Writer and novelist
Look Back In Anger, John Osborne’s seminal play, is a work whose impact is shaped by its context. You really had to be there, at the Royal Court Theatre in London on May 8th 1956, to experience the full weight of its combination of searing rhetoric and challenging subject matter.
Those of us who experienced the play in the following years may wonder why the play created such a stir, but such is the case with work which is ground-breaking in its time.
Bill Naughton’s creation Alfie Elkins has had several outings since his first appearance in the 1962 radio play Alfie Elkins And His Little Life. In addition to the radio drama, this character has sustained a stage play, a novel and a sequel, a 1965 film and a 2004 remake.
Alfie Elkins turned out to have legs, the most notable being those of Michael Caine, the star of Lewis Gilbert’s 1965 movie Alfie, in which Caine’s long lean frame is stylishly clad in Mod-inspired duds such as low-rise grey tapered trousers and Chelsea boots. There’s also a double-breasted blazer bearing an RAF badge, worn without the irony with which military dress was adopted as a fashion later in the decade.
It begins with a classic Sweeney-type chase, as three armed robbers and their driver follow a security van across Waterloo Bridge in London. In the Kingsway Tunnel, now known as the Strand Underpass, the security van explodes and three men meet a horrific end.
Move away now, avert your eyes from their charred bodies and focus on the women who are left to grieve their demise — the Widows.
Penny Wanawake, the smart and sassy black offspring of an English aristocrat and an African diplomat, carves her confident path through seven novels by Susan Moody, all written in the 1980s.
Penny is a wise-cracking amateur sleuth in the tradition of Philip Marlowe, a legacy which is honoured in the author’s staccato style and in the scattered references to crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and John D MacDonald. Penny is jokingly referred to as Samantha Spade and Philippa Marlowe.
Rachel Roberts as Brenda in Saturday Night Sunday Morning with Albert Finney
The 1960 film of Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, based on Alan Sillitoe’s fine novel, is an acclaimed example of British New Wave cinema. It perfectly captures the working-class milieu of 1950s’ Nottingham (which is in the East Midlands, not the North of England as is sometimes assumed).
The film is uncompromising, with no attempt to soften or romanticise working-class life and characters. The themes of adultery, drunkenness, abortion, violence are explored with unflinching realism, courtesy of director Karel Reisz’s documentary background.
The recent death of Rodney Bewes, who played Bob in BBC TV’s Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, brings an additional poignancy to the wistful comedy classic.
The funny, sad, clever scripts of Dick Clement and Ian Le Fresnais are superbly brought to life by Bewes and by James Bolam as Bob’s mate Terry, both in the original series The Likely Lads and its sequel.
The novel A Kind Of Loving by Stan Barstow was made into a 1962 film directed by John Schlesinger but Barstow went on to write two more books about the characters and the Vic Brown trilogy was made into an absorbing 10-part television series 20 years later in 1982.
The TV series, which is called A Kind of Loving, is an unpretentious depiction of the three novels and, in the portrayal of the relationship between draughtsman Vic and typist Ingrid, explores contemporary attitudes to love, sex and marriage, and the claims of morality, responsibility and individual choice.
In his 1960 novel A Kind of Loving, Stan Barstow (1928-2011) introduces us to Vic Brown, a young man of 20 from a mining family in the fictional town of Cressley in Yorkshire. He is infatuated with Ingrid, a pretty 18-year-old typist in the engineering works where Vic is a draughtsman.
They do go out together, Ingrid seemingly having had her eye on him for some time, but Vic’s infatuation soon fizzles out and he finds there is nothing left, not even friendship or liking. By then, however, Ingrid is pregnant, and he ‘has to’ marry her, as we used to say. Ingrid has a miscarriage, and the novel ends with Vic coming to terms with his lacklustre marriage, hoping that he and she might find ‘a kind of loving’ to carry them through.
Who still sends postcards anyway? That must have been a widespread response to the news that Britain’s oldest postcard publishing firm, J Salmon, established in 1880, is closing down.
The habit of sending postcards to people at home from your holiday destination may well now seem quaint, a convention belonging to the dark ages before social media made communication so easy and so immediate.
The stellar combination of Clive James’ witty, erudite, masterfully crafted poignant lyrics and Pete Atkin’s agile, subtle, eclectic music and understated vocal delivery has produced a body of work which belongs in the finest songbook tradition.
Each song has its own delights, and each is moving and captivating in its own way. I particularly relish those which present a cameo of a person, a character who is immediately and vividly created through pithy phrases and sharp dialogue, whose story could be the basis of a novel or a film.
