HOME.
Hmm - Hmm.
The cat Shadow was hovering.
"You're hovering," I remarked. "What is it, food again?"
"Do try to curb the negative attitude," he said. "As a matter of fact it's Royal Ascot." He struck his poetic pose and my heart sank.
"Don't tell me: you have a poem."
"Too right, mate, listen to this..."
And before I could so much as close the stable door he was emoting to a tune reasonably close to the Richard Rodgers classic My Favourite Things:
"Most Favoured Mascot."
Girls in posh dresses and millinery monstrosities,
Blokes in grey toppers and hired suit pomposities.
Look at me, I am a right royal mascot
Perched on the back of a posh coach at Ascot.
Hmm - Hmm
Owners and trainers and horses in blinkers,
Brightly clad jockeys and tipsters and tinkers
Odds on the favourite's not going to win
Best back a horse owned by a Sheik Yadust Bin.
Hmm - Hmm
Race talking Claire Balding has got all the patter,
She can talk the hind leg off a horse that don't matter.
But the prize little waffler, no doubt about that
Is little Willie Carson in a bloody great hat.
When the chosen horse
Does just half the course
When I'm blowing a gasket
I simply imagine I'm perched on a posh coach,
The most favoured royal mascot.
[Repeat all verses]
"That's it," he said. "Repeat all verses."
I smiled: "Maybe later."
"D'you think they'd like it?" he asked after a while. "Rodgers and Hammerstein?"
"If they weren't dead I think it'd kill 'em," I said.
He thought about that for a moment.
"You're having a josh with me," he said.
"Sure," I replied. "But more Gifford than Ackland."
BBC Radio 2.
I still listen every weekday morning to Wake Up To Wogan, [On line, on digital and on 88 to 91 FM.]
I shake my head as he talks over the beginning or the end (sometimes both) of every track he plays to make sure nobody will illegally record it: I mutter when he forgets to credit the performer and when he inexplicably drops his voice at crucial moments: I smile indulgently when he wheezes with laughter at the least funny Janet and John sketch and I growl impatiently as he introduces yet another contribution from the TOG repertory company led by its tiresome retired actor manager.
I love it.
The unscripted banter of the broadcasters, the way Traffic Totty Lynn Bowles talks about "north bahnd and sahth bahnd" traffic and once even announced that there were "hold ups to sahth bahnd traffic at the rahnd abaht."
I like Deadly and Johnny and Charlie and the seldom-heard-never-seen Barrowlands Boyd.
I wouldn't change a minute of it. It's not the same with anyone else, not even Johnny Walker, who I also like.
It's just not a normal morning without ol' Tel.
This week he's away on a holiday break. It will probably last no more than a fortnight and it happens every three or four weeks.
Sure there's more important things than snorkers and broadcasting.
Like what?
Like golf.
And grouting.
TELEVISION (CONTAINS SPOILERS).
Robin Hood.
Robin (Jonas Armstrong) bade a fitting farewell to Nottingham by blowing his enemies and half the town to smithereens.
He then succumbed to the poison on a dagger wielded by Gisborne's sister.
Well. at least there is the nucleus of a cast left for the next series.
One interest in series three has been the casting of Alun Armstrong's son Joe as Alan a Dale (bumped off last week) and of David Troughton's son, Sam, as Much.
(Grandfather Patrick Troughton was in the first television series of Robin Hood.)
Fascinating family likenesses.
CSI: NY.
The end of series five was a master class in actor management.
Faced by the inevitable clamour from actors' agents for their clients' salaries to increase in proportion to the increased popularity of a show, the cunning executive will gather the entire cast together in a bar and quietly ease a black sedan into position outside.
A window will roll down...a machine gun will appear...
Care to guess who will still be around for series six?
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
128. From I o W to Cardiff - music all ways.
HOME.
Isle of Wight Festival.
Yeah, it's that time again. Granddaughter Jess has gone with one of her friends and the requisite adult accompaniment to be entertained by a host of assorted musical talent at the 8th IW Festival.
Who is appearing?
No, not The Who, that was last year.
Among those I recognise are The Charlatans, Neil Young, Stereophonics, McFly, Razorlight and Will Young.
Then there are groups like The Prodigy and Pixies of whom I know little and, finally, there will be a host of bands with names like The Bitch, The Botch, The Kitsch and The Crotch of whom I know nothing.
