Month: July 2019

Number Ten at Number Ten

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, Childhood, Doctor Who, Little Bit Of Politics, Moaning, Money

Sorry, politics again.

Like Doctor Whos of the modern era, the Prime Minister has changed yet again. It’s the tenth Prime Minister since I’ve been alive – that’s an average of just under five years each, although of course there have been two long-players amongst them. (Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, obviously.)

I can remember as a child hearing on the news that Jim Callaghan was leaving. (He was my third Prime Minister, whose appearance later changed after he confronted the giant spiders of Metebelis Three – and no, I won’t be getting bored of this tiresome comparison anytime soon, sorry). Other than a name and a face on the news, and what with my being not quite eight at the time, I didn’t know much about him. Not even which lot he was leader of.

But regardless of the detail, I knew he was leaving what seemed to be a pretty important job – it had to be, based on how often he appeared on TV (usually just after Grandstand and before The Generation Game). So in my political naivete I had sympathetic visions of the poor guy having to get up in the morning to go and find another job. Would he, I wondered, be on the bins by next week?

That, of course, isn’t quite how it works – some four decades on, I’ve learned from simple observation that, post-Downing Street, there’s plenty of opportunities for an ex-PM. The lecture circuit, the book deal, ludicrously high fees for ludicrously low hours in consultation or as a board member to some favoured company.

What I didn’t know until today, which is why in fact I’ve hardly mentioned Boris and haven’t even mentioned Brexit at all is that there is in fact a thing called, ‘The Public Cost Duty Allowance’.

I was already aware that the ‘golden handshake’ when you go from being an MP to suddenly not being an MP any more is rather more generous than it would be if, say, I were to go in to work on Monday and find myself given the boot – and only recently I was ranting about the over-generous allowance for maternity leave. But what I didn’t realise was that there is the aforementioned allowance “to assist former Prime Ministers with the costs of continuing to fulfil duties associated with their previous position in public life.”

It’s newsworthy today because as my brother has pointed out on Facebook, Nick Clegg has (a) managed to have the point stretched to include deputy Prime Ministers such as, just to give one example, just off the top of my head, such as himself; and (b) accordingly claimed £113,000.

I’ve put in the bit about Nick Clegg partly to have a moan and partly to give a paragraph of thinking time, to try and derive some meaning from the phrase that ended the one before, because I’m not sure what duties former Prime Ministers have to fulfil, which are associated with their previous position.

I can believe that an ex-PM gets a lot of invitations to open this, join that, speak at such and such, and whatever – but in most instances those are going to be paid engagements; and besides, they’re not to do with their role as PM, it’s just basking in  the residual chutzpah of having been PM.

That is to say: how can there be a role of ‘ex-PM’ when the duties of the role are being carried out by the new PM? If they want to go off and do this, that or the other, fine carry on, but I’m struggling to see why the rest of us are subsidising it. Is it like having a wife, but keeping a mistress?!

However it works, it seems more than generous – in respect of the newest ex-PM, I think the second ever female Prime Minister is extremely lucky that we’ll be keeping her in the manner to which she’s become accustomed.

As for Mr Callaghan, at least now I know why he wasn’t emptying our bins the following week. He of course was famously followed by the first ever female Prime Minister.

You know, the one with the long scarf and the robot dog…

A Letter To America (To US, from us)

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Little Bit Of Politics, Trump

Hey America, what happened to you? You used to be cool, man!

It’s not even eleven years since you voted in your first black President, on a wave of optimism that wasn’t confined to just America. We all felt like the future had finally arrived.

Look at you now.

If you’re having to nitpick over the possible other interpretations of words in an attempt to prove your President isn’t racist … well, then he probably is. If you’re debating exactly what is meant by ‘concentration camps’… well, then they probably are.

Don’t get me wrong. I can absolutely understand the appeal of voting for somebody who’s not a career politician, who isn’t a part of the system, who’s just an ordinary guy. Trouble is, your man Trump is a multi-billionaire ex-TV star who lives in a big gold tower – he’s the least ordinary guy I can think of.

Maybe despite that, maybe you think he represents you, you think he cares. Maybe you point to the fact that he’s a businessman used to making tough calls and breaking hard deals. I guess that’s true – but a businessman does it to make profit, not to help people. You wouldn’t want this guy as your boss, why would you want him as your President?

