What are your feelings about boxing? Most of the time I try not to think about it, and that’s because when I do think about it my mind is totally boggled by the fact that we live in a world where people continue to practise a sport whose sole aim (unless I’ve misunderstood) is to knock your opponent unconscious. Isn’t it barbaric? Am I wrong? Of course boxing can be dramatic, and if you don’t see the genius of something like Raging Bull then I can’t help you, but my view is broadly that of Mr Bonaparte: ‘Whatta the difference who’s-a win? Is terrible to see!’
Mr Bonaparte’s son Joe is the Golden Boy of Clifford Odets’ 1937 play, which is a rather old-fashioned, solid, enjoyable piece of work all round. It opens in the office of down-on-his-luck boxing manager Tom Moody. One of his small stable of prize-fighters has broken his hand, and the boy who brings him the news has a suggestion: can’t he take part in tonight’s big fight instead? ‘There are forty-three thousand minutes in a month,’ observes Joe poetically (he’s read the Encyclopædia Britannica from cover to cover, which explains how he knows this); ‘can’t you give me five?’ But Moody’s not in the mood:
Looka, you idiot, did you ever hear of Phil Mateo? … The Chocolate Drop marked him lousy in twelve minutes and ten seconds. Was Kid Peters within your ken? And did you ever hear of Eddie Newton? The Chocolate gave him the blues in two rounds. And Frisco Samuels and Mike Mason …
Ah, the romance of those old-style boxing names. Four pages in you’re already picturing the way this will play out, and yes, a lot of nails are hit on the head: a rapid rise to success, a bunch of people (savoury and unsavoury) wanting a piece of Joe, Joe getting too big for his boots, a modicum of romantic intrigue. The twist you fail to anticipate is that Joe is a musical prodigy, torn between the boxing ring and the recital room, and he can’t make up his mind whether (in Moody’s words) ‘the fist is mightier than the fiddle’. Violence on the one hand, violins in the other.
With music I’m never alone when I’m alone … When I play music nothing is closed to me. I’m not afraid of people and what they say. There’s no war in music. It’s not like the streets …
This is Joe talking to Lorna. On the first page she’s introduced as ‘Moody’s girl’, but in fact she might be a better fit for Joe. It’s not every day you meet a girl who talks like she’s in West Side Story, same as you.
Somewhere there must be happy boys and girls who can teach us the way of life! We’ll find some city where poverty’s no shame — where music is no crime! — where there’s no war in the streets — where a man is glad to be himself, to live and make his woman herself!
Great, daddy-o. What Joe needs is someone to tell him to play it cool. No such luck.
In 1939 a film adaptation of the play was made. It’s on YouTube and well worth your time: Joe is played by William Holden (which accounts for why his cock-eyedness is transformed into what the newspapers call ‘GORGEOUS curly hair’), Lorna by Barbara Stanwyck (who can’t really make Lorna a more coherent character than she is in the play, but what more can one ask of any woman than that she be Barbara Stanwyck?), and Mr Bonaparte is played by a mid-thirties Lee J. Cobb in old-man mode. Cobb had played a smaller role in the original Group Theatre production of the play, which also featured the likes of Frances Farmer, Elia Kazan, Martin Ritt and Karl Malden. I’d like to have seen it.
One thing the film has over the play is that it features some actual boxing and fiddling, with Holden doing some pretty good miming in the latter, his repertoire consisting largely of the Méditation from Thaïs and Brahms’ Wiegenlied with a bit of Bach and Chopin thrown in. I think the play is the superior piece, though. Odets must have been furious with the 180-degree change to his ending, and the excision of the play’s staginess means the corresponding loss of some of its edge and immediacy. Here’s the punchy final exchange of the opening scene:
JOE Don’t worry, Tom.
MOODY Call me Tom again and I’ll break your neck!!
World events have really settled down this year, haven’t they. The comfort of knowing that things are going so well for everyone else has made it that much easier for me to concentrate on myself and my own pleasure for a change. These are some of the things I’ve enjoyed.
