust. I couldn’t be happier.

The competition itself was more nerve-wracking. Never in my life have I obsessed so much about six cues. Mainly it was because I had to talk into headphones in the wings while watching a monitor and talking to a woman I’ve still never seen. I was very lucky that Sarah was friendly, knew her stuff, knew I was awkward about my stuff and made me feel I wasn’t talking into a scary void. Richard, the over-all stage manager was comfortingly efficient and I could start cueing whenever I wanted, so it wasn’t that bad.

I’m proud of the two scenes from King Lear that we staged. Our actors were fantastic (a couple of fluffed lines were seamlessly covered over) and we had some striking minimalist visuals. Our flaws were happily minor – no sound cues, too close to the end of the stage. We didn’t get through but it was a close thing. Bill Kenwright (my mother’s favourite producer!) loved us and wanted us in the final but we were undone by Quentin Letts (Daily Mail theatre critic – he seemed quite nice & not the spawn of the devil I was expecting) and Miriam Margolyes (adorable actress). Miriam whirlwinded up to our dressing-room afterwards to tell us we were a great group, we should say ‘f*ck them & go on, but we lacked spark; being supportive and utterly crushing in the one speech.

But still - it’s Miriam Margolyes! In person! In Stratford!

The two groups in the final are the operatic Goliath of Regent Rep from Bournemouth and the naturalistic David of Crossmichael Drama Club from the Borders. I’ll be delighted for whoever wins but I have a definite soft spot for Crossmichael and I’d love to see them win it. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed.

We also got to meet and spend time with the high-energy Liverpool Theatre Group – Tell Tale. They’re young, new and exciting and I can’t wait to see one of their productions.

http://www.telltaletheatre.co.uk/about

Next year STG will likely be back in Stratford for another competition : the RSC’s Open Stages. We’ll be staging a full production of Coriolanus and my fingers and toes will be crossed for that one.

This week we’re staging ‘The Crucible’ at the Cottiers Theatre in Glasgow. It’s a great production – even though I have to endure the UNBEARABLE HORROR of school parties. Still – they did love it. Apparently it’s just like Eastenders. Success!

So onwards and upwards! The bleak future is becoming quite bright.

http://www.strathclydetheatregroup.co.uk/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z82TeQxVaU

filming our director Bruce Downie for 'Stagestruck'

Arthur Darvill, Karen Gillan & Matt Smith in 'Dr Who'

Being a fan of horror and adventure more than romance I had no idea that ‘Romantic Suspense’ or ‘Gothic Romance’ was still a genre that sold until the success of Young Adult Paranormal Romances like ‘Twilight’ and ‘The Vampire Diaries’ brought stories with elements of love and fear into the mainstream from books to cinema to television. Even the BBC family sci-fi show ‘Doctor Who’ has its own brooding relationship tensions between the Doctor, his companion Amy Pond and her husband Rory. Which reminded me of a small pile of Romance paperbacks that drifted about my room in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some of which I actually read (years later - I was only born in 77), and of the girls comics I cherished like ‘Bunty’, ‘Judy’, ‘Misty’ and ‘Diana’ which often featured tales of gothic, thwarted, quasi-historical love affairs.

Of course the genre starts with Ann Radcliffe.

Mother Radcliffe, as the poet John Keats christened her, was the first writer to take the gothic horror pioneered in ‘The Castle of Otranto’ by Horace Walpole and combine it with a love story. My favourite of her books is ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’, written in 1794, where the innocent orphan Emily St. Aubert is menaced by the vile Montoni, imprisoned in the terrifying Castle Udolpho, escapes and is reunited with her one true love Valencourt. I was passionately in love with Valencourt for about three chapters, until he dithered about handing money over to a peasant, after that – well, I tried - but it was never going to be the same.

a body is discovered in 'The Mysteries of Udolpho'

Ann liked to keep her disgusting villains and her male love interests separate but the Bronte sisters would combine them.

Timothy Dalton & Ann Calder-Marshal in 'Wuthering Heights'

Charlotte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ was published in 1847. The eponymous heroine is an orphan with no money who grows up to become a governess to a child at a large sinister mansion called Thornfield. Although mousey and plain, Jane is determined and has morals. She falls in love with her stern and rather tormented employer Mr Rochester. Strange things happen, they get engaged, it turns out he’s already married and his mad wife is kept in the attic. Jane leaves him and nearly dies until coming into an inheritance. She returns to Thornfield, finds Rochester blind, the house burned and his wife dead. They marry and he recovers. In Emily’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, published in December of the same year, the hero is the orphan, born into poverty and brought to Wuthering, not quite as a servant but not as an equal. He’s wild, violent and possessive. He and the heroine, Cathy, play together on the moors as children, she declares that he’s her life, but still leaves him to marry a man of her own class. She dies – and in the part of the book no one much remembers – Heathcliff takes revenge on her daughter. The revenge doesn’t work out, he sees visions of Cathy, and he dies.

