Alan Brien - In Memoriam

Alan Brien going live

2011-12-19T14:22:00.000Z

Alan’s entry will go ‘live’ on Thurs 5 January. You should be able to access it by entering a public library membership number at http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

2011-03-02T21:43:00.002Z

its your birthday approaching darling man. there wil be hand raised pork pies, bayaldi, caper berries

Ronnie Payne's anecdote

2011-01-23T19:18:00.001Z

"I'm really pleased to be asked. I should have be in touch ages ago. What I intended to tell you was about Alan's kindness to me when I was in a state after my first wife Isabel had run off while I was being a Hemingway type foreign correspondent in Paris. Alan came with me to my deserted London flat. Highly emotional and slightly pissed I burst out - "I can't stand it, the whole place has become a tear trap."
Most friends would have made sympathetic noises. Alan said "That's a great title for your novel"
"Yep. All I need now is another hundred thousand words" I replied and we both went out and got cheerfully drunk.
love ronnie"

2010-01-22T20:43:00.000Z

"His features resembled a fossilised wash rag."
- Alan Brien (about Steve McQueen).

2010-01-22T20:36:00.000Z

Alan Brien
Well, I forget the rest by Quentin Crewe
Hutchinson, 278 pp, £17.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 09 174835 6
Many is the time I have hauled Quentin Crewe into a restaurant on my back, his wrists crossed under my chin, his voice chattering into one ear or another. As I did so, I often caught a surreal glimpse of myself as some kind of hunter of human game, bearing to the cannibal feast one more main course still alive and thrashing. ‘Q’, I am happy to say, is still alive and stirring things up – not least in this quirky and curious autobiography.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

2009-12-14T17:00:00.002Z

Paul Vaughan will be writing an entry on Alan for the next publication of the DNB. If anybody has anything to add do please post it here.

from Alexei Sayle's website

2009-12-07T16:50:00.002Z

Mother Nature wasn't too kind to our hero as time went by - and Alexei went totally bald and grew a beard - looking more like famous Observer columnist Alan Brien than the cutting-edge comedy giant he once was. And sadly, he was no longer able to fit into his trademark mohair suit.

The Guardian Women's Page

2009-12-07T14:46:00.002Z

Harold Nicholson

2009-12-07T13:48:00.003Z

There was a photograph of Nicholson at Long Crichel House and I remember Alan saying he was one of the best looking men of his generation.

From Joyce, on Alan, after her 90th birthday

2009-12-07T13:45:00.001Z

"So different to most people. Nicer than most men. My little brother."

Bede Grammar School evacuees, 1939

2009-09-08T12:46:00.000+01:00

Talking with John Updike, 1968

2009-09-08T12:44:00.000+01:00

Battle of Britain M. Hipwood

2009-08-27T15:45:00.000+01:00

Addendum email (with some cuts) from Arnold Wesker

2008-11-26T14:55:00.002Z

22 November 2008

Dear Jane

Thank you for inviting me to Alan's memorial. I owe him a great deal, not
simply for guiding me to The Roundhouse but, as theatre critic of The
Statesman (and elsewhere) for his early support of my writing. It's not
merely that he admired it but that he did so with uncanny perception. I
remember thinking that's how I would have reviewed them myself!!!

You had a very good crowd there though I missed other critics, were they
there? And you assembled music that really recreated the times. I can
remember lustily singing The International on my (communist) mother's knee
as it were. Not sure how I feel about it now. Mixed emotions, like many,
I guess.

Anyway, Alan must have left a huge hole in your life which I hope is being
filled as he would have wanted.

Thanks again, till Hay perhaps - before I sell it.

Warm wishes

Arnold

SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L

The Addresses

2008-11-25T20:06:00.000Z

My tribute

The first film Alan and I saw together in 1994, was ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. I mention it because it seemed so utterly unlikely, at that point, Alan would become my husband or I, his fourth wife. And it makes him sound like Blue Beard.

He had just returned from Bosnia with Ken Lukowiak, who introduced us. It was spring, it was the matinee, and Alan placed his jacket over my lap, the first in a succession of courtesies from this inscrutable man with the black eyes and the lilting, gravelly voice. His looks reminded me of my own Russian and Polish ancestry even though it was a northern light that cast across Alan’s whole being.

Over a lunch at Zamoyski’s, we talked about Savile Row tailoring - he still wore a bespoke suit he’d had made in September 1965 - and pearl buttons on oyster satin. ‘We go in and out of the same door’ he would say.

I had never knowingly read him and knew nothing of his reputation. His first present to me was a copy of Lenin: the Novel, delivered by hand, inside which he wrote ‘If G. Greene can write letters in other people’s books. I can write to you in mine…I would like (as we used to say at school) to be your friend…if you have a life time or two to spare, dip into mine - it contains about half of what has happened to me…’ Though he never used two metaphors where three would do, my, what a book.

He was working on his second novel, a fiction of The Life of Cicero, and our first trip abroad would be around the ancient Greek and Roman sites of the Western Mediterranean, when we would always be first at the gates to disembark.

Alan, owned himself, as Boswell put it, “to be amorous”. He became a life model at the Ruskin School of Art in the forties to be nearer the Cuban studio model he had a pash on. He had the gift of listening with his whole attention and those stealthy tactics of his were extremely seductive.

I now know the Alan I met, aged 68, was less gladiatorial than he had been. Strangely, in retrospect, I think he handed the baton of ‘bad cop’ in this partnership, to me. He never bragged, rarely took credit, NEVER said ‘I don’t know’, was most tender with animals. He owned very little, other than books, and poetry in particular lit him up. What prejudices he had, he put aside for me, embracing the Bloomsbury Group, for one, becoming deeply fond of my old friends, Igor Anrep and Annabel Farjeon.

Alan was the first person I had met who almost never said ‘no’, nor ‘I told you so’, no matter how many times I ditched the car, we were caught by the tide, not even after I encouraged him into the middle of the river to get a better view of Low Force, and he broke his ankle. His pedal was always pressed to the floor and we enjoyed the same kind of delving into things.

But there is also the truth of unremembered things. I want particularly to say that DEVASTATING as the diagnosis of Alan’s Lewy Body disease was, with respect to the things he couldn’t influence he showed tremendous courage and stoicism, adopting his father‘s motto ‘let the other fellow be embarrassed’. If anything his imagination became even more elaborate and filmic. Alan called his hallucinations ‘free cinema’ and if he didn’t mind them neither did I… most of the time. He may even have had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome for all I know. Of course I jest but he had always seen the world through a fish eye lens, whitewashed mulberry trees in Crete were cricketers, starlings in the sky were tea leaves, he loved the narratives of cloud formations, and he was eccentric, a natural bohemian. Once he dyed his sand shoes with food colouring that turned his feet green when it rained.

Strangely, given his autobiographical style, he didn’t gossip or chew the cud.
Alan’s silences had always been more pregnant than most and I never stopped wanting his opinion, succinct as it became. When we met a new person and I asked what he thought, ‘shallow but not superficial’ came back in a heart beat.

The fact is Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy. Lives coast on memory and for Alan it became new ones. He had the ability to live in the moment. His appetites had always been vital, ravenous even. ‘That was the best meal I ever ate’ he would say. ‘You were marvellous’ he would whisper on our way home from a do during which he had simply smiled beatifically.

I never tired of looking at him. What a gift he was for painters and sculptors. But how is it possible to be variously mistaken, in the street, for Sean Connery, David Leitch, even Liberace? And, to resemble all of them, including Lenin, Augustus John and Cezanne. Somehow, they all really were aspects of Alan.

Now Alan was tone deaf and the only song I ever heard him sing, and really well, was ‘Herrin’s Head’.

From Paul Vaughan

A little more than 60 years have passed since I first met Alan, and so you’ll understand how very hard it is to realise that we’ll never hear again that voice still with its traces of Sunderland and somehow tuned to mockery and aphorism...like those in his famous 34 Things Every Sociologist Knows (and may or may not be true). It was a New Statesman piece in 2006: example --

14. The average annual income of authors in Britain
who have published more than one book is £178.

And

19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return
to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the
name of the signatory.

I think I may have been present at the coining of one of his axioms. It was at Oxford in the forties when a man none of us knew had punched one of the people sitting in the bar where we had met. When remonstrated with he said, ‘I’m sorry, I always talk with my fists,’ leading us to try to think of suitable rejoinders to this fatuous excuse, like ‘I don’t like your grammar,’ or ‘We don’t speak your language.’ Alan however remarked ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,’ a precept he must have stored away, because out it came later on in life though didn’t for some reason make it to the famous 34.

Alan had started writing at school in Sunderland. One thing he wrote was a story
for the Wizard, or it might have been The Hotspur, with a hero called Hercules Standpoint. He sent it off to D C Thomson of Dundee, the firm who published all the popular boys’ weeklies, and they liked it, and put it into one of the weeklies in their stable. The letter of acceptance asked for more episodes -- but unfortunately Alan was quite unable to think of one, and never replied. What happened to Standpoint, marooned, as it were, in one episode, Alan never found out.

In spite of this early glitch in his career, Alan became the No 1 literary journalist of his day but I always think of him first at Oxford after the war -- a slim, laconic individual already with a beard: he shaved it off one day and looked so different that I passed him off as somebody else, an undergraduate called John Martin: I suppose we could have called him Hercules Standpoint but thought a very ordinary name would work better. Anyway people introduced to him were puzzled: the voice was familiar and so, vaguely, was the face but who was he? Alan re-grew the beard and Martin passed, briefly, like a sort of semi-recognised phantom through Oxford society.

Of course the late 1940s in Oxford were a wonderful time as many here will testify: we had come out of the services, a reforming government was in by a landslide, and we had the world at our feet. And I think we all, including Alan, loved Oxford with its glorious buildings and vistas and wonderful things to do. Alan, like me, had been up during the war, before being called up, and he had upset the dons at Jesus by his Sunderland accent and as I understand it rather delinquent behaviour...so much so that the Principal of Jesus said, when Alan left, ‘That man will come back to this college over my dead body.’ And as Alan said to Godfrey Smith, ‘that is exactly what I did.’ The Principal having unfortunately died in the interim.

Alan‘s career in the RAF was only intermittently heroic. He went for training as a pilot but he turned out, as he told us, totally incompetent, and his last act in pilot training was to crash his plane while attempting to land. The CO of his unit was furious, and told Alan he was going to have to pay for a new aeroplane out of his RAF pay (ten bob a week or so) but I don’t know if this threat was carried out. Instead they made him an air-gunner, and he liked it when someone said to him once, ‘If you’re an air-gunner, where’s your air-gun?’ Actually Alan did fly one mission, and told us he was terrified: luckily, the war ended before he could be sent up again.

So it was back to Oxford, where the star undergraduate of the time was Ken Tynan, conspicuous in those peculiar orange and green ensembles of his. He had written a piece about Oxford for Vogue, which appeared I think in the long vac of 1947. It was a rather camp sort of piece, on which Alan did an efficient hatchet-job in the Isis. Tynan had written ‘Oxford is feminine, yes, feminine,’, causing Alan to write, ‘The emphasis will be Mr Tynan’s to the grave.’

Anyway this led to his being appointed editor of the Isis. He was a huge success at this and his Isis was funny and essential weekly reading. Derek Cooper was Features Editor and they made a formidable partnership, Derek producing brilliant parodies (notably of Graham Greene and John Betjeman (the first brought a telegram from a reader that said CONGRATULATIONS GRAHAM GREENE), and Alan with extraordinary leading articles, like one that started

‘Like Adversity, and I dare say Perversity, University makes
strange bedfellows...’

During his term as editor, the rival university magazine was Cherwell. The Cherwell editor had for some reason been made a Papal Count, and (I dare say quite reasonably) he liked to flaunt this honour. But he was rash enough to pick a fight with the Isis and it developed into a sort of mini-feud. Alan finished it off: he delivered the coup de grâce when he described Cherwell as ‘count-struck.’

With his sharp eye for paradox, Alan could make ordinary things seem extraordinary. We were walking back to his flat in Walton Well Road one day and he said,’That’s the house, there, the one sticking out at the front. looks as if it’s volunteering -- Here, take me...’ And once, we were in the ABC in the Corn when the door opened and in came a black man who happened to be in holy orders, and with his dog collar he was wearing a white tropical suit. ‘Look,’ said Alan, ‘there’s a clergyman in negative.’

When he went down he continued to view the world with a certain louche disdain. He was determined to become, not a journalist but a literary journalist.and that is what he very soon did. There were one or two hurdles to be jumped, including the job at Mini-Cinema, which he called Mini-Enema -- and that job ended badly, when the editor called him in after he’d been enjoying a three- or four-hour lunch and told him he was fired. Drawing himself up, Alan said before stumbling out: ‘I came here for increment. And you give me excrement.’

During his earlier years as a journalist he became a sort of ghost writer for Randolph Churchill, a position that led to several odd adventures. He had a story about staying the weekend, with Randolph, at Chartwell, Winston Chuirchill’s house in Kent. It was said that a small boy who was one of the other guests, having nothing to do, wandered around the house and climbed the stairs. He walked along a corridor and opened a door: at the other end of the room he saw an old man sittingup in bed smoking a cigar and reading. He looked up over his spectacles. The boy said, ‘Are you the greatest living Englishman?’ And the old man said, ‘Yes, I am. And you can bugger off.’

There was ano9ther occasion when Randolph took Alan to lunch at White’s, in St James’s. As it happened, Alan had just written for George Scott’s Truth a Profile of Evelyn Waugh in which he made no attempt to hide Waugh’s faults, chiefly his snobbishness and country-squire affectations. As Randolph and Alan entered the club, Waugh emerged. Randolph greeted him enthusiastically, and introduced Alan. In the moments that followed Alan decided he should identify himself, and he said, ‘I’ve just written your Profile for Truth.’ Waugh ignored him. But later wrote to a friend, ‘Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.’ I suppose this tells us more about E velyn Waugh than aboiut Alan but it does illustrate Alan’s fearlessness, his readiness to take risks and his indifference to those whom others regarded as iconic.

At Oxford he was a pupil of the great F W Bateson, Oxford’s only rival to the Leavises in Cambridge, a believer in analytical reading and close criticism of the texts we had before us, and quite opposed to the romantic, phrase-making belle-lettriste tradition that had held sway in Oxford for decades. Alan would come back from a Bateson tutorial and pass on the day’s aperçus, like the probability of incest in the Wordsworth household and the masturbation images in Donne --

But since that I
Must dye at last, ‘tis best,
To use myself in jest.
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye...

On the whole t wasn’t wise to bandy words with Alan, I remember him saying he used to deal with bullies at school by arguing with them -- no poor man’s repartee for him -- he was like Auden’s ‘The silly fool, the silly fool, who beat the bully as a rule,’ except that Alan was certainly no fool. He was a man of strong opinions, eloquently and wittily expressed. I recall how he came out of the Radcliffe one day after reading some of Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, in a contemporary edition and was pleased to find someone (no doubt some early Victorian undergraduate) had written in the margin Damned Whig. Somehow it could only have happened to Alan. He was a damned Whig of course: he was on more than one Aldermaston march and in 1956 he asked his editor on the Evening Standard to send him to Hungary...the editor wouldn’t, but as a kind of compromise he sent him to New York. There, his bullshit-detector was no doubt working at full stretch. At about this time his telephone number in London, which was GULliver something, could be more easily remembered by people like us who were better at words than numbers, as GULFPAN.

Well, it continued to do that throughout his career. He had a way of looking at you sideways through eyes that were a quarter closed and you knew his sceptical intelligence was examining your opinions and, quite possibly, found them untenable. You can’t say that he would begin, and you’d have to try to defend your ideas as he dismantled them for you. It has been the grimmest of ironies that this most articulate of men should be stricken with a condition that interferes with your judgement and causes, of all things, a failure to communicate. But I am glad to say that when I saw him a few days before he died he was pretty lucid and seemed in control of his feelings and actions. Much like the old Alan that I shall always remember with admiration and affection.

Dear Jane here are my words: [Valerie Grove]

Alan Brien was one of those rare people with whom I fell in love long before we actually met. Since he came from Sunderland, and I came from South Shields only six miles away, I always knew we’d get on because people from the North-east always do. But what I fell in love with was his pieces in the New Statesman in the 1960s, and when we did meet, I was able to recite from memory a paragraph from a column of his that I’d copied into my commonplace book – something he’d written in 1969.

At that first encounter, at a film preview in 1971, he did not disappoint. He was everything I’d expected: a large presence, with a fine profile and those Slavic eyes and cheekbones and sardonic smile that were entirely suited to the amused, sceptical expression he so often wore. He would listen, but he was always ready to argue and provoke, even when wrong. We had a bet on his assertion that The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God was written by Kipling, which in fact was written by E Milton Hayes. He seemed to recall everything that Lord Beaverbrook ever said, and could recall whole conversations, at fantastic length: you’d think he’d reached a punch-line, but then he’d go on to another. It was the same in arguments, where Jill’s famous description of him being like a wart-hog, butting its way through the other animals to the water, was most apt: he’d shoulder his way through everyone’s verbiage and views, and get to the truth. I’ve never met anyone who held the table like him.

Here’s the opening of his column that I still have by heart.

“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after eating too many burberries’.”

Dear Jane

I plan to be at the memorial. Not sure about The Garrick Club.

Will one of your eulogists add a paragraph pointing out that it was Alan
who contacted me to alert me the fact that The Roundhouse had been bought,
along with other land, by a property dealer named Louis Mintz who didn't
know what to do with the old engine shed, which was a Grade Two listed
building, and perhaps - suggested Alan - I could persuade Mr Mintz to give
it to the Centre Fortytwo project. I took up the suggestion and eventually
persuaded Louis Mintz to give us the 19 years lease left on the building.
Thus it was Alan who ignited the spark that led to the Roundhouse becoming
an iconic London building. And it was Centre Fortytwo's focus on The
Roundhouse and its surroundings that led to the beginnings of Camden
Market!

Arnold

SIR ARNOLD WESKER F.R.S.L

Order of Service

2008-11-25T20:05:00.000Z

Memorial for Alan Brien
1925-2008

Wednesday 19th November 2008

ST PAUL’S
CHURCH
COVENT GARDEN

Rector

The Reverend Simon Grigg

Organist

Simon Gutteridge

The Bidding

The Reverend Simon Grigg

Hymn

He who would valiant be
‘Gainst all disaster,
Let him in constancy
Follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.

Who so beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound --
His strength the more is.
No foes shall stay his might,
Though he with giants fight:
He will make good his right
To be a pilgrim.

Since, Lord, thou dost defend
Us with thy Spirit,
We know we at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away!
I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labour night and day
To be a pilgrim.

John Bunyan 1628-1688

Address

Jane Hill

‘Herrin’s Head’

Sung by Bob Davenport

Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head,
Oh! what'll I do with my herrin’s head?
I‘ll mak’ ’em into loaves of bread,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things.

(Chorus)
Of all the fish that live in the sea,
The herrin’ is the one for me.
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
How are you the-day
My hinny lad.

What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes,
What'll I do with my herrin’s eyes?
I‘ll mak’ ‘em into puddings and pies,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)

What'll I do with my herrin’s fins,
What'll I do with my herrin’s fins?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into needles and pins,
Herrin’s fins,
Needles and pins,
Herrin’s eyes,
Puddings and pies,
Herrin’s head,
Loaves of bread,
And all manner of things. (Chorus)

What'll I do with my herrin’s tails,
What'll I do with my herrin’s tails?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a ship that sails,
etc. (Chorus)

What'll I do with the herrin’s guts,
What'll I do with the herrin’s guts?
I’ll mak’ ‘em into a pair o’ boots,
etc. (Chorus)

Address

Paul Vaughan

Alan by Himself

‘Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate’, Quote…Unquote (Nigel Rees), BBC Radio 4, 1985

In the Boiler Room

Written and played by Susie Honeyman (violin)

Address and Reading

Valerie Grove

Alan Brien, New Statesman, May 23 1969

“I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens -- ‘Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries’.”

Hymn

Sung by Bob Davenport, to the traditional tune ‘The Rose Tree’,
with Roger Digby on anglo concertina

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

William Blake 1757-1827

Reading

Terry Jones

‘My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout’, Paul Durcan

Reading

Nigel Wild

Alan Brien’s Diary, The Sunday Times, June 18 1972

‘A new, welcome addition to any political get-together, an ironic, fantasy essay by folk-singer Bob Davenport. The problem of the North East, he argued, was how to replace industry by tourism- hijacking the Yanks on their way to Edinburgh. His solution? “A dude pit”, like a dude ranch, where visitors (after a D.H. Lawrence crash course on the plane) could spend a shift under ground, suffer a mock disaster with stereophonic sound, and be rescued with their names on a casualty list in the local paper.’

The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s ‘The Call’)

Sung by Bob Davenport with Roger Digby on anglo concertina

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.

I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows’ tears, and orphans’ moans;
And all that misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.

John Scott of Amwell 1730-1783

Alan by Himself

‘Sacred Cows’ extract from ‘Face Your Image’ (Malcolm Muggeridge), presented by David Dimbleby, 1974

The Internationale

The Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales, recording from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier‘ (Director, Frank Cvitanovitch), Thames TV, 1973

Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers
Arise ye criminals of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant
Now away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses arises arise!
We'll change forthwith the old conditions
And spurn the dust to win the prize!

(Chorus)
Then comrades come rally
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race,
Then, comrades, come rally!
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale unites the human race.