Top 3 theatre
It’s been a good year for Brian Friel. Sadly I didn’t get to Faith Healer in Cambridge as it coincided with a bout of Covid, but the Combined Actors of Cambridge production of Translations at the ADC was invigorating, exposing lots of the complexity of this multi-layered, multi-faceted masterpiece; Dancing at Lughnasa was the best thing I saw at the National Theatre this year, a warm, funny and melancholic production with lovely performances from the likes of Siobhán McSweeney, Louisa Harland and Ardal O’Hanlon. I caught an early preview of Pygmalion at the Old Vic in September. It’s a production that drew some mixed reviews, and I didn’t warm entirely to Bertie Carvel’s cartoonish Higgins, but I thought some of the supporting performances were knockout, particularly those of John Marquez (Doolittle), Sylvestra Le Touzel (Mrs H), Lizzy Connolly (Clara) and Taheen Modak (Freddy). Anyone who didn’t fall in love with Patsy Ferran’s gamine Eliza wouldn’t be human. What a malleable, indestructible play.
Top 3 student theatre
Glad to report the Marlowe Society is going strong – their BME Twelfth Night in February was a success, highlights including the performances of Yasmin Jafri (Viola), Andre Ediagbonya (Orsino) and India Thornhill (Maria). I found Kae Deller’s Aguecheek, played with sticky-out T-Rex arms, very endearing. Better still was the Marlowe’s Derek Bond-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play I’ve (somewhat embarrassingly) failed to connect with – until now. I had a smile on my face from start to finish. There was a great physical beauty to the production, the play of light, the red, blue and green, the smoke, but the performances were what made it sublime. Temitope Idowu and Naphysa Awuah made a beautiful double act as Oberon and Puck, while Kitty Ford’s versatile Bottom gave me much pleasure. I suspect we’ll be hearing more of Ford, and of Ella Scott, another natural comic. I loved the lovers, always a blind spot for me before. It was genuinely magical. The best modern play I saw at the ADC was Paula Vogel’s Indecent, about the history of Sholem Asch’s play The God of Vengeance. Dominika Wiatrowska and Francesca Lees in particular made an impression on me, and there were times when I was quite choked up.
Top 3 opera
Actually I only seem to have gone to three operas this year, but they were all excellent. Two Christmas treats: The Turn of the Screw at the Ustinov Studio, Bath, a claustrophobic production in rather too small a performance space, even with reduced instrumentation, but featuring some spectacular singing and acting, especially from Anna Cavaliero, Britten’s Governess to the letter, and from Oliver Michael and Maia Greaves as Miles and Flora; and then Hansel and Gretel at Covent Garden, whose orchestra had the full measure of the rich fruitcakiness of Humperdinck’s score. The liberation of the gingerbread children can’t fail to move. Best of all, in September, was Les Troyens at the Proms, a work I love more each time I hear it. I loved Alice Coote, Paula Murrihy, Beth Taylor, Laurence Kilsby, etc. etc., but the real star may have been the Monteverdi Choir. The martyrdom of the Trojan women at the end of Act 2 gave me a physical thrill. They were very near, I could have reached out and prevented a death.
Top 3 musicals
I saw the best production of Sunday in the Park with George at the ADC in February. Good old CUMTS: if students know and love a piece enough, they invariably do it proud, and that was the case here, with Eoin McCaul and Annie Stedman shining as George and Dot. More Sondheim in December, with a beautifully mounted production of Pacific Overtures at the Menier, the staging full of imagination and cleanness. I especially loved Jon Chew’s reciter and Saori Oda and Masashi Fujimoto in multiple roles. Exceptional in lots of ways, and perhaps all the more special for being so rarely seen. A shame to lose ‘Chrysanthemum Tea’. I could have named more Sondheim, but I suppose my third choice has to be Oklahoma! – the production I missed at the Young Vic last year. I think it probably worked better at the Young Vic, could feel the West End audience bristling at some of the innovations, but I thought the dream ballet was sensational, and the nasty final flourishes too. The small band, leaning into the score’s country elements, was excellent; still, I hope next time I see it there will be a full orchestra. But what a masterpiece.