In the 1970s and 1980s ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ were the quintessential reading of a moody teenage girl. They read the books, they watched the tv and film adaptations, they listened to the single by Kate Bush. They were as much a part of the era as peacock chairs, Bryan Ferry, Biba, Disco, David Cassidy, rubix cubes and the New Romantics.

One of the many film versions of Jane Eyre

There would always be a few Mills and Boon’ in their collections, with titles like ‘My Dearest Demon’, ’Dark Master’ and ‘Savage Surrender’. The most obviously thrilling books were written by Charlotte Lamb, the pseudonym of Sheila Holland, a former BBC researcher who wrote her first book in three days while looking after her husband and five children.  There would probably be a copy of ‘Dragonwyck’ by Anya Seaton, or ‘Forever Amber’ (Amber being Amber St. Clare!) by Kathleen Winsor, two racy 1940s American novels, both of which were turned into steamy 1940s films. There would also likely be ‘Rebecca’ and ‘My Cousin Rachel’ by Daphne du Maurier, full of the desperate sinister menace she perfected.

Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland in 'My Cousin Rachel' 1952

Then there was Cornwall-based writer Winston Graham who created a realistic historical sprawling saga gothic in his ‘Poldark’ series of novels charting the tangled love life of his scarred and tormented mine-owning retired soldier Captain Ross Poldark, who marries the daughter of a miner, loves the wife of his cousin and fights over her with his jumped-up new money business rival George Warleggan. There were murders, rapes and family curses. The BBC adapted the books and the tv series was transmitted between 1975 and 1977.

Robin Ellis & Angharad Rees as Ross & Demelza Poldark

His novel, ‘Marnie’, was turned in to a twisted, psychological gothic romance Alfred Hitchcock movie starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, a film that would periodically play late at night on the BBC throughout most of my childhood.

Tippi Hedron & Sean Connery in 'Marnie'

Stanley Kubrick’s film of ‘Barry Lyndon’ was a chilly satire of a gothic romance, our hero marrying for money and ending with nothing. The sets, the costumes, the poster, Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, everything was puzzlingly like those great swashbuckers Richard Chamberlain was making in the 1970s – ‘The Slipper and the Rose’, ‘The Count of Monte Christo’ , ‘The Man In the Iron Mask’ – but the tone was disturbingly wrong. It was intellectually dark and distant - nothing like the 1983 BBC version of ‘Jane Eyre’ or the 1970 film version of ‘Wuthering Heights’ both starring Timothy Dalton, who seemed to be the deepest, most haunted, most aching actor in the world… but still… I could never quite get the theme tune ‘Women of Ireland’ out of my soul.

Much more suitable was the timeslip drama ‘The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan’ starring Lindsey Wagner. Made for American tv in 1979 it was about a wife trying to salvage her failing marriage who finds a dress that transports her back to Victorian times and the loving arms of a more solid and reliable man. Like a lot of 1970s romance it was about trying to be liberated and a modern woman, but also wanting the passion and safety of an old-fashioned relationship. What I remembered was the Laura Ashley style dress that was her passport to the past. Dressing-up and dreaming might lead to meeting a sensational boyfriend like David Bowie in Labyrinth – and not some spotty kid who sits behind you in double maths.

As I got older the heavy gothics briefly gave way to perky sexcom romances – the infamous bonkbusters - like ‘The World Is Full of Married Men’ by Jackie Collins – made into a an amazingly disco showbiz SEX MONEY SCANDAL, career v. love,  peacock chair-fest film in 1979. Or ‘Riders’ and ‘Polo’ by Jilly Cooper – HORSES! POSH TOTTY! And ‘Lace’ by Shirley Conran made into a Dynasty-Dallas joy of mini-series in 1984 containing the world’s greatest line ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother’.

Sherrie Lee Cronn & Anthony Franciosa

Then I got old and phobic about girly romances. Frankly I was too much of a sickly, hopeless geek and romances were promising me things I wasn’t sure I was entitled to even dream about. I moved on to H.G. Wells and Philip K. Dick and forgot all about Gothic till I noticed the rows and rows of sexy vampire stories filling the shelves of every bookshop everywhere.

And it triggered a memory. DOROTHY EDEN!

I searched for Dorothy on the internet and didn’t get much. She was born in New Zealand. She moved to Britain in 1954, she died in 1982. She wrote 43 novels, many of them marketed as Gothic romances or Romantic suspense. To me she is the modern Queen of the genre. I’m not sure why. The heroes are terrible – a hairy Norwegian University lecturer, an uptight bored solicitor, a smirking artist. Even the glamourous settings somehow manage to come across like a wet afternoon in Bognor… in January. But there’s always a tightly plotted little mystery that packs a real punch. The solutions are ingenious and the fates of many characters are starkly tragic. They’re addictive. I wish someone would turn them into ITV style crime dramas or grimly glossy Brit flicks.

