Pingu

Concerned that at times this blog risks being too serious, this time I’m going to look at something more light-hearted. Children’s television has continued to provide me with almost infinite pleasure long since I put away other childish things. I grew up on Postman Pat and Charlie Chalk and Bertha and Fireman Sam (in the days when it was made with care and charm and stop-motion, and not the cheap-looking computer-animated travesty it has become – but that’s a rant for another day). At school we watched BBC programmes like Music Time with Jonathan Cohen and Helen Speirs and Look and Read with its serialised stories like Badger Girl, Geordie Racer and Through the Dragon’s Eye, now the cult classic it always deserved to be. When I got home there were programmes of the quality of the peerless Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, Simon and the Witch with the wonderful Elizabeth Spriggs and Joan Sims, or the unfairly maligned ChuckleVision, which in its glory days was not unworthy of comparison with Laurel and Hardy, I maintain, though it has gradually tailed off over the last fifteen years.

There was also Playdays (formerly Playbus), in the era when Friday meant the Tent Stop, where one could see such luminaries as occasional chatline publicist Ricky Diamond and polymath Trish Cooke demeaning themselves in the name of entertainment. I have not forgotten the frisson of excitement that ran through my Year 8 class when several of us recognised the Roundabout Stop’s Mr Jolly in a touring production of Macbeth that came to our school, though my friend Josh was more worked up about the prospect of Lady Macbeth taking her top off when she reached the line “Come to my woman’s breasts”. I reassured him this was not likely, as later proved to be the case. I’m not sure where the idea came from – perhaps the Polanski film, which had somehow been sanctioned for use in English lessons, Keith Chegwin, nude sleepwalking and all.

I could write reams and reams about these gems, and about the older series I came to know from videos – Captain Pugwash, for instance, or Noggin the Nog – and perhaps I will expatiate upon these weighty balls, if I may invoke Brian Stimpson for a historic moment, at a later date, but for the moment I will dwell on a programme from rather later in my childhood. A benefit of having brothers four and eight years younger than myself was that I had the excuse to keep watching television intended for pre-school children far beyond the age at which it was socially acceptable, with my relative maturity allowing me to bypass most of the dross rather than feasting on it unquestioningly as I would have in my infancy. So I shunned Teletubbies but revelled in the joys of Storytime, far superior in 1994 to what it had been in the late ’80s, featuring the unlikely but irresistible pairing of John Ringham as bumbling eccentric Mr Banglebede and Siân Reeves as his indefatigably chirpy sidekick Jess.

But I meant to write about Pingu, of which my brother Tom was a devotee when he was about two or three. The BBC brought out several videos, which we owned. One was called “Pingu the Chef”, which Tom would pronounce “Pingu Shay”. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now it seems obvious that he was intentionally using the French pronunciation of the word as it is in the context of compound nouns like ‘chef-d’oeuvre’. It’s the least one would expect from a child so precocious that one of his first words was ‘boobies’, though I must take some credit for that myself. I’ve been revisiting some of the early ones recently, and am delighted to find their appeal enhanced by the years rather than dimmed.

Permit me to be facetious for a paragraph. It must be a difficult thing to produce a programme ostensibly for children which is nevertheless equally appealing to adults. Many programmes achieve this feat through oblique sexual innuendo. Take Mr Jolly’s repeated singalong invitations to “Roll up and ride on Rosie” (Rosie being the roundabout). The Postman Pat theme casts Pat subversively in the comic stereotype of a randy milkman, servicing the housewives of Greendale. “Maybe, you can never be sure, there’ll be knock, ring, letters through your door” (dirty chuckle). The symbolism of his bright red van is so blatant that it’s a wonder the censors didn’t intervene. The stories about Captain Pugwash featuring characters called Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabin Boy are apocryphal, though Pugwash’s nasal twang makes his occasional ejaculations of “Really, Master Mate!” open to misinterpretation. A recent episode of ChuckleVision shows the depths to which the brothers have sunk. Running a B&B, they welcome a guest who wishes to take a telescope up to his room. “I’m an astronomer,” he explains, “I’m hoping to sneak a look at your anus later.” And the less said about Rainbow the better.

There is none of this filth in Pingu. It’s a simple story of Pingu, a penguin, living with his parents. In one of the early episodes a baby sister, Pinga, is born, and their play and bickering forms a major part of the programme. Its appeal lies partly in its design – claymation is always endearing because the care that has gone into it is visible on the screen – partly in its ingenious language-transcending soundtrack, and partly in the occasionally fraught but always loving relationship between Pingu and his friends and family. One of my favourite episodes shows what happens when Pingu and Pinga’s parents go out to a concert, leaving them alone for the evening. Children watching it love the havoc they create in their parents’ absence; adults find humour in the contrast between the chaos at home and the concert hall scenes where, during a sedate performance of the Unfinished Symphony, their mother, oblivious to the state of her igloo, produces an angelic portrait of Pingu and Pinga. It’s a delight. Great music too.