They will all be very loud and very good after ten cans of lager.
Yesterday those of us in the area who have not joined the festival audience were able to stand outside our houses and watch The Red Arrows give another fantastic display over the site.
My Leader and I must have seen them half a dozen times in the past few years.
They are sheer magic.
Long may they reign.
READING
The Independent.
Perhaps surprisingly for a retired old bloke I scarcely found time to read much last week.
On Monday I managed a look at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's column.
She was decrying women who flee the political battlefield: at least, I think that's what it was, I could be wrong, a week is a long time in political journalism.
Then, on Friday, Johann Hari warned that we are filling space with trash, much of it orbiting earth at thousands of miles an hour.
That really was dire news.
I always thought all the trash in space was beamed back by satellite to become reality television.
Both of these journalists are fine writers.
I bet they cheer up sometimes, too.
TELEVISION
I'm Running Sainsbury's (C4).
At a time of economic downturn the chief executive of Sainsbury's, Justin King, one of those charming blokes born to sail through interviews, had the brilliant idea - well, lays claim to the brilliant idea - that shop floor workers (now called colleagues would you believe?) should be invited to submit their proposals for the better running of the company.
The idea is not entirely new: every sharp company in the country must have experimented with a staff suggestion box from which it hoped to garner a few good ideas for as little money as possible.
But the Sainsbury's idea had a twist: four of the proposals would be taken up for a trial period in selected stores under the direction of the proposer.
Of the first two, one suffered setbacks and has not worked out - sad, because it was a nice idea - and the other has been given an extended trial in twenty shops.
When I go into a supermarket only two things really concern me:-
(1) why have they shifted every-goddam-thing around again? and:-
(2) how long is the queue at the checkout going to be?
I have loathed and avoided standing in queues ever since the war: still remember ration books and people lining up outside the butcher's shop.
So far as my involvement in the process of shopping is concerned, I do not try the free samples offered by free sample offerers, I do not bother with anything said over the Tannoy and I do expect to lose my wife inside twenty minutes somewhere between wines and spirits and pet food.
For the next half hour she ceases to be my Leader and becomes: "Where the hell is Maureen?"
What?
Well of course it's my fault.
Life (ITV3).
That pleasant English actor Damian Lewis is back for what is apparently the last series of this amiable American cop drama. Sarah Shahi co-stars as his likeable, down-to-earth partner.
It is a well scripted, well acted, easy to follow show; which means - in televison production terms - it is absolutely right for the axe.
I shall be sorry to see it go.
Robin Hood (BBC1).
Talk is that Jonas Armstrong, arguably the best Robin in this load of supreme tosh since Jason Connery, is to be replaced by an Errol Flynn lookalike called Clive Standen who has suddenly appeared in the role of Archer, half-brother of Robin and Gisborne (don't ask).
We are close to the end of series three which started off with the casting department choosing David Harewood (an actor for whom I have the utmost respect) as a black Friar Tuck.
This chap blithely wanders into Nottingham and York unnoticed by the colour-blind townsfolk.
Well, with abject apologies to Yasmin A-B, neither my imagination nor my political correctness stretches quite that far.
Friar Tuck was Eugene Pallette (1938) and James Hayter (1952).
He was a fat old white bloke, not a well-built young black bloke.
Still, looking back I was opposed to the casting of Ben Kingsley as Gandhi and of Alec Guinness as Indian mystic Godbole and Arab leader Prince Feisal, too.
Does that make me a racist?
Do I care?
BBC Cardiff Singer of The World 2009.
A great week and a wonderful final from which the Russian soprano Ekaterina Shcherbachenko emerged a deserved winner.
(Dame Joan Sutherland, frail but indomitable, presented the trophy.)
The popular People's Favourite prize went to tenor Giordano Luca from Italy and the toughest competitor to beat in the competiton, undoubtedly, was an amazing countertenor, Yuriy Mynenko, from the Ukraine.
Well done the BBC and well done Wales!
Isle of Wight Festival.
Yeah, it's that time again. Granddaughter Jess has gone with one of her friends and the requisite adult accompaniment to be entertained by a host of assorted musical talent at the 8th IW Festival.
Who is appearing?
No, not The Who, that was last year.