Top 3 live music
Seeing Suede at Cambridge Corn Exchange was more of a thrill than I’d ever have expected. Part of it was that I kind of missed Suede first time around, was just a bit too young for their first two albums, so I did some revision in the months before and found myself falling in love with them. Eels, on the other hand, I’ve seen more times than I can remember, and were on their usual good form at the Bath Forum. They did ‘Jeannie’s Diary’, swoon. Great support at both gigs, from Desperate Journalist and The Inspector Cluzo respectively. Best classical gig was Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra doing Mahler 9 at the Proms, which was a transcendent occasion, one of those concerts I’ll remember for a long time. Mentions also to Jordi Savall, Dimitri Psonis and Hakan Güngör doing an East-meets-West gig in Cambridge, and to Benjamin Grosvenor at the Wigmore, whose finale of the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata might be the most exciting, incandescent piano playing I’ve ever seen live.
Top 3 albums
I’m still on a John Wilson kick. If nothing has come along to match last year’s Hollywood Soundstage album, I’ve been loving his first two albums of the orchestral music of Eric Coates with the BBC Philharmonic. I’ve also discovered Dutton’s reissues of various 1970s-era ballet recordings by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and have had the one featuring Falla’s El sombrero de tres picos and Dukas’ La Péri (two of my favourite ballets) on repeat. The most felicitous discovery of the year was Peter Fink’s 1973 album of Production Music on YouTube. Its funky instrumentals were used as filler music on a cassette of Pamela Oldfield fairy tales read by Penelope Keith that I cherished in infancy. It’s wonderful to hear them unexpurgated, with some added extras. Go on, give it a spin and have a little dance.
Top 3 comedy
I really missed Edinburgh this year, and will make an effort to get back there in 2024. The nice thing about living in Cambridge is that sometimes Edinburgh comes to you, which means I’ll be able to see Paul Foot’s show next year. I caught up with Ivo Graham’s My Future My Clutter at the Junction in March. His preference for the past over the present or future struck a chord with me: ‘You can’t change it, but boy you can think about it.’ I saw Peter Fleming Meets Doctor Who! twice, once in Frome, once in Bath, and the second time it seemed probably the best show yet from a performer who just keeps getting better. (I have to say that, but it happens to be true.) And Brian Butterfield’s Placeholder Name Tour at EartH in Hackney is simply one of the funniest things I’ve ever witnessed. The audacious second act opening justified admission on its own. I’ll be seeing him again next year.
Top 3 books
I’ve had another good reading year, and it’s hard to get it down to three. A more complete assessment will follow shortly, but I was stunned by all of the following: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, exhilarating and tragic, and exhilarating because tragic, and tragically awful and awfully sad and awfully funny. I just reread this paragraph and began laughing all over again.
The audience, arriving in a long clean serpent of cars the following night, were very serious too. Like the Players, they were mostly on the young side of middle age, and they were attractively dressed in what the New York clothing stores describe as Country Casuals. Anyone could see they were a better than average crowd, in terms of education and employment and good health, and it was clear too that they considered this a significant evening. They all knew, of course, and said so again and again as they filed inside and took their seats, that The Petrified Forest was hardly one of the world’s great plays. But it was, after all, a fine theater piece with a basic point of view that was every bit as valid today as in the thirties (“Even more valid,” one man kept telling his wife, who chewed her lips and nodded, seeing what he meant; “even more valid, when you think about it”).
Even more valid, when you think about it! Well, Revolutionary Road will always be valid because of its quality, and so will The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym – one of her later novels, which perhaps I love more than the early ones; at one point I thought of Frasier, which also features insufferable protagonists who become more sympathetic because of their being gently ridiculed – and O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker, which might seem like a hybrid of Gormenghast and I Capture the Castle if it weren’t so distinctively its own thing. Stained glass and birds and bath crystals and love-is-strong-as-death.
Just missing out: Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, especially the second book, A Man in Love; A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris; Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar; The House in Norham Gardens by Penelope Lively; The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope.