We peasants, artisans and others
Enrolled among the sons of toil,
Let's claim the earth henceforth for brothers,
Drive the indolent from the soil.
On our flesh too long has fed the raven,
We've too long been the vulture's prey.
But now farewell the spirit craven,
The dawn brings in a brighter day. (Chorus)

No Saviours from on high deliver,
No faith have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains of must shiver,
Chains of hatred, of greed and fear.
Ere the thieves will out with their booty
And to all give a happier lot,
Each at the forge must do his duty,
And strike the iron while it's hot! (Chorus)

Eugene Pottier 1816 - 1887

Blessing and Prayers

The Reverend Simon Grigg

They are what you eat

2008-11-25T19:54:00.001Z

Thanks to Duncan for telling me about Julie's article.

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/26/documentary

They are what you eat
Julie Christie
Friday September 26 2008
The Guardian

I am often asked if I have ever been in a film that I believe changed people's lives. Away From Her did, maybe - but the one I am sure about is The Animals Film, which I narrated for its director, Victor Schonfeld, more than 25 years ago, and which revealed on film for the first time all the different ways in which we abuse animals.

It's hard to quantify the impact the film had at the time. The late Alan Brien, in his review in the Sunday Times, wrote: "I do not know when I have come out of a screening so moved by the power of the cinema as a medium to transform the entire sensibility of an audience." It was applauded when it was shown at the London film festival, and Channel 4 outbid the BBC to have it shown in its first week of broadcasting. Since then, it has been shown around the world, sometimes leading to changes in law. Many people who watched it became vegetarian. Many more, myself included, completely changed their consuming habits, according to whether their purchases involved animal testing or not.

Because the message of the film was so powerful, there is a tendency to forget the film-making skill it involved. Victor realised that you could not present unmitigated horror for two hours, so he interspersed the remarkable exposés of factory farming and animal experimentation with cartoons and vox pops, while Robert Wyatt and David Byrne lent their wonderful music to it. Twenty-five years later, it stands up as a major documentary, in the tradition of films such as Harlan County USA, the 1977 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple about the plight of American miners. Victor's film really was a breakthrough for this kind of documentary-making. Like the best documentaries - like the best films of any kind - it was illuminating.

But what long-term effect did the film have? Since it was made, some things have changed in Britain, through campaign pressure, public opinion, education and legislation. Many of these changes stem, I am sure, from the film's exposure of the extent to which animal cruelty is involved in all aspects of our lives. For instance, in the early 1980s when the film was made, you would have been lucky to lay your hands on free-range eggs or meat; and never, ever would you have imagined that, owing to public demand, supermarkets would stock humanely reared dairy products. The cruelty-free movement has grown to such an extent, and its lobbying become so effective, that the testing of cosmetic products on animals is now banned in the UK - a big step forward.

However, horrific animal cruelty is still part of the foundation on which we build our comfortable lives in the west, and will be so as long as we continue to demand massive quantities of cheap meat. Only through factory farming can this craving be satisfied, and the issue has tended to slip from view since the film was made. Thank goodness for the emergence of a new kind of animal-rights campaigning - personality- and television-driven, to suit our times - exemplified by the efforts of people such as Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. People are again being reminded that the chicken we eat is not actually born on a polystyrene tray wrapped in clingfilm. As with everything, education is the key - we learned about Corn Belts and Rice Bowls at school, but never how the animals we eat reach our plates. It suits the agricultural industries to keep us ignorant, and as long as corporations pursue profit at any cost and human beings refuse to recognise the sensibilities of all species, we have a very, very long way to go. Victor's film reminds us of the journey made so far - and encourages us to continue on it.

· The Animals Film is released on DVD on September 29

Post memorial...and in no particular order...

2008-11-24T16:51:00.002Z

Unedited texts from Daniel Carrier, writing as John Gulliver in the Camden New Journal.

'Celebrating the life and principles of Citizen Brien'

SITTING in a flea pit cinema in Sunderland as a teenager, Alan Brien became inspired to be a journalist.
What did the trick was the film, Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane, about a press mogul.
All around him he could hear chairs flip up as others walked out. But he was gripped…… his future was calling him.
Now the life of the extraordinary journalist, novelist, raconteur and political sage is due to be celebrated at memorial service next week in Covent Garden.
His fourth wife Jane Hill, who lives in the Highgate Village cottage the couple shared before his death aged 83 in May, tells me that among the people coming to pay their respects is the legendary folk singer Bob Davenport, jazz giants Ian Christie and Wally Fawkes and scores of his friends from journalism and broadcasting.
“He was a life long Socialist, feminist and revolutionary and that never changed,” Jane recalled when I met her on Tuesday.
“He had firm principles and he stuck by them. It cost Alan personally at times, too: “He was a serial resigner – if he was a member of an organisation and there was something he did not agree with, he'd walk out. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Sunday Times, he resigned from his post, saying his conscience would not allow him to take Murdoch's shilling. His principles cost him a News International pension.”
And he could be scathing towards those who he felt had sold out, too – but not in a cruel way.
Jane recalls him tearing strips off Malcolm Muggeridge on air in a show called Face Your Image for departing from his left wing principles he held in his younger days and finding religion.
“The thing was, when Malcolm was asked to respond, he simply said Alan was absolutely right. That is because however vitriolic Alan could be, he was always fair and always true,” said Jane. “His concern was always for truth – he was never spiteful.”
Alan's memorial is at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden next Wednesday at 2.30pm.

'Monty Python star celebrates the life of Brien'

THE life of Alan Brien, journalist, critic and broadcaster was celebrated by friends and relatives yesterday (Wednesday) at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden – and they heard Monty Python star Terry Jones reveal the debt Camden Town owes to Alan.
Before reciting one of the author's favourite poems - 'My beloved compares herself to a pint of stout' by Paul Durcan – he said playwright Sir Arnold Wesker gave Alan the credit for turning the Roundhouse into an arts venue.
Terry Jones said Alan told Sir Arnold the Roundhouse had been bought by a property developer who did not know what to do with the old engine shed.
So Alan asked Sir Anold if he could persuade him to give it to Centre 42 [Wesker's arts group]. “It was Alan that made the Roundhouse an iconic building for the arts,” he said.
His widow Jane revealed that although Alan was struck down by a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body disease, he was always brave, stoical and cheerful, calling his hallucinations 'free cinema.'
Those gathered to pay their respects heard broadcasts of the journalist, who lived in Highgate, heavily criticising Malcolm Muggeridge, and Muggeridge responding by saying Alan was absolutely right, and failing to spot that the phrase 'violence is the repartee of the illiterate' as a quote of his own on a Radio Four quiz programme.
Biographe Valerie Grove, who lives in Highgate said: “He was one those rare people I fell in love with before I'd even met him. We were both from the north east and people from the north east always get on with each other.
“When we met, I was not disappointed – he had such a large presence, and I have never known any one to be able to hold a table’s attention like him.
“In the 1960s, my economics master insisted I read the Statesman every week and I was able to recite from memory a column he had written.”
She read the passage, which typified Alan's wit: “I remember noting, when I first came to London, how often the names of stores in the ads sounded like the baby-talk of the Nanny Mafia in Kensington Gardens – 'don;t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe…. I know a child once died of the Whiteleys after too many burberries.'
Those celebrating Alan's life were also treated to Bloomsbury folk singer Bob Davenport singing two traditional songs from the north east and a version of William Blake's Jerusalem.
Among the crowd was writer Paul Johnson, Observer film critic Philip French, his son crime writer Sean French, author Deborah Moggach and illustrator and writer Posy Simmonds. They headed to the Garrick club afterwards to listen to trad jazz provided by Highgate's Wally Fawkes and Ian Christie.

http://www.scena.org/blog/2008_08_24_archive.html

2008-11-21T19:56:00.001Z
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
In a critical condition (5)

When the versatile writer Alan Brien died in May this year, obituarists reminded us that he was the first person to be hired in 1960 by the new-founded Sunday Telegraph, in the post of drama critic. 'On this we can build,' the editor is supposed to have declared as, around Brien, he formed a team of witty, incisive and never-too-sententious Sunday writers.

Couldn't happen now, I hear you say. No paper would ever construct itself around an arts critic, and no critic could ever be held to personify a newspaper in the way that Brien did, or Neville Cardus on the Manchester Guardian, Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Pauline Kael on the New Yorker, and others of a golden age.

Or could it? We keep hearing media executives talk of innovation when they mean sackings - the latest to use this euphemism is the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, where 550 jobs are about to go.

But innovation is not made overnight. It comes from the experience and wisdom of newspaper veterans who have seen it all before and know what works and what won't. Getting rid of good critics is a symptom of media death wish. It declares that a newspaper has no sense of its past, present or future, and no conversation with its readers.

A newspaper that cherishes and promotes its critics - as The Scotsman does, for instance, during the Edinburgh Festival - offers readers a reliable benchmark against which they can measure their own reactions and opinions to things they have seen and heard. The Scotsman deploys its critical team strategically in festival time as a way of setting itself apart from the range of free newspapers that flood the city streets.

In Salzburg, likewise, the local Nachrichten is read more closely during festival time than any of the national or international papers because its critics provide a clearer context day by day of events in the present festival against triumphs of the past. Their value cannot be measured purely in payroll terms.

True, few critics these days have the fame or clout that Brien, Cardus and Reich-Ranicki did in their pomp, but arts critics still form the thin blue line between a newspaper of value and a throwaway sheet.

They can be, in the public perception, the soul of a newspaper or at the very least its conscience. Executives who ignore that truth will follow the critics they fire very rapidly onto the nearest dole queue.

Source: Artsjournal

posted by Norman Lebrecht at 3:22 PM

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/Profumo.html

2008-11-21T19:51:00.001Z

www.iconocast.com

2008-11-21T19:38:00.003Z
Reunited after 64 years: RAF gunners who thought each other had ...15 Jul 2008 ... Evening Post, UK - Jul 21, 2008 ... The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer ...
www.iconocast.com

From The Times November 20, 2008

2008-11-21T19:33:00.001Z
Memorial service: Alan Brien

There was much laughter in church, when a tape recording was played of Alan Brien’s last appearance on Quote Unquote.

“Violence is the repartee of the illiterate,” was the quotation presented to him. He was mystified. Could it be George Bernard Shaw, Brien wondered. Or Chesterton, perhaps? Whereupon Nigel Rees had to reveal that Brien himself had written those words in 1971.

The broadcaster Paul Vaughan, an Oxford contemporary, spoke of Brien’s brilliantly aphoristic leading articles when he was editor of Isis, and about the time Randolph Churchill introduced Alan to Evelyn Waugh. “I’ve just written your profile for Truth,” said Brien. Waugh ignored him, but later wrote to a friend, “Randolph hired a Jew to insult me in White’s.”

Brien’s Sunderland background was echoed in songs sung by Bob Davenport, the Tyneside folk singer. His fourth wife Jane remembered that he could be mistaken in the street for Sean Connery or Liberace at various times, and was able to say: “The fact is, Alan was very entertained by himself. He was rarely unhappy.”

Terry Jones read one of his favourite poems, My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout, by Paul Durcan, and Valerie Grove recalled one of his 1960s essays in the New Statesman, remarking on how London’s shop names resembled a nanny addressing her charge in Kensington Gardens: “Don’t be so selfridge, Master Fortnum. Eat up all your harrods, and then you can have a gorringe. You’ll do yourself a gamage, mark my words, unless you have a c.c. and a. every morning on the derry and tom. Ponting is rude. I knew a child once died of the whiteleys after eating too many burberries.” VG

A memorial service for Alan Brien was held on November 19 at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden. The Rev Simon Grigg, rector, officiated and said the bidding prayers.

Mr Terry Jones read My Beloved Compares Herself to a Pint of Stout by Paul Durcan; Mr Nigel Wild read Alan Brien’s Diary, from The Sunday Times, June 18, 1972; Mrs Valerie Grove read a piece written by Alan, published in the New Statesman, May 23, 1969, and gave an address, along with Ms Jane Hill, widow, and Mr Paul Vaughan.

During the service Mr Bob Davenport sang Herrin’s Head; Jerusalem by William Blake, to the traditional tune; The Rose Tree; and The Drum (Retort on Mordent’s The Call) by John Scott of Amwell, accompanied by Mr Roger Digby, anglo concertina. Ms Susie Honeyman, violin, performed her own composition entitled In the Boiler Room and a recording of the Morriston Orpheus Choir of Wales singing The Internationale from The Road to Wigan Pier was played. Recordings of Violence is the Repartee of the Illiterate from Radio 4, 1985, and Sacred Cows an extract from Face Your Image, presented by David Dimbleby in 1974, were also played.

Among others present were: Mr and Mrs Adam Brien (son and daughter-in-law), Mr and Mrs John Mckelvie, Mr and Mrs Richard Arison, Mr and Mrs Stuart Verrilli (sons-in-law and daughters), Ms Alyson Brien (daughter), Mrs Joyce Hill (mother-in-law), Mr Peter Hill (brother-in-law), Mrs Alexa Gilpin Hill (sister-in-law), Ms Lucy Gilpin Hill (niece), Mrs Muriel Halls, Miss Amy McKelvie, Miss Esther McKelvie, Miss Isabella Arison, Mr Jack Arison, Miss Megan Brien, Mr Josh Brien and Burt Brien (grandchildren), Mr Malcolm Carr, Captain Phillip Carr with other members of the family.

Sir Arnold and Lady Wesker, Mr Trevor Grove, Ms Andrea Galer, Ms Jane Bond, Mr and Mrs David Stone, Mr and Mrs George Carey, Mr and Mrs Jack Waterman, Mr Nathan Silver, Ms Roxy Beaujolais, Ms Deborah Moggach, Ms Catherine Rickman, Mr Felix Jay, Mrs Margaret Legg, Ms Fiona Legg, Mr Jock McFadyen, Ms Annie Morag McFadyen, Mr and Mrs Karl Miller, Ms Petra Markham, Mr David Walsh, Mr Philip Purser, Mr John Spurling, Ms Jean Lovell Davis, Ms Anna Soderstrom, Ms Carole Holland, Ms Sarah Holland, Ms Julia Holland, Ms Gilly Oakes, Ms Mary Kenny, Ms Marjorie Wallace, Mr Ken Lukowiak, Ms Kersti French, Ms Nicci Gerrard, Mr Sean French, Ms Ursula Owen, Ms Jo Batterham, Mr and Mrs Grenville Robinson, Mr Graham Binmore, Mr Jo Simon, Mr Ian Christie, Mr and Mrs Wally Fawkes, Mr Ronnie Payne, Ms Celia Haddon, Mr Nigel Rees, Ms Julia Hobsbawm, Ms Teresa Grimes, Ms Harriet Green, Ms Yeen Au, Ms Lynn Barber, Ms Mary Clemmey, Mr Ernie Eban, Ms Victoria Glendinning, Ms Anne Holmes-Drewry, Ms Alison Telfer, Ms Diana Melly, Ms Angela Neustatter, Mr and Mrs Philip Thomas, Ms Finola Quinn, Ms Estella Weldon, Ms Eleanor Bron, Mr David Maccoby, Mr Christopher Gardner, Ms Monica Petzal, Ms Olivia Fane, Mr and Mrs Paul Johnson, Ms Carolyn Gowdy, Ms Monica Petzal, Mr Joseph Steeples, Mr Daniel Carrier, Mr John Forman, Ms Emma Gibson, Mr Graham Tayar, Mr Paul Shearsmith, Ms Rachel Miller, Mr David Croft, Ms Maria Wakely, Ms Naomi Fabian Miller, Ms Serena Inskip, Ms Celia Lowenstein, Mr Godfrey Smith, Mr Peter Preston, Mr and Mrs McGrath, Mr Michael Leapman, Ms Pippa Vaughan, Mr and Mrs Bernard Carnell, Mr Gerald Wakelin, Mr Ivor Samuels, Ms Elspeth Hamilton, Mr Christopher Cross, Mr Phil Grey, Ms Vicki Jung, Ms Jane McAusland, Mr Colin Crewe, Ms Josephine Marston, Mrs Pat Hutchison, Mr Nick Callow, Ms Mary Morrison, Mr Steve Swannell, Ms Melissa Pow, Mr Robert Robinson, Mr Al Alvarez, Ms Irma Kurtz, Ms Jane Brown, Mr Don Cameron, Mr and Mrs Hilary Rubinstein, Ms Shirley Conran, Ms Dorothy Rowe, Ms Joan Bakewell, Ms Nina Bawden, Mr Russell Enoch, Ms Katharine Whitehorn, Mr Hunter Davis, Ms Margaret Forster, Ms Cynthia Kee, Ms Claire Tomalin, Mr Michael, Frayn, Mr and Mrs Herbert Kretzmer, Mr and Mrs Jay Landesman, Mr Lewis Wolpert, Mr David Galliford, Mr and Mrs John Mortimer, Mrs Gladys Glascoe Mr Philip French (Critics Circle), Mr Mark Le Fanu (Society of Authors), Ms Eileen Gunn (general secretary, Royal Literary Fund) together with many more friends and former colleagues.

Evening Standard: The Londoner's Diary, 20th November 2008

2008-11-21T19:28:00.002Z
* VETERAN jazzman Wally Fawkes played the clarinet in the Garrick Club yesterday afternoon, following a memorial service for Alan Brien, critic and columnist for The Spectator, Punch, the New Statesman and The Sunday Times. It's thought to be a first for the crusty old Covent Garden watering hole. One or two members claimed Fawkes hadn't played for years, but Londoner's Diary readers will recall that he performed at the launch of Humphrey Lyttelton's posthumous book only last month. Although Brien was a member of the Garrick, he refused to wear a tie when he didn't feel like it, until he was persuaded to resign.

I posted a comment to say Alan didn't resign because of a tie - he happily wore a bow tie after all - he resigned because the club wouldn't allow women members.

'Another hoary old, yellowing, cutting...'

2008-11-01T16:02:00.001Z
'Another hoary old, yellowing, cutting: this time an article Alan wrote for the New Statesman during the World Cup in 1966, when teams from football-playing nations around the world descended on host-country, England, to play matches in grounds all over the country, including Sunderland's Roker Park, now, sadly demolished.' sent by Malcolm.

