Copyright © 2005 Martin Newell Pepys 0.1 Blogware © Steve Dix
As I reported in last week's Joy of Essex, I attended a most unusual production by the I Hear Voices Theatre Co at Colchester Slackspace. Slackspace is a scheme whereby retail or office space not currently in use, becomes a temporary home to arts events, such as exhibitions, small concerts or other performances. It's a good idea, which owes as much to old-fashioned 'Waste not, want not. principles as it does to the 1960s European Situationism a thing which I'm sure many of you will remember with huge affection.
The production which I saw at Slackspace was an episode of a spoof 1950s radio thriller, called Bentley Strangetrousers. The invention of local theatre mavericks, Darren Gooding and Damien Bell, the plays are recorded complete with sound effects in front of a studio audience. Made as if for a 'live radio' broadcast, each episode is then made available as an internet podcast. Entrances to performances which take place on Sunday afternoons, are free. The plays are charming and funny. In fact, I've seen far worse entertainment costing far more. The show takes place two floors up, in the offices of Colchester's old Co-op Bank. So, to recap, I've just spent two consecutive Sunday afternoons, sittting upstairs in a former bank, watching actors pretending to be 1950s British radio stars recording a programme. Why? It was fun.
It was also free because the actors didn't get paid and because the performance space cost nothing. There persists a slightly fluffy idea in certain quarters that art somehow flourishes during a financial recession. In one way this might be true, since truly creative people deprived of funding will sometimes like prisoners with no hope of parole sing, dance or paint the walls despite it all. Just because it's possible for art to happen without money, however, doesn't mean that it should do. Arts funding will always be the first casualty when the money gets tight, because artistes are meant to struggle, aren't they? If this is our rationale, then why not souse them in icy water and beat them with oaken staves, too? We might get another Dylan Thomas or Burne Jones.
Ah, but times are hard, and tackling the iniquity of arts funding is a minefield. We are constantly assailed, for instance with the fact that Shakespeare is a priceless national treasure. If the Bard really is so universally popular why does the R.S.C. need funding? Shouldn't it be able to support itself? Never ask. Similarly, one man's white elephant is another's Visual Arts Facility. And why is Damien Hirst a brilliant 'enfant terrible' while Rolf Harris isn't even a serious painter? Does art have to be difficult to be worthy of funding? Why is art which is even remotely accessible deemed unworthy? We, the slack-jawed peasantry, obviously cannot be entrusted with such judgements. The people in charge, however, will frequently create prizes to award to themselves. This is mostly to remind the rest of us how important they are. Can you remember who won the last Turner Prize? The Booker Prize? The TS Eliot Poetry Prize? Best Performance in the UK Theatre Awards, even? No, neither can I. All I know is that the pubs, village halls and function rooms around Colchester are full of things which will make you laugh, cry or dance. Quite a few of these entertainments are made by ragged-trousered hobbyists, who aren't even going to get a sniff of the funding such as exists.
I recently watched an old Parkinson TV interview with the late Kenneth Williams. Petulant and oozing chagrin, the actor spat: I spent seven years, in the provinces! He spoke of it as if it had been a jail sentence, or a bitter war of attrition fought in some arid foreign outpost. He was actually only talking about doing some paid theatre work outside of London. Horrid places like Colchester, we imagine. Talent, on the evidence of what I've seen in Slackspace this past few weeks, needs to be locally-funded to encourage it to stay here not to be driven by poverty, craven and trembling into the bingo wings of Mama Metropolis.
Slackspace is great, don't get me wrong. But there are purpose-built spaces locally which are every bit as slack as our former Co-op Bank. They're called theatres. There's a theatre at Firstsite. There's another at the University of Essex. There's even a theatre at the Mercury Theatre. They must have times during the day or even the odd night when they're not being used. It costs enough to build a theatre. Shouldn't we be using them more efficiently, by slipping shows like Bentley Strangetrousers into their scheduling gaps?
The way the funding process works is as follows: the artiste approaches the funding body and is given a soul-destroying pile of forms to fill in. Now there's a long wait for a letter which begins, Dear Creative Practitioner, (really)... It usually continues, Unfortunately, you have not been successful upon this occasion...
The artiste then either puts the event on in a leaky scout hut or gives up. How much better if an assessor came to see the players and then said, Okay, you're good. Use the Mercury Theatre / Firstsite. The following dates and times are free. Any money left over, after basic costs are taken out, is yours. Then we, might keep our talent in the town and all the money in the local economy. One problem. It might be too simple.