Top 3 new films
The first time I went to see Todd Field’s Tár I had several reservations; a second viewing showed the film in a new light, my view of the ending transformed, a quiet triumph rather than a quiet tragedy. I love a good film about power dynamics, and this is certainly that. I think the quirkiness of Babak Jalali’s Fremont, with Anaita Wali Zada as an Afghan refugee working in a California fortune cookie factory, probably put some viewers off; not this one. I loved her scenes with deadpan shrink Gregg Turkington and found it ultimately a kind and hopeful film. And everything looks sexier in black and white. Best of all was Celine Song’s Past Lives. If you’re a romantic, which I suppose I am, it’s hard not to be moved by the idea of special connections between people existing outside of time and place. It’s a gorgeous piece of work.
Top 3 old films
Claudia Weill’s low-key comic drama Girlfriends is an easy film to love with a lovely central performance from Melanie Mayron. It’s witty and playful, and the Criterion Blu-ray has some excellent extras. Another film with a warm Jewish milieu is Woody Allen’s Radio Days, the most adorable of his films I’ve seen. It made me feel nostalgia for something I’d never experienced first-hand, and I love the way its sentimentality is tempered with occasional spikiness. And I finally got around to watching The Long Good Friday, which is just up my street. I don’t know why I like gangsters when their lives are falling apart, I just do. This one has the coolness of my beloved Get Carter, but it’s probably funnier and knows it. I also have a bit of a crush on Paul Freeman.
Top 3 TV
It’s been a vintage year for Taskmaster. This blog is proof that I’ve loved Mae Martin and Lucy Beaumont for years, but weren’t Jenny Eclair and Julian Clary and Sam Campbell (to name but three) sensational and lovable too? Let’s hope for more where that came from. For the first time since (by my reckoning) September 1988, when it caused my five-year-old self some slight but lasting trauma, I watched the 1984 Smallfilms adaptation of Rumer Godden’s Tottie: The Story of a Dolls’ House. What a miracle of a series, so absolutely modest in some ways, told entirely through still photos and minimal stop-motion animation, yet spellbinding, partly because of its simplicity. David Heneker’s music-box score is perfect. And BBC Four has been a feast of old TV this year. I’ve loved repeats of Andrew Davies’ adaptation of The Old Devils and mid-’90s Top of the Pops, but if I have to pick a single highlight, let’s say The Shock of the New. I’ve got a new pin-up and his name is Robert Hughes.
(Also, perpetual favourites The Great British Pottery Throw Down (though throwdown should be a single word) and Junior Bake Off (though bake-off should be hyphenated).)
What next?
Yuja, Hough, Lisiecki, Blechacz – the piano auspices are good. I’ve got some comedy gigs lined up that are unlikely to disappoint. See you back here in 366, dudes.
At the age of nine I started a new school (the custom in my part of North-East Somerset), and new schools mean new libraries, and new libraries mean I start reading Noel Streatfeild.
I knew of Streatfeild already from the shelves of books from my mother’s childhood at home, but at nine even I wasn’t effete enough to want to read Ballet Shoes. (That came later.) Still, something about her evocative name (the first syllable mispronounced in my head as Street, not Stret, until I learned better some years later) attracted me to the books in my classroom.
My first Streatfeild was either The Circus Is Coming or The Growing Summer, I don’t now recall. It was The Growing Summer that quickly became one of my favourite books. I graduated to others, but I can’t now remember which I read, or what they were about. A Vicarage Family, Caldicott Place … 1962’s Apple Bough might almost have been one of them, but I would certainly have remembered it if so, as it might have been written for me.
A tiny part of the appeal of The Growing Summer was that it centred around four children with the bizarre surname of Gareth, which made it special to me. Apple Bough is about four children with the no less bizarre surname of Forum. Was Streatfeild unaware that most people in the world don’t have stupid names? Very possibly: the dedicatee of Apple Bough is ‘my American god-daughter Priscilla McOstrich’.