NEW STATESMAN 22 JULY 1966 p139
ARTS
Out of London: Sunderland for the Cup
ALAN BRIEN
‘Playing Football is Strictly Prohibited’ said the notice between the deck-chair attendant and the pie-and-chips stall on the lower promenade. The pale golden Sunderland sun hung in the creamy postcard blue sky like a heraldic emblem. For once the fizzy, ginger-beer North Sea stretched waveless and silent to the curved horizon like a rippling expanse of oiled silk. On the first morning of my holiday visit to my home town, I led the family safari of mother, wife and two small children to the water’s edge, carrying as badges of my domestic office a bottle in one hand and a blanket in the other. As I supervised the unloading of the pack team into a defensive half-circle, I said: ‘This is what I call the sea-side’. And so it was.
But it was also the second week of the World Cup season in the football-crazy North-East. No sooner had I placed the metal tray with its precious load of drinks in the heart of the encampment than a large spotted ball dropped from the heavens and sent the paper cups spilling and scooting for cover. It was the classic situation envisaged by Charles Atlas in those body- building ads in my schoolboy pulp magazines. Here was the beach-bully at last, kicking sand in my face, while my loved ones mimed indignation. But it was a 14-stone weakling who had difficulty struggling up out of the canvas embrace of his chair to face the two brown, muscular, young seven-stone athletes leaning over him with apologetic grins. I had waited too long to send in the coupon for that free, without-obligation first lesson and the weight of middle-aged parenthood lay heavy on my pullovered, shawl-wrapped shoulders as I preached a sermon on neighbourly decorum to the almost naked oafs. I looked around along the great scimitar of sand, wet and red and coarse and shining below the tidemark, dry and white and fine and scalloped above, and realised I was in the middle of an enormous practice pitch. League upon league of Walter Mittys were playing at Bobby Charlton, kicking and heading and diving and dribbling. Rub-a- dub-dub went the noise of balls endlessly pummelled and thumped against the towering sea wall, shooting off at unexpected angles as they hit the corners of the massive stone blocks, rocketing up and up into the sun until they were caught in the high off shore breeze and then curving in a smooth parabola to plop back on the gently swirling water. Young and old, toddlers and grandfathers, fat and grey as lard or hard and weathered as teak, each alone and oblivious in a mass opium dream of football fame, speeding across an imaginary Roker Park towards an open goal-mouth. Meanwhile a family party had materialised from nowhere in the penalty area.
As the sun sank improbably behind the backs of our necks on this eastward-facing beach, the area available for play had in creased ten-fold but the soccer sandmen were still arriving. Sunderland regards it self as the homeland of football, still remembering the day when they could point with modest pride to their unique record of being the only team never to be relegated from the First Division. Local historians even claim that Roker Park was the first place where the spectators ever developed the habit of flooding over the barriers to hug and punch their heroes after a goal. Yet though the shops are full of World Cup symbols, and the Sunderland Echo printed a message of welcome in Russian from the Mayor to the visiting Soviet team, the fans are largely staying at home to watch the Cup on television.
Admittedly, the two matches to dale — Chile v. Italy and Italy v Russia — have been mediocre. The Russians were obviously the best team and the best team won — as every spectator observed to his mate in exactly those words as we marched 50-abreast, like a mob of strikers in a Soviet film, through the suburban streets after the Saturday afternoon game. But the style seemed to me oddly mechanical and academic, as if they were taking part in some athletic drill. There was no aggression, no sinewy anger or intelligent pugnacity, so that a beautifully executed sequence of tricky passes up the field would culminate in the placing of the ball with mild accuracy exactly in the arms of the opposing goalkeeper. The Italian supporters chanted their slogans through transistorised loud hailers, syncopating them with rhythmic clapping and tattoos of foot-beating. The few Russians waved their red flags and encouraged players by the names and nick names. But the majority of locals, massed in the standing room at both ends, preserved an almost contemptuous aloofness, occasionally approving a clever manoeuvre or a showy save, but never letting loose that great rumbling, roaring steam-locomotive howl of partisan excitement I remember from pre-war days.
I think the Sunderland apathy had only a little to do with the quality of the football. The truth is that Wearsiders, cut off from through-traffic by road or rail from the north to south, form their own cloth-capped, weird-accented Ruritania as insulated and nationalistic as the Welsh or the Cornish. When my friend Blank was film critic of the Daily Express in years gone by. there was a notice on the subs’ table which read: ‘In Blank’s copy, for “Ava Gardner” read “Lana Turner”, and for “Lana Turner” read “Ava Gardner”.’ He explained to me that no errors had ever occurred when he always confused these two stars because the subs realised that he always confused these two stars. Until the age of 18, though intellectually I knew better, emotionally I still considered ‘Sunderland’ and ‘England’ as more or less interchangeable terms.
On top of Sunderland/England, like a bonnet worn by a witch riding an invisible broomstick, sat Scotland, a nation of dour, humourless trusties, fake rebels aching to be bought over by the shallow South at the expense of everything but their rolling consonants. Below lay the Midlands. Manchester, Yorkshire and the rest, a country of born chargehands and natural foremen, tight-lipped stingy organisation men. To the West, Ireland was scarcely more an island than Wales — two Celtish strongholds of shifty foreigners who, fortunately for them, did not often dare invade the North-East — which, anyway, did not contain the easy pickings they relished. Right down at the base, practically a suburb of Paris, a dependency of Rome, lay Mediterranean, sub tropical London, the Latin Quarter of King’s Cross, visited only by beer-crated coach parties, or on specially chartered, indestructible trains, for royal marriages, jubilees and coronations and equally sacred ceremonial Cup matches. To us, the compass point was embedded in the mouth of the River Wear and every extension of the free leg took you further away from the heart of England, Sunderland.
Italy, Russia Chile, North Korea - what are these but outsiders’ substitutes for Sunderland? They would have to have superlative football teams to get us out there cheering. This intense conviction of superiority runs alongside a deep, sceptical, comical condescension towards the town itself and most of its inhabitants. When I returned last week, I had not been in the place for more than an overnight swoop for 10 years or more. In my memory, though I constantly boosted it as a mixture of Dodge City and Coronation Street, it had become a low, dull, monochrome panorama of houses which should have been called hice and of ugly factories, It seemed to me on every previous visit, as the special train strayed off the main line and wormed its tedious way across to the forgotten coast, that the sunshine and the blue skies ‘would be cut off within a few miles of Sunderland by a barrier which reached to the clouds. - There might almost have been great signs by the track announcing ‘Here Be Grendel’s Lair — Beowulf Turn Back’.
This time, perhaps because my American wife enjoyed the place and my metropolitan children begged to be allowed to come back next year, I began to see the whole area as a wild, lush country landscape with great corridors of dazzling sand and mysterious rock dotted all over with outsize working toys of shipyards, cement factories, forests of cranes, exhibitions of ships, startling bridges over valleys as well as rivers, which appealed instantly to an eye for the picturesque. I was not surprised to find that Lowry was staying here, painting a new series of waterscapes and harbour views. There is a peculiar excitement and satisfaction in coming down the valley of the upper Wear - itself rich, fruity, flowery land banked by bare rolling moor like the Dordogne with a bite in the air - upon a glowing white factory with a chimney like an obelisk. The pit heads - wheels endlessly spinning, lines of buckets building geometrical mountains of gun-metal grey, serviced by line upon line of clinking trucks - have the sort of line and pattern artificially and pointlessly imitated by many modern sculptors. In the age of the motor car, countryside which cannot be bettered in France or Ireland lies within an hour’s leisurely drive.
I also began again to appreciate that friendly argumentative cynicism, expressed in long, repetitive, probing paragraphs of natural rhetoric, which is the characteristic of the North-Easterner. They have seen too much of politicians, clergymen, social workers, educationalists, to expect life to be changed by outside forces. I was told of a visiting VIP, admiring a new council estate, caravan after caravan of red-bricked boxes marching into the ploughed fields, who asked a local councillor whether a church had been included in the plan. Replied the councillor, a staunch Methodist: ‘Church? Why, man, we haven’t even built the Club yet.’ The working man’s club is the East End pub music-hall of 50 years ago with its programmes of comedians, singers, impressionists, jugglers, advertised each week in the local paper. And the Sunderland night-clubs have a relaxed, jovial, value-for-money air which makes their London equivalents seem like sucker traps. La Strada, in the centre of a town which in my day closed down all cafés at 6.30, has the smooth, cinematic atmosphere which reminds me of an early Bogart movie based on a Chandler script.
Sunderland takes its share of that working-class prosperity which our socialist rulers are assuring us is ruining the nation. It is a democratic land where no one is insolent because no one is condescending, where the poor who arc mainly the old and the sick are buoyed up with strong and tender family ties and good neighbours, where the majority live modestly but well, while a few are making their fortunes turning comforts into necessities. In the evening, even in July, the people who clog the town in the day vanish as the sun begins to slant down and you can scorch along the main streets at 8p.m. without seeing another car. Life is in the pubs, in the clubs, by the telly, with an iron-tasting beer served in a glass like a flowerpot. It is a gregarious, family, matey world full of nest warmth and community solidarity. It has many of the qualities of the England of the past which have vanished in our atomised South. It has many of the qualities which a social-democratic England of the future will need to develop. Sunderland has partly opted out of the commercialised meritocratic fads and fashions of the England of today. Perhaps it is not so far away from the genuine England which underlies all change of governors and rulers.

2008-10-15T23:46:00.002+01:00

First Elegy, Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke

2008-09-16T19:38:00.002+01:00
"Oh, and there's Night, there's Night, when wind full of cosmic space
feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, longed for, mild disenchantress,
painfully there for the lonely heart to achieve?
Is she lighter for lovers?
Alas, with each other they only conceal their lot!
Don't you know yet?-Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe-maybe that the birds
will feel the extended air in more intimate flight."

Yes, the Springs had need of you. Many a star
was waiting for you to espy it. Many a wave
would rise on the past towards you; or, else, perhaps
as you went by an open window, a violin
would be giving itself to someone. All this was a trust.
But were you equal to it? Were you not always
distracted by expectation, as though all this
were announcing someone to love?
(As if you could hope to conceal her,
with all those great strange thoughts
going in and out and often staying overnight!)"

"Strange not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange,
to see all that was once relation so loosely fluttering
hither and thither in space. And it's hard, being dead,
and full of retrieving before one begins to espy
a trace of eternity-"

~ First Elegy recited by Alan, June 1994

1996 Alan, Gilly and Brecht

2008-09-16T19:28:00.000+01:00

'One Art' from Geography II, 1976, by Elizabeth Bishop

2008-09-16T19:13:00.003+01:00
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

The Mariner's Star by Candida Clark

2008-09-16T19:10:00.001+01:00
....Beyond this just a shell of infinite beauty oystered all around.

Sea Voyage around the ancient Greek and Roman sites of the western mediterranean, 1995.

2008-09-04T17:56:00.002+01:00

2008-08-27T19:37:00.000+01:00

2008-08-27T19:11:00.002+01:00

Paella supper Christmas 2006

2008-08-27T19:00:00.001+01:00

From Godfrey Smith

2008-08-26T19:05:00.000+01:00
27 V 08
My dear Jane:
Even when we know the moment has to come, it’s impossible to imagine a world without Alan. I feel as if some enormous gusher of power, some inexplicable force of nature, had suddenly been turned off. Indeed, so strong was his imprint that I don’t really see him as gone at all: he’s still indelibly in my mind, and always will be. I remember those legendary days at Oxford, when he pedalled about the town with that famed beard already conjuring up the idea that some sage from outer space had arrived to shake us all out of our skulls. He was enormously articulate: the readiest man I ever met. He was one of those people who not only can spin a marvellous yarn, but was himself the source of endless anecdotes. All Oxford people think their own era was the best; but I think we knew it was. What luck we had! And then there were all those years in Fleet Street, when no gathering of great hacks was complete without Alan. I had the added good fortune to look after his copy during his spell as film critic of The Sunday Times; though to tell the truth, it seldom needed more than some par marks before it was sent to the printers. In retrospect, what an exhilarating team that was: Bernard Levin on theatre, Dennis Potter of television, Alan on cinema. But shake the kaleidoscope any way you like, during the half century in which he wrote like an avenging angel, Alan’s name glitters among all the rest - unmistakeable, irresistible, incomparable. And funny. Thank you, dear Jane, for all the loving care you gave the dear chap; it’s impossible to say much to help at some moments, but remember nothing can ever take away all those good times you had together, and all those memories. Let’s keep in touch. Warmest wishes.
Yours ever
Godfrey Smith

The Big Wheel

2008-08-16T19:24:00.001+01:00

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2008-08-16T19:10:00.000+01:00
"There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion
That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together."

Man Listens by Carolyn Gowdy

2008-08-16T19:06:00.002+01:00

And then.... Blair Witch Project

2008-07-29T20:52:00.004+01:00

A year later

2008-07-24T14:40:00.000+01:00

First met

2008-07-22T20:05:00.000+01:00

Taken at Julian Holland's wedding, 1995

2008-07-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

Columnist who wrote on theatre and inspired Auberon Waugh to don a false beard

2008-07-04T12:33:00.001+01:00
Daily Telegraph Obituaries Friday July 4 2008

Alan Brien, who has died aged 83, was a sparkling columnist sought after throughout Fleet Street in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s; like all pundits he was driven to exaggeration by the need to write something fresh, but in a couple of paragraphs he could cast a penetrating light on any subject, whether it was the pleasures of whisky, the pessimism of the Irish or Tudor building.

He was at various times film critic for the Evening Standard, television critic for The Observer, political pundit for the Sunday Pictorial and a trenchant denunciator on all subjects for the Daily Mail.

But his keenest interest was the theatre, which he covered for the Evening Standard, The Spectator and, most notably, The Sunday Telegraph from 1961 to 1967.

He described Michael Hordern's Macbeth as resembling "an Armenian carpet-seller who would not have been allowed into the back portcullis of Dunsinane".

Leo McKern's Volpone had "all the rubbery, tireless pugnacity of an overgrown toddler freaklishly endowed with grown-up glands and adult organs"; while Madge Ryan, in Entertaining Mr Sloane, was "a nymphomaniac Goldilockse parodying adult sexuality with many a roguish twinkle and a girlish skip, like a debauched Shirley Temple".

Brien pointed out that The Merchant of Venice was "a fairy tale with a plot as full of holes as a string bag" and groaned at the popularity of the "well-made" play, epitomised by Noël Coward's explorations of drawing-room embarrassments.

Yet while relishing such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and then Tom Stoppard, he recognised that "the Theatre of the Absurd is nowhere to go for a laugh".

The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer School, Sunderland, before going into the RAF to become a pilot. He then transferred to train as an air gunner before joining No 207 Squadron in June 1945. After going up to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, and staying on to edit Isis, Brien arrived in London with an influx of ambitious northerners determined to give assured Oxbridge figures a run for their money.

Soon he was was appearing in most well-known publications as well as on television, most notably when he chaired the discussion programme Three After Six. A gregarious character, given to frequenting all the journalists' favourite watering holes, he once had a fight with the Panorama reporter John Morgan at a Private Eye lunch over which of them was the more working-class.

In 1967 Brien was snapped up by Harry Evans, The Sunday Times editor, who declared that his new recruit could get interesting copy from the fluff in his navel. He reported from abroad, reviewed films and wrote a diary. But the latter, which ran with a photograph of his bearded face, prompted Auberon Waugh to write a cruel parody in Private Eye (topped by his own face in a false beard) with regular references to "when I was in the RAFe_SLps " and conversations with Lord Beaverbrook, who had once sued Brien.

Like many journalists, Brien proved surprisingly sensitive when attacked, with the result that Waugh kept up his campaign; and long after Brien and his beard had vanished from The Sunday Times Waugh's column marched on.

After leaving the paper in 1984 Brien retired to Wales to write a long, well-researched novel, Lenin, which earned some respectable reviews. He also produced Domes of Fortune, a volume of essays in which he hymned the breasts of his third wife, the feminist journalist Jill Tweedie, for being the shape of Roman helmets.

She died in 1993, having affectionately written that he had none of the attributes of a mythic lover, being neither chivalrous nor very polite; he reminded her, she added, of an old warthog she had once seen in the African twilight.

Alan Brien suffered from poor health in later years, and died on May 23 at Denville Hall, the actors' home. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hill, and by the four daughters and one son of his first two marriages.

34 things every sociologist knows

2008-07-04T12:30:00.001+01:00
Published 14 August 2006
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 May 1970.

How many of these might you hear today? Number 2 and number 12, certainly, and perhaps number 34, which like a few others at least ought to be true. Whatever the reality was in 1970, I wonder how many modern Hull bridegrooms have met their wives at public dances. Alan Brien, critic, columnist and wit, was a regular contributor to the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Selected by Brian Cathcart

My sociologist friends complain that we laymen possess very little scientific information about our fellows, yet whenever we are faced with some elaborately researched generalisation about human behaviour we sneer and say: "But everybody knows that!" In order to muddy the waters of controversy, I have constructed a list of apparent truisms. I do not vouch for their accuracy, and reserve the right not to enter into correspondence with anyone about any of them.

1. The divorce rate is higher among the rich than the poor.

2. Men have a lower pain threshold than women.

3. No one has ever contracted lung cancer through smoking pot.

4. More soap is used per head per year in the north of England than in the south.

5. More men commit suicide than women but more women attempt suicide than men.

6. As 5, with the addition of the phrases "except in the north", "before 1945", "of childbearing age", and "collected from a random sample taken from readers of the Guardian woman's page".

7. London bus conductors have the lowest rate of heart disease of any British manual workers.

8. London bus drivers have the highest incidence of ulcers of any British socio-economic group.

9. The sales of tinned food to housewives are significantly lower in Wales than in the Home Counties.

10. Most serious accidents in the home in Scotland occur when the male wage-earner falls downstairs on a Saturday night.

11. The likelihood of any Member of Parliament bearing the same surname as any other MP is six times greater than the same likelihood among any group of the same number.

12. Most criminals are the product of broken homes.

13. 67 per cent of all London taxi drivers are Jewish.

14. The average annual income of authors in Britain who have published more than one book is £178.

15. More sexual offences are committed on the night of the full moon than on any other night in the lunar month.

16. At the 1966 general election, 27,264,747 votes were polled out of a UK electorate of 35,957,245.

17. The Daily Mail has had seven editors since the last war.

18. This is the same as the Spectator over the same period.

19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the name of the signatory.

20. On a test measuring group attitudes, Hong Kong Chinese showed most hostility to Japanese and Asiatic Indians and least to Americans.

21. Married couples are more likely to share any physical characteristic - colour of eyes, hair, skin; height, weight, blood group - than not.

22. Criminal statistics show that in Britain the characteristic crime of the Irish is drunkenness, of the Scots violent assault, of the Jews fraud, and of the Welsh petty larceny.

23. That of the English is cruelty to children.

24. The amount of tax relief allowed to owner-occupiers in 1969-70 was £215m.

25. Britain has one acre of woodland to every 13 people.

26. There are 19 Briens in the London telephone directory.

27. Only 7 per cent of all people murdered in the UK in the past 25 years were killed by someone who was a total stranger to them.

28. The drop-out rate among students is highest among those from large families and lowest among those who are an only child.

29. The majority of motorists prosecuted for motoring offences have criminal records.

30. One bridegroom in four in Hull met his wife at a public dance.

31. Three married couples out of four in southern England were born, or brought up, within half a mile of each other.

32. Mental illness decreases in time of war.

33. There is a small, but distinct, tendency to bronchial ailments to be found among middle-aged people who have owned a dog for more than five years.

34. No long-term increase in the sales of any goods has ever been proved to result from an increase in advertising expenditure.

Three After Sixty Author unknown

2008-07-03T15:50:00.000+01:00

"The Anatomy of a Bore"

2008-07-03T10:09:00.003+01:00
A first response to the Quote...Unquote Newsletter from John O'Byrne in Dublin. Forwarded by Nigel Rees.

'Interested to read your piece on Alan Brien. I had no idea he had died - I must have been away on my travels and missed the papers. By sheer coincidence, last night I was reading a 1958 piece by him (a review of The Birthday Party) reprinted in the recent Spectator 180th special anniversary annual. He wrote: "The Birthday Party is like a vintage Hitchcock thriller that has been, in the immortal, tear-stained words of Orson Welles, 'edited by a cross-eyed studio janitor with a lawn-mower'.

Also on my shelf is a great piece, "The Anatomy of a Bore", he wrote for the same magazine in 1963, where he identified the people he least wanted to sit down next to at dinner. He wrote: "The most boring thing about the bore is not just that he is boring, but that he makes you boring too. You can smell him out in any group by tuning into your own conversation."

A great writer - will be missed.'

Miles & Me by Jonathan Sale

2008-06-30T20:38:00.003+01:00
'He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit.'

For more than two decades, Miles Kington's daily musings on culture, politics and modern life were cherished by readers of The Independent. His death this week robs Britain of one its most original humorists. Here, friends reflect on the man they loved, while over the page are extracts from some of his finest columns

Friday, 1 February 2008 The Independent

Laughing all the way: Miles Kington pictured in 2006 © Geraint Lewis

There was only one occasion when my father, a retiring Cambridge academic, actually picked up the phone and dialled my number to congratulate me. It was after he'd read a piece I had written for Punch magazine – in collaboration with Miles Kington. The idea for the feature had been mine – "A history of demolition", prompted by the fact that half of London was being demolished to make way for the building boom of the early Seventies – but the fine touches, needless to say, had all belonged to Miles.

When we were preparing that article, some of the bits of work that we threw out for reasons of space were more imaginative than the efforts that other contributors to Punch would come up with in an entire year. "A history of demolition" was our only joint byline in my 17 years on the magazine, and by far the best thing I ever put my name to. On other weeks, it would have been me who phoned my old man.

Many people are so-called humorous journalists. Give us (or, to be precise, give me) a sandwich board inscribed "The End Of The World Is At Hand" and we (I) can turn out a jolly 1,500 words about what Japanese tourists said to us as we strapped it on and paraded up and down Oxford Street. Miles, however, was that rarity, a real humorist. He wouldn't have had to do that stunt – because he would have been able to come up with something far, far better.

Other journalists might write about sex. Miles wrote a wonderful spread on "How To Write a Sex Manual", which was illustrated with explicit photographs of the author engaged in foreplay with a typewriter and stroking the keyboard in a post-coital sort of way.

As a literary editor and writer, Miles was the best of colleagues and the worst of colleagues. He was my closest friend, and biggest pain in the neck. He was senior enough to "OK" my ideas, and junior enough for me not to be in trouble when I admitted that I had boobed. We were the only cyclists at Punch, in an office where the other blokes were always making pretentious remarks about their over-the-top motors.

He could, from time to time, also be enormously touchy and grumpy: as our contributor Alan Brien remarked, he was a manic-depressive without the manic bit. He could be pointlessly rude, but democratically so: he would be offhand to someone in the post-room (which was not admirable) and to the editor (which was foolhardy). He could mooch off early, leaving the rest of us to drown in a flood of page proofs.

One editor wanted to have him locked up. This was allegedly so that Miles could write an article about a night in the cells. More seriously, the same editor, Bill Davis, finally had enough and asked the rest of us if Miles was worth his keep. I protested that he was worth his weight in new typewriter ribbons (a judgement I later began to revise somewhat) and was pleased when no more was said about throwing the book at the then literary editor.

The feeling between editor and employee was clearly mutual. After a Punch works outing, in which as usual the drink had flowed even faster than the bons mots, a loud crashing was heard from the editor's office. This turned out to be Miles, expressing his feelings towards that editor by kicking hell out of his desk. He clearly felt better about getting this off his chest, and boot, and we put the desk together again – and expressed elaborate surprise when bits fell off it during the next editorial meeting.

My patience was tested after the next Punch works outing, when again the drinks flowed like printer's ink. Afterwards, Miles retired to the editor's office and yelled: "Hey, do you remember when I kicked the desk in?" In case I'd forgotten, he proceeded to wallop it again. I was reassembling the unoffending piece of furniture when Lord Barnetson, the chairman of the entire newspaper group, wandered in to see who was trashing his premises. I persuaded him that desks often fell to bits, thanks to shoddy modern manufacturing techniques.

"Kington works hard at his eccentricity," wrote Michael Parkinson in a piece about passing the Kingtons' flat while on the top deck of a bus and seeing Miles dreamily playing his double bass while his children ran round him and other people got ready to go to work. (This was back in the days when Kington rented a flat in Notting Hill and Parkinson travelled on buses.) Maybe there was an element of artifice in his demeanour; but certainly Kington cared less than most about appearances – his own appearance, anyway.

Tidying my office in a burst of keenness during my first month, I burrowed down through archaeological layers of dusty correspondence to long-gone members of staff. Round about the Pleistocene age, I discovered a pair of trousers. "Ah," said Miles, "I wondered what had happened to them." They were probably his best pair. He tended to wear old jeans, as he went everywhere on an old sit-up-and-beg bicycle, stopping occasionally to pull The Times out of the basket and fill in a crossword clue.