Hearing voices

One article from Susan Tomes’ excellent A Musician’s Alphabet in particular has continued to resonate with me since I read the book early in 2007. The article concerns background music – not the kind one hears in department stores or, reputedly, lifts (though I’ve never been in one where there is music playing – I probably use the wrong class of lift), but the kind that plays in one’s head, whether one is conscious of it or not. She writes:

Over the years, many people have asked me what piece of music it is that I’m playing on the table top with my fingers, or humming under my breath. Sometimes they’ve been surprised, perhaps offended, that I could be thinking of a piece of music while I’m supposed to be taking part in a conversation. And yet often when they ask me, I’m not even aware that I am following a piece in my head while also listening to them. It’s become an automatic process, like that of digestion – essential but unconscious.

Playing on the dining table is only the tip of the iceberg. Like most musicians, I have music playing in my head most of the time whether I like it or not.

This struck a chord. I have a vivid recollection of being gently reprimanded by a teacher for not paying attention during a history lesson. She had noticed my fingers drumming on the table. I would have been about 12 and was playing a Haydn sonata movement I had been preparing for Grade 5. I think my being suddenly made aware of it may have exorcised me of the habit, as it’s not something I tend to do any longer. I now usually wait for a real piano before trying something out.

Reading the bit about music playing in one’s head was an eye-opener, though. I was occasionally conscious before of hearing music where there was in fact none, but now I wonder just how often I imagine music without being aware of it. It doesn’t happen much at home, because I often have music or the TV on in the background, but at work where silence is the order of the day, and especially at times when there are menial or repetitive tasks to be performed, music comes and goes regularly.

Looking through a list of song manuscripts in the course of my work today, I found that the titles alone were enough to trigger particular settings in my head. Examples: “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” (Dring), “Drop, drop, slow tears” (Gibbons), “Lyonnesse” (Finzi), “O can ye sew cushions” (Britten), “Tell me where is fancy bred” (Poulenc). It doesn’t take much for my mind to go off at a tangent. Seeing one line of poetry will often keep a melody in my head for several hours.

In order to check how often I do imagine music, I have over the past few days set reminders to catch me unawares and interrogate me about what my mind is up to. It’s not a remotely scientific test, not least because a) I’m doing it myself and b) I know I’m doing it, and so my findings are quite likely to betray some kind of observer/subject-expectancy effect. Nevertheless the results are as follows:

Tuesday
12.00pm Schütz – Christum wir sollen loben schon
3.00pm Finzi – “Ditty” from A Young Man’s Exhortation
4.50pm Weill – “Die Ballade von der sexuellen Hörigkeit” from Die Dreigroschenoper
Wednesday
9.45am Britten – “The brisk young widow”
11.55am something, I think, but difficult to determine
1.55pm imagined 4-bar melody that often comes into my head when at work
4.15pm Schütz – Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzugleich
Thursday
9.50am Scriabin – Piano sonata no. 5
11.55am Schütz – Lobt Gott, ihr Christen allzugleich (again)

The Britten and Scriabin are easily explained – they were the last pieces of (actual, audible) music I had heard at the time. The Finzi is explained by my having happened upon its text, a poem by Hardy, shortly before. But why such a disproportionate amount of Schütz? It’s a bit of a puzzle, but my thinking, usually patchy at best, goes along the following lines: chorales are catchy because they are simple and strophic, and strophic melodies can be repeated ad infinitum without a great deal of thought. The ideal kind of thing to sing or hum to oneself when the mind is semi-engaged. Then there’s that 4-bar melody. Perhaps in order to demonstrate it is not entirely devoid of originality, my mind sometimes produces music of its own, which I write down if I think it’s any good. On trying it out later I invariably find it sounds better in my imagination. To explain the Weill I’d have to follow my train of thought back a very long way. Perhaps I was thinking about bondage.

A raft of questions present themselves. Do I hear in harmony? Yes, always, unless the music is monophonic to start with. Sometimes I imagine performing the music, but usually on the piano. If it’s a song, then singing. I think of music pianistically in general, and in my imagination, unlike in real life, I possess the ability to play things like Scriabin’s 5th sonata or the Vingt regards. Do I hear complete pieces? Not usually, just repeated phrases or motives. I know I made it all the way through the Weill in my head, but I can do that because I know it well enough, words included. I couldn’t do that with the Scriabin. I hear the words of songs if I know them, otherwise I tend to go, “There is a lady sweet and kind / mm mm mm mm mm mm mm mm.”

I’m sure an enormous amount has been written on this subject already, and that there is much still to be written, so excuse my uninformed ramblings. It’s fascinating to someone like me who hasn’t really thought about such things before.