The Forum children are Myra (9, named after Dame Myra Hess), Sebastian (8, Bach), Wolfgang (7, Mozart) and Ethel (5, Smyth), their parents piano accompanist David and scatty artist Polly. Although named after musicians of note, the only Forum who has talent in that direction is violin prodigy Sebastian. When a performance of ‘Gipsy Airs’ (presumably Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, not desperately likely repertoire for an 8-year-old but we’ll let that pass) creates a sensation, a whirlwind of international touring beckons, so the Fora enlist the services of eternally capable governess Miss Popple, put their beloved home of Apple Bough on the market, and take to the skies.
Isn’t Streatfeild good at creating dreams for imaginative children? As a young reader I’d have lapped up this fairytale of a childhood devoted to making music, just as wannabe ballerinas did Ballet Shoes. There’s a good sprinkling of real life to make it seem plausible: one sticking point for Sebastian (and later Ethel) is that British law dictates you can’t earn a living from performing until you’re twelve. What do you do if you’re a kid who has to perform? Go abroad.
It’s not all about Sebastian. As with The Growing Summer, each of the four children has their own distinctive personality, and every reader will have at least one child they particularly identify with (the Little Women effect). While Sebastian is touring, Wolfgang (Wolfie, Wolf) realises his great dream is to write pop songs, to the horror of his music-snob father (‘[If] it happens,’ he tells David, ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to be brave about it’), and also lands some acting work; Ethel (Ettie) is desperate to dance, which leads to a meeting with Madame Fidolia of Ballet Shoes; oldest child Myra doesn’t know what she’s going to be, doesn’t perceive in herself any special talent, which makes her the beating heart of the book. ‘You have a trouble which is unique in your family,’ says her perceptive grandfather. ‘You underestimate yourself.’
Perhaps you’ve read Saplings, Streatfeild’s brilliant novel for adults, now published by Persephone. It’s also about a family of four children, in this case a family splintered by the Second World War. Elements of Apple Bough are like Saplings in negative. In Saplings, the fracture of the family is catastrophic; in Apple Bough, some form of fracture seems almost desirable. Polly is determined at all costs to keep the family together, but years of following in Sebastian’s wake, comparatively neglected, leave his siblings resentful and unsettled, the unit unable to prosper while its individual members are pulling in different directions. (Sebastian needs help too.) What the children require is some kind of benign emancipation from their well-meaning but oblivious parents. Thank goodness for understanding grandparents and secret ploys, that’s all I can say.
If it seems unusual to name a book after a house that’s hardly ever glimpsed, it seems less so as you come to realise how closely the children’s dreams of stability are bound with the memory of their old house. Apple Bough is not just their home, it’s an emblem of home.
‘The nicest thing I know,’ [Wolfgang] said once, ‘is eating tea at the same time at the same table knowing it’ll go on being at the same time at the same table for weeks and weeks.’
I won’t say how things turn out, but you can probably guess.
It’s funny how these books, so dated in some ways, have remained timeless. The centenary of Ballet Shoes approaches, and yet I’m sure it must still be loved by each new generation of readers. I was happy reading Streatfeild’s 1960s books at thirty years’ remove, and I hope they still come to life in the minds of children today. One thing in Apple Bough that might be slightly passé to the modern reader is a Cockney husband and wife who risk straying into caricature territory, but actually their liveliness is a great asset.
‘Mrs Bottle – Mr Bottle – I’m going on telly.’
Of course the Bottles were as thrilled as Wolfgang.
‘That’s ever so nice, dear,’ Mrs Bottle said. ‘And just the right place for you, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Mr Bottle dug Wolfgang in the chest with one finger.
‘And while you’re there you might ‘ave a word with any ‘igh-ups you meet to tell ’em we don’t want no more talks nor brains’ trusts.’
2022, we hardly knew ye. Don’t know what I mean by that. Anyway, let’s get this done.