He dressed, said a cartoonist, as if someone had given him a 20-quid Millets voucher. Yet he always seemed more elegant and handsome, in a raffish sort of way, than anyone else. You would never have guessed it, but there seemed to be money in the background. While the rest of the staff were scraping around for mortgages, he quietly mentioned that he would buy his house outright. But in his family in general, he saw himself as being of the church mouse persuasion; there was or had been a castle somewhere in the family tree but it had gone to another branch.

When Alan Coren, the new editor, took over, Miles would have expected to move up to become deputy editor, but maybe his CV – the desk-bashing etc – stood in his way. Alan announced nervously that there would not be a deputy editor as such. In fact there was, but it wasn't Miles. This may have been the safe decision but it didn't please Miles, then literary editor, who became somewhat less reliable. During one of his unexplained absences from the office, Coren was forced to ring around various BBC recording studios to see if anyone had seen him playing there with his band, Instant Sunshine.

Miles always said that he didn't realise he had been sacked. He left when he was asked to present a programme about a train journey in the Andes. This involved, clearly, going to the Andes, which would make it hard to pull his weight around the office for a while. He asked if Coren minded. Coren didn't mind at all, but said that he would have to hire another literary editor to fill the enormous gap left by Miles, as indeed he did. That was much nicer than saying: "On your bike."

Posy Simmonds

2008-06-30T17:54:00.003+01:00
Posy was shipwrecked on Desert Island Discs, yesterday, Sunday 29th June 2008 (repeated this coming Friday). Posy lodged with Jill before either of them worked on The Guardian and part of the arrangement was that she collect Luke from nursery school.

Posy went to the Central School for Art and Design and the Sunday Times cartoonist Mel Calman, who spotted her work at her degree show, introduced her to Jill.

One of Posy's strips caricatured Alan. Jane Andromache knows which one.

See NPG 6247 Women's Page Contributors to The Guardian by Sarah Raphael. oil on paper laid on board, 1994. The sitters are:

Dame Elizabeth Anne Lucy Forgan Show (1944-), Journalist and media director.
Posy Simmonds Show (1945-), Cartoonist.
Mary Stott Show (1907-2002), Journalist.
Polly Toynbee Show (1946-), Journalist.
Jill Sheila Tweedie Show (1936-1993), Journalist.

Memories of Alan from Jo Simon

2008-06-23T21:12:00.000+01:00
Visiting your Dad in hospital, I was daydreaming in the cafeteria gathering strength for the long journey to the ward when I heard someone say very softly 'it's der Teufel'.

It was Alan and Jane who had come down from the ward. Alan was quoting from his schooldays when he was indoctrinating a Jewish contemporary into Marxism.

The boy eventually invited Alan home for tea. The door was opened by his mother, who was possibly a rare breed of Sunderland Tory. Leaving Alan on the doorstep she shouted up the stairs 'It's der Teufel'.

Game Shows

2008-06-22T17:34:00.001+01:00
Take It or Leave It
Host
Alan Brien

Co-hosts
Adjudicator and question-setter: Brigid Brophy

Broadcast
BBC2, 7 November 1964 to 8 January 1971

A television literary quiz, with four writers and critics discussing books and poetry. A paragraph or verse would be read out, and the contestants asked to name the work and author. Contemporary writers suggested the enjoyment came not from instant recall, but the literary detective work employed.

Feliks Topolski R.A.

2008-06-22T17:30:00.001+01:00
Feliks Topolski's 'Memoir of the Twentieth Century'

Alan Brien, Punch

"... his giant Memoir, in colour and on a grandiose old masterly scale, quartered in a brick dungeon like a Piranesi engraving, manages to distil the essence and apotheosis of his genius. Reworked and magnified from the thousands of sketches he has created hour by hour during an amazingly eventful career, they are for me one of our Century's great solid achievements."

EVELYN WAUGH

2008-06-22T17:19:00.002+01:00
EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER
Volume 7 Number 1 - Spring 1973

David Lodge, "The Arrogance of Evelyn Waugh," The Critic, 30 (May-June, 1972), 62-70, also a defense and explanation of the man, will interest casual readers but not Waugh scholars. His sources are principally Mr. Pinfold and Frances Donaldson, and though one of these is critically acceptable it has been exploited previously. He retells the standoff at White's between Waugh and Alan Brien, courtesy of Randolph Churchill - who really should have known better than to introduce anyone suffering from boredom to Mr. Brien, of all people. He quotes Harold Acton's "prancing faun" flourish, explains that Wormwood Scrubs is a prison, and concludes that Waugh's public image was the mask of a bored but decent man who valued his privacy. There is nothing at all wrong with this essay, but there is nothing at all new in it either.

TWO NEW BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ITEMS

D.S. Gallagher of James Cook University of North Queensland, who is well-known to EWN readers for some brilliant bibliographic investigations, has discovered a hitherto unrecorded Waugh letter to the editor by following up a clue in Alan Brien's "Permission to Speak..."

Evelyn Waugh, "Self-denial," Truth, October 15, 1954, p. 1729. Response to anonymous Profile: "Waugh Among the Ruins," Truth, October 8, 1954, pp. 1242-1243.

Gallagher observes that the author of the anonymous "Profile" appears to have been Alan Brien. His "Permission to Speak, Captain?" Spectator, CCXVI (April 15, 1966), 463 contains the following sentence: "My mind was packed with information I had laid in for my profile."

Gallagher notes that Truth was a London journal of comment which ceased publication around 1957. In his letter Waugh asserts that, contrary to the statement made in the "Profile," his home is not open to visits by the paying public.

Footlights

2008-06-22T17:03:00.002+01:00
from The Mausoleum Club Forum

Tangocow

posted on 21-5-2007 at 11:25 AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
26/10/79 - Alan Brian - Russell Davies, Harold Evans, Sponooch, Jilly Cooper, Prof Peter Townsend, Lord Melchett, Peter York, Lynda Hayes, Will Elsworth-Jones, and Jeremy Child, Norman Bird, Ronnie Brody in a sketch.

16/11/79 - Cambridge Footlights - Martin Bergman, Hugh Laurie, Robert Bathurst, Emma Thompson, Peter Cook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who's Alan Brian? I can't find anything on him anywhere. (Maybe it was journalist Alan Brien?)

And is that a list of the Footlights members, or were they the guests?

andrew martin. posted on 21-5-2007 at 03:22 PM

Yes, it's Alan Brien.

Martin Bergman sat at the desk for the Footlights show, presenting - the others did sketches, Cook was a guest.

Sunderland, circa 1940

2008-06-21T19:31:00.005+01:00
The following is a transcription of a tape sent to Alan by Gladys Glascoe (maiden name unknown) in 2005 after coming to Alan's 80th birthday celebrations at The Spaniards.

I hope someone will recognise, and correct, names and places which I transcribed phonetically.* See Comment.

Dear Alan,

I'm afraid it's proving too difficult to pay a visit and arrange a meeting for the time being but Joan [sic] tellls me you're busy writing your memoirs. It occurred to me it might amuse you to hear my recollections from the far past. So here goes.

I was in the winter of 40, back from evacuation, in the lower sixth form, and getting ready for A levels, when my brother, Randal, made a friend Tom McNichol [spelling], whom I quite liked because he had red hair, and his family had a flat that was for the time unoccupied, and unheated I may say, and he and Randal used to go and sit there and talk and have the odd cigarette and Randal persauded me to join them and we used to sit there and talk and I heard Tom mention someone called Adam. And when I said 'who is that?' I didn't get a very clear answer except this was someone who was a person of distinction. One of a kind. But I still wasn't clear in what way.

Now later I met Nancy and Eric Clavering and became involved in the YCO and frequented the old rooms in Coronation street. Do you remember? I don't know if it was there that I met you or at the Claverings, in their ...top floor flat I think it was. I know we had parties there and meetings. Trying to think when I heard of you next. I can't remember when I first met you. I just can't. I remember having the impression, because of course you were two years younger than me, but that didn't seem to weigh in your reputation. My recollections of seeing you, whenever that was, was that you were tall and thin, and shabby, as many of us were in those days.

Now, you were friendly with Lesley Jolly [spelling], of whom I was greatly enamoured for a long time, and I remember Lesley Jolly and you having a conversation about the fact you used to get up early and since you passed the library on your way to school, you would stop in there and read all the newspapers, now this impressed me, I must say, and it obviously impressed Lesley.

A story I have in connection with Lesley Jolly is that he persuaded you to take part in an apprentices' strike in the ship yards. My clearest memory was of you reporting back to Les - he was coaching you, what you have to do and what you have to say - he said now keep your hands in your pockets, cos your hands are obviously not those of someone who has done manual work. Taking a rest now because my voice gives out easily.

PAUSE

Don't expect these impressions to be connected or organised at all....

You told me your father went over to Ireland with the black and tans and came back on the other side, because of his experiences. I once met your father while you were away in the airforce. I called because I hadn't heard from you for a while. I found him a lovely person. I really liked him very much.

Now what else...? We smoked, and how we smoked, whatever we could lay our hands on. There was a kiosk near the station and when shortages were most severe we found this girl who sold us cigarettes that no one else had ever heard of. There was one particularly throat searing brand called Robin. You remember? When she sold it to us she was really quite triumphant she'd be able to supply our needs. I haven't smoked for twenty years but I still.. . I've dreamnt ocassionally that I was smoking, and after a good meal I get that sensation in the chest, that I would love a cigarette or better still a cigar, but I don't, not worth it....

After we took to - they call it hanging out together these days - but I think the expression we would have used was knocking about together, in a desultory way. We went to the Havelock once to see 'Stormy Weather' with Lena Horne, singing of course, looking absolutely gorgeous. You said 'I wouldn't mind marrying her', to which I replied 'Chance would be a fine thing, wouldn't it?' You said 'well some people would object because she is black', and I was really surprised that you should even jokingly allow the existance of that sort of prejudice.

Another thing that comes to my mind is that you, and I, and a third party, whom I don't recall except in a vague and shadowy way, took to - you may disbelieve this but it's true - took to breaking into unoccupied houses. I think only three times at most. God knows why we did it... On one ocassion the three of us were crossing a sort of conservatory and suddenly you disappeared up to your knees. You'd stumbled into... I think it must have been a pond originally, dry fortunately, full of leaves and rubbish... we were very luck we weren't caught...

What else did we do? Sit about in each other's homes. On one occasion I recall we were in an icecream bar, sitting either side of one of those cubicles. On the side opposite to me a woman appeared over the top of the barrier waving for, requesting a light.....which I, I reached across and asked you to pass to her. You expressed great surprise that I'd been so observant as to notice her. I'm prepared to accept that I was a horrid and really quite stupid girl but I wasn't that stupid I couldn't see someone waving, climbing over a barrier and waving.

Every now and then I have to stop because my voice gives out.

PAUSE

Do you remember going to socialist summer school at Malham? Do you remember that? I remember one character who was staying there telling us about his visit to the pub the night before, saying I came back, on the way I bent down, I could hear the sound of someone being sick and it was me. I don't think either you or I drank to that extent, certainly not then...

I remember when we arrived, going for a walk along a stream where there were swans, it was a lovely setting, beautiful fresh clean air. You took the train part of the way and biked for the rest. I remember on the way back, seeing you out of the window, where the road rang alongside the railway track, peddling furiously to keep up, which you did, and you managed to get into the train at the next stop.

Do you remember we had a spell - I don't know who the third party was - of pretending to talk common? 'tack and common' [spelling]. The character, alderman Chalk [spelling] and we put about to each other scurrilous reports of alderman Chalk and the council. I can't remember who we played these games with. It may have been David Maccaby. I often wonder what happened to David. An amazing family that. There was Lorna and there was HZ. HZ was a formidable character. I gathered ... I think I met him once briefly. We didn't know him as well as David. I once heard an argument reported, an argument with him, reported, that you had had. You told him Marxists don't believe in formal logic. The only way you could half way win the argument.

PAUSE

I remember when my unrequited passion for Lesley Jolly reached a point where he was...when we were engaged, after a fashion. I mean I didn't realise... It took me a long time to realise his problems, or his cast of temperament. It wasn't until he and I had split up and he was involved with Julian Meckelfeld [spelling] that I fully realised the strength of the passions that could be aroused. I remember walking down the street between the two of them and it was as if I wasn't present at all. They sort of gravitated together. I remember when I told you Lesley Jolly had told his mother he was engaged to me. You said you weren't surprised. You know I expected her to be surpirsed. You said, 'Well it's better than getting engaged to Colin and Brighton [spelling].'

These recollections are very scrappy I'm afraid but I do ask if you want amplification on any of them, say so, I may not be able to give it but I'll try.

PAUSE

I remember quite vividly a happy week that we had when you suddenly turned up on the doorstep, home on leave, and in airforce uniform, and if I may say so looking very good in it,... towards the end of the school summer holidays. We spent the time going about, just sitting and talking, and when you went back, I understood - I don't know how true this was - that you had overstayed your leave and that you were in trouble when you got back. I remember you writing your ambition was to be a columnist like Alexander Woolcott. God forgive me, I wrote back and said 'wanting's one thing, being's another.' I like to think this spurred you on. ...You were a rear gunner and when your plane was damaged, or landed badly, the rear gunner's pod broke away and bounced you across the air field. A shocking experience.

PAUSE

Well Alan these reminiscences are proving very scrappy and uncoordinated but I'll give you two or three more and then post this off and see what you think of them.

I seem to remember... you coached my brother, Colby [spelling], in maths... I'm not very well acquainted with that period as for some reason you and I weren't speaking to each other. I can't remember why and I cant imagine why.

There was a time when... I think it was the party held a dance in the lake, or it may have been the soviet committee, something progressive or we wouldn't have been there and I turned up in my one and only evening dress, which I rather loved, it was cyclamen, it fitted to the waist and flared out to full length and I was very pleased with myself. I tried to get you to dance and you claimed not to dance. At that time I didn't realise that there are lots of reasons why young men didn't want to go onto the dance floor. But you did say that I had a nice waist. No longer I'm afraid.

Oh yes... Another flattering bit. You and Lesley Jolly were discussing knowledge of marxism and one of you asked what I'd read? 'Only Tommy Jackson's [spelling] Dialiectics'. And one of you said 'You've made it go a long way.' How far that was a polite rejoinder and really concealed a contempt for my ignorance. I don't know.

I think I shall close now and say look after yourself. Love to Joan [sic]. And I will either tape something more if I remember anything more or I'll write.

Paul Cezanne

2008-06-21T16:20:00.002+01:00
Could Megan describe how it was the clay figure she made of Alan - from memory - for his 80th birthday, was so much like Alan whilst also being the image of Cezanne?

'IT’S APPROACHING BERNARD SHAW...'

2008-06-21T15:15:00.004+01:00
The“Quote...Unquote”
NEWSLETTER
Publisher&Editor:NigelReesVol.17,No3,July2008

When Alan’s wife, Jane Hill, told me about the ‘memorial blog’ that had been launched to enable friends and colleagues to post tributes on his death, I was delighted to see that ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate’ was duly accorded a place among the top ten quotations on the website set up by his son, Adam.

The number of guests who have appeared on Quote ... Unquote over the years and who have, in modern parlance, recently ‘left the building’ is very sad. I would mention in particular Ned Sherrin and Richard Boston who were on the very first edition and returned several times in the early days. But then we have also recently lost George Melly, Miles Kington, Humphrey Lyttelton, Alan Coren, Gerry Fitt, Bill Deedes, John Rae, Dick Vosburgh, Anton Rodgers and, a relative latecomer to the show, Jeremy Beadle. We will miss them all but the death of one in particular brought back a very happy memory from 1985. The last time I encountered the writer and journalist Alan Brien was a year or two ago at a book launch. He asked why he had not been invited back to appear on Quote ... Unquote. I no doubt fudged some answer but the real reason was that there was no way we could repeat a wonderful moment from one of the four editions he had appeared in back then.

One of the quotations I asked him to provide a source for was, ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.’ In his light, lilting voice he set about it: ‘I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Modernish, I think. Can’t be very old. Bernard Shaw would be too good for it, but it’s approaching Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it’s Chesterton, is it?’ Well, this is not a trick I can play very often on panellists – indeed, I don’t think I have ever done it to anyone else – and I was able to say, ‘Shaw, Chesterton ... Alan Brien, you wrote it in an article on corporal punishment in schools in Punch in 1973 ... ’ Oh, how we laughed. What I sometimes do – when I know who is taking part in the programme – is to see if indeed they do have any quotations attributed to them in the dictionaries but then usually feed these to other panellists. I had found ‘Violence is the repartee ... ’ in Frank S. Pepper’s Handbook of 20th-century Quotations. When I told Alan this, he said he would immediately go and buy a dozen copies and give them to his friends for Christmas. ‘Not quite Shaw, not quite Chesterton, but very good Alan Brien,’ I said. He responded: ‘That describes it very well. That’s what I was trying to be!’ It was a good joke to play on him but, as I say, it was absolutely unrepeatable.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951

2008-06-18T15:41:00.003+01:00
Alan noticed everything. He had a remembrance of meeting Wittgenstein. I have an idea it was to do with lodgings in Oxford. Might it have been Beaumont Street? Can anybody add to this?

On Dylan Thomas in Oxford. 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife...'

2008-06-16T21:09:00.004+01:00
Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.

Thomas untutored
Volume 16 Number 2, Hilary 2004
Oxford Today

A fascination for Oxford briefly held the Welsh poet enthralled, says his biographer Andrew Lycett.

A jotted reminder in a notebook - 'Find exact modern duties of Proctors and Bulldogs compared with 19th century' - is hardly the sort of penny-plain line we might expect from a major lyrical poet. But in late 1946 Dylan Thomas was researching a radio talk about Oxford. He was living in the grounds of Magdalen College. And he was fascinated by the University, which played a background role in the unfolding of his career.

Most of his notebooks were crammed with his own poems. The State University of New York at Buffalo possesses four exercise books with fair copies of all Thomas's teenage verse. Later, he would draw on this early material, which provided models for half his published output.

Thomas's youthful creativity held him back from the undergraduate career that his schoolmaster father wanted for him. Thomas père was a prickly alumnus of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. Having gained a first-class degree, he would have liked to proceed to Oxford. Instead, he ended up teaching English at Swansea Grammar School. His son Dylan, born in 1914, went to the same establishment. But clever though he was, his temperament was unsuited to sustained academic effort and, at the age of 15, he rejected the classroom for the 'craft or sullen art' of poetry.

Nevertheless, for Dylan Thomas Oxford was always a chimera. In the 1930s, he is said to have visited the city to talk about James Joyce, although I have found no evidence of this. In 1937 he wrote an enthusiastic review of Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood for a short-lived undergraduate publication, Light and Dark. He clearly had admirers in Oxford, for he suggested the English don, Lord David Cecil, as a subscriber to a 1938 edition of his poems.

At the start of the Second World War, Oxford poets such as Sidney Keyes regarded Dylan Thomas as a welcome antidote to Auden and his circle. They invited him to address the University English Club, an undergraduate society, in November 1941. Thomas had been working with John Davenport on a novel, The Death of the King's Canary, which interwove an unlikely story about the murder of the poet laureate with brilliant parodies of contemporary poets. Philip Larkin (St John's) noted appreciatively: 'Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices. He remarked, "I'd like to have talked about a book of poems I've been given to review, a young poet called Rupert Brooke - it's surprising how he has been influenced by Stephen Spender ...". There was a moment of delighted surprise, then a roar of laughter. Then he read a parody of Spender entitled The Parachutist which had people rolling on the floor.'

Later in the war, Thomas and his wife Caitlin were back in Oxford, staying with the historian A J P Taylor and his wife Margaret. It was an unexpected encounter, unwittingly engineered by pianist Natasha Litvin. She used to play at lunchtime concerts in Oxford organised by Margaret Taylor, who one day asked her to bring some guests along for the weekend. In all innocence, Litvin and her husband Stephen Spender invited the Thomases.

They did not know that Thomas had already met the Taylors, and had not endeared himself to them. That was in April 1935, six months after reaching London from Swansea. During that short time, Thomas had befriended the poet Norman Cameron, an Oriel graduate who had been a key figure in Oxford's English Society in the late 1920s. Anxious because the sparkling young poet was over-indulging in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, Cameron arranged for him to take time off for what was essentially a rest cure with his former Oriel friend A J P Taylor, then teaching history at Manchester University.

Recently married, Taylor was not impressed by the poet who, invited for a week, contrived to stay a month. In his memoir, A Personal History, Taylor recorded how he had to ration access to his beer barrel, since his guest drank 'fifteen or twenty pints' each day. As Thomas was leaving, he announced he had lost his return ticket and asked to borrow two pounds. The historian reluctantly agreed, hoping never again to see a man whom he described as 'cruel' and 'a sponger'.

A decade later, the dynamics of the Taylor marriage had changed and Margaret, bored with academic life, was ready to be impressed by the romantic young poet. After Thomas advised her on her own verse, she took pity when in March 1946 he was having difficulty finding accommodation for his young family. She invited them to stay at Holywell Ford, the house where she and her husband lived in the grounds of Magdalen, where Thomas slept in a one-room summerhouse beside the river Cherwell or in a gypsy caravan. So began one of the great acts of modern literary patronage. For eight years, until his death in New York in November 1953, Thomas looked to Margaret Taylor to bail him out of financial difficulties. She was besotted by him and he exploited her. After allowing him to stay at Holywell Ford, she bought him a series of dwellings in South Leigh, Oxfordshire (1947-9), Laugharne, South Wales (from 1949) and in Camden Town, London (a short-lived bolt-hole in 1951-2). She also arranged for his son, Llewelyn, to attend Magdalen College School.

