Writer and novelist
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 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.
A sad farewell and thank you to Glen Campbell, whose powerful interpretations of Jimmy Webb’s lyrics have enthralled audiences since he recorded them in the 1960s.
The three songs here are mini-dramas which position emotional anguish in lightly-evoked, unforgettable locations which transcend their geographical identity. The lyrics take on universal significance, and speak to everyone who has ever experienced love, longing and loneliness.
Nearly 25 years separate Ken Loach’s 1993 film Raining Stones and the first episode of Jimmy McGovern’s 2017 television series Broken but they are united by the questions they raise about individual and collective responsibility, the relationship between people and society, and the struggle to maintain humanity and dignity in the face of a system which threatens to destroy hope and self-respect.
Despite Ken Loach being a humanist and a secularist and Jimmy McGovern being a former Catholic, both dramas feature priests as key figures, and in both the struggle to buy a little girl’s First Holy Communion dress provides a focus for observations about class, society and human dignity.
The whole dating scene has changed immeasurably since the singers and songwriters of the 1950s and 1960s explored the terrain of teenage love. Our younger selves had to negotiate the pleasures and heartbreaks of relationships and what used to be quaintly known as ‘going out’ or ‘courting’ without the benefits and ease of high-tech communications.
Take the humiliating experience of being ‘stood up’. There you are, at the appointed time, standing outside the cinema or dancehall, or waiting at the corner or the bus stop or railway station or wherever you arranged to meet, and your date doesn’t show.
Bitter Harvest is a film version of Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, which is a collection of three novels set in London at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s.
Its setting is The Midnight Bell pub in Fitzrovia in the West End of London, where the lives of three characters, Bob, Jenny and Ella, intertwine.
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble is a novel published in 1965 about a flat-dwelling girl in her early 20s living and working in London in the decade which swung.
She goes out on dates and has a good social life. She goes to pubs and parties, she hangs out in Soho and West End restaurants, she has a ‘bessie mate’ with whom she has deep and meaningfuls over a bottle of wine. She has sex (once) and she gets pregnant.
Watching the TV version of Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh 40 years after its debut on stage at the Hampstead Theatre in 1977, followed by the televised version as a Play For Today on the BBC later that year, is an unnerving experience.
The things that seemed funny back then have acquired a darker edge, and the work has become a play for this day in ways that we couldn’t have anticipated.
‘We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.’ So goes the Springsteen song. True as ever, Boss.
Furthermore, some of us also learned a lot from the single’s big sister, the LP, and in particular from the notes on the record sleeve, which is what the cover encasing the vinyl was called.
The youngsters in Rumer Godden’s novel The Greengage Summer, set in the 1920s, are blessed with the usual requirements for an interesting fictional childhood — a set of quirky siblings and unconventional absent parents.
Goaded into action by the brattish behaviour of her five children, Mama Grey whisks them away from Belmont Road, Southstone, their dull habitat on the south coast of England, to the Champagne area of France, to visit the battlefields and pay homage to those who died in the Battle of the Marne.
How could a novel about young women working in New York six years after the end of the Second World War have any relevance to today’s 20-somethings in similar situations?
When the novel is Rona Jaffe’s The Best Of Everything (published 1958), the answer may surprise you. And what is even more surprising is that in many ways this book has more contemporary resonance than Sex And The City, its later, flashier, sister in the group-of-women-dealing-with-love and-work genre.
One of the 339 books referenced in the Gilmore Girls TV series is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 influential account of druggy trips and the growth of the hippie movement. Jess Mariano — well, who else — is seen reading it. A very Jess choice.
But it’s the other Wolfe whose words have particular resonance as we look forward to revisiting the Gilmores and Stars Hollow in Netflix’s new four-parter, Gilmore Girls, A Year in the Life.