Among those I recognise are The Charlatans, Neil Young, Stereophonics, McFly, Razorlight and Will Young.
Then there are groups like The Prodigy and Pixies of whom I know little and, finally, there will be a host of bands with names like The Bitch, The Botch, The Kitsch and The Crotch of whom I know nothing.
They will all be very loud and very good after ten cans of lager.
Yesterday those of us in the area who have not joined the festival audience were able to stand outside our houses and watch The Red Arrows give another fantastic display over the site.
My Leader and I must have seen them half a dozen times in the past few years.
They are sheer magic.
Long may they reign.
READING
The Independent.
Perhaps surprisingly for a retired old bloke I scarcely found time to read much last week.
On Monday I managed a look at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's column.
She was decrying women who flee the political battlefield: at least, I think that's what it was, I could be wrong, a week is a long time in political journalism.
Then, on Friday, Johann Hari warned that we are filling space with trash, much of it orbiting earth at thousands of miles an hour.
That really was dire news.
I always thought all the trash in space was beamed back by satellite to become reality television.
Both of these journalists are fine writers.
I bet they cheer up sometimes, too.
TELEVISION
I'm Running Sainsbury's (C4).
At a time of economic downturn the chief executive of Sainsbury's, Justin King, one of those charming blokes born to sail through interviews, had the brilliant idea - well, lays claim to the brilliant idea - that shop floor workers (now called colleagues would you believe?) should be invited to submit their proposals for the better running of the company.
The idea is not entirely new: every sharp company in the country must have experimented with a staff suggestion box from which it hoped to garner a few good ideas for as little money as possible.
But the Sainsbury's idea had a twist: four of the proposals would be taken up for a trial period in selected stores under the direction of the proposer.
Of the first two, one suffered setbacks and has not worked out - sad, because it was a nice idea - and the other has been given an extended trial in twenty shops.
When I go into a supermarket only two things really concern me:-
(1) why have they shifted every-goddam-thing around again? and:-
(2) how long is the queue at the checkout going to be?
I have loathed and avoided standing in queues ever since the war: still remember ration books and people lining up outside the butcher's shop.
So far as my involvement in the process of shopping is concerned, I do not try the free samples offered by free sample offerers, I do not bother with anything said over the Tannoy and I do expect to lose my wife inside twenty minutes somewhere between wines and spirits and pet food.
For the next half hour she ceases to be my Leader and becomes: "Where the hell is Maureen?"
What?
Well of course it's my fault.
Life (ITV3).
That pleasant English actor Damian Lewis is back for what is apparently the last series of this amiable American cop drama. Sarah Shahi co-stars as his likeable, down-to-earth partner.
It is a well scripted, well acted, easy to follow show; which means - in televison production terms - it is absolutely right for the axe.
I shall be sorry to see it go.
Robin Hood (BBC1).
Talk is that Jonas Armstrong, arguably the best Robin in this load of supreme tosh since Jason Connery, is to be replaced by an Errol Flynn lookalike called Clive Standen who has suddenly appeared in the role of Archer, half-brother of Robin and Gisborne (don't ask).
We are close to the end of series three which started off with the casting department choosing David Harewood (an actor for whom I have the utmost respect) as a black Friar Tuck.
This chap blithely wanders into Nottingham and York unnoticed by the colour-blind townsfolk.
Well, with abject apologies to Yasmin A-B, neither my imagination nor my political correctness stretches quite that far.
Friar Tuck was Eugene Pallette (1938) and James Hayter (1952).
He was a fat old white bloke, not a well-built young black bloke.
Still, looking back I was opposed to the casting of Ben Kingsley as Gandhi and of Alec Guinness as Indian mystic Godbole and Arab leader Prince Feisal, too.
Does that make me a racist?
Do I care?
BBC Cardiff Singer of The World 2009.
A great week and a wonderful final from which the Russian soprano Ekaterina Shcherbachenko emerged a deserved winner.
(Dame Joan Sutherland, frail but indomitable, presented the trophy.)
The popular People's Favourite prize went to tenor Giordano Luca from Italy and the toughest competitor to beat in the competiton, undoubtedly, was an amazing countertenor, Yuriy Mynenko, from the Ukraine.
Well done the BBC and well done Wales!