Let’s take your Health Insurance. Over here we have something called the NHS (the S stands for Service) and it’s free. You get ill, you go to the doctor or the hospital and you get help. You don’t get a bill.

I’ll probably need to use up some of my word count to say that again. It’s a free service. You don’t get a bill.

I’ve repeated it because I can only assume you don’t know about it. If you did, why would you continue as you are, why aren’t you all demanding a US version of the NHS? Obama tried some small baby steps towards it, but even that’s been turned around now. Hard to comprehend, because I can’t see how it’s in anybody’s interests to have a health service which you’ve got to pay for.

Oh, wait – unless you’re in the health insurance business! And what’s good for business must be good for America, right. That’s why you want a businessman in the White House I guess…?

What about this whole gun thing? Every other country, one school massacre is one too many – for you, it seems to be a fact of life. You get so many shootings, they don’t even all make our news anymore. And what’s Trump’s answer? Arm the teachers! Yes of course, because more guns is bound to be safer than less guns.

And I daren’t even start on the whole abortion debate. Over here in the twenty-first century, the rest of us have pretty much accepted female emancipation and equality as being here to stay – but you tell us you want to turn that clock right back, so if a woman  get knocked up they’re stuck with it. What’s that you say, on religious grounds…? Dear God.

It’s horrifying, because you know, you look and you sound so much like us. But if we ignore the catchy music and actually listen to the lyrics… well then you really are a foreign country.

It’s not just horrifying, that’s the thing – it’s also really tragic. When I was a kid in the 70s, in the UK, America is what we wanted to be. Your toys were so much cooler, your TV shows so much more exciting, you seemed to have it all and we wanted it! Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Fonz, malls, McDonald’s, Starsky & Hutch, and Luke Skywalker.

Back then, and in an excited way, they’d say we were five years behind America, so we’d see these great things coming. Now, that same sentence is a curse, a depressing glimpse into an awful future.

I hope it’s no longer true – that the UK won’t end up being led by a self-centred man who speaks without thinking, insults without caring, who is a rallying cry to the nationalist and the extremist, and who ultimately has no interests but his own at heart.

Oh f—

A Quick Flash Before Bedtime

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in 1970s, Childhood, TV

I did it for twelve consecutive nights. Only while my wife was away, of course.

Don’t worry, this blog hasn’t been rated for even brief nudity, so I’m referring to the fact that for my birthday recently, my brother bought me the complete 12 episode Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe on DVD.

I’ll confess, I approached it with a little trepidation. A few years back, in a similar ‘nostalgic birthday present’ scenario, I rewatched ITV’s Dick Turpin from the 1970s. The theme music and title sequence were as good as I remembered – but the programmes themselves, other than Richard O’Sullivan’s superlative leading man performance, were rather disappointing. Dull, thin, repetitive.

Maybe that lowered my expectations this time round; or maybe I recalled that the Flash Gordon serials were already old when I’d first watched them as a kid. This final Flash story is generally regarded as the poorest of the three, and to be honest it made the least impression on me back in the day. But, just as I’d gladly watch Return of the Jedi even though I know it’s not a patch on the other two, so I enjoyed (re)watching Flash now.

Of course, you’ve got to take it on its own terms. As a child I probably watched wide-eyed from the edge of my seat, hanging off every word like it was some kind of gospel truth. As an adult, the response is often wry amusement rather than white-knuckle excitement. Professor Zarkov’s curious accent, which to my ear at least sounds rather more Irish than Hungarian, for example; or the recasting of Princess Aura from the arresting beauty of the first serial, to some kind of shrill, permed, sub-Lucille Ball type figure in this one.

Undeniably, though, there are some striking moments in it too, probably hugely impressive to the original Saturday morning audience of 1940. The weird movement of the walking bombs in parts three and four is clearly achieved by undercranking the camera, but it makes for an eerie effect nevertheless. And the language of the rock people, despite O’Zarkov’s claim that it is similar to an ancient Gobi dialect, is simply the sound played backwards – at times you can spot where whole scenes have been played backwards to achieve the effect, leading to peculiarities in the actors’ movements. At least it goes to show that somebody, the director maybe, was determined to experiment, even on a lowly-regarded, ‘knock it out quickly for the kiddies’, film like this.