Because of Dorothy I will be seeking out more in the Romantic suspense genre, rediscovering some of the lost worlds of my childhood, and dreaming of my potential future.

It will look like this

Lots of great writers are angry about stuff. Mostly it’s political. They’re socialists or liberals or conservatives and they hate anyone or anything that gets in the way of their beliefs. Mostly it’s well thought out, it centres on the values, and it isn’t that kind of chronic bigotry aimed at identifiable groups of human beings that can disfigure a novel or film or play into unreadability or unwatchability.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it almost is.

Sometimes it is if you’re in the group the hate is aimed at.

Sometimes the hate makes it better.

It all depends on how much the hate is internalized and made universal and how much vulnerability and fear the writer shows.

The trouble with writers is that there’s too much time to brood and far too many rejections to goad even the most stable person into developing elaborate theories as to why they’re being excluded and who by. The European favourite in the past was always the Jews. Liberal or socialist, conservative or fascist, until after the second world war, the looming image of the greedy, rootless, loyalty-free Jew was the go-to for hating on. It’s obvious why. Numbers and real power. If Jews boycotted your novel, you’d still be a bestseller, most publishers were not Jewish, and since people hate to hear bad things about themselves and the world is full of bad things and powerful people can exact vicious revenges – picking a small, visible group and having a reasonable cover-story (they killed Christ, they hate the name of Christ, they desecrate the host, they poison wells, they murder Christian children, they secretly run the world)  is an easy way of unleashing all your bitchy fury and self-loathing on to the world without reprisals or self-accusations.

Shylock and Fagin are nice depictions compared to most others, probably because Shakespeare could see Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians killing each other as if they were non-Christians, and Dickens reserved his greatest hatreds for anyone who created the conditions that made his working in a boot factory as a child a necessity. The Jewish writer Mendele Mocher Sefarim was so grief-striken at the hate Jews faced that all he could write were caricatures, self-hating laments on this one theme. His inner world was dominated by how others felt about him. The Irish Protestant academic Vivian Mercier wrote a fantastic book called ‘The Irish Comic Tradition’, clearly he loved and wanted to be part of Irish Literature,  but he couldn’t help taking a couple of snobby swipes at Irish Catholics (he probably didn’t even realise he was doing it) and then lists insults aimed at Protestants by Catholic poets as if picking a wound is the best way of healing it. The Victorian novelist Marie Corelli had a real talent for writing oddball new-age religious romances, but page after page of her work has prissy insults aimed at all the male critics who thought she was a crap writer, who would have left her to starve if an insightful publisher hadn’t the intelligence to rescue her. Partly it’s flattering to her audience, they’re insiders in her elevated circle, but mostly it ruins the story and limits her imagination. But at least they took the path of lashing out, in a very personal way, at their declared haters or themselves.

Other writers simply spew out the hate.

In ‘Zuleika Dobson’ a comedy about a beautiful woman who causes lethal chaos at Oxford, Max Beerhohm stops the plot dead in Chapter 13 to lauch an unprovoked attack on a minor character. ‘Noaks’ is some disgusting working-class person with no looks and no manners who has been allowed, by some kind of government grant, to disgrace the gloriously doomed boys (who come from decent schools like Eton and Harrow) with his weedy, ignoble, vulgar presence. As Max was Jewish and gay it’s probably his own projected feelings about himself,  but you’d have to surmise that from his biography, it’s not in the book. In hundreds of British colonial novels our insecurity (will we be defeated? Will we be subjugated? Will we die abroad? Will we be stuck in a poor country? Will our descendants be poor?) and our guilt (our Empire was too late – liberal democracy and nationalism had replaced feudal landlords and conquering Kings and we knew it) played out in a million Chinese villains (opium dens! White slavery! Gangs!), sexy but barbaric and disgusting Arabs (a street arab was a thief, a dirty arab was applied to anyone we didn’t like), and black tribesmen banging drums and raising Zombies with voodoo. Rudyard Kipling’s reputation only survived ‘the white man’s burden’ rubbish because he was fond of India and mostly hated the British Raj for being incompetent (and causing tension) and for being weak (and wanting to give up).