Monday, June 08, 2009
127. Home and Away - with music.
HOME.
Music.
The weather has been glorious so I have been sitting here doing less than I should and not giving a tinker's cuss.
In the background my old aiwa digital audio system (posh description for an inexpensive stereo) is helping lull me from the slog of extemporaneous composition.
Randy Crawford is halfway through the fascinating One Day I'll Fly Away; Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes will shortly be telling me that they are Up Where We Belong, then it will be Still Magic with Peter Skellern and then still more magic with Peggy Lee's You Can Sing A Rainbow: Mick Hucknall will follow to remind me how he feels Every Time We Say Goodbye and after that the duet from The Pearl Fishers will be sung in French by Nicolai Gedda and Ernest Blanc.
It's one of my personal choice tapes: put it together some years ago and still enjoy every one of the more than thirty tracks on it.
Good job I shall never be invited to choose eight Desert Island Discs.
How do those who get the invitation make up their minds?
Yesterday, in similar tranquil mood, I listened to the Yes album Fragile and marvelled again at the superb musicianship of Bill Bruford, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman and at Jon Anderson's terrific rendition of Heart of the Sunrise.
Well they'd never have time for that on your radio desert island, would they?
Na-a-h, I couldn't select just eight tunes.
I'd be forever hankering after the stuff I'd left out.
Reading.
I continue at a leisurely pace with Bryan Forbes' The Endless Game.
Could go faster but for incessant interruptions and a couple of months backlog of DVDs demanding attention.
So far ol' Bryan has been such darned good value that whatever DVD I have on at the same time as I read needs constant rewinding (or whatever you call it on a DVD) because I become so immersed in the book I lose the plot on the box.
Well, to be honest, losing the plot is not something I find difficult to do nowadays.
Once did a complete three year correspondence course with my radio playing in the background, but that was more than fifty years ago and you didn't have to watch radio.
Come to think of it, I sometimes wonder why I am watching...
Television.
And Springwatch again.
Kate Humble, Simon King and Chris Packham are doing the honours.
Bill Oddie should be missed, sadly or happily according to whether you were or were not a fan, but I don't see any signs of the team falling apart since his departure so I guess that says it all for programme presenters.
They're as necessary as they are popular and as popular as last week's show.
Kingdom is back on Sunday evenings.
Ol' Stephen Fry playing the kindly country solicitor Peter Kingdom.
Lovely start of week tosh with a great cast including a lady particularly popular in this part of the world, Celia Imrie.
I think she has a home here somewhere.
Everybody likes her.
In the first episode, the guest stars were June Whitfield and Peter Sallis, both on the run from
Last of the Summer Wine.
Since the demise of Kathy Staff somebody (tell me not Roy Clarke?) has decided that Russ Abbot, as Hobbo, should replace the late Brian Wilde's Foggy as the token Walter Mitty character.
Hobbo is not a success, the series is sadly limping, and I do not blame June Whitfield and Peter Sallis if they are AWOL.
At the moment they are better off with Stephen than with Russ and far better off with either than with the other Stephen on
Stephen Tomkinson's African Balloon Adventure.
Always liked the idea of travelling by hot air balloon, but this is a trip too far.
What goes up must come down and when I came down it would have to be somewhere flat, convenient for rescue and clear of hazards.
It would not have to be in the middle of impenetrable scrubland or herds of startled wild animals.
I'm sure Stephen Tompkinson and camera crew survived the three episodes - we'd have heard, wouldn't we? - and well done them.
But beautiful though the scenery clearly is, the thought of where we could land next would have precluded participation on my part.
Against my religion.
Devout coward.
AWAY.
Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK, 2009.
In July our daughter Jac and her friend Zoe Farndon are going to see the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright's new opera Prima Donna.
I don't know how Zoe is with languages; Jac is fluent in German and can manage a smattering of Italian: the opera is in French.
Doesn't matter.
Hell, I speak nothing but Isle of Wight English with a side-helping of Invective but that never stopped me enjoying opera in Italian.
Che Gelida Manina is melodic in a way that Your Tiny Hand is Frozen just ain't.
I hope Prima Donna will be a magical first for Rufus and a total treat for all those faithful fans who make it to Manchester.
That particularly goes for Jackie and Zoe.
Enjoy every minute my dears.
Music.