Enjoy/London Assurance

Not exactly what you’d call a regular theatregoer, I have nevertheless been to two plays in the last week or so. Firstly, Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at Bath’s Theatre Royal, which is touring around the country following its triumphant West End run. It was a surprise flop on its premiere in 1980, and it’s not one of Bennett’s greatest plays – too busy, I think, in terms of the points it makes, not quite sure enough of its intentions, and as a result unsatisfying in some respects – some of the same problems that bedevil his recent hit The Habit of Art, though the two plays have little else in common. It’s still riotously funny in places. Alison Steadman is a revelation, and the scene where Carol Macready appears to fellate the unconscious and possibly deceased David Troughton unsurprisingly brought the house down. Ah, that sort of play, you are thinking. Yes, it is cheeky in some respects, though as so often with this writer pathos is never far around the corner. The heart of the play for me lies in Richard Glaves’s transvestite son, infiltrating his parents’ house after many years of estrangement in the persona of a council-sanctioned snooper. For any faults it may possess, it’s an undeniably intriguing work and one likely to repay time spent in its company. I think a perusal of the script may be a good idea.

On Saturday I paid a visit to the National Theatre for Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance, in a tremendous new production directed by Nicholas Hytner. I really haven’t enough superlatives to lavish upon it, so forgive me if I go overboard in my customary manner. Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt Courtly is nominally the star. His performance is a thing of utmost wonder. One reviewer has described it as a cross between Lord Byron and Mr Toad; another suggests he is channelling Bella Emberg. As I beheld his first entrance I thought of Al Lewis and the stupid actors from Blackadder. From the moment he takes the stage, bewigged, perfumed, imperious and resplendent in an extravagant dressing gown, his every movement commands the attention. In the scene where he woos Fiona Shaw’s Lady Gay Spanker, rutting in one sense if not yet another, he appears a ball of animal sexual fury. It fair takes the breath away. The play’s poster shows him in modern dress, but this production photo by Catherine Ashmore gives a more accurate impression of his appearance.

Until now the most celebrated modern production of the play in England was one in the early 1970s featuring the divine Elizabeth Spriggs as Lady Gay – a performance I would love to have seen – and Donald Sinden as Sir Harcourt, who I imagine must have relished getting his teeth into this part, venerable old ham that he is, though even his performance cannot possibly have been as camp as Beale’s. Sinden came to mind as I watched the play. I remember reading an article written many years ago by Stephen Fry which touched on Sinden’s performance in Never the Twain, criticising among other things his grotesque gurning and mugging, perhaps in order to demonstrate the point, often borne out, that it is easier for comic actors (or comedians) to turn their hand to straight acting than it is for straight actors to take comic roles. Sinden’s a strange example to use, being an actor who has always acted light comic parts, but it does point up the fact that a good or even a great actor does not necessarily a good sitcom actor make. Situation comedies must be very difficult to get right. Beale’s performance in this play is delightfully broad, and I’ve never been so entertained in the theatre, but what is right for a live audience of 1,000 may fall flat on the small screen. I suppose it comes down to different styles of comedy and of acting.

I’ve dwelled so much on the various marvellousnesses of Simon Russell Beale that it may give a skewed impression of the other actors not being up to the job. That’s not the case at all. Fiona Shaw is superb as the hippophilic Lady Gay. She gives the impression not so much that she loves horses as that she is a horse. The image of her spread across the sofa stamping her hoof will stay with me. The two young leads, Paul Ready and Michelle Terry, are both enormously likeable, which is the main thing in roles of that kind. Mark Addy as Max Harkaway displays a range and a composure hitherto unknown to me. I can confidently state that the part of Cool, the supercilious Courtly valet, has never been embodied better than by Nick Sampson in this production. It is only perhaps the irritating characters of wideboy Dazzle and lawyer Meddle that disappoint.

This is before one even gets to Richard Briers as the cuckolded Dolly Spanker. He is an absolute joy to behold, gently juddering whenever sexual matters are obliquely alluded to, roving in his nightgown, shooting at the light fittings with a blunderbuss and so on. This is why one really ought to see the production twice. I was occasionally conscious, at points where other characters were talking, of Briers, seated at the side of the stage, doing things that were making other members of the audience double up. The problem is that one’s eyes can’t focus on two things at once, unless one is Marty Feldman.

Boucicault’s play doesn’t have the reputation of greatness that the best works of, say, Oscar Wilde do. That this production is such a success is partly down to the fact that it’s not echt Boucicault. Richard Bean has made textual amendments, i.e. put in more jokes, which are cheering. Courtly’s line “She lived fourteen months with me, and then eloped with an intimate friend” becomes “She lived fourteen months with me, and then eloped with my best friend – and I miss him.” Not an original joke, but the audience collapsed with laughter. The new lines are integrated quite seamlessly, with the exception of an anachronistic reference to debt consolidation that didn’t get quite the laugh it wanted. The thorny issue of the minor character of a usurer called Solomon Isaacs is resolved inspiredly through the casting of a Japanese actor in the part. It doesn’t make the scene he is involved in particularly funny, but it does defuse any tension that might have arisen otherwise.

As I walked over Hungerford Bridge on my way home, I was momentarily stopped in my tracks by a man attempting unsuccessfully to take a photo of a family group against the backdrop of the Thames at night. These camera malfunctions prompted his wife to call across the bridge: “It’s like when you push my button, love – it don’t happen!”