Taylor's biographer Adam Sisman described Margaret as 'a sort of middle-class Lady Ottoline Morrell'. At her Holywell Ford salon one might meet authors Louis MacNeice and Graham Greene or the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. Dylan Thomas would appear as a poetic turn; John Betjeman, then secretary of the Oxford Preservation Trust, expressed delight at his reading of Thomas Hardy's 'To Lizbee Brown'.

But all too often the Welshman was tired and emotional after a day at the BBC in London. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper recalled how Thomas 'overturned a full decanter of claret - good claret too - drenching the fastidious Lord David (Cecil). That dinner party was not a success.' And Thomas could be embarrassingly rude about his patroness: after she had laboured over a dish of jugged hare, he wavered before condescending to 'eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me.'

Nevertheless, Thomas enjoyed life in Oxford. Undergraduates used to see him in the Turf, Gloucester Arms or White's, a club near St Aldate's. With Caitlin or Margaret Taylor in tow, he drank with friends, such as John Veale, a young composer whose father was University Registrar; Ernest Stahl, a German don at Christ Church; Dan Davin, an energetic New Zealander at the University Press; and Enid Starkie, who taught French at Somerville and with whom he discussed Rimbaud. Although dismissive of his education, she loved his conversation, declaring she would have been happy if he 'had read the telephone directory'.

Writing in the Sunday Times in 1973, Alan Brien (Jesus) recalled the familiar figure of Thomas in the Cornmarket on Saturday afternoons, 'staggering along loaded down with string bags, behind his striding, empty-handed Viking Irish wife - the very seaside postcard of a booze-flushed snub-nosed, ox-eyed, hen-pecked slave husband, aching to slide off into a pub and lose wife, shopping and consciousness'.

Intrigued by the University, Thomas adopted it as a subject for his radio talk in late 1946. This was part of an exchange with an American station, which provided a piece about Princeton, but sadly neither Thomas's script nor the tape survives.

Along with the memo about proctors and bulldogs, Thomas inscribed gobbets about the University and its lore - potted biographies of luminaries including Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson; a list of quotations about the place from Wordsworth, Swinburne and others; even a section devoted to 'Eccentric Figures' such as Martin Routh, President of Magdalen, described as the last man in Oxford to wear a wig, who died in 1854 in his 100th year. Although not formally involved in the University, he did participate in literary events, particularly at the Poetry Society.

After moving to South Leigh, near Witney, in August 1947, Thomas became less prominent, but whenever he returned to Oxford, he made up for lost time. As he informed the Scots writer Hector McIver in February 1949, '[Hugh] MacDiarmid is coming to lecture to the Oxford Poetry Society next month. A party is being arranged.' Seeing Thomas swaying down the High Street, Kenneth Tynan (Magdalen) asked if he could help. 'Get me some more bloody crème de menthe', Thomas screamed.

The poet Michael Hamburger (Christ Church) welcomed Thomas's authentic Bohemianism in grim post-war Oxford and novelist Francis King (Balliol) wrote of the Welshman's 'voluble, dangerous charm'. However, younger undergraduates were sceptical of his wordy lyricism in an age of austerity and the atom bomb. John Wain and Kingsley Amis (both St John's), for example, wanted a more robust, ironic style, as was later associated with the Movement group of poets.

By this time, Thomas was experiencing a difficult, even barren, period as a poet. His recognition of this change of mood spurred him into looking, during his last few years, for new artistic challenges in radio and in America. In South Leigh in 1948, he first began to knock some shape into his 'play for voices', Under Milk Wood.

Soon his Welsh yearning for home, or hiraeth, began to tug at him. A year later, he went to live in Laugharne, though another longing - for academic respectability - remained evident in the contract he signed with the Oxford University Press in early 1953 for a book about Welsh fairy tales. Although these two desires struggled within him, there was no doubting which was the stronger. Walking along Broad Street, Martin Starkie once asked him if he would like to have been at the University. Thomas replied: 'In some ways, yes; in most ways, no.'

Sally Belfrage for The Crack

2008-06-16T17:17:00.005+01:00
Obituary: Sally Belfrage
Independent, The (London), Mar 16, 1994 by JESSICA MITFORD

Sally Mary Caroline Belfrage, writer: born Hollywood, California 4 October 1936; married 1965 Bernard Pomerance (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); died London 14 March 1994.

IN 1955, we were all more or less on the lam. My husband Bob and I arrived in London using revoked American passports; our friend Cedric Belfrage had just been deported from the United States to his native England as a subversive alien. America was going through the convulsions of McCarthyism. Cedric, a long-time US resident and editor of a left-wing national weekly published in New York, had fallen afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Birds of a feather, Bob and I often visited the Belfrage household in London. As we sat plotting the overthrow of the US government by force and violence - or, more accurately, discussing what London plays might be worth seeing - a stunningly beautiful creature would dash into the sitting-room, give her Dad a kiss, and be off quick as a wink to a party. This was 19- year-old Sally, long of leg, blonde of hair, blue of eye.

We were in London again when Sally, then aged 21, once more darted into view. She was writing A Room in Moscow. A vivid memory: Cedric told us, 'Sally has got no idea what it takes to be a writer. She's too damn popular, out every night until Lord knows what hour, and then of course she sleeps until noon. I keep explaining to her that she'll never get the book done that way, one has to be disciplined to write . . .'

A year or so later the book was published to great critical acclaim in England and the United States. Sally was feted everywhere, brought by her publisher to New York for interviews. I remember reading an article in Reynolds News - I think that was it - in which the writer interviewed father and daughter. He thought that the daughter had surpassed her paternal mentor.

Sally, who adored her father, might have disputed that. But to me, the writer did have a point, as evidenced in her next book. In 1964 she joined the intrepid band of civil-rights volunteers from all over America to make the dangerous journey into Mississippi as part of a bold, and ultimately historic, challenge to the most murderously racist state in America.

Out of this brave effort at least a dozen worthy books emerged. Of these, only Sally's Freedom Summer (1965) has the authentic ring of an enduring classic.

Leafing through it today, I still feel the chills and thrills of first reading, as each character springs alive from the page. In a typical Sally-ism, she describes fear as 'a condition, like heat or night or blue eyes. You had to arrange your fear as a parallel element in the day and night, to exist beside it and to function without its interference.'

Over the years, Bob and I got to know Sally Belfrage better and better - first as a contemporary of my daughter Constancia Romilly, when they would wheel their respective babies in prams around New York together, and later as an indispensable London friend whose welcome was always unalloyed joy.

My last letter from Sally came just a few weeks before she died. We'd been corresponding about the possibility of a book tour for her forthcoming autobiography, UnAmerican Activities. She had been diagnosed some months before with incurable cancer, but 'What the hell?' was her attitude.

Well - I can just see her wowing them with this on the chat shows.

It just so happens that Un-American Activities is the best, the most profound and the most amusing account ever written by a former Red Diaper Baby. Stay tuned for reviews this August.

Film maker Midge Mckenzie

2008-06-16T17:01:00.002+01:00
Alan had given Jill a cameo of Shakespeare. He then gave it to Midge, after Jill died. Midge was a great party giver. We went to her memorial in Highbury.

Shoulder to Shoulder with Midge MacKenzie

Ellen Shub a freelance photojournalist, and friend of Midge MacKenzie's, whose work over the past three decades has focused on social justice issues and activism in the US.

Filmmaker Midge McKenzie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA in April 2000 after a screening of John Houston: War Stories
Photo © Ellen Shub

MacKenzie, an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life's work focused on feminism, peace, human rights, and social justice, died in January. She was 65 and died at home in London of cardiac arrest after a lengthy battle with cancer.

A crusading social activist with flaming red hair, characteristic wide-brimmed Stetson hats, turquoise bracelets and rings, and cowboy boots, she campaigned with relentless tenacity and insight to document women's history in the United States, Great Britain, and the world. She was tirelessly dedicated to creating a more just, peaceful world that respected the human rights of women and the value of authentic community.

She is perhaps best known for her 1975 Masterpiece Theatre television series and book, Shoulder to Shoulder, enlivening the history of the British women's struggle for suffrage.

For me personally, that series and book, with images of women being force-fed while on hunger strikes in prison, made feminism real to me. It has inspired me to photograph women's issues in America for over 30 years.

Mackenzie documented the women's movement, and allied social justice movements, in film. Women Talking Betty Friedan and Kate Millet talking about raising consciousness. She filmed Jane Fonda testifying about her trip to Hanoi, and created the film As I Stand Here Ironing on the stories of Tillie Olsen. She also threw tomatoes at Bob Hope at the Miss World contest in London, and as an ardent anti-apartheid activist, staged a reenactment of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre on London's Lyceum stage.

Mackenzie collaborated with Amnesty International to create The Sky: A Silent Witness human rights abuses seen through the eyes of women. It follows the journey of Guatemalans to reclaim the remains of 180 massacre victims and features women from across the globe, including a Tibetan Buddhist nun, a Tiananmen Square demonstrator, and an African-American civil rights worker, testifying about human rights abuses in their own countries.

She created a strong anti-war film, John Huston: War Stories, in 1999, which centered on an interview with director John Huston and the footage, banned by the US War Department at the time, he shot in World War II in Italy,

She was a founding member of the New England Chapter of Women in Film and Video, taught film history at the Carpenter Center for the Study of Visual Arts at Harvard, created multimedia events with the Joffrey Ballet, Prisoners of Childhood based on the work of psychologist Alice Miller, and films on remote communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

A memorial attended by friends from London, New York, and Massachusetts was held April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where clips of her films and personal remembrances were shared.

Oxford days, Mike Hill, Isis & Deal, Kent

2008-06-16T16:43:00.003+01:00
Alan didn't know Mike had died.

From The Times April 9, 2008

Mike Hill
BBC writer and producer who remained fiercely anti-Establishment
Mike Hill was a much-liked and sometimes quirky presence at BBC television in a golden period of its satirical - and serious talk show - heyday.

He was the deputy to Rowan Ayers for the groundbreaking Late-Night Line-up presented by Joan Bakewell and Michael Dean, and went on to be executive producer of a late-night discussion programme Up Sunday in 1972-73 which featured a glittering array of talkers and performers, including John Wells, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Barry Humpries, Clive James, Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. The initial format of the show was to discuss the week's news critically and entertainingly, with a regular slot featuring James Cameron and Willie Rushton. Up Sunday was, in the words of a former BBC executive, so successful that “naturally, the corporation took it off”.

Hill subsequently became executive producer of The End of the Pier Show, transmitted in 1974-75, which was a mixture of satire and musical, with guests John Wells, John Fortune, Carl Davis and Madeline Smith, Peter Sellers, John Laurie, Ivor Cutler and John Bird. This was the first TV programme to mix cartoons with live performances and was thought of as pioneering in its time.

During the 1970s and 1980s Hill continued to be involved with subsequent programmes of a similar genre, mixing satire, current affairs and music, including In the Looking Glass, Rutland Weekend Television, and fantasy programmes such as The Snow Queen, The Light Princess - which won the Royal Television Society's Most Original Programme Award in 1978, Jane of the Mirror (a strip cartoon which won a Bafta for artwork), and two hour-long Angela Brazil-type schoolgirl films, Schoolgirl Chums in 1982 and St Ursula's in Danger in 1983.

Hill had an unlikely background for a media man, having been in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War - he flew Spitfires in a reconnaissance task over the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, and was a brave and sometimes reckless pilot. He had also seen service on Russian convoys during the war.

He was born in Yorkshire and, originally called Denys Michael Ryshworth-Hill, was the second of two sons. He first attended school in Ripon, Yorkshire, and then went to King's School, Canterbury. While at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, from 1945-48, he wrote the sports column for Isis. He never completed his Oxford degree as he was rusticated for insufficient attention to studies, or, as a contemporary remembers, for being a “general drunk and layabout”.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Hill lived the kind of Bohemian life in London that was possible in those days when there were cheap lodgings in Chelsea and a man could survive somehow on the small fees paid by a series of fringe magazines. He was pleased to wangle a job as editor of Flight Deck magazine, for the Fleet Air Arm - especially, he told a friend, because the publication only came out four times a year. In this capacity Hill was employed by the Admiralty. He was subsequently employed as a journalist by Amalgamated Press.

In the 1960s Hill was introduced to the BBC by his wartime friend Rowan Ayers. He did some research work on The Great War, written by Correlli Barnett, which was broadcast in 1964. He worked on the Tonight programme and went on to become Ayers's deputy on Late-Night Line-up, a legendary live discussion programme which mixed the serious with the provocative, and was finally taken off the air in 1973 after 3,000 memorable transmissions. He also worked with Ned Sherrin on That Was the Week that Was.

Hill's naval background earned him the nickname “The Commander” at the BBC. Joan Bakewell considered him a warm and encouraging presence in the Late-Night Line-up studio, as did many colleagues. A BBC colleague, Ian Keill, remembers Mike Hill as “optimistic, witty and cheerful - even when everything about us seemed to be falling apart at the seams”. Those with a more corporate view of BBC structures were more inclined to judge Hill as genial but irresponsible: yet the presenters and performers felt he protected them somewhat from “the less encouraging noises emanating from the sixth floor at TV Centre”.

Hill certainly had his eccentricities. Despite, or perhaps because of, his background he was chronically anti-Establishment, and all but concealed his family's double-barrelled name (or his own true given name, Denys). He had an obsessive hostility against Wykehamists, whom he considered snobbish, Civil-Service-minded and having an insufferably superior air. This may have derived from an adversarial view of Alasdair Milne, sometime Director-General.

In his bohemian days Hill had been an habitué of such Soho shebeens as the Colony Room and the Gargoyle drinking club, but in his middle years he curbed his drinking habits and latterly he eschewed alcohol altogether.

Hill retired to Deal, Kent, in the 1980s, prompted by the presence there of his friends Alan Brien and Jill Tweedie, and where his sometime neighbours included Simon Raven and Charles Hawtrey. He retired from the BBC mainly to care for his wife, Patricia Montague-Brooks (neé Ferguson), who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Despite - or perhaps again, because of - a reputation in earlier days as a ladies' man, Hill was devoted to his wife and her two daughters from a previous marriage, whom he came to regard as his own family. He was devastated when Patricia died in 1984, from a bout of pneumonia.

In retirement he maintained a cheerful friendship with pals from his BBC days, and particularly with Ned Sherrin - a loyal friend from Oxford days. He had always wanted to be a writer, and privately he wrote poetry as well as several unpublished novels. He published three books, including Duty Free: Fleet Air Arm Days, drawn from his diaries kept during the Second World War, and a word-of-mouth success with military veterans; Right Royal Remarks - 1066 to 1996, from research done with Ned Sherrin on strange quotations from royalty through the centuries; and A Little Local Difficulty, a roman à clef about life at the BBC, which he self-published, and which featured, barely disguised, characters such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Grace Wyndham Goldie.

Michael Hill, BBC producer and writer, was born on June 17, 1923. He died on March 16, 2008, aged 84

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Alan with sister Joyce, 2005. Great friend, Jo Simon. behind.

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Alan with his mother, Isabella

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Alan's father, Ernest

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Photograph by Ian Christie, Highgate 2005

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Austen Kark

2008-06-13T17:30:00.002+01:00
Austen was one of Alan's oldest friends and with him in Holloway on the day we first met in 1993. He was also the influence behind Alan getting one of his first jobs, on his father's magazine, as associate editor, Mini-Cinema 1950-52.

obituaries
Austen Kark
BBC mandarin who successfully defended the world service

Dennis Barker The Guardian, Monday May 13 2002

Austen Kark, who died in the Potters Bar rail crash aged 75, secured a place in broadcasting history as one of the three former managing directors of the BBC World Service to oppose the plans of John Birt, after he became director general in 1992, to end the service's independent status at Bush House, in central London, and absorb it within the rest of the corporation.

With Gerard Mansell and John Tusa, the other two of the "three wise men", Kark opposed the plan in speeches, letters, newspaper articles and behind-the-scenes lobbying. While they campaigned, plans were drawn up to sell the lease of Bush House, only to be reversed. Nearly a decade later, victory went to the trio by default, and today the world service remains at Bush House, with its own management structure substantially in place.

Coming into office as managing director in 1984, exactly 30 years after he joined the corporation, Kark was the man-in-the-middle of another great BBC controversy - the launching of the world television service to complement its radio counterpart. The idea was first mooted by Kark's predecessor, Douglas Muggeridge, who had a certain protective public profile as the nephew of the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge.

Douglas leaked the idea to a Guardian journalist, and made a speech in the United States implicitly urging the Thatcher government to supply the funds for a scheme to keep British broadcasting ahead of other nations. He was rapped over the knuckles for his pains, and told by Mrs Thatcher that if ITV could run the beginnings of an external television service without government funding - as it was then doing - the BBC should not expect feather-bedding.

After Muggeridge's retirement, Kark kept the idea of world service television alive but, being a man of lesser public profile and more reticence, did not stick his neck out with any public announcements. It was his successor, the former news presenter John Tusa, who finally got the service launched.

Tall, reserved, and with a hesitant manner that concealed an incisive mind - and a generous awareness of the qualities of his staff - Kark had a chequered career before joining the BBC. He was born in London, the son of an army major who became a publisher. He went to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, to the Nautical College, Pangbourne, the Royal Naval College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1944, and served for two years with the East Indies fleet, aboard HMS Nelson and HMS London.

At Oxford in 1948, Kark directed the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, before going into the family magazine business, Norman Kark Publications, among whose products was the glossy literary magazine Courier, which flouted the austerity of wartime and postwar publications. Kark worked on one of the less ambitious magazines, Bandwagon, and became associate editor (1950-52) before editing the London Mystery Magazine for two years.

From 1954, he was a BBC reporter, and, 10 years later, became head of the South European service at Bush House. This fostered his already existing interest in countries of the region, especially Greece, about which he later wrote guidebooks.

In 1972, he switched to the East European and Russian service, and became editor of the world service the following year. He was adviser to Lord Soames, the last governor of Rhodesia, on election broadcasting in the colony, and, in 1980, chaired, for Robert Mugabe, the Harare government report on radio and television in Zimbabwe.

In 1974, he became controller of engineering services, but moved back into the broadcasting mainstream in 1981 with his appointment as deputy managing director of external broadcasting. After two years as deputy, he became managing director, retiring in 1986.

Kark was a man of broad interests, especially involving southern Europe and the Commonwealth. He was made a trustee of the Commonwealth Journalists' Association in 1993.

In retirement, he wrote Attic In Greece (1994); his spy thriller, set in the Middle East, The Forwarding Agent (1999), was praised by the crime writer PD James, an old friend. Most of it was written at his home in Nauplion, a port in the Aegean, where he and his wife, the novelist Nina Bawden, spent much of their time. In London, the couple lived in Islington, in a house backing on to the Grand Union canal. His hobbies included real tennis, travelling and studying mosaics. He was a member of the Oriental Club and the MCC, and was appointed CBE in 1987.

In 1949, Kark married Margaret Solomon, a relationship that produced two daughters but ended in divorce in 1954. That same year he married Nina Bawden; they had one daughter, and he was stepfather to her two sons, one of whom predeceased him.

Dennis Barker

Antonio de Figueiredo writes: I was in close professional contact with Austen Kark during the cold war years, when Bush House was like a mini-United Nations, bypassing the curtains of censorship and dictatorial rule that smothered many countries of the world. At that time, hundreds of foreign refugees, including myself, congregated daily in the canteen, hoping for the day British freedom and democracy, for all its shortcomings, would be extended to our homelands.

Kark had the right combination of cosmopolitan open-mindedness and dedication to British democratic toler ance to ensure that the much admired English-language world service was the model for more than 46 foreign language services that broadcast objective news and comment not available to hundreds of millions of people then deprived of freedom.

Once, when I praised the world service for the role it played on behalf of demo-cratic rights and values, he replied with what struck me as typically English laconic objectivity: "Well, let us try and keep it that way."

Austen Steven Kark, journalist and broadcasting executive, born October 20 1926; died May 10 2002.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday May 13 2002 . It was last updated at 00:19 on January 11 2008.

Astrakhan hat

2008-06-13T17:09:00.002+01:00
left on the train to Deal when visiting Michael Hill, only a few years ago, and not recovered.

Astrakhan' was originally called As-Tarkhan, which is another name for Ras Tarkhan (meaning "Lord of the Alans", a Scythian tribe.)

Surrealist Jonathan Routh has died

2008-06-13T16:12:00.006+01:00
Jonathan rang Alan from Jamaica maybe a year or so ago, because a journalist had referred to Alan, in print, as the 'late' theatre critic of the Telegraph.

From The Times June 6, 2008

Jonathan Routh: Candid Camera prankster
Prankster who was one of the leading spirits behind the immensely successful television hoax programme Candid Camera
Jonathan Routh
Jonathan Routh was a supreme practical joker and hoaxer whose star reached its zenith with Candid Camera, the hugely successful Sixties television series in which unsuspecting members of the public were duped into making fools of themselves while filmed with a hidden camera, to the delight of viewers. It was one of the earliest examples of television voyeurism.

Routh was also a primitive artist and an author who led a charmed, eccentric, bohemian life in which, by his own admission, he relied heavily on the kindness of wealthy friends, living in a succession of smart addresses and eating at the best restaurants. “I have never had any money. Never,” he once confessed.