The crime writer Josephine Tey had class and race issues. In ‘The Franchise Affair’ two nice middle-class women are holed up with depleting resources in a crumbling country manor assailed by the forces of the welfare state. Some young tart accuses them of kidnap. A mob of yokels try to burn their house down. The book constantly pits their decency with this new world of the feckless poor made entitled and lazy by the post Second-world war Labour government. There’s an ‘us’ unjustly on our way down, and a ‘them’ unfairly on their way up. This is a writer in agony and under threat, making no effort to ask herself if she’s being proportionate. In ‘The Singing Sands’ her hero, Inspector Grant, goes on holiday to Scotland and ends up involved in a murder case that seems to hinge on a creepy poem ‘The beasts that talk, the streams that stand, the stones that walk, the singing sand…’. If she’d burrowed into the animistic horror of that poem she might have created a powerful story – instead she takes nasty swipes at Scottish Nationalism, the Gaels and Glasgow. She was a Scottish writer attached to the Union, but also, attached to uniformity and the mainstream. To find herself in contested space was painful. But again, she didn’t question herself, she simply accused Scottish Nationalists of being destructive and sentimental (and of being Irish – outsiders posing as us to do us harm), the Gaels of being some kind of fairy race who should stick to tourism, and Glasgow of being so horrible no one should ever set foot in it.

Scotland’s position is an odd one; dominated but not oppressed, enlightened but dogmatic. Intellectually it’s difficult not to get hysterical and freaked out by it. So many influences, so many damn contradictions, so many double binds and dead ends! But at her best she was capable of turning that confusion in to an eerie atmosphere of doomed affection, or threatened serenity. I’m in danger of seeing lesbians around every corner – but I can’t help but feel the real source of her lashing out was her sexuality. Her best novel is ‘To Love And Be Wise’, a murder mystery shot through with the longing of one woman for another, not only unspoken but unspeakable. For most writers, who need a career, the thing that truly bugs them is too terrifying to be tackled head on. The thing that truly terrifies them is the thing that would stop them having a career.

Annoying as feeling censored is – it can be for the best.

Hate can date.

H. P Lovecraft was a racist. He thought non-whites were inferior to whites, and that whites could degenerate into non-whites through bad blood. This was a science based theory in his day, a bastardisation and amplification of evolution. Hitler used it to explain why his nice drawings were shunned and degenerate artists got their foul daubings critically acclaimed. If you didn’t want to believe that modern life was rubbish because capitalism had made us competitive and hedonistic and the proles were destined to murder us all in our beds before creating a shared Utopia, then fascism was your fall-back. Fascism was about blood and land. You, with your fine blood, belong in this fine land. If your fine blood is doing badly in this fine land then some INVADER! has either infected you or is blocking you. Both H. P.’s parents had gone mad, and he was so shy his social opportunities were limited. Fearing madness, and knowing he wasn’t doing as well as he should, despite being highly intelligent, he scapegoated blacks and Asians. Looked at with hostility we’re all (any human on Earth) ugly morons who should be shot or kept in cages, and H.P. was looking with bewildered, paranoid, hostility. It gave him nightmares. Wisely he wrote the nightmares down instead of his rationalizations. His horrors are full of ancient primal gods, slimy forgotten fish peoples, aliens lurking in the darkest regions of infinity waiting to come into our present. Some nice black woman going shopping could probably inspire him into a baroque description of murderous torsos, human sacrifices and cackling cave-systems. He created the Necromonicon, a sparingly quoted from bible of hybrid evils, an icon, an endless source of  free-floating anxiety and delirious non-specific dread.

Bruce Robinson isn’t entirely a hater, but ‘Withnail and I’ , a brilliant film about struggling actors, one working-class and one posh, has issues. Uncle Monty gets a couple of socialist lines, Withnail makes the point that some things are ‘free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t', the drug dealer Danny tells us that ‘we’re about to witness the world’s biggest hangover and there’s fuck all Harold Wilson can do about it’ but really the whole film is a gibbering homophobic, misogynist masculine meltdown. If Bruce had gone the way of John Osborne whose later plays contained constant, dramatically worthless, digs at woman and gays (bunch of bitches the lot of them – is the general jist), the film would very uncomfortable – as it is – it focused on the FEAR.

Marwood (the I) stares in horror at a fat old lady eating a dripping sandwich while a newspaper headline declares a man happy to be getting a sex change into a woman. Withnail talks about a shot putter who took anabolic steroids, he urges an unwilling Marwood to look at the picture of how enormous the man is and gasps ‘imagine getting into a fight with the fucker’. Marwood is made to feel lesser when Withnail lets his Uncle Monty think Marwood went to Harrow (class being just another factor that makes a man feel under threat), and panics about Monty seeming to be a ‘lunatic’ and a ‘raving homosexual’.

In a pub Marwood gets insulted by a giant drunk Northern Irishman and before being betrayed by a cowardly Withnail and them both having to flee, he goes to the bathroom and panics in a Voice Over that goes like this ‘I could hardly piss straight with fear. Here was a man with three-quarters of an inch of brain who had taken a dislike to me. What had I done to offend him? I don’t consciously offend big men like this. This one has a definite imbalance of hormone in him. Get any more masculine than him and you’d have to live up a tree… (sees graffiti) ‘I fuck arses’? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses. Maybe he’s written this in a moment of drunken sincerity? I’m in considerable danger in here. I must get out of here at once…‘ Marwood has gone into the pub. smelling of petunia to mask the smell of vomit, and the man calls him a ‘ponce’ so it’s obvious the man thinks he’s a long-haired dandy. But Marwood doesn’t mention it. Marwood thinks the attack comes from nowhere before worrying that it may turn into a rape. Later on in the film a pub. landlord (who Withnail smarms up to by claiming he and Marwood were in the Army) remarks ‘taking a crack and the Mick’, and the film allows it to pass. Only Marwood’s masculinity matters, every other man just has to take it.

