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.

Can Do

   Hell of an image, that Rosie the Riveter, if you're ever thinking of recruiting people.

 

 Still tasting the bitter-sweetness of Poussey's Advenures in the Arts World, the following night I wonderfully found myself beneath railway arches again, watching actors dance and musicians jam. One Night Records was the name of the night. Glimpsing an abandoned juice box on an oil drum at the entrance, I intinctively reached for it to pump alcohol onto my hands. We arrived for nine, and moved from stage to stage in groups. We could carry drinks with us and lower our facemasks for a sip of Old Fashioned. I think ours was the last group, and small. There were no more than twelve of us to fill these rooms, so no way to make any of them feel like clubs, with or without social distancing.

 

 

 

 But they didn't need to. We were where we were, stragglers at a dip in history, sitting still and bursting with gratitude. Every act must have already been playing for two hours before we arrived: The One Night Records Rhythm Revue Band. Amy & the Calamites. Sumudu. Laurence Corns and the Candid Jug Orange Band. Jaz Delorean. All of them in front of us. All seeming so happy to be in front of us too, togethering. I think that's the literal translation of "entertainment": Togethering. Here's a clip of the last act we saw, maybe the last live act I'll see this year. I'm still bursting with gratitude.

Canvas Tanks (A Round-Up of What's Not)

Thanks to Tony Way for this... "It’s Omar, Dan, Sophia, Jahmal, Naomi, Justin, and Will I feel sorry for. Nobody gives a fuck about them."

 Erratum: Yesterday's post was obviously inspired by the image above, top row, second from the left, which had been doing the rounds over the weekend, and which I only found out today is not, as rumoured, a government initiative to specifically discourage people from becoming live artists in response to theatre closures, but actually one of a series of adverts from 2019. Oliver Dowden, the Minister for whatever it's currently called, issued a tweet slightly correcting the story, but neglecting to say that the campaign was from last year. Almost as if - well - maybe the misapprehension wasn't entirely inconvenient. I know. That sounds crazy.

 

 Similarly, a few weeks ago ITV News had to retract a story that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had singled out careers in the live arts as now "unviable", when in fact he was talking about, well anything. And yet the word "unviable" is still cropping up in the feed of creatives feeling wretched, and the same thing will probably happen to "Fatima". It's hard, probably impossible, to find the origin of these false alarms, but miserable to see them spread, especially if they do turn out to be the work of some sockless, civil-service-dodging, gaslighting, grudge-drunk, anarcho-fascist game theorist who probably can't so much as spell "Psy Ops". Easier to source is the fake story that might have initiated this pattern, published in the Daily Telegraph a month ago and immediately debunked by Stweart Lee, that the new Director General of the BBC would be setting his sights on "left-wing comedy". It was a lie, but that didn't stop the anger, or the enervating processing of a manufactured attack when that lie spread, and the jokes are still being posted today satirising the non-existent, harshing - in a word - the vibe, simply because it's more fun to riff on a story than to check if it's true. Well actually, no. As Tony Way has proved above, both can be fun. We can do both.

Not real.

#WhyTheyAreDoingThis (with the Incomparable Ince)

 

 I was actually planning on posting this before #WhyAreTheyDoingThis started trending on tw*tt*r, just because it's so good, but anyway yes, here's why. I feel Robin Ince should be given the chance to turn down a knighthood for his stewardship of the Cosmic Shambles during this pandemic; he takes his job incredibly seriously without taking himself seriously and every one of their videos has made my lockdown life a little richer. This Covid-specific Q&A is a particular highlight, whether you want your own questions answered, or something to answer someone else's, or even if you think you know it all anyway but just want to enjoy patient and enquiring minds presenting their findings and discussing their differences. Pretty much everything is covered here, including the problems faced when trying to communicate this stuff: messages require clarity but without becoming so simplified they provoke "rage against the soundbite". I was also interested to learn the two biggest problems attending the coming winter won't be the cold itself, which is actually bad for the virus, but the closing of windows, which will keep infection in, and the turning on of central heating, which will make virus-carrying particles floatier. I've assumed the only thing stopping the current government from turning out similarly useful information packages - like they used to do with seatbelts and the country code -

 

F***ers.

 

... was a hatred of the seventies, but on reflection I suppose the message does have to be allowed to change. So in the absence of Joe and Petunia, or Jimmy Savile shaking an egg in a box, here is an absolute good, to be used unsparingly. Again, their patreon's here.

Musty Corn!

 No sung blog Sunday today, sorry! I've been wrestling with iMovie, trying to get today's Journal of the Plague Year reading up. Apparently it doesn't like it when I shift filters to give footnotes because the clips are too short, but you didn't need to know that, anyway I put on a suit for some of this, which is how I was finally reunited with my muti-ballpoint retractable, but that's in the video, look, I promise to do more with this blog than just plug the youtube channel, but for all you seventeenth century health and safety regulation fans here's what I've done today. The new regulations governing the depth of a grave are quite interesting, but be warned it's not nice what happens to the dogs, and if you simply want to hear me having a too much fun saying "musty corn" in Patrick Allen's voice*, jump straight in at 14 minutes 23 seconds:

* Oh alright, Sir Maxwell House's voice (... and thanks to Quentin Smirhes for the video).

Or Else

Yes, to hell with this campaign even if she does have nice eyes. And to hell with the dead children that Tfl ("TFL"? "tFL"? "TfL"?) keep plastering across the daily commute. To hell with all the punishing, public-funded, landscape-poisoning Mene Mene's. Here's an alternative approach from the traditionally more relaxed New Zealanders which proves it's perfectly possible for an effective public information campaign to be warm, kind, even funny, and its slogan had me punching the air. Excellent work, Don Draper.

As for what the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was thinking here...

Still thanks for the laughs. (Picture taken while rehearsing Alice in Wonderland on bikes. A council's shed is full of polling station signs, road signs, unused street lamps. it's like being backstage at reality.) 

 In other news the outstanding National Office of Importance joins the blogroll over on the right, as does the the great, glogg-serving, theatre-doing, actual science-writing Michal Regnier's fab blog.