Candid Camera — a concept imported from America and the forerunner of Game for a Laugh and Beadle’s About — was presented by Bob Monkhouse, with the lugubrious, beetle-browed Routh and Arthur Atkins as the pranksters who would spook hapless participants with talking pillar boxes and cars without engines. Jennifer Paterson, who later found success in the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, would sometimes nudge victims into shot while disguised as a cleaner.

A tailor was persuaded to make a suit for a chimpanzee. Tourists were coerced into propping up a “leaning” Nelson’s Column. Once Routh dressed up as a tree, stood at a bus stop and asked: “Does this bus go to Sherwood Forest?” On another occasion, he stuck his head out of a coal hole and told passers-by that he was looking for Baker Street Underground station. It was innocent stuff by today’s standards, but considered frightfully daring at the time.

Related Internet Links
Watch Jonathan Routh on Candid Camera
Among his most celebrated hoaxes was posing as a driving instructor and demonstrating to a nervous woman pupil the proper way to drive. He crashed four times in five minutes. On another occasion he dumbfounded an airline receptionist by removing the wheels of her car, painting the windows and taking out the seats when she called at a garage for two gallons of petrol.

Routh once organised a “silent recital” by “an unknown Hungarian pianist” at the Wigmore Hall. “Tomas Blod” performed “Transmogrifications, Opus 37, by Sandal” in which he sat at the piano and played not a note. Routh thought it “a quiet success”.

On another occasion he posted himself from Sheepwash, Devon, to the offices of the Daily Mail in Fleet Street, claiming that he was too scared to go to London on his own. As “livestock”, parcels had to be accompanied at all times, he was put in a postman’s care for the duration of the journey and delivered for £2. The postman was silent throughout. Routh thought this episode demonstrated the height of English tolerance and good manners.

John Reginald Surdeval Routh was born in 1927 and spent part of his childhood in Palestine where his father was a colonial governor. He was educated at Uppingham School, from which he was expelled for putting up a banner in the chapel which read: “Vote Routh, Communist”, while campaigning in a mock election. He read history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, revived the moribund Footlights Dramatic Society and edited Granta, one edition of which was described by a chaplain as “the most obscene item I have ever seen in print”. As an indication of things to come, Routh took a group of undergraduates off to “measure” Bletchley for a bypass, and then collected signatures condemning the fake proposal. After 18 months or so he was invited to leave Cambridge.

Finding himself at a loose end, Routh, who by this time had changed his first name to Jonathan, invented Jeremy Feeble, an 18th-century poet whom he contrived to get mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement and on the BBC Third Programme.

His first job was as showbusiness editor of the now-defunct Everybody’s Magazine, which published a piece he filed from India in 1951 while on location with Jean Renoir, who was filming The River. He wrote that shooting had to be suspended when the cast was struck down by “dhoti rash, a virulent infection contracted from low-caste washerwomen”.

This job was followed by a spell as “Candid Mike” on Radio Luxembourg. In one broadcast he conducted a bizarre conversation with a London Transport inspector who had caught him travelling with a grand piano on the Underground.

Candid Camera was launched on an unsuspecting public in 1960 and became an instant success with viewers, who relished the misfortunes of Routh’s hapless victims. In the first programme he pushed an engineless car into a garage and told the mechanic that it had just broken down. The garage man opened the bonnet to find nothing there. Routh played dumb. Utterly bewildered, the mechanic then looked under the car and in the boot before summoning his mates to see if he’d missed something. Eventually, one of them pronounced to general astonishment that, indeed, there was no engine.

Among those I met....

2008-06-13T15:46:00.005+01:00
ADVENTURES OF A LANGUAGE TRAVELLER
An autobiography
JOHN HAYCRAFT
Edited by Michael Woosnam-Mills
Constable • London
1998

Fabled City

Our first speaker was Doctor Joad, reserved as ever except on the platform. We
organised fund-raising dances and a debate between the economist Graham Hutton
and the historian AJP Taylor. I got a lead article on world government into Isis
and a short story I had written in India into Viewpoint magazine. Being published
at Oxford was a triumph. Everyone felt Oxford and Cambridge were cradles for
success, particularly at this time when undergraduates were older, eager to fill
the vacuum left by the war. It was an amazingly élitist group. Among those I met
at Oxford between 1948 and 1951 were Robert Runcie, journalists John Ardagh,
Alan Brien, William Rees-Mogg, Anthony Sampson, Godfrey Smith and Ken
Tynan, politicians Tony Benn, Margaret Thatcher, Jeremy Thorpe and Shirley
Williams, the poet Philip Larkin, novelists Kingsley Amis, Nina Bawden, Sue
Chitty, Thomas Hinde and my cousin Francis King, the critic Martin Seymour-
Smith, John Schlesinger, William Russell, Michael Codron, Alan Cooke, Charles
Hodgson, Michael Croft, Tony Richardson, Peter Parker, Robin Day, Robert
Robinson and Magnus Magnusson. Government grants for those who had done
national service meant there were more non-public-school students. Of 250 Jesus
College undergraduates, only five came from public schools.

It was a fantasy world, perhaps because undergraduates were consciously
making the most of this euphoric period between the circumscriptions of school
and the forces, and the exigencies of a career. One morning Rodney, Rebecca,
Janet and I were walking in the Corn, when Rodney suddenly exclaimed, 'It's as
sunny as a wedding day! Let's get married!' We bought cakes and wine and told
the registration office clerk we wanted to get married at once. I'm sure we would
have gone through with it, but the clerk talked firmly about identity papers and
giving notice. 'It seems unfair people can't get married when they want!'
objected Rodney. The clerk took this seriously and suggested Rodney put it in
writing. We
[p115]

books on Book 'em

2008-06-13T15:36:00.002+01:00
Alan Brien
Lenin the Novel

Corners slightly bumped. DJ has chipping on corners, edges & top & bottom of spine, but cover illustration intact.

William Morrow.
www.bookembooks.com/ap_alan_brien.html

In 1965 I suggested to Alan Brien...that he choose for discussion Mailer's first novel for 10 years, The American Dream.

2008-06-13T15:24:00.003+01:00
Philip French

Latest blog posts
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Philip French is the Observer's film critic.

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About Webfeeds Norman Mailer and me
Over the years the American author had my BBC career on the line more than once
November 21, 2007 10:00 AM

The head of the Third Programme thought Norman Mailer's ideas were half-baked, even mad, but eventually became a fan.

The death of Norman Mailer brings back memories of three odd and related incidents at the BBC. As a newly arrived producer at Broadcasting House in 1961 I proposed that Norman Mailer be invited to discuss his new book Advertisements for Myself for the Third Programme (now Radio Three). It was accepted with a certain reluctance as Mailer, then on bail for the attempted murder of his wife, was out of favour. My chosen interviewer was another maverick social observer, Colin MacInnes - I thought the result splendid and so did they. I called the talk A Cruel Soil for Talent, which was Mailer's description of the prevailing cultural climate in the US, and sent a billing to the Radio Times. Then early one evening the head of the Third, PH Newby, the novelist and first winner of the Booker prize, phoned to say he'd heard the programme, thought Mailer's ideas about God, Satan, politics, existentialism and modern sexuality half-baked, even mad, and he'd withdrawn it from the schedules. When I suggested I wouldn't work for him again if it wasn't broadcast, he took the unprecedented step of arranging a playback for all Third Programme producers who'd then be asked to vote. Around 30 people attended, there was a vote and I won by a fairly decent margin. The programme went out (though it was cut by 10 minutes to show official disapproval) and the press reception was excellent. Newby became a Mailer fan, and I worked at the BBC for another 30 years.

In 1965 I suggested to Alan Brien (theatre critic and Spectator columnist), the then book reviewer on the Home Service's Sunday lunchtime programme, The Critics, that he choose for discussion Mailer's first novel for 10 years, The American Dream. Two days later he told me the producers had dropped the book because it featured anal sex. So he'd resigned and was taking the story to Fleet Street. Some minutes later I had a call from the assistant head of radio publicity to say that, to refute Brien's claim, the BBC was putting out a press release saying The American Dream had been withdrawn from The Critics to avoid duplication with my Third Programme magazine, New Comment. I immediately phoned my boss, the legendary radio pioneer and friend of Ezra Pound, DG Bridson. "Geoffrey," I said, "I've just had a call from a stupid bitch in publicity called Joyce Rowe and they're going to put out a lying statement that will make us all look like fucking idiots." There was a pause. Bridson said: "Joyce Rowe is my wife." In his 1971 memoir Prospero and Ariel, Bridson wrote of this affair: "I was intrigued to find myself pilloried as another Pastor Manders. But though I have no objection to sodomitical practices (among consenting adults) I still think they might have proved unacceptable to the old ladies of Cheltenham if the book had been recommended to them over lunch one Sunday morning."

Three years later, in 1968, the novelist and historian David Caute was invited to review Mailer's Armies of the Night, his book on the anti-war march in Washington, for the Third Programme. In the course of the talk he quoted from another Mailer book, the novel Why Are We In Vietnam?, a long, scatological monologue on the theme of machismo. A couple of days before transmission the head of the talks department saw the script and demanded that the quotation be cut and the talk rerecorded. Caute refused and the talk was withdrawn. The novelist and playwright Julian Mitchell, a friend of Caute's, got up a letter of protest to the Listener, the BBC's prestigious weekly journal (it was closed down in 1989 for reasons of economy) signed by a couple of dozen writers, John Updike and Angus Wilson among them.

The following year I launched a new programme, The Arts This Week, to go out live on the Third Programme every Wednesday evening. My co-producer was Russell Harty and the programme was presented by Bryan Magee, the philosopher, broadcaster and future MP. One of the items for discussion was Why Are We In Vietnam? and the speakers were Eric Mottram, lecturer in American literature at London University, and Julian Mitchell. In retrospect I'm not sure just what we expected, but a few minutes into the discussion, Mitchell said something to the effect that it was impossible to get a sense of the book's tone without quoting from it, and after telling listeners that they had 20 seconds to get over to their radio sets and switch off, he quoted a passage from the book that contained more than half-a-dozen four letter words.

I don't recall how many people phoned in to complain - not many, I think. I do remember that immediately after the programme ended Howard Newby, still head of the Third Programme, called the studio to say how much he'd liked it, and there were a number of calls from people who'd enjoyed it. The following morning the weekly Third Programme talks meeting began with a brief review of the previous seven days' broadcasting. But before the discussion got going, George Camacho, the head of talks and previously the controller of the Light Programme (the future Radios 1 and 2), said to Howard Newby, who was in the chair: "I think we've got something to discuss". "What's that George?" said Newby. "I think you know perfectly well," said Camacho. "We'd banned Caute six months ago, and this is going to make us appear to say the least a little inconsistent." "But George," said Newby, with quiet reasonableness, "'Caute was quoting a book that hadn't yet been published. Last night's discussion was specifically centred on the published book. It's a very different situation."

Such Jesuitical argumentation was very characteristic of the BBC at the time. Camacho's response was what is usually conveyed in print by 'hrummffph', and the meeting went on to other business. In the early 1970s, in an article in the quarterly magazine Encounter on changing tastes and values in broadcasting, Camacho vigorously defended his decision. I had gone into the meeting wondering if my career was on the line again, but The Arts This Week went out live for another 97 editions.

Comments

Selective Memory...her column on the Spectator because she bumped into one of its stalwarts, Alan Brien, at a party.

2008-06-13T15:17:00.001+01:00
The original Bridget Jones
Joan Bakewell revels in Selective Memory, a delightfully self-effacing memoir from frontline feminist Katharine Whitehorn

Joan Bakewell
Saturday October 6, 2007

Guardian

Selective Memory
by Katharine Whitehorn
320pp, Virago, £18.99
It is the aspirin in the suspender I recall most vividly. Along with black ink to disguise laddered stockings, it featured as a slut's remedy in a landmark 1963 Observer article in which Katharine Whitehorn led the charge for women journalists to write as themselves rather than as pale shadows of the men who dominated the field. And here she is setting out how that battle was fought and well-nigh won, long before the shock troops of Germaine Greer and co came surging up with their heavy reinforcements. In her autobiography, her light wit is as delightful as ever, her honesty as unflinching.

Katharine Whitehorn was no "child of the 60s", and that giddy, glamorous era overshadows the decade that went before it, which is often characterised as grim and monotonous. It was no such thing. Rather, it was full of the excitement of positive change. "We had the heady sense that everything was getting better," recalls Whitehorn of the 1950s, and she was where the fun was to be had - in the journalism of the time. She arrived full of confidence and good sense, from an enlightened, left-leaning background. Father was a housemaster at Mill Hill School, later at Marlborough, mother came from a family of Christian socialists, and there was a grandfather who was a founder of both the Peace Pledge Union and the Marriage Guidance Council. She would go on to marry a Quaker novelist and send her sons to Westminster School. Good middle-class professionals all.

But her childhood had not been easy: father dubbed her "pudding", she was bullied at school and ran away from Roedean, showing spirit in the face of rigid and unfeeling treatment. Her self-reliance was remarkable at a time when women were mostly being schooled for home and children. She hitchhiked alone for two months around Europe, took a British Council job in Finland, and drove across America with one of a series of smitten boyfriends. She makes it all sound languidly easy, but only someone of her determination and staying power could have done so much. She would eventually be one of the first and most distinguished of women columnists, writing for the Observer for 30 years.

Her first job was on Home Notes, a trite little publication where she subbed real-life love stories. But it put her into the swim of Fleet Street activity and friendships. Picture Post's legendary photographer Bert Hardy used her as a model for a feature called "Lonely in London", sitting before a gas fire surrounded by milk bottles and drying laundry. The photograph found its way into the Hulton library and was used everywhere. It also got her a job as a cub reporter on Picture Post, where she went out an assignments with photographers, honing her skills writing their captions.

As she tells it, the opportunities came out of sheer luck: Home Notes because she just happened to be in the office when the job came up; covering the Paris fashion collections for Picture Post because an editor had run off with the only other girl on the paper; her column on the Spectator because she bumped into one of its stalwarts, Alan Brien, at a party. It all sounds a bit too light-hearted and Bridget Jones. The record speaks for something more resolute: a lifetime's dedication to a craft of which she became master - the sly, informative, witty and important personal column.

An agenda soon emerged. Her first column for the Observer was about Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, one of the ur-texts of 1960s feminism. "I think my feminism must have been of a pre-war kind," she explains, as she praises a string of strong single women, while acknowledging that at the same time her desire to find the right man for herself. Cooking in a Bedsitter was her practical contribution to women's freedom. She wrote it in three-and-a-half months and it stayed in print for 40 years, sitting not only on my shelf but on Delia Smith's too. This was a time when there were few fridges and no supermarkets, when single girls lived with two gas rings and a saucepan, and 38% of women cooked (cooked!) three meals a day. A series of mini-books followed: How to Survive in Hospital ... in the Kitchen ... Children ... Money Problems. In her mature years she was, not surprisingly, asked to sit on company boards and became rector of the University of St Andrews, while supporting the International Women's Forum. Now, in her 70s, she is Saga magazine's agony aunt.

But Selective Memory is her personal story, too. She did marry the right man, and lived with and loved him for 45 years. Gavin Lyall was a thriller writer, who in later years battled alcoholism. She talks of it with her usual robust good humour, but the pain shows through. It's good that in writing this book she conjures up again their many happy days together, not least on their boat on the Thames, and she talks of her widowhood with a gentle melancholy. Those who knew and loved her columns will enjoy her company all over again, and newcomers will learn of a stalwart, serious feminism that predates the 1960s.

· Joan Bakewell's The View from Here: Life at Seventy is published by Guardian Books

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include

2008-06-13T14:44:00.002+01:00
Sexual Symbolism, Religious Language, and the Ambiguity of the Spirit: Associative Themes in Anglican Poetry and Philosophy.

Abstract by Ralph Norman (Canterbury University)quoting from a piece Alan wrote in The Spectator, 17th April, 1964 - a review of Patridge's SHAKESPEARE'S BAWDY. (grateful thanks to Ralph Norman for providing a pre-editorial draft-version of his article.)

Unfortunately, one euphemism Partridge should have included with these is missing from the original list as published in the first (1947) and second (1955) editions of Shakespeare’s Bawdy. These early editions of Partridge’s book drew the following critical remarks from Alan Brien in The Spectator on the 17th April, 1964, pointing out the missing medical – and theological – euphemism:

Mr Partridge … completely omits from his index “spirit” as a euphemism for “semen”. The twelve volume Oxford English Dictionary also fails to include the meaning. Yet the evidence for claiming that it carried this extra sense in Elizabethan times (compare “spunk” today) is undeniable … I see that Leslie Fiedler, in a volume published in 1962, makes the same point. This gives edge and bite to the famous “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action”, especially if “waste” can also be read as “waist”.
And I have a clinching quotation to help Mr Fiedler along – in Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627), he writes, “It hath been observed by the ancients that much use of Venus doth dim the sight … The cause of dimness of sight is the expense of spirits.”

The reference to Shakespeare – ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ – is, of course, to Sonnet 129, ll. 1-2; the reference to the critical scholarship – to Fiedler and his remarks on dirty puns and double entendre – is to The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. To put his omission right, Partridge included an extract from Brien’s article – spelling Fiedler’s name (alas!) incorrectly – in the subsequent, third (1968) edition of his book. But in the quoted article from The Spectator, Brien had neglected to state that, before Fiedler, Patrick Cruttwell had already noted the connection of ‘spirit’ and ‘sperm’.

Lord Beaverbrook

2008-06-13T14:38:00.000+01:00
Evelyn Waugh remarked of Beaverbrook, “Of course, I believe in the
Devil. How otherwise would I account for the existence of Lord Beaverbrook?”
Alan Brien, The Proprietor, in THE BEAVERBROOK I KNEW 178, 186
(Logan Gourlay ed., 1984).

Reprinted in The Gargoyle 2007

2008-06-13T14:13:00.003+01:00
Born in 1925, Alan Brien is a novelist,
journalist and critic of distinction. Serving as
an air-gunner in the RAF in the War, he
enjoyed a long and successful career in Fleet
Street, writing variously for the Daily Mail,
the Sunday Dispatch, Sunday Pictorial,
Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, New Statesman,
Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Punch, as
well as being a regular broadcaster on radio
and television. In 1987, his novel on Lenin
was published. Now retired, Alan lives in
North London.

Bless My Soul
by Alan Brien

(“Sacred Cows”, Sunday Times Magazine, 3rd April 1977)

If there is any creature I find less
sympathetic than a sacred cow, it is the
sacred cowherd. And this, it seems to me, is
Malcolm Muggeridge’s true role.
Our sacred cows in the West, like living
goddesses of Nepal, are quite often more to be
pitied than resented. It can be very lonely, rather
tiring and frustrating, above all, being above all,
not much fun up there on the pedestal. Yon are
never allowed to be fallible, gullible, irritable or
wrong. But the cowherd, working on his
percentage, can always plead that he is only
human. He is just the front man for a mystery that
cannot be approached direct. So every guru has
his chila, every champ his manager, every star his
agent, every freak his barker, every gangster his
mouthpiece and the perennial aim of the power
behind the throne is to outlast the power behind
the throne. Our hero, MM, has survived in the
same way by herding many a sacred beast to the
sacrifice without singeing even much more than
his own eyebrows.
The voice is the voice of Malcolm, the
mug is the mug of the Mugg, but the message
must always be the message of the Lord. Now it is
the Lord God, but it has been the Lord Camrose,
also General-Secretary Joseph Stalin, also the
Manchester Guardian, also Mr Punch, also the
BBC. Malcolm Muggeridge is a cowherd for all
seasons – he must never be blamed personally for
where his sacred cow of the decade leaves its
sacred cow pats.
There is no problem charting
Muggeridge’s succession of causes. Indeed, he
has documented the primrose path in his own
volumes of autobiography. He likes to identify his
own part in life’s soap opera as increasingly that
of “a displaced person”. I would substitute instead
“a born defector”, or perhaps “the natural doubleagent”.
The difference is not always easy to detect
as Muggeridge, who also occasionally likes to
present himself as a sometime secret-service man,
has good reason to know.
The pattern, as I see it, is of an eloquent
advocate – a word spinner and jest-juggler
without peer among advertising copywriters –
who too easily becomes imprinted by the allembracing
gospel he is asked to preach, then
equally suddenly rejects the imprint, only to
emboss upon his psyche another monolithic creed.
After each failure the revulsion is dramatic,
permanent, possibly near hysterical.
For example, as a young man he wrote
leaders for the Manchester Guardian, full of
simple faith in progress, the classic doctrine of
liberalism. Even 40 years later he is still
denouncing that innocent idealism in terms of
manic hyperbole: “Liberalism [he wrote in 1965]
will be seen as the great destructive force of our
time: much more so than Communism, Fascism,
Nazism or any other lunatic creeds .... Compared
to the long-term consequences of Gilbert Murray,
Bertrand Russell and Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt,
Hitler was an ineffective dreamer, Stalin a Father
Christmas and Mussolini an Arcadian shepherd.”
He went to Moscow in the mid-1930’s,
anticipating the foundation of Utopia, and
prepared to sell up and settle there forever.
Disillusioned, he has never ceased denouncing
everyone on the Left, even those who never
shared his naive expectations, as dupes of the
Kremlin. After the war he wrote leaders for the
Telegraph as assistant editor, and it is the Tory
leaders he supported then he now places in the
pillory. He came to fame as a combative, critical
Editor of Punch – a magazine he has since rarely
missed an opportunity of denigrating. And he
finally established himself as a household image
on television, with his knobkerrie face and that
strangulated voice which, next to Edward Heath’s,
must be the most extraordinary and artificial of
any public man. Yet his favourite topic is a
denunciation of TV as a medium fit only for
hucksters and charlatans, guaranteed to process
reality into trivia.
For an intellectual of his repute, many of
his essays are curiously ill-informed, selfcontradictory
or just plain silly, better fitted for
the Sunday Express than the Guardian or the
Statesman, or even the Telegraph, despite a
surface glitter of sequinned rhetoric. The
quotation on liberalism is one standing for many.
Muggeridge on contraception and abortion, with
he loathes with a virulence which seems barely
rational, will seize any stick, however feeble and
rotten.