Top 3 theatre It’s not been what I’d call a vintage year for student theatre in Cambridge, not that I’ve gone to a huge amount of it. I loathed one production so intensely that I left at the interval, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. But the Marlowe Society’s BME Much Ado about Nothing in March had a lot to recommend it: colour, pace, and some beautiful speaking from among others Naphysa Awuah (Beatrice), Louella Lucas (Hero), Joy Adeogun (Don Pedro), and particularly Marie-Ange Camara (Leonato). Company in June was very good, with a large and polished band playing the original Jonathan Tunick orchestrations (even ‘Tick Tock’, too often omitted). Maddie Smith, veteran of a few ADC musicals, stole the show as Amy, and I lament that her Cambridge theatre career was so Covid-affected. I’d have liked to see her in other things. Ashley Cooper’s Joanne and Emilia Grace’s Marta were also excellent, especially vocally. Best of all was Our Generation (NT Dorfman), Alecky Blythe’s sprawling verbatim play about a bunch of diverse teenagers. Puppy-doggish Conor Gormally as Belfast Thatcherite Callum, sweet Joe Bolland as public schoolboy Lucas, Rachelle Diedericks (also a fine Mary Warren in The Crucible later in the year) as studious Ierum … but it’s invidious to single out individuals from an impeccable ensemble cast. It was just lovely to watch young people being brilliant. Here’s to more of that in 2023.
Top 3 new films On the subject of young people being brilliant… Try Harder! is everything you’d want from a documentary, a portrait of five San Francisco high school pupils applying to college, initially unassuming, presently gripping. By the end I was punching the air. And if you’re in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer! Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II is one of the best films about filmmaking I’ve seen, and will surely grow in impressiveness with future viewings. Best till last: Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun, with Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio giving stunning performances as a young father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey in the late 1990s. A true cinematic love story. I see I’ve chosen three female-directed films in a year whose Sight and Sound poll saw a sea change in terms of diversity. When I next revise my own top films list, I’ll be surprised if Aftersun isn’t on it.
Top 3 old films My knowledge of Italian Neorealism is sketchy, I watch a new one every few years and then forget about it, but Fellini’s I Vitelloni, a story of five friends and their preoccupations, is one I may remember, really beautiful and beautifully real. Elsewhere in the world, Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, consisting of Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and Through the Olive Trees, and becoming more self-referential and kaleidoscopic with each film, was a delight, full of the quietly pulsating human feeling that, who knows why, seems so often to be the natural province of Iranian filmmakers. The film that made the greatest impression on me all year was perhaps Streetwise, Martin Bell’s 1984 documentary about street kids in Seattle. As with Try Harder! you find yourself caring very deeply about its subjects, falling in love almost. Parts of it are unbearably, overwhelmingly sad. It’s a hard world for little things, but attention must be paid.
Top 3 live music Anyone who saw or (raises hand) was in the 2004 student production of Britten’s Peter Grimes in St Giles’s Church, Cambridge, starring tiny Allan Clayton as Grimes, will have had no doubt that he’d sing the role at the Royal Opera House eventually. This March he finally did, and I went twice. He’s the embodiment of Grimes, of course, but Bryn Terfel made Balstrode coherent in a way I hadn’t seen before, and Jacques Imbrailo and Catherine Wyn-Rogers among others were class. The aerialist too was a lovely touch. It was great to see Simon Rattle and the LSO doing Weill at the Barbican in April. My beloved Sieben Todsünden with Magdalena Kožená was beautifully done, but so were the smaller items. Andrew Staples singing ‘Lonely House’, just sumptuous. And I was moved to see the Emerson Quartet make a belated Cambridge debut on their farewell tour, playing Beethoven and Shostakovich. They played as a single organism, it felt superhuman. Honourable mentions: Imogen Cooper, Artur Pizarro playing Albéniz’s Iberia, Stephen Hough, Salome (ROH), and a super Dizzy Gillespie gig earlier this month at the Marylebone Theatre by a NYJO sextet led by Mark Armstrong.
Top 3 books Sometimes I struggle to find three titles worthy of inclusion here; this year it’s been a struggle to get it down to three. So, to pick three titles arbitrarily from a longlist of about twenty: Evan S. Connell’s novel of early 20th-century housewifery Mrs Bridge, which should be much more widely known in the UK (its sequel Mr Bridge is scarcely less good); Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy A Scots Quair, set at the same time as Mrs Bridge but a world away, though it’s also full of life and pity; and My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, which I enjoyed so much that I read it again a few months later, a recovery rate unprecedented in my adult life. Honourable mentions to Some Tame Gazelle and Jane and Prudence (Barbara Pym), The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead), Earthlings (Sayaka Murata), Tampa (Alissa Nutting), Columbine (Dave Cullen), Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry), The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case (David James Smith), The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen), Election (Tom Perrotta), Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (Russ Rymer), Riceyman Steps (Arnold Bennett), A God and His Gifts (Ivy Compton-Burnett), Mr. Ives’ Christmas (Oscar Hijuelos), and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, all of which I loved. More on all this presently.
