Prefab Spon

 Among the many public information films from the late forties being shown in the corner of the Imperial War Museum in which I had installed myself (see yesterday) was one showing the viewer around one of the prefabricated aluminium "Churchill Villas" being almost literally wheeled out to house returning soldiers. My Dad grew up in one of these.

 

 

 

 This isn't exactly the film I saw, but it uses much of the same footage. What I watched dwelt less on the narrowness of the corrridors and more on the materials used in the bungalow's construction. Common in fact to everything I saw in that corner of the IWM was a note of what things were made of, and how much they cost.

 

 

 "And before you've smoked your third cigarette, the curtains are going up in the living room."

 Another thing I noticed in these films was how thin everybody seemed. Brief shots of shirtless British troops bare-legged in their shorts and boots showed a body type not unfit, but almost uncastable these days. And that's what first reminded me of Spike Milligan.

 

 

 It didn't seem preposterous to me to suppose that it was the constant exposure to these bodies, bodies like his own, that inspired the unflattering scrawniness of his illustrations, and the octagonal-shin-shaming character descriptions of The Goon Show.

 

"HASTILY DRAWN HOLE TO CONCEAL BADLY DRAW BOOTS."

 

 Once reminded of Milligan, more and more of what I saw of this post-war world so badly in need of repair seemed to be reflected in his work. Every bravely heralded, short-term, cost-assessed solution - like the prefabs my Dad grew up in "intended to last ten years" - recalled the face-saving announcements of The Goon Show's Greenslade, or the tags left on the costumes of Q9, or the holes dug and sticks erected to support Spike Milligan's badly drawn feet. 

 

 

 So that was an educational weekend for me. In other notices, as Hallowe'en is fast approaching I thought I'd do little reposts of the Universal Frankenstein essays I wrote earlier this year, so here is what I wrote about 1931's Frankenstein.