Marwood is ridiculously menaced by Uncle Monty, after he and Withnail go on holiday to Uncle Monty’s cottage. Monty turns up late at night, terrifying Withnail and Marwood, who are in bed together fearing that a rural poacher wants to attack them. Later on it turns out that Monty only gave them the cottage because Withnail led him to believe Marwood could be seduced. While there Monty strides across the moors telling them aggrandising tales of his youth. He stands too close to Marwood. He plays mind-games. He gives Marwood motivations and a character he doesn’t have; trying to force him into seeing himself as a naughty tease who fancies Monty. He calls Marwood conservative, tells him he’s cutting himself off from experiences he would enjoy, that he’s lying to himself, that he’s wasting his youth. Finally he tries to sexually assault him and Marwood escapes by telling him that he’s too in love with Withnail to ever cheat on him. Then he storms off to Withnail and yells at him while holding a gun.

Monty has no real power over Marwood. It’s Withnail that has the power. It’s Withnail who causes Marwood to initially put up with Monty’s harassment and once Marwood stands up to Withnail, they wistfully part company. Marwood goes on to an acting  job, Withnail quotes Hamlet to the wolves in Regents Park, alone and abandoned. Withnail’s class and self-assurance have been oppressing Marwood, but Marwood doesn’t know it because he admires him so much. That’s why Marwood has to project his worries on to other men and old, ugly, repellant battle-axes (the only young women in the film are school girls. Withnail shouts ‘scubbers’ at them and says ‘they love it’). Those feelings have to go somewhere, but no object is good enough. Irishmen, poachers, gay men… they trigger his fears, but there’s no way of over-coming them.

Danny and his friend Presuming Ed (of whom Marwood says ‘who’s the huge spade in the bath?’ as if being called a ponce hasn’t nearly caused him a nervous breakdown) provide the drugs that keep Marwood stuck in his flat and, after the disastrous holiday it’s their warped political ideals that give Marwood the practical reason to escape (kept back rent cheques, drugged rodents)…  But still Marwood focuses on anyone but Withnail… His parting look is one of sympathy and affection.

Maybe it’s a metaphor for the love of the acting profession that forced many working-class actors into adopting R.P. accents and confronting the politics of the casting couch?

What if something you love hates you? Or you hate the way it loves you?

All of our fear and hate couldn’t exist without love and longing.

Deeply felt fears can be transformed into biting lines and memorable situations.

Demographic Panic – the fear that who and what we think we are, or are thought to be by others (who are or will be stronger),  is not good enough –  is a natural thing.

When the panic is rationalised into hate, it makes writing repulsive.

I’ve never believed in cool – within five minutes everything is rendered naff – all you have to do is get used to it. All art is trashy kitsch looked at with jaded eyes. Only extreme youth, beauty and images of danger have the right kick. But we all get old, beauty fades, and dangers can be so horrible we should feel guilty for making them art. There are canons of good art. Opera is good. Ballet is good. The Young British Artists of the 90s were good. Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen… enough academics think they’re not naff, so they’re not naff. Naff is never academic, or genuinely aristocratic. Even though your average British stately home is a riot of hideous china figurines, disgusting gold leaf and appalling chintz – they’ve got class. Naff has to want class or the good life or a good life, but it can’t have it. Naff is a Royal mug in a semi-detached, Naff is a karaoke contest on the Costa del Sol. Naff is mainstream, genteel, safe, prissy, priggish, timid, ingratiating, wrong, pretentious, bad but not boring, foolish, ridiculous, unintellectual. Lumpen with aspirations.

Theatrical naff in the 20th Century centred on the Well-Made Play. The well-made play had one set – two at the most – three would make it a musical. TWMP was an understated version of the melodrama – nice hero, nice heroine, nasty villain, icy villainess, comical servants, dear old Mas & Pas. There was a problem – social for a serious play (like drink, or war, or divorce), domestic for a comedy (like love, career, impressing the neighbours) and a mixture of both for the thrillers and the farces. It tended to have three acts. In the first scene of the first act the characters were set up. In the second scene of the first act the problem loomed. In the second act the problem complicated. In the third act the problem was resolved. The dialogue was plain (with maybe a bit of baroque punning in a farce), the pace was even, shouting came at the end, the moral was common-sence. There was no sex, violence or swearing. Religion was quietly kept in the background. Politics would occasionally intrude, most often to tell the audience that it wasn’t intruding because that would make it a play written by some kind of radical & we wouldn’t want to be one of those would we?

