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Biba was the legendary fashion shop which started on a kitchen table, developed into a boutique, grew into a store and finally died.

The brand still exists in different contexts but nothing will match its heyday. The classic years must be 1965-69 when Biba on Kensington Church Street in West London was the mecca for with-it (as we said then) teens and twenties looking for cutting-edge fashion at a price nearly everyone could afford.

As Biba’s founder Barbara Hulanicki said, ‘The worst economic freeze does not touch the pockets of secretaries.’ Those were the days.
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Little did we think as we stuck posters to our bedroom, bedsit and halls of residence walls that we were initiating what would become a rite of passage and a marker of our progress through life. We thought our choice of poster said a little bit about ourselves and our similarity to or our differences from other tribes.

There wasn’t much choice, back in the day. Alberto Korda’s renowned photo of Che Guevara was a safe option, indicating right-on credentials.

Posters of Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with beard and moustache hovered on the borderline between being knowing and just following the herd. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers indicated a desire to be thought of as arty, while anything referencing Lord of the Rings screamed fey and fanciful and to be avoided.
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The contestants

Philomena is the hit film starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan about a woman’s search for her adopted son.

Once A Catholic is the hit play by Mary O’Malley, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1977 and currently enjoying a revival in London and Liverpool.

Villains in habits

Nuns are at the centre of both works. In Philomena, we have the nuns who ran baby-farms in Ireland, taking in pregnant young women and sending their babies to be adopted, often to America, often for money.
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John Braine’s novel, Room At The Top, published in 1957, contains many of the elements of a racy blockbuster. The tale of ambition and adultery, fuelled by issues of class, sex and money, follows the fortunes of 20-something Joe Lampton as he climbs his way up the ladder of social and economic success.

But this isn’t a story of glitz and glamour. The novel is set in England just after the the Second World War and Joe’s upward trajectory is not towards the golden pavements of London, or the dreaming spires of Oxford, or the glittering lights of Hollywood or Broadway.
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National Poetry Day this week saw the publication of an anthology of poems about trains, Train Songs, edited by Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson. The poems cover a wide field, representing American Blues and the troop trains of two world wars among childhood favourites such as Auden’s Night Train.

The descriptions of the anthology refer to the celebration of carriages, platforms, waiting rooms, and ‘the poetry of departures and brief encounters’. I have explored these ideas in previous posts (search for Railway Romantics in the search box at the top of this page) and it’s great to see more about the impact of train travel on the national collective consciousness and imaginative sensibility.
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Autumn Term by Antonia Forest (published 1948)

Decades before the genre of Young Adult fiction was identified, Antonia Forest’s series of books about the Marlows, a family of six girls (one set of twins) and two boys, explores the world of young people with clarity and a sometimes shocking lack of sentimentality.

The characters’ intense inner lives are put under a microscope which reveals moral ambiguities, shifts and compromises, self-interest, conflicting loyalties, jealousies and tensions in a prose style which is lucid and entertaining.

Little wonder that critic Victor Watson said that Forest was Jane Austen for the young. She even uses Austen’s technique of free indirect speech, where the reader is brought straight into the characters’ heads and identifies with their interior monologues.
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Crime writer Sophie Hannah’s novel, The Monogram Murders, featuring Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot has just been published and is getting a good reception.

Hannah says reading Christie as a young teenager made her fall in love with mystery fiction. You and me both, Sophie.

The first Agatha Christie novel I read was Death on the Nile, which plunged me into a grown-up world of passion, sex, jealousy, greed, exotic places, even more exotic characters and, of course, murder.

I gasped at the ingenious plot and the clever twist. I marvelled at the audacity with which the author baffled my expectations and assumptions.
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David Frost was a TV pioneer who was one of the major forces behind the ground-breaking satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3 as it was quickly dubbed.

The show could be seen as defining the spirit of 1963. Its first outing was at the tail-end of the previous year, and the second series ran throughout 1963 before being halted because of the forthcoming general election. At any rate, that was the reason the BBC gave.

The show had a pop at politicians, the Prime Minister, public figures, Britain’s declining global power, farmers, restaurateurs, public relations people. It satirised religion and class and social attitudes. The programme delighted in puncturing stuffiness and pomposity. Ted Heath blamed the show for ‘the death of deference’. You couldn’t give it a better compliment.
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Hats in the ring for songs

about Elvis Presley:

The Colonel and The King

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Elvis Presley Blues

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Apparition in Las Vegas

MANY SONGS NAME-CHECK OTHER SINGERS. SOMETIMES THIS is done convincingly, sometimes it seems an easy way to become part of a mythology that belongs to someone else, or a blatant piggyback on to someone else’s fame and achievement.

Elvis, who died 36 years ago this week, must hold the record for the number of songs that have been written about him, that name him or that reference him explicitly or implicitly. All these years after he finally left the building, Elvis’s name still resonates and tugs at our imaginations.
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