________________________________________________________________________________

'Narcissus revisited' grooming by Alan Brien

2008-06-13T14:03:00.002+01:00
Alan was fitted for a suit in Savile Row in the Sixties (the date appears inside the jacket)which he was still wearing fifty years on, the last time was at Becky's wedding.

Men in Vogue
Condé Nast. November 1965-1970?

Associate editors were Robert Harling and Beatrix Miller of this fashion and lifestyle men's magazine. The cover of the first issue showed actor Edward Fox in a fur coat photographed by Norman Parkinson. It had 126 pages plus cover. Size: 12.25" x 9.125" (31cm x 23cm). It lasted at least until the winter of 1969.

Condé Nast drew back from launching Men in Vogue as an autonomous publication again in 1985, when Cosmopolitan, Elle and Harpers & Queen all had dedicated sections for men. It was not until 2005 that Men's Vogue appeared.

Contents of the first issue of Men in Vogue in 1965:

'A reference for Mellors': author Anthony Powell considered what happened to Lady Chatterley and her lover

extract from jazz man George Melly's biography, Owning Up

'The Englishman: the best dressed man in the world?' Featured James Astor, Cecil Beaton, Brinsley Black, Gay Kindersley, Nigel Lawson (BBC economics adviser and FT columnist), Jocelyn Stevens (editor-in-chief of Queen), Sir Fitzroy Maclean (a Scot), Christopher Gibbs, Lord Gormanston, Julian Ormsby-Gore

'The heroes of St Moritz': Tony Nash and Robin Dixon had won the world bobsleigh championship. Photographs by Terence Donovan

'The most Bailey girls in the world.' David Bailey on women he finds 'different, mysterious and interesting': Catherine Deneuve (his wife); Jean Shrimpton; Monica Vitti; Francoise Dorleac; Jeanne Moreau; Sue Murray

'Men and their cars': racing driver Jim Clark in a Lotus Elan; photographer Terence Donovan in a Silver Cloud II; Mark Boxer, editorial director of London Life, in a Rover 2000; Kevin Powell, Granada traines (Mini Moke); Peter Sheridan (Invicta 1930); Lord Snowdon (Mini and Aston Martin DB5);

'But you can get a girl with a gun' by Antonia Fraser
special report on winter clothes (cover feature). The models were all actors: Corin Redgrave, Edward Fox and Gilles Milinaire

'Ski and after'

Paris

'Narcissus revisited' grooming by Alan Brien

'What is travelling?': adventure, sport, business and travelling's sake
Christopher Gibbs' shopping guide to London
fashion award for 1965: worst-dressed man award for prime minister Harold Wilson

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.05.24

2008-06-13T13:28:00.002+01:00
Alan's second novel, working title, 'And When Rome Falls', was based on reading around the life of Cicero and commissioned by David Godwin when an Editor at Jonathan Cape. It was very close to completion.

Alan was a member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 03.05.24
Letter: More New Books with Ancient Settings

For some previous titles, cf. BMCR 3.4 (1992), 338. The most gorgeous new item is Roman Nights (St Martin's Press, NY, 1991), a novel by one Ron Burns, billed in the blurb as a UPI editor, Philadelphia Bulletin columnist, Los Angeles Herald Examiner crime reporter, and (now) novelist. His story is set between the last days of Marcus Aurelius and the murders of Commodus, then Pertinax. The protagonist functioning as privatus dickus is Livinius Severus, a minor noble, lawyer, and Stoic. His job is to solve a series of gruesome murders of Stoics, a nice thought (the murders, that is, not the solving). Lucan and Thrasea turn up as Stoics. So do characters with odd names, e.g., Cinna Catalus (sic). Most deliciously for devotees of the Petronian question, so do Trimalchio (as mine host, with some pastiche and filchings from the Cena) and 'his whore' Fortunata, with whom our hero has some jolly times, including one night of five couplings -- penile servitude, indeed! There is much quoting of Marcus Aurelius' 'just published' Meditations, and at one stage 8 rolls of papyrus are found containing Juvenal's Satires, with copious 'dirty' quotation from the sixth.

In France, Pierre Grimal has just brought out Les Memoires d'Agrippine (de Fallois, Paris, 1992), a fictional recreation of one of the most regrettably lost ancient documents of them all, the Memoirs of Nero's mum, whose doings would eclipse those of Fergie and Diana. So far, I've only seen the review in Le Canard Enchaine (5/8/92), but it sounds yummy. Incidentally, anyone visiting England in the near future might still be able to see a rare performance of Handel's early (1709) opera, Agrippina, with American soprana Susan Roberts in the title role -- one reviewer compared her to Bette Davis.

Falco is back, in Lindsey Davis' The Iron Hand of Mars (Hutchinson, London, 1992: I imagine there is an American edition), this time sleuthing in Germany, sent by Vespasian to look into the fates of Civilis and the XIVth Legion, with flashbacks to the hapless Quintilius Varus. Women play a big role in this new adventure.

Those more attracted to Greek settings may like A Choice of Murder (Owen, London, 1992) by Peter Vansittart, a reworking of Plutarch's account of Timoleon, suitably embellished to make a proper novel.

A mammoth new novel on Augustus is scheduled to appear later this year by Alan Brien. This author is a British journalist and humorist who (I suspect) may not be well known in North America, but Calgary libraries (not likely to be unique in this) contain his earlier titan, a novel about Lenin.

I've saved the bad news until last. The ineffable Colleen McCullough has recently inflicted volume two (The Grass Crown) of her threatened multi-volume saga on the late Republic on to a suffering world. I did my best to kill the thing off while reviewing the inaugural The First Man in Rome in The World & I (March, 1991), 406-12, but who am I to repel this march of Thornbirds in Togas?

Barry Baldwin University of Calgary

Ed.'s note:
As I read this letter, it seemed to me that we got to the bad news pretty early on. Would it be fair to ask whether any of these exercises do more than use Roman costumes to provide cheap thrills, with lashings (painfully evident in this account) of sexism? This series started because I called attention to Saylor's Roman Blood, which seemed to me both a decent murder mystery and a serious attempt to do justice to Cicero's Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, and though it is a light enough sort of book, I still think it has merit. (Saylor has a new one in the bookstores called Arms of Nemesis, with a Spartacan theme but less closely tied, it would appear, to any specific text, but I've not yet had time to look at it.) Rather like the south central LA murder mysteries of Walter Mosley, who puts a lot of social history between the lines, or the early Tony Hillermans, while he still had fresh things to say about the Navajo.

JO'D 26 September 1992

Oxford Journals.org Essays in Criticism

2008-06-13T13:20:00.002+01:00
You need a subscription to access this but it brings to mind how well read Alan was and the ways in which he disseminated his reading. Who is John?

W. J. HARVEY Editorial CommentaryEssays in Criticism, 1968; XVIII: 1 - 14. ......University College (it was John's) to whom I had recently been introduced by one of my own undergraduate-pupils (was it Alan Brien?), who had also lent me a slim volume of the young man's very promising and elegant poems. John and I chatted briefly......

Ruskin School of Art, Oxford

2008-06-12T16:51:00.003+01:00
Clarifications and amendments will be made. But placing the suggestion, in the first instance, that Alan was a life model at the Ruskin School of Art, when at Oxford, and believed his form appeared in a sculpture commissioned for Westminster Cathedral (can't have been the Abbey, can it?). Clearly he modelled and we did once visit the Conway Library to see if we could find him, to no avail.

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/research/photographic/conway/index.shtml

Peter Wilby The Guardian, Monday June 2 2008 Article history

2008-06-11T20:50:00.002+01:00
Remembering Alan Brien

Last week's obituaries of Alan Brien, I thought, didn't quite pinpoint his place in the history of journalism. Brien, as one obituarist said, was a critic and essayist in the tradition of Belloc and Chesterton. He reviewed film, theatre and books when reviewers were among the biggest newspaper stars. Now, the stars are general columnists, writing about life, the universe and everything, but mainly about themselves and their families.

Brien, who died at 83, straddled those two eras, being not only among the last of the old, but also among the first of the new. Harold Evans, when Sunday Times editor, said Brien could get more interesting copy from the fluff in his navel than some hacks could get from a month on the road. Once, when he was driving up the motorway with his wife, the Guardian's Jill Tweedie, a tiny pebble shattered the car windscreen. Between them, I swear, they got six columns out of it. The record probably stands to this day.

Contact the Media editor
editor@mediaguardian.co.uk Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk

Der Teufel

2008-06-11T18:36:00.002+01:00
When Alan's boyhood friend, David Maccaby, who became a painter and later blind, took Alan home for the first time, his mother, on opening the front door, reeled back with 'Der Teufel', Satan. The Hebrew term for Satan has a decidely different meaning than in Christianity. It is the title of a Prosecutor at the Divine Court.

Satan, the Devil, Pan....

A link to John Milton's 'Paradise Lost', the book Alan carried with him when flying as a rear air gunner in the Lancaster.

A Film Impression of Jesus College, Oxford in 1948: 'Our College'

2008-06-11T18:11:00.002+01:00
Administration by Alan Brien, Peter Broadhurst also Geoffrey Hunter, Peter Davis, Derick Grigs.

Reissued 2006. Jesus College, Oxford.

Time for another picture. Alan and Solly, 2007

2008-06-10T21:06:00.005+01:00

Churchill

2008-06-10T20:09:00.003+01:00
The Papers of Piers Brendon
GBR/0014/BREN
Brendon, Piers (1940-), historian
1993–2000
11 boxes
Transcripts of interviews with Alan Brien and Anthony Montague Browne (former Private Secretary to Churchill). Transcript page numbers 435-538. 1 file

Janus

Three After Six: Rediffusion Television & Benny Green

2008-06-10T19:31:00.002+01:00
He first worked for the BBC in 1955 and worked regularly for it from then on. In the 1960s he often appeared (with, among others, Alan Brien, Dee Wells and Robert Pitman) on Three After Six, Associated Rediffusion's early evening television discussion programme on current affairs,. In the 1980s he contributed occasionally to Stop the Week, Robert Robinson's Saturday discussion programme on Radio 4. Green also wrote and/or narrated many radio documentaries about stage and film musical stars and Hollywood, his other main interest apart from jazz and sport. He also wrote for magazines, including Punch, and regularly for newspapers. He was a big fan of writer P. G. Wodehouse, about whom he wrote a literary biography (1981).

Profumo & Claud Cockburn

2008-06-10T19:14:00.003+01:00
In the summer of 1963 Cockburn took up an offer from Richard Ingram to edit a special edition of Private Eye. It was the height of the Profumo Affair which, coinciding with Cockburn's decision to put greater emphasis on politics in the satirical magazine, propelled Private Eye into mass circulation and national prominence. The format has stayed pretty much the same for the last twenty-seven years. Alan Brien, who worked with Cockburn ...

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/Profumo.html

I suspect that the continued production of indexless books is simply due to a mixture of parsimony and slovenliness.— Alan Brien, Sunday Times (23 Feb

2008-06-10T18:57:00.004+01:00
Society of Indexers, Woodbourn Business Centre, 10 Jessell Street, Sheffield S9 3HYTel: +44 (0)114 244 9561 Fax: +44 (0)114 244 9563
info@indexers.org.uk

Why have an Index?

Alan often looked to the index first and sometimes read the last page or paragraph before the end.

As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protégé. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama ..

2008-06-10T18:34:00.007+01:00
The man is a lion of prides. The mane is wayward and unhatted. The massive head and frame are by Hogarth, the voluminous suit by Khrushchev's tailor. An excess of ergs twitches his head and fingers; the English hair and teeth, the cockney-of-the-walk intonations announce his presence in the densest lobby crush. In the past two years, the New York Times's Clive Barnes has become a public character, the most theatrical and prolific critic since the days of Alexander Woollcott.

He is not only the Times drama critic but its dance critic as well. He revisits hits to make sure audiences are getting their money's worth. He often has simultaneous reviews in the same edition; once he had four, an event that occasioned a different kind of criticism—from management. They conspired to persuade him to relinquish one job, but ended by giving him two offices, one in which to compose ballet reviews, the other for batting out theater pieces—carried throughout the U.S. on the N.Y. Times News Service.

Soot and Dickens. In addition to his twin assignments, Barnes teaches a course in critical writing at New York University, writes a monthly column for Holiday, flies over 100,000 miles a year on the lecture circuit, appears on educational television, and dictates a monthly contribution to the British periodical Dance and Dancers.

After William Butler Yeats met Oscar Wilde, he wrote: "I never before heard a man talking sentences as if he had written them all overnight." Barnes is Wilde's mirror image. His written work reads as if he had just spoken it. The criticism, the speeches, the conversation tumble out with blithe facility as if on a reel of four-track tape. One wonders whether there will be an end to it: it seems unbelievable that there was a beginning.

There was. "I was your typical working-class overachiever," says Barnes. Like soot and Dickens, he is a London slum product. His father, an ambulance driver, deserted Mum when Clive was seven. The brilliant, chunky lad played his part well in school; a scholarship helped him into Oxford's postwar meritocracy, along with Director Tony Richardson and Sunday Times Arts Columnist Alan Brien. As soon as Brien had a leg up on Fleet Street, he brought along his protégé. Barnes' reputation for fluency was instantly evidenced in music, drama and dance criticism."He just liked to turn on a verbal tap," recalls Brien, "bottle the words that come out and then begin filling the next bottle."

London Lisp. The stuff in the bottles sparkled. The New York Times began to buy small pieces in 1963, in 1965 invited him to be its staff dance critic. For Barnes, the deadlines were lifelines; the city was home. "From childhood," he claims, "I had inhaled imported U.S. culture in films and drama. I was immediately Americanized."

Well, almost. The supporting actor who was playing Clive Barnes in the early New York days was considerably different from the star who plays him now. In his first few months on the job, listeners to the Times radio station WQXR were astonished to hear a London lisp on the evening news: "Thith ith Cloive Bawneth, dawnthe cvitic of the New Yawk Timeth." A put-on, many decided. But the speech defect was real. The speaker, moreover, was as straight as a line of type. After shedding his first wife of ten years, Barnes married Patricia Winckley, a lithe balletomane who looked like a swan on leave from St. James's Park. In New York, the Barneses and their two children, Christopher, 7, and Maya, 5, settled into a sprawling pad on Riverside Drive. The overachiever brushed up his diction, stiffened his self-assurance and pressed on.

Even before Barnes became drama critic, his appetite for theatrical performances was notorious. "If you dimmed the lights in a car," says a fellow critic, "Clive would have tried to review it." Two years ago, after Howard Taubman succeeded Brooks Atkinson and Stanley Kauffmann succeeded Taubman, the New York Times turned to Clive Barnes. His first reviews ran on heedlessly, as Barnes reviewed the theater, the audience, the seats. But by the following season he was as relaxed as an actor in the second year of a hit comedy, still babbling, but in the manner of a relaxed and witty raconteur.

Drama Ghetto. The harder he worked, the heavier he grew—and the bigger target he made. "If I decide to stay around Broadway beyond the current season," griped Producer David Merrick, "it will be for the pleasure of throwing his fat limey posterior out in the street." Fellow Critic John Simon fulminated in New York Magazine: "The APA production of The Misanthrope is as bad as . . . as . . . it is hard to find an adequately monstrous simile. As bad—let me try—as its review by Clive Barnes." Dance and Music Critic B. H. Haggin briskly summed up Barnes' critical efforts as "uncomprehending nonsense." The critic's critics have not been entirely unjust. Barnes' manic dance criticism often reads more like promotion than analysis. And frequently a drama review will come down with logorrhea simply because he didn't have time to write a short one.

Now that New York City has but three major newspapers, Barnes has unprecedented authority, even for a Times critic. His raves can light up marquees for two years; his pans have flushed million-dollar musicals into the Hudson River. Staking out territory where first-stringers rarely used to tread, he helped revitalize off Broadway, formerly the ghetto of drama. "Today," Barnes believes, off Broadway "is the last place where a writer has the freedom to fail."

Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."

Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."

Talent of Enthusiasm. If his prose is ephemeral, his insights and images are not. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, he wrote, "has the dust of thought about it, and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air." In a review of The Boys in the Band, he observed, "The New York wit is little more than a mixture of Jewish humor and homosexual humor seen through the bottom of a dry-martini glass." Krapp's Last Tape, he said, "is a masterpiece of pauses—Beckett cares so much for silence that he erects his plays around it." His negative comments are in the Benchley tradition. A one-word review of an English play called The Cupboard: "Bare." No one enjoys throwing custard pies at his own image more than Barnes himself. He constantly claims that Americans give critics too much power. "A Barbary ape could have this position and awe people," he says. "Barbary apes are not irreplaceable."

Perhaps, but no one has yet been found who could ape Clive Barnes. It would take a team to turn out his week's work, and none of it, it seems, would have his wit or fluency. Most important—to audiences and to the theater itself—none would have his enthusiasm. "My ideal criticism is to write a notice about a play that I didn't like," he says, "and yet send people to the theater to see it."

Time magazine
Overachiever
Friday, Apr. 11, 1969

Sunderland Echoes

2008-06-10T01:36:00.003+01:00
Alan Brien describes his ‘colonial experience’ growing up in the North East; photograph by Duffy

In my mind’s eye, better these days than my body’s eye, I see its sea and streets. Focusing closer, the Docks the Tram Shed, where my brothers worked and where my father worked, twin poles for me of what was practically an off-shore island. Sunderland, originally ‘the Sundered Land’.

The sea, the North Sea, James Joyce’s “snot-green, scrotum-tightening sea”, which didn’t stay long in its proper playground, the endless Saharan scimitars of sandy beach or the crane-fringed fortresses of the quays, but reared up over the town, like a Disney storm-cloud.

Coal fires on sun-glazed summer afternoons. Parlour doors hung with inch-thick layers of plush drapery. Steamy, sweating caves of bed-clothes inhabited by dented aluminium hot-water bottles wrapped in old flannel drawers, or heavy stone jars with heavy stone stoppers. Backrooms of beer-only pubs, where the regulars, sitting so near their thighs interleaved, formed an idolatrous circle round the totem of glowing pillar-box stove.

Winter promenades along a fume-besieged front, the waves booming like cannons as they thundered under the Hapsburg lip of the beach wall and their spray exploded in great frozen stars of emerald grapeshot. Cold, the Enemy, always in your bones, worse even than the Tories

The last tram on Saturdays almost a jamboree, a cold-climate fiesta, packed with illuminated turn-to-mask faces, passengers swaying and singing inside its hurtling, glassy, goldfish tank, while the conductor gave up jangling his useless ticket punch, and the driver, cut off from us all behind his swinging chain, stamped his clanging bell and groaned us round right-angle bends on his way to the last stop before his terminus, my father’s Tram Shed.

At my father’s funeral, when the sea mist made the sky sag like the roof a waterlogged tent and rose among the grave stones like puffs of smoke, six old tramways-men materialised like genies, immaculate in long moth-balled navy and red uniforms, ticket-punches gleaming, to carry their comrade’s coffin - a working-class ceremonial no Guardees could have out-smarted - before vanishing again to take the new-fangled bus home on their pensioner’s travel passes.

Nobody ever goes to Sunderland by accident. Nobody ever happens to pass through it. It’s not on the road, or rail, to anywhere, or the centre for anything. An Anglo-Saxon Alsatia, it was still to us, growing up there in the Thirties, a North-Eastern Afghanistan where we were as cut off from that faraway capital of Empire, London, as any other colonial people. We weren’t directly occupied by Southern forces, but ruled instead by proxy, a puppet province subjugated by mass unemployment, pacified by the Means Test; our closed-down shipyards and part-time pits barely worth their exploitation. We were all working-class — even the one in three out-of-work; some, like several of my uncles, since the Armistice of 1918. We grew up in the class war, a war our side had already lost, though. Encouraged by my father, I joined a maquis which fought back at street-corner meetings. Even our middle class — the managers and small businessmen — were working class; though they sided with the oppressors, the absentee Tory owners of all we surveyed. But then, the mass of the natives were collaborators too, voting for the enemy — even if they secretly despised their foreign masters.

For everyone outside did seem foreign. Sunderland was England. The North East embodied all other worthwhile points of the compass. Who were the true Northerners, if not us? The Topographical War absorbed, and sublimated, much of the passion which would have fuelled the Class War. Our borders were between Darlington and York. Manchester, described by the alien-controlled BBC as Capital of the North was to us the Gateway to the Midlands. They still laugh, up in Sunderland, at Mike Parkinson’s Barnsley being anything but a Potemkin village, run up overnight for the Hampstead tourist trade, full of Berlitz proles in comic costume, speaking a regional Esperanto probably learned off Linguaphone records.

Sunderlanders thrive on paradox— you could equally say that nobody goes there, except by accident. Today, yesterday, they’re proud and self- pitying, resent you leaving, gawp at you coming back. Good with their hands, canny with their brains, tireless, indestructible, confident of out-doing Japs, Wops, Krauts and Yanks in anything. Yet inoculated against the Work Ethic, always able so find summink bettar ta dee. Never heard of the Problem of Leisure, (something the Depression gave plenty of), so prodigious and compulsive talkers, footballers, growers of leeks, breeders and trainers of dogs, workmen’s clubbers.