Some writers of TWMP were in their element like Dodie Smith (Dear Octopus) or Enid Bagnold (The Chalk Garden), some writers like Emlyn Williams (Night Must Fall) were trapped by it.

The eternal nephew, Terrence Rattigan

Terence Rattigan, a playwright who destroyed his own credibility in the 1960s with his half-comical, half bitchy defences of TWMP, called its audience Aunt Edna. Aunt Edna wanted a bit of glamour, a bit of excitement, ideas for furnishings and clothes she could reasonably save up for, and an idealised version of her life – getting married, having children, her husband having a job, retirement. It could be scaled down and taken literally. It wasn’t idealistic. It wasn’t Jesus Christ telling us to drop everything and follow him. It wasn’t a demagogue urging us to take up arms for the Revolution. It wasn’t sex, drugs, rock’n'roll and a tragic early death. It was sensible, sustainable and amiable. You wouldn’t have to go bankrupt trying to buy a house in the South of France (a weekend in Brighton would be just the same), you wouldn’t have to trash hotel rooms and snort coke (you’d rather redecorate and have a sherry). It wasn’t some high concept piece of pop culture agitating you for more – more money, more power, more influence, more everything, more anything.

Aunt Ednas exist at the heart of all settled cultures. She’s British, Irish, Jamaican, Indian, American… she’s Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Pagan. She’s whatever she was raised to be and doesn’t have to think too much about. She’s very loyal and attached. She’s very fearful and phobic. She doesn’t want to hear anything threatening or mean. She can be a snob and a bigot – but she’s not aware of it. She would be hurt and bewildered if you pointed it out. If you pointed it out on a stage she would feel slightly sick, and accused. She would walk away sorrowfully wondering why the ‘Bright Young Things’ hated her so, or she’d glare furiously hoping someone else would boo while she harrumphed. She thinks the country is all wrong, but she doesn’t want anything to change. That’s the centre of Aunt Edna, she can veer to the left or the right. She can assimilate new norms – as long as it’s a bit gay and not laddish. She’s never going gangsta, she might go drag queen. If she does go gangsta it’ll be to indulge her beloved Grandson. Aunt Edna’s standards warp around those she loves.

Aunt Edna loves Romance and Murder.

She did then, she does now. (Curiously enough, while her rap loving gangsta Grandson is the subject of a moral panic over his listening and viewing choices – it caused the London Riots! -  no one worries that the Christmas treat of the nation’s nice old ladies is a polite orgy of throat cutting, poisoning, stabbing, burning, running over, shooting, battering and trip-wiring).  

And so the reigning Queen of the Well Made Play (still to be seen touring and in the West End – with stars!) is the reigning Queen of the Golden Age Crime Novel, Agatha Christie.

Young Agatha Christie

Agatha has nice characters (sketched in with a few details, but the leads seem to be based on real people rather than stock types) and great plots. The plot is the main point of an Agatha story so that any morals, or accusations would be slipped in behind the basic business of murder and detection. It keeps the heat off the audience. It’s the difference between a Bible basher who thunders away and makes you feel like a worthless sinner or makes you feel like you really ought to go lynch those worthless sinners or you’ve neglected your duty, and a nice Priest who reads a bit of the Bible and tells us something mildly uplifting or improving we could take from it.

Her books clatter along and the puzzle keeps our attention. Darker things bubble beneath in a way they don’t for almost any other crime writer. Agatha seems puzzled by life. She can feel emotions, can see actions… but she doesn’t quite understand how they ended up in Devon. How can we have created a world of afternoon tea and the postal service when we’re capable of stabbing each other to death in a frenzy of passion? Things just are. There’s the surface, normal and sure. There’s the dream world of crime. There’s before and after. She evades the transitions. She hates anything contested. Her narrators are unreliable, her suspects appear to one thing and are often revealed to be another. You can’t trust a policeman to be a policeman, you can’t trust a nurse not to poison their patient. Lovely people can be evil, evil people can be noble. Her worst ire is for idealists who try to bring the normal world of order and the dream world of passion together with explanations or new ways of living.

Her imagination seems to have been driven by childhood fantasy. An Edwardian world of nursery rhymes, Chivalry and fairyland. Bad things are valiant in fantasy. There’s no moral horror in being a King with a Kingdom of peasants, no shame in slaying a dragon, conquering a country or kidnapping a fair maiden. Children are scolded and pinched, gingerbread men are chased and eaten, wily rabbits try to outwit hungry foxes. But that’s not how nice well brought up ladies would behave in real life. Then she grew up and her world was not always as happy as she was told it should be. Her father died when she was young, her opera career failed, the first world war sent her out to work in a pharmaceutical dispensary (where she learnt not only about poisons, but that being near poison could make even the most ordinary and mousy seeming man feel powerful), her first husband cheated on her and she suffered a breakdown (disappearing and sparking a nationwide man-hunt, before turning up in Yorkshire, claiming to have amnesia). With all these pretences, all these incompatible perspectives, the theatre was a natural home for her work.