Still, it’s a product of its time isn’t it. The treatment of the female lead is the most obvious sign of this. Nominally, Dale Arden is one of the three heroes but in reality, she gets little to do except say, “Flash!” a lot, and get herself captured. Her highlight is probably getting to change costumes around about episode six, into a female Robin Hood type outfit which, dare I say, she clearly rather fancies herself in.

But then, in context, Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe was made nearly thirty years before the first moon landing, when Gone With The Wind had only just been released. Looked at another way, in 1940 America was apparently happy telling this sort of tale, of brave, square-jawed heroes fighting a seemingly unstoppable tyrant hell-bent on absolute domination, while Europe was… Well, you can see where that’s going can’t you.

This was the last of the Flash serials, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was considered just as effective, and considerably cheaper, to reshow the old serials instead of making new ones, meaning of course that they, and he, was prevented from falling into cinematic obscurity. TV clearly snapped them up, so it’s no great surprise that more than thirty years after the last serial was made George Lucas wanted to make a feature film. Alas, he was refused the rights so had to go off and make up some sci-fi show of his own instead (not sure how that panned out for him).

A film arrived in the end, of course – Flash, in 1980. Proving beyond a doubt what we TV-loving schoolboys of the late 1970s already knew.

Gordon was Alive.

Our Beds Are Crowded

by andrewcurnow1971, posted in Family, Moaning, Sex

Speak for yourself, Freud.

I don’t know what sort of Austrian multi-player sexual shenanigans Sigmund was involved with (he wrote, wilfully misunderstanding for comic effect) and in the interests of full disclosure, I probably ought to admit that I didn’t even know the above title was a quote from Freud, until I just Googled it. Truth is, I half-remembered hearing it in an episode (possibly the LAST episode) of The Golden Girls.

I realise that there is a subtext to the quotation of course, but taking it at face value for now, my bed is far from crowded. In fact, more specifically, it is currently operating at below average occupancy, to the tune of one wife.

To put it another way, I’m sleeping alone at the moment because my other half is away house-/dog-sitting. She’s been absent for just over two weeks, and isn’t back for another four or five days yet.

It’s not by any means the first time she’s done this, and it isn’t very far away – it’s only the next village along in fact. Even that rather overstates the distance between us, as it’s no more than a ten minute walk, and downhill most of the way. (Unless you’re coming back of course, when it’s uphill most of the way. Obviously.)

For several years I used to make the joke that she was away filming another series of sitcom My Wife in the Next Village (which I suspect is a rip off of forgotten Alderton ‘n’ Gordon vehicle My Wife Next Door) but that joke has started to wear a bit thin, at least according to my wife (in the next village).

I don’t mind her being away as such, and if I’m totally honest it’s nice to have full control of the TV remote for a change. But more with each time, and especially when it’s a multi-week haul like this one, I find myself put off-kilter by her absence. It’s worst at bed time, and not in a Freudian sense (well, OK, not just in a Freudian sense). There’s something fundamentally comforting about somebody else just being there, whether that translates into a warm back on a cold night, or simply the reassuring sound of another human being softly breathing (well, loudly snoring) in the darkest of the night.

After over twenty years, even if I’m not consciously aware of it I may well be subconsciously (yes, Freud again, I know) used to there being two of us in the bed; and to revert, even temporarily, to being on my own, to being all alone… it’s not as easy as I’d have expected.

In darker moments, I can’t help but be aware that the day will come when either I or she will be sleeping alone permanently. My wife has a friend who lost her other half, and on at least one occasion she has woken up absolutely furious with him for having died. So in those darker moments, I know that inevitably one of us will end up totally abandoning the other. And I’m still not sure whether it’s better to be the one who leaves, or the one who’s left.

In even darker moments, it’s what worries me most about the awful day to come when I lose one of my parents. That will be bad enough in itself, but my deeper fear of that scenario is how the remaining one will deal with it.

Thankfully, dragging myself away from dark and darker moments, in the current instance we’re more or less into the home straight now. I’m looking forward to her being back here with us soon (even if it does mean I’ll have to hoover on Wednesday) and to sharing the bed with her again and, hopefully, getting to know each other again.

Our bed won’t be crowded though.

It’ll be just the two of us.