Whilst everyone else is busy disinterring the 1970s, I've been rekindling my own old obsession with some of the lesser-loved bits of the 1950s and early '60s. The main parts of 1960s and the 1980s are popular destinations for novelists, playwrights, directors and all manner of other cultural necrophiles. For me, however, it's that formal, tweedy, pipe-smoking, trilby-wearing and ultimately sensible period, lying roughly between the Suez Emergency and the Profumo Scandal which is fascinating. Born in 1953, I do actually remember some of it.
As a young man of the early 1970s, my interest was also kindled by the humour of people such as Spike Milligan, the Pythons and the Bonzo Dog Band who'd travelled through that austerity. The fustiness of the era was a source of mystery and amusement to me. Only in recent years, however, as I pore over the photos, the films and the comedy records, do I even begin to get an idea of the subversive brilliance of some of its talent.
The 1950s seems to have been a transit camp for almost everything which later shook up light entertainment. The comedians and scriptwriters, constrained as they were by moral standards nearer to Victorian ones than to our own, needed to be ingenious in order to create humour which didn't fall foul of the rules. Such constraints may partly explain a few of those half-remembered catchphrases like Can I do you now, sir? or Mind my bike. Household expressions back then, they now seem arcane. Paul Whitehouse of the Fast Show, mined exactly such a seam, with his fictional music hall comic, Arthur Atkinson, who also used incomprehensible catchphrases like: Where's me washboard?
Yet, it is only when you take the spanners to these matters actually dismantle them and lay all the pieces out on the table that you really begin to understand what they might be made of. I decided to do exactly that to devise a pilot for a radio mini-sitcom to broadcast as an experiment on my own internet radio programme.
I called it What The Thump? It would feature two stuffy 1950s-style British chaps, Mike and Colin who shared a house. They'd have a widowed housekeeper called Mrs Huxtable, whom one of them would fancy. The comedy could be suggestive but not rude.I studied the form of old radio shows before I scripted and recorded it. Then I overdubbed applause. Sometimes, just for fun, I put it in the wrong places. I added sound effects and light music of the period. As a forgery, What the Thump came out surprisingly well funny, even. I'd never be able to sell it, of course. Even if it was any good, there's no point in ever sending anything to the BBC, nowaday, as it takes at least two years from application to broadcast. And then they'll change it beyond recognition.
I've always worked along the lines that if you don't like the entertainment on offer, go away and learn to make your own. In an age of cheap digital technology, there's no reason why anyone with a modicum of imagination should have to put up with what they don't like. So, almost for an exercise, I made my radiophonic return to the fusty 50s.
Suddenly, seemingly apropos of nothing, came an e-mail from Mr. Darren Gooding who, for the past eight years or so has run a small independent theatrical production company in Colchester. Darren, whom I know only slightly, informed me that he was making a 'radio' comedy set in 1950. Four episodes would be recorded at Colchester Slackspace in this case the vacant former offices of the Co Op Bank in Victoria Place. The production, a spoof secret agent story entitled Bentley Strangetrousers would run in front of a live audience, in same way that the BBC once recorded shows such as The Goons and Round the Horne. I was invited to attend a recording. How could I resist?
In the strangely appropriate setting of a redundant 1930s office building, up two cavernous flights of stairs, I settled down to watch Darren Gooding and his colleagues, Damien Bell, Mary Bollan, Gerry McKee perform and record this extraordinary play-within-a-play.
When it was finished, of course, it would not really be 'broadcast'. Because there's no way of getting it to the BBC or not in uder two years at any rate. 'Bentley,' Darren Gooding told me, was intended to go out as a 'podcast' on the internet.
It is a vaguely outrageous to me, that such a talented and energetic group of players now comprise part of a media underclass, with little hope of wider exposure or remuneration for the productions which they devise. They exist, not because of arts budget cuts and administrative circumlocution but despite it. In some ways, it's probably a good thing that the metrocentric opinion formers, and the bean-counting bursary dispensers don't get their frigid fingers upon such productions. They'd only go and ruin it. Often, though,there's the ever-present danger that talent which is unsupported may wither on the vine. This is why I have appointed myself the new Head of Comedy at Radio Wivenhoe ( Seven listeners can't be wrong.) so that we can broadcast the entire series as part of our spring season. I've also volunteered to join the production of Bentley Strangetrousers for one episode. Tune in next week.