Sunderland is a one-storey town full of tall-storey men, a place flattened into a [?], near-
provincial acres of terraced bungalows giving way only to council estates consisting of serpentine culs‑de-sac, making a walk home over twice the distance in half the time a Londoner would queue for a number 11 bus.

They have an indelible local loyalty, history, [??] idiocies, yet watch the old [??] waste with a cynical apathy towns have suffered a planning [?] transplant, ancient mazes replaced by solid concrete plugs. Only Sunderland has been disembowelled with gaping holes. Our Big Ben town hall toppled, into a grassy dent which floods whenever it rains, like every Sunday. Our grandiose Grand Hotel vaporised into a cinder car park. Nowhere have they more cause to hate the Good Old Days, nowhere do they mourn them with such elegiac eloquence.

Home-town love is honourable patriotism. Sunderland: my Tin Pan Alley song. The hole in my foot I got vandalising a private development which dared infiltrate our council estate...the swollen eye-ball from the clod of mud while playing ghouls in the dark…stealing chocolates from Woolworths…seeing how far the tide came up your face in the Holy Rocks…riding our kid’s bike between trams… watching pigs cut open over the slaughterhouse wall…spouting Bolshevism on a box on the sea front... drinking in the Bede School library, hiding the French-letter catalogue inside Masefield’s Life of Jesus…a girl in Mowbray Park who [?] like Veronica Lake and who looks like Irene Handl and [?] the new generation have no standards

Sunderland, I love it, I don’t have to like it. After all, the people who live there, they do, and they don’t.

© Times Newspapers Ltd. 1976

Defeat of a Drinking Man - By Alan Brien

2008-06-09T23:08:00.000+01:00
One day in 1956, it reached the ears of the Evening Standard that Hemingway was in mid-Atlantic on the Liberte. And some officious desk-bound executive conceived the idea of sending me down to Plymouth to extract an interview as he passed within sight of the English shore. My journey down there was made miserable by the thought that I might have to scale some slippery, swinging rope ladder, green with fear and sea-sickness, while the great man sneered from the bridge.

Needless to say, the operation which had been simply demonstrated in Shoe Lane by moving a finger across a tiny map of England turned out, when put into effect by a flesh-and-blood correspondent dealing with actual trains, motor-cars, boats and bureaucrats, to be an odyssey of snags and frustrations. Once in my compartment, I was seized with a fit of nervous amnesia and suffered from delusions that I should be going to Portsmouth or Southampton. The shipping line at Plymouth was shrouded in a pall of vagueness about the hour, or even the day, of the Liberte's arrival. Some officials promised that I could travel out to its mooring spot on the luggage tender. Others insisted that the Customs authorities would not permit any visitors. The shore-to-shore radio telephone operator connected me with a laconic American voice which insisted that Mr. Hemingway had failed to turn up in time for the departure from New York.

My only success was in hiring a miniature tug affair, steered by a Bogartian, unshaven salt in plimsolls and a yachting cap, for five pounds. That at least would give a professional look to my expense sheet. We seemed to spend hours circling the ship while the suitcases spilled out of some hole in its side like giant children's bricks, but no one resembling the great man peered out from among the faces along the rails. Once inside, not up a rope-ladder but across an almost equally vertiginous and shuddering ramp, I realized that I had not the faintest idea of where to start looking. It had never occurred to me that a liner could be so enormous or complicated -- it was like being insinuated into the base of a bee-hive and told to have a word with the queen.

My deadline, which had once seemed so comfortingly distant, was now almost upon me. I started running the corridors shouting, "Ou est Monsieur 'Emingway? S'il vous bloody plait." Various steward figures in dazzling white ducks gave me cabin numbers, apparently at random, in French, and I plunged, sweating and Medusa-haired, into various wrong staterooms.

Twice I found bars tucked away in windowless metal caverns. The bartenders denied any knowledge of 'Emingway and suggested different bars. Other journalists, who must have been deposited aboard by submarine, appeared at the end of long carpeted vistas, pantomimed fury like the Demon King and contempt for rival papers, and made off at a trot.

Eventually, having traversed the ship a couple of times, I arrived back at one of the bars and discovered there a battered, burly figure humped on a stool. He didn't look like Hemingway as much as like an old, over-exposed, badly retouched photograph of Hemingway. His hair and beard seemed to have been knitted on heavy wooden needles out of shiny, new delicate barbed-wire. His face, such of it as was visible, was as bright as a peeled orange. And as he spoke tiny vessels appeared to explode across his cheeks like Very shells over a battlefield. "Mr. Hemingway," he said, "has nothing to say to the press, but I will buy you a drink."

He spoke very slowly and carefully like someone counting out small change in foreign currency and watching to spot the moment when he is being overcharged. I took the drink and poured it down into a stomach already distended by a queasy brew of ale and resentment. Now I was here I couldn't think of a single thing to say. A hasty rake over the surface of my mind produced a recent small news item -- some bumptious tourist in Havana had taken Hemingway's place at a bar and been picked up and ejected by an indignant boozy crony. What was the use of Preaching about the True and the Beautiful and the Good and That's the Way It Should Be Among Men, I asked, if the preacher behaved like any Hollywood bum on a spree?

Hemingway punched himself in slow-motion on the ear as if annoyed that it should be transmitting such gibberish.

"You a drinking man?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"You have your favorite bar?"

"I suppose so," I said.

"Then you have your favorite place at that bar. And that is your place. And they keep it for you."

"No I don't," I said, "and no they don't."

"Then it’s not a real bar," he said amicably. "In a real bar, they keep your place where you put your back to the wall. That's all."

"That’s not all," I said, stamping my feet. "That's Warner Brothers gangster talk. How would you like it if I had you thrown out of my bar?"

Just then a fat Frenchman appeared. "I think my seat, sir," he announced.

Hemingway slid off like a boxer who hears the bell for the next round.

"Excuse me. Excuse me," he said. "Your seat, certainly."

There was a longish pause and then we were both shaking with laughter until the counter rattled.

"To hell with newspapers," he shouted. "Come to France. We'll get off the boat and just drive into anywhere."

I thought of the nicotined finger, the last edition, the pay slip, Lord Beaverbrook. "Some other time," I said. Back on the shore I scribbled my newsless story as I waited for the call to FLE 3000 to come through. At last it came --"the office is closed for the day, "they said, "try tomorrow morning."

And that’s the way it was.

A born defector

2008-06-09T23:03:00.000+01:00
Spectator, The, Apr 26, 2003 by Vestey, Michael

Radio

Since Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the most famous and illustrious journalists of the last century, died in 1990 little has been heard of his prolific sayings, writings and numerous television programmes. I understand, though, his 1930s novel Winter In Moscow is in paperback, an important book exposing the evils of Soviet communism. Richard Ingrams wrote his biography but, as Muggeridge himself would have acknowledged, television success is as ephemeral as many other occupations.

Last Saturday, though, some of this was redressed by Radio Four when Miles Kington presented an hour-long programme about his life and work in The Archive Hour - St Mugg, a reference to the nickname he acquired during his final religious phase. Kington described him as the `best-known gadfly of journalism ... the court jester of the media. the smiling face that pointed out the emperor had no clothes on'. He played the famous exchange between Muggeridge and the critic Alan Brien in which the latter observed, `What does worry me about you is that, I think, you are a born defector. I won't say that you mess on your own doorstep, not at least until you've moved, and once you've moved you go around and throw stones though the window and set fire to the basement.'

Brien cited his period on the Manchester Guardian and his later abuse of the paper, his time in the 1930s Soviet Union and his disillusionment with communism, his 'outstanding' editorship of Punch, which he thereafter hated, his fame as a television journalist and `now you say it's an idiot's lantern', his varied and active sex life and the later denunciation of sex as appalling and ludicrous. Disarmingly, Muggeridge, with those unforgettable stretched vowels. replied, 'I think it's extraordinarily true. Alan thinks it's a kicking in the teeth but it isn't that, it's a deep sense of dissatisfaction with everything one's done and everything one's been associated with.' Re added, `Alan puts it very flatteringly as a matter of fact because it's not true that I was a particularly good editor of Punch.'

Brien had concluded by saying, `Now what I would like to see at the age of 71 is that you should join the Roman Catholic Church and prophesy ten years later you would leave it in a blaze of publicity.' Although Muggeridge said that he loved the Catholic Church he wouldn't join it, partly because of the truth of what Brien had said. In fact, though, he did but died before he could defect from that, assuming, of course, that he might have done if the pattern of his life was anything to go by. Born in Croydon to a socialist father who became a Labour MP for a time, Muggeridge, after studying chemistry at Cambridge which he hadn't liked, eventually joined the Manchester Guardian as it then was, and was posted to Moscow with his wife Kitty.

At that time he regarded capitalism, as Marx had foretold, as irretrievably moribund and doomed, offering its captive workers no hope. As Kington put it, he soon saw through the charade and realised that Stalin was introducing a tyranny not a utopia, starving people to death not feeding them. He tried to warn his readers but the Left were blinded by wishful thinking and refused to believe him. He published Winter In Moscow, the novel's hero based on himself.

His contempt for visiting socialists grew. `For the most part,' he said in a later television programme, `they were intellectuals of the Left, privy councillors to be, contributors to the New Statesman, the flower of our Western civilisation ... I can hear them now in the eager high-pitched voices explaining away privations they'd never have to endure, an oppression that would never reach them. The most publicised and certainly the most fatuous of all the visitors was, alas, Bernard Shaw.' He turned on his friends, the rather ridiculous socialist thinkers, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whose book, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation, had been, they proudly told him, thoroughly checked by the Soviet ambassador to London.

Although irreverent, a natural satirist and iconoclast, he was clearly searching for something which turned out to be, towards the end, religious faith. Was he really a hypocrite, people wondered, with his earlier womanising and then rejection of sex, his support for Mary Whitehouse and Cliff Richard in the Festival of Light which was opposed to what it called moral pollution, and his admiration for and promotion of Mother Teresa. Having sent up most aspects of modern life he became the target of satire, particularly in a sketch by Peter Cook, previously not broadcast, in which Muggeridge and a theologian friend set off in the steps of St George in Willesden, a parody of a programme Muggeridge had made about St Paul. No, I think Alan Brien got it right: he was a born defector and a vastly wise and entertaining one at that.

Copyright Spectator Apr 26, 2003

Alan's response to a review of "Lenin - The Novel"

2008-06-09T22:37:00.003+01:00
To the Editor (New York Times):

Any British author, not to mention the author of a first novel, must be gratified to get the space you gave ''Lenin: The Novel'' in your issue of Oct. 16 (1988), even though your reviewer, Ellendea Proffer, runs to impressive length to describe my fiction as a cartoon of fact.

Owing to our postal strike, which lingered long in the Welsh mountains, and some problems with Royal Mail muleteers, it is probably rather too late to enter into any dispute over the details. So I will forgo pointing out that, contrary to her assertion, there are many sources testifying to Lenin's appalling clothes and vulgar abuse - you have only to look at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's deeply researched ''Lenin in Zurich.''

It scarcely needs any rebuttal to squash your reviewer's shocked cry - ''Mr. Brien actually seems to admire this historical bloodthirstiness'' - by pointing out that nowhere does ''Mr. Brien'' express any opinions. My book is a work of imagination, the fictional diary of a real person. Naturally, the first-person narrator tends to believe that what he is doing is right. What would your reviewer expect - ''Dear Diary: I am a blood-soaked monster, on a throne of skulls''?

ALAN BRIEN Corwen, Wales

Collection of Alan Brien's quotes

2008-06-09T21:51:00.008+01:00

New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite-the taxi driver.

(of annual migration of Americans to Great Britain) - The blue-rinse warbler and her horn-rimmed mate are rare and overdue this year.

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting.

I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.

This Thane of Cawdor would be unnerved by Banquo's valet never mind Banquo's ghost.

(of Steve McQueen) - His features resembled a fossilized wash rag.

(of Nicol Williamson) - (as having)...eyes like poached eggs, hair like treacle toffee, and a truculent lower lip protruding like a pink front step from the long pale doorway of his face.

A Pinter play is like a Hitchcock film with the last reel removed.

Critic bites dust, dogs dance for joy

2008-06-09T21:45:00.001+01:00
Alan Brien died last Friday. He was the first, and best ever, theatre critic on the Sunday Telegraph; indeed he was the first appointment to that newspaper when it was launched in the early 1960s.

That was the measure of Alan’s distinction. The Sunderland son of an electrical engineer on the town’s trams, he went to Bede Grammar School and Oxford via a stretch in the RAF at the end of the war including a raid on Hitler’s mountain retreat of Berchtesgarden.

He was both earthy and urbane, worldly and thoroughly radical, a brilliant talker and writer on many subjects and a great rival, as well as friend, of Kenneth Tynan. They don’t make critics like him any more, certainly not on the Sunday Telegraph, anyway.

He was a regular star contributor to Plays and Players when I edited the magazine in the mid 1970s. He was always late with his copy, to the extent that I used to have to go round to his Paddington apartment and wrench it physically from his own hands.

I’d stand in the hallway while he finished it off at the typewriter and wait for him to emerge, tousled and invariably hung over, in his dressing gown. He was married four times, had five children and wrote just one book, a long simmering faction called Lenin: The Novel; tragically, I don’t know anyone who’s ever read it.

Once, he appeared in our Victoria Street offices after an exceedingly good liquid lunch in El Vino’s, where he formed a remarkable double-act with another great critic, Philip Hope-Wallace. He was at least two days late with the copy. “What am I writing about this month?” he asked. “Trevor Nunn’s sequence of four Roman plays at the Aldwych,” we replied.”How many words?” “Fifteen hundred.”

He sat in a corner, fumbling with a handful of cuttings which turned out to be a few newspaper reviews of the same production to jog his memory and feed his argument. He reeked of lunch and could hardly sit straight in his chair.

One hour later he handed over fifteen hundred words of the highest standard, witty, descriptive and appreciative, incorporating a dispute he once had with Lindsay Anderson over whether or not Shakespeare ever wrote a right-wing play (Brien grudgingly agreed with Anderson that Coriolanus fitted that bill).

Turning over these memories — “the last literary-journalistic giant in the tradition of G K Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and James Agate,” said Philip Purser in his Guardian obit, not unjustly — I set off in the howling wind and rain of another typical Bank Holiday Monday for a tramp on Hampstead Heath.

We’d hardly gone fifty yards when I saw a curious fellow in a pork pie hat barking instructions, and throwing balls, at a trio of deep black mongrel dogs while an attractive blonde lady kept guard over a zipped up baby.

The picture came into focus. The man was Ken Campbell, the dogs were his dogs, the lady was Prunella Gee, the actress and mother of his daughter Daisy, whose baby was in the push chair.
“Right, as it’s you,” rasped the reckless genius of Epping Forest, “we’ll ‘ave an impromptu dog show!” And he turned our little patch of sodden greensward into a mini circus ring of leaping canines, pouncing and prancing, racing and fetching.

Within minutes, several other dogs had joined in and a small appreciative audience stood by with silly grins on their faces.

Ken was sorry to hear about Alan Brien, though he hardly knew him. “The thing is,” he said,”he gave the appearance of knowing what he talked about, even if he didn’t, and he had a wild, hedonistic streak about him which is good news, eh?”

We parted company and tramped on towards Kenwood to complete our Bank Holiday soaking and enjoy an excellent pint of beer in the Spaniard’s Inn. A good day was completed by catching up with the Martin McDonagh film, In Bruges.

In Bruges is a real gem, and an astonishing first movie by the author of The Pillowman and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. It has all McDonagh’s qualities as a playwright — great dialogue, terrific plot twists, sardonic humour, hilarious violence — as well as a naturally instinctive cinematic nous.

The story of the two sad hitmen stranded in Bruges while awaiting instructions is beautifully shot (as indeed are most of the characters by the end) and edited and also, ironically, serves as a great tourist brochure for Bruges.

In some ways the film is an hommage to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, the canals of Bruges substituting for those of Venice, but the tone is finally all of its own, and the performances of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell as the hitmen and Ralph Fiennes as their shadowy boss are absolutely cracking.

Michael Coveney - Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 - What's on Stage

Peter Green

2008-06-09T19:42:00.003+01:00
Actors' agent and resident of Denville Hall who welcomed Alan to the fold with "after a new show opened we'd go to the newspapers looking for "what has Bernard Levin written, what does Ken Tynan say but what does Alan Brien think?"

A life-long friend met and made at Jesus College, Oxford

2008-06-08T22:36:00.005+01:00
The Daily Telegraph
22/11/2001

THE LORD LOVELL-DAVIS, who has died aged 76, was raised to the peerage and made a junior minister by Harold Wilson in 1974 after giving invaluable assistance in the propaganda war that had helped Labour to achieve three general election victories.

From 1962 to 1974, as Peter Davis, he led a voluntary committee of media specialists to advise the Labour Party on publicity. The other committee members were an advertising executive, David Kingsley, and a public relations consultant, David Lyons.

Codenamed "The Three Wise Men" to protect their identities, they chose a then little-known market researcher, Bob Worcester, of Mori, to carry out regular public opinion surveys for them. Between them, they thought up the Let's Go With Labour campaign slogan for 1964, and You Know Labour Government Works two years later.

Both slogans captured the national mood: disillusionment with the Macmillan and Home administrations, and the excitement generated by Harold Wilson's call to harness the "white heat of technology" to government. But in 1970, the focus on the Conservatives as Yesterday's Men. . .They Failed Before flopped badly. It had been planned as a knocking prelude to a positive pro-Labour campaign for an autumn election that was to feature Labour's Winning Team
. . .Make Britain Great Again. But the plan was undone when Harold Wilson unexpectedly decided on a June election, ignoring the group's advice that he would lose then but could recover by the autumn. However, their February 1974 campaign proved a winner.

Peter Lovell Davis, the son of an accountant, was born on July 8 1924. (Later, on receiving a peerage, his choice of title would oblige him to hyphenate his name). He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Stratford-upon-Avon, and at Coventry Technical College, where he joined the Air Training Corps.

In 1943 he joined an RAF officer training course which included a year at a university; he went to Jesus College, Oxford. He qualified as a Spitfire pilot, was promoted to flight lieutenant, and was sent out to the Middle East. He was destined for the Far East when Japan surrendered.
In 1947 he returned to Oxford and completed a degree course in English; perhaps more valuable was the experience he gained writing for the undergraduate magazine Isis, and as its films editor. This led to a foothold in Fleet Street with Central Press, an old-established and badly run-down features agency. It was taken over by the Bristol Evening Post, with Davis as managing director, briefed to restore its fortunes.

Apart from a small Fleet Street office, its meagre tangible assets included a lobby correspondent's pass to the House of Commons, held by a retired Glasgow Herald political journalist, Robbie Robertson. Davis recruited a trainee journalist from the Acton Gazette, Ian Waller (later to become The Sunday Telegraph's political correspondent) to provide full-scale political news coverage.

Within a year several leading provincial papers, including the Glasgow Evening Times and the Bolton Evening News took the service, and Waller's weekly political commentary was syndicated all over the world. Central Press flourished and Davis remained there until 1970, when he became chairman of Features Syndicate and of Davis and Harrison Visual Productions.
His long association with Harold Wilson, which was to cost him his ministerial office as soon as James Callaghan became Prime Minister, had begun with a chance encounter soon after the general election of 1959.

He tried unsuccessfully to persuade Wilson, then a leading member of the Labour Party's National Executive, of the importance of using modern advertising and market research, and of the power of television in electioneering. Wilson's mind was still rooted in the age of public meetings and doorstep canvassing; but Davis persevered and eventually convinced the party's National Executive Publicity Committee to give his group a chance.

Wilson was eventually converted, and Labour's 1964 and 1966 campaigns were the most sophisticated and effective of any party. One key to the group's success was Davis's insistence on keeping clear of policy-making arguments and sticking to the role of sympathetic professionals, providing advice and expertise on implementing policy.

He forged close links with Wilson and with his secretary Marcia Williams (now Lady Falkender), though he never belonged to the so-called "Kitchen Cabinet" of Wilson's closest advisers. Much to Davis's surprise, he was offered a peerage and appointment as a Lord-in-Waiting in 1974. Still young and energetic by their Lordships' standards, he brought a breath of fresh air to the Upper House.

Good-looking and personable, Peter Lovell-Davis was well-equipped to carry out the duties attached to the post, acting, for instance, as the Queen's representative in attending foreign dignitaries on their arrival in Britain.

From 1975 to 1976 he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Energy and launched an energy conservation campaign with the "Save It - Switch Off" message, aimed at housewives. From 1976 to 1984 he was on the Board of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Lord Lovell-Davis's particular interest was child welfare, and he was chairman of the steering group of the Caring for Children in the NHS Committee.

He was chairman of Lee Cooper Licensing Services from 1983 to 1990, and of Pettifor, Morrow and Associates from 1986 to 1999. He was a trustee of the Academic Centre of the Whittington Hospital, Highgate, from 1980, and of the Museum of the Port of London and Docklands from 1985 to 1998.

He married, in 1950, Jean Graham; they had a son and daughter.

alan

2008-06-08T14:36:00.002+01:00
The mischievous glint in the eyes. The mouth crimps up at the corners. The comment that was not what I was expecting. The camaraderie. The sense of fun. The sense of the world. The feeling of complicity. Being allowed into your private joke on life. The sheer pleasure of your company. I'm going to miss you. Alan.