Top 3 comedy It was great to see Tim Key live for the first time in a few years, with his show Mulberry at the Soho Theatre. No one else has his dangerous magnetism. Peter Fleming’s Woefully Inaccurate History of the BBC at the Museum of Comedy was a characteristically funny and poignant tribute to the national broadcaster in her centenary year. A Christmas Carol-ish, also at Soho, was your standard Mr Swallow Christmas show, only with the added bonus of Sarah Hadland singing a manic song about her relationship with her turkey. A good way to end the year.
Top 3 sport My own Englishness is always a bit half-hearted, but even I was surprised by my underwhelmment at the Lionesses’ triumph in Euro 2022. I think it was because they’d been so impressive, both on and off the pitch, that I ended up feeling it couldn’t have mattered less whether they won the trophy or not. What they achieved was bigger than football, as future years will surely show. So to pick three other highlights: Bazball, Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix, and Chelsea Women winning a very hard-fought WSL on the last day of the season. I do love this Chelsea side. With the men’s team at its lowest ebb in years, the women are providing more than consolation. Not since the days of Ed de Goey have I loved a Chelsea keeper as much as I do Ann-Katrin Berger. Jess Carter, Jessie Fleming, Erin Cuthbert, Pernille Harder, these are my sporting heroes now. And I’ll never get tired of watching Sam Kerr’s second in the final match, controlling the ball on her chest and lobbing Mary Earps (at 2:13 here).
Top 3 TV I watched all of The Yogi Bear Show. The cartoons I most loved in childhood, until The Simpsons came along, were the Pink Panther ones, but revisiting Yogi Bear as an adult has been a great pleasure. Yogi, Boo-Boo and Ranger Smith are all lovable characters, and pleasingly animated. As for Snagglepuss, he’s the apotheosis of style over substance. The cartoons themselves are pretty drab, but Snagglepuss himself is adorable. A-window-able, even! Heavens to Murgatroyd. Frankly the best thing I saw on telly all year, better even than Tom Stevenson winning Countdown and Paul Hollywood entering the Junior Bake Off tent as an emergency judge and causing a bunch of children to shit themselves spontaneously, was Liza Tarbuck’s magnificent goatee on Taskmaster Champion of Champions 2. A legend in her own lifetime. But the one thing that has given me the most sustained joy is Howard and Hilda’s simpering on repeats of Ever Decreasing Circles. A still underrated sitcom that will one day be acknowledged as one of the greats.
Top 3 albums An eclectic bunch, as usual. I’ve been cataloguing a lot of music in the second half of the year, and listening along with much of it (who knows Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods? delightful), and that’s how I came across the various iterations of Tōru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, included on this beautiful album. I’ve only known it for a couple of weeks, but John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London’s Hollywood Soundstage is an album as beautifully conceived as it is performed. Max Steiner’s Now, Voyager, Korngold’s Elizabeth and Essex, David Raksin’s Laura … a treasure trove. As last year, perhaps tragically, the one thing I’ve listened to most often is an EMI comedy compilation from the early 1990s, Comical Cuts 3. Even by the standards of their own days, Vic Oliver, Ronald Frankau, Arthur Marshall and Douglas Byng were probably never the height of hilarity, but there’s something deeply comforting about their cheeky songs and routines that I can’t quite explain. Marshall’s cod-Angela Brazil schoolmistress monologues contain some minor masterpieces. ‘Miss Baines had kept wicket for Lundy Island, but she could make nothing of Mary’s hot deliveries. The plucky little girl put all she knew into her lobs, and her balls were like greased lightning.’
I hope you’ve had a happy 2022, and have a happier 2023.
Somewhere Boy 