She benefited from coming from a well-established world of crime novels. She had a breadth of experience and a commitment to the technical aspects of the story that most writers of ‘crook plays’ didn’t have. It wasn’t a case of getting them on and off stage, of having a body and a couple of big scenes. Her murder plays are so well plotted that there’s room to wonder about the people, their lifestyle, what it makes them feel. It borders on the mythic or the metaphysical. In ‘And Then There Were None’ (the original title was Ten Little Niggers – the plot corresponds to a nursery rhyme of the same title, it’s like ten green bottles with black boys and it’s appropriately hideous, though too controversial in our racially awkward times) visitors are trapped on an island and bumped off one by one, in ‘Appointment with Death’ a domineering woman seems to be outdone by the heat, the sand and the timelessness of the desert, in ‘Spider’s Web’ a murder has to be endlessly covered up for political reasons.

Modern audiences adore this stuff. The tourists are still packing in to see the ‘Mousetrap’ in London, and Bill Kenwright Ldt has its own ‘Agatha Christie Players’ (with stars! And Mark Wynter!) who seem to be touring a play a year. I’ve seen every one of them – my Mother is a wee Glasgow Aunt Edna (by sheer force of will – she grew up in Yoker - she should be watching pantomimes, male strippers and anything involving motherhood or the menopause and cackling) and she wouldn’t miss it. They star actors unseen since reality tv ate the schedules; Susan Penhaligon! That guy out of ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’! That young one that looks like that one who was married to that bloke who ran off with Dirk Bogarde but who isn’t because she’s young! The Glasgow audience is not an easy one for anything English, unless it’s Edna English, in which case Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic (and Asian – not too many though, this is a massive failing of British Naff culture – skin colour is still a bar to belonging, to feeling safe, to identifying with the lead) can come together in a common cause. They ooh at a bit of thigh, chuckle at a thieving cockney char, sigh at a lovelorn yokel, gasp at an attempted strangulation. It’s amazing to see that level of engagement. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to seeing a show booed off the stage or an author called for during a standing ovation. Posher theatre is dullsville in comparison; there’s laughter, maybe a bit of under-the-breath heckling, but not much else.

Agatha has her haters. She’s been accused of anti-Semitism – she was fond of referring to people having a Jewish nose – possibly because she knew someone who had a Jewish nose and she kept recycling the detail. She’s been accused of stereotyping the working-class, I think she wrote what she saw, which wasn’t much outside of her own sphere. She’s been accused of implying that foreigners are sinister – I think her hero Poirot throws a bucket of cold water over that one. Besides she was half-American, she wasn’t pure English anyway. She’s been accused of homophobia for her constant references to manly women and effete men. I don’t know how much a woman of her class and generation would really, properly know about homosexuality – it could all have been half-hidden from her – but there’s no evidence she disliked gays. No anecdotes of rudeness. Even in her later, demented novels where lesbians get a direct mention – there’s no hint that she thought lesbians a bad thing. In fact - the whisper has always been that her second husband was gay and Agatha herself might not, given half a chance, have been quite so straight. Anyway, she was surrounded by men and women who went to boarding school, who had a pash for a fellow inmate and who came out of the whole shebang Jolly Hockey Sticks practical or a bit of a dandy. It was all grist to her ‘don’t trust a book by its cover’ mill.

Myself – I love her work. I love a Well Made Play. I like Naff.

I wouldn’t be able to write it and I’d die of boredom if that’s all there was. But at its best, with its audience, in all its artificial glamour and glory. It’s perfection.

So I was overjoyed to find some lessons on DVD – in this case, ’Playing Shakespeare’, a series of nine acting Master Classes, written and presented by John Barton (co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company), featuring members of the Royal Shakespeare Company : Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Church, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Susan Fleetwood, Mike Gwilym, Sheila Hancock, Lisa Harrow (my favourite), Alan Howard, Ben Kingsley, Jane Lapotiare, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Ian McKellen, Richard Pasco, Michael Pennington, Roger Rees, Norman Rodway, Donald Sindon (a man who can’t sniff without booming), Patrick Stewart (pre-Star Trek), David Suchet (pre-Poirot) and Michael Williams. It was filmed in 1982 and transmitted in 1984. A young Helena Bonham Carter was in the audience. It was produced by Melvyn Bragg and made by London Weekend Television for ITV – back in the days when ITV wanted to bring a bit of culture to the masses.