The weather has been glorious so I have been sitting here doing less than I should and not giving a tinker's cuss.
In the background my old aiwa digital audio system (posh description for an inexpensive stereo) is helping lull me from the slog of extemporaneous composition.
Randy Crawford is halfway through the fascinating One Day I'll Fly Away; Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes will shortly be telling me that they are Up Where We Belong, then it will be Still Magic with Peter Skellern and then still more magic with Peggy Lee's You Can Sing A Rainbow: Mick Hucknall will follow to remind me how he feels Every Time We Say Goodbye and after that the duet from The Pearl Fishers will be sung in French by Nicolai Gedda and Ernest Blanc.
It's one of my personal choice tapes: put it together some years ago and still enjoy every one of the more than thirty tracks on it.
Good job I shall never be invited to choose eight Desert Island Discs.
How do those who get the invitation make up their minds?
Yesterday, in similar tranquil mood, I listened to the Yes album Fragile and marvelled again at the superb musicianship of Bill Bruford, Steve Howe, Chris Squire and Rick Wakeman and at Jon Anderson's terrific rendition of Heart of the Sunrise.
Well they'd never have time for that on your radio desert island, would they?
Na-a-h, I couldn't select just eight tunes.
I'd be forever hankering after the stuff I'd left out.
Reading.
I continue at a leisurely pace with Bryan Forbes' The Endless Game.
Could go faster but for incessant interruptions and a couple of months backlog of DVDs demanding attention.
So far ol' Bryan has been such darned good value that whatever DVD I have on at the same time as I read needs constant rewinding (or whatever you call it on a DVD) because I become so immersed in the book I lose the plot on the box.
Well, to be honest, losing the plot is not something I find difficult to do nowadays.
Once did a complete three year correspondence course with my radio playing in the background, but that was more than fifty years ago and you didn't have to watch radio.
Come to think of it, I sometimes wonder why I am watching...
Television.
And Springwatch again.
Kate Humble, Simon King and Chris Packham are doing the honours.
Bill Oddie should be missed, sadly or happily according to whether you were or were not a fan, but I don't see any signs of the team falling apart since his departure so I guess that says it all for programme presenters.
They're as necessary as they are popular and as popular as last week's show.
Kingdom is back on Sunday evenings.
Ol' Stephen Fry playing the kindly country solicitor Peter Kingdom.
Lovely start of week tosh with a great cast including a lady particularly popular in this part of the world, Celia Imrie.
I think she has a home here somewhere.
Everybody likes her.
In the first episode, the guest stars were June Whitfield and Peter Sallis, both on the run from
Last of the Summer Wine.
Since the demise of Kathy Staff somebody (tell me not Roy Clarke?) has decided that Russ Abbot, as Hobbo, should replace the late Brian Wilde's Foggy as the token Walter Mitty character.
Hobbo is not a success, the series is sadly limping, and I do not blame June Whitfield and Peter Sallis if they are AWOL.
At the moment they are better off with Stephen than with Russ and far better off with either than with the other Stephen on
Stephen Tomkinson's African Balloon Adventure.
Always liked the idea of travelling by hot air balloon, but this is a trip too far.
What goes up must come down and when I came down it would have to be somewhere flat, convenient for rescue and clear of hazards.
It would not have to be in the middle of impenetrable scrubland or herds of startled wild animals.
I'm sure Stephen Tompkinson and camera crew survived the three episodes - we'd have heard, wouldn't we? - and well done them.
But beautiful though the scenery clearly is, the thought of where we could land next would have precluded participation on my part.
Against my religion.
Devout coward.
AWAY.
Manchester International Festival, Manchester, UK, 2009.
In July our daughter Jac and her friend Zoe Farndon are going to see the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright's new opera Prima Donna.
I don't know how Zoe is with languages; Jac is fluent in German and can manage a smattering of Italian: the opera is in French.
Doesn't matter.
Hell, I speak nothing but Isle of Wight English with a side-helping of Invective but that never stopped me enjoying opera in Italian.
Che Gelida Manina is melodic in a way that Your Tiny Hand is Frozen just ain't.
I hope Prima Donna will be a magical first for Rufus and a total treat for all those faithful fans who make it to Manchester.
That particularly goes for Jackie and Zoe.
Enjoy every minute my dears.
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