I watched Later with Jools Holland the other night. I concluded that Holland, a much-loved music presenter, and former keyboard player with the band Squeeze, can surely not be too far from canonisation now. So, I settled down to watch the programme, which, for those of you who've never seen it, consists of half a dozen acts, all set up around a large studio, taking it in turns to play their sonic wares. The music featured on Later crosses several genres, whilst the artistes themselves can consist of anyone from a venerated old blues guitarist to the skinniest whelps recently emerged wet-nosed from the Indie kennel. The acts appearing on Later often come under the 'critically acclaimed' heading. In other words, it's grown-up listening, often of a rootsy nature. And I'm bored to death with it. It's like watching Opportunity Knocks in an alternative universe with Holland in some avuncular Hughie Green role. Later's image is a high-cred, maximum integrity one. Yet, as a rule, most participants will still tart themselves up, then preen, pose and pout as if appearing on the most facile of industry-sponsored pop shows.
I came home from the Far East in mid April of 1966 aged 13. During the 2 years in which I'd been away, England had shimmied out of grey flannels and into bell-bottom hipsters. Brilliant new pop songs were being released on a daily basis and many young pop stars were now sporting sharp new clothes and feathery. mod haircuts. Imagine if I'd turned on the TV and seen men older than my father was at the time, wearing exactly those same clothes and haircuts. Because it's what I witnessed on Later when Paul Weller and his band came on. As regular readers may have gleaned, I'm no stranger to raiding the dressing-up box myself, but I repeat my assertion that there's a fine difference between clever and wrong. With Later, however, as with rock music itself, I suppose that nothing's been said because nobody wants to be the first one to point out that the train ran out of coal ages ago. Not really good enough, is it?
And so it came to pass, last week, whilst discussing these weighty matters that I learned of a mythical Hughie Green connection with our county. Over to our South Benfleet girl for more:
Drive along Benfleet Road, and, at the junction between Benfleet Road and the Essex Way there was this very modern house perched right on the edge. And it overlooked Canvey Island. That was the house which was rumoured to be Hughie Green's. Were there any grounds for such a myth?
I asked her.
No, no, no. That's all it was. But it persists to this day that he lived there. The area was known as 'Millionaires Row'. The houses up there are such amazing mansions. I drove you past there. This particular house overlooked the area you were at the top of the Essex Way and when you were looking down, you were looking at Canvey, a bit of Kent and Coryton. You'll get the same vista when you're driving back from Southend towards Benfleet. And (at night) my mum used to call it Fairyland. and she said, ' All the twinkly bits are the fairy carriages and they're taking all the fairies home.' You look across these flat lands and they all merge together. So you can't actually tell the difference between them. A lot of people, if they just glance at that area and they look at Coryton oil refinery and then Canvey Island which has storage of oil and methane there they link the two and think that Canvey has a refinery, which it does not. The working refinery is at Coryton.
I looked for Coryton on the map. It lies at the mouth of Holehaven Creek, near Stanford le Hope. But wasn't there also some kind of 'ghost' refinery on Canvey? I asked the Benfleet girl.
In the 60s or 70s, Occidental, I think,were the company. They started building it. Then, there was an investigation into the relative stupidity of building an oil refinery right next to such a large amount of habitation. And it was all stopped. So, although the refinery is there, it never ever worked.
Wasn't Canvey Island once marshland? I asked her. It was reclaimed by the Dutch. she said. She didn't know exactly when. On the island are a number of round cottages and they are Dutch cottages. Very, very beautiful. There are lots and lots of ditches on Canvey. On Long Road, leading up to... Furtherwick, is it? There's a long, long road and a ditch all along its side. And my grandad, during the war, was responsible, for the maintenance of that ditch to keep it from flooding.
Because, being a farmer, he was in a reserved occupation. And actually, in my garage, one of my forks has the letters WAC (War Agricultural Committee) burnt into it. And as for the ghost refinery, in the 90s, I believe, Fred Dibnah was called in, to blow up its stack, as part of one of his TV programmes, but it actually collapsed before he could do it. So what was called the Oil City was only ever a container area. But there was never a refinery on Canvey Island. The jury's still out on Hughie Green, it seems, but I found the diversion far more interesting than watching Later with Jools Holland. I must be at a difficult age.