The DVD cover of Playing Shakespeare

Of course I learnt a lot. How to follow the line and put pauses were Shakespeare put pauses, how to use irony, how to play the words and let the emotions follow naturally. I learnt that Shakespeare is not boring if the actor relishes the language (I also learnt that almost all actors don’t relish it – John Barton was the best actor in the programme, possibly because he was the only one who really-honestly-completely understood and trusted the work). I learnt that actors have a type of nervy desperation in filmed rehearsals, half wanting to be one-up on the other actors, half terrified of being rubbish, and being wildly deferential, jokey and pally to cover it up – which was quite entertaining since I didn’t have to go through it.  Lisa Harrow was lovely and heartbreaking. Patrick Stewart did bizarre things with his voice. Roger Rees was so lively I could swear a drug was involved.

Lisa Harrow & Roger Rees in 1973 - photo by Wolynski

But for all I learnt about acting, Shakespearean verse and human nature… what really impressed me was how seriously they took it. They’d managed to find something that gave – for the time they worked on it – meaning and structure to their lives. It involved action, it involved emotions, but it had rules, it had limits, it had a purpose. They would dedicate themselves to their roles, would learn their lines and movements, and then would present it to an audience, who would enjoy it, or learn from it, or would long to be part of it, or would take the actors as role models or dream lovers or leaders of their own personal cultural tribe… It’s easy to take the piss out of them. John Barton’s sweet, chubby little face seems as hand-knitted as his tie and his cardy, the actors are ‘frightfully’ middle-class (the poor sods could be starving on the RSC wages but their vowels would still sound as if they should be telling the servants what they want for dinner) and they make acting seem like the most GRAVE, IMPORTANT, RISKY thing in the world, which it isn’t. You could also get angry at them for eating up all those resources – the time, the money, the heating, the lighting, the space, the props, the costumes, the make-up, the sets, the snacks - just to arse about with a dead poet; Pol Pot would stick them in the fields, Chairman Mao would get the students to batter them, Fidel Castro would probably roll his eyes a bit and wish he could put them in a field or batter them. They’re so LUCKY.

Because having something to do, something to revere, helps to evade the most pressing modern problem; what’s the point?

What is the bloody point? We’re born, we keep alive (often by eating some other creature that’s trying to keep alive), we pass on our genes or we don’t, and we die. We absolutely always die. You can have the greatest life in the world and you’ll still have to kick the bucket. In the olden days we were half dead and our survival instinct wouldn’t give us time to contemplate such things – really, if we all want to be mentally healthy we should go back to hunting and gathering and dying at 20; then we had religion or at least superstition (and some of us still do – although even the true believers have doubts, it would be hard not to since Science and secularism keeps bombarding us with facts and alternatives – I had to let my heart and my head go their separate ways, my heart says ‘Jesus!’, my head says ‘Jesus’ while tutting at me)… and beyond half dying and worshipping the Creator, what?

I think there’s roughly three directions we can stumble down.

1. Fixations – this could be one thing, one thing at a time, or hundreds of things screaming in your brain all the time. This covers drink, drugs, sex, food, shopping, ideology, phobias, fears, illnesses, twitter… anything that eats your time up and fills your imagination with possibilities… this can be listless and amoral, or driven and judgemental.

2. Going up – getting more stuff, earning more money, having more power and influence, gaining a higher status, perfecting a skill, beating an opponent… This can be individual or collective, real or imaginary, personal or vicarious… it can be work, or sport, or war, or family, or a hobby.

3. Going down – getting rid of stuff, helping others, sacrificing, giving up… this is when you do things for the greater good, or for a higher power, or to serve a noble idea,or to raise your unique sprogs, or save adorable donkeys… you can be admired for it or you can be seen as a creepy smothering controlling enabler.  

Lots of patterns of living incorporate all three – like buying tons of stuff from Oxfam or looting Oxfam without getting caught by the cops, or fighting for economic equality or fighting to preserve a traditional hierarchy.  And some people are stuck with one and wish they had another – like working in a call centre and wanting to rescue whales. And some people have none – like being stuck in a house, with no money, no job, and nothing to go out for.

We’re surrounded by these choices and have no choices at all. We need to be in the right place, at the right time, knowing what we want or else we muddle along with mild to acute frustrations, wondering what’s missing. All our biggest arguments, panics and manias centre on trying to persuade others that this pattern is the best pattern, and that pattern will lead us to DOOM - that DOOM happily hiding the real DOOM, which is that you’re bleeding going to die and nature doesn’t care (or not care) if you do it painfully or in your sleep or in silk sheets or in a ditch. That thought is agony. We need a discipline. A guide. Some rules. Consequences. Anything that cuts through the chaos. Anything so we don’t have to think it. Anything so we don’t have to think of the terrible thing we think about when we don’t know what the real terrible thing is.

If only we could feel as sure as those Shakespearean actors in that rehearsal room….  

John Barton, Sir Ian McKellen, David Suchet