Cris Warren

More Urban Myths

2007-04-04T08:21:00.000Z

Urban myths abound in Bristol, so well worn and old are many of them that they are part of the city’s folk-lore. In some instances, such as the origin’s of Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill, they are accepted as established historical fact even when the evidence points to origins far less sinister than the slave trade.
I’ve heard scores of urban tales about Bristol, all are purported to have happened to distant relatives or friends of friends, all have a modicum of plausibility, all are complete nonsense. That doesn’t mean they have no worth, however.
All stories, whether their origins are ancient or just arrived in the inbox of your e-mail, have something to say about the times we live in, even if it’s just to point out that we’re no less gullible in the electronic age than we were in the stone age.
Here are six of my favourite modern urban myths that continue to circulate in Bristol. If you have a favourite urban myth about the city, please send it in. Nothing validates a tall story better than it being in print.

The Completely Untrue, Probably, Story Of KFC’s Strange Disappearance From Bristol.

While they cornered the bucket full of fried fowl market throughout the rest of the country since the 1960s, Colonel Saunders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets were conspicuous by their absence in Bristol during the late 1970s and much of the 1980s. Why? Well, allegedly, the great grand-daughter of Colonel Saunders moved to Bristol from the Southern States of the USA to enjoy her dotage in Sneyd Park in 1973. In search of a taste of her youth she decided to visit the KFC franchise that was on Blackboy Hill. But so dismayed was she at the rudeness of the staff and their scant adherence to the ‘secret recipe’ and above all general hygiene of the premises, that she called an extraordinary board meeting at KFC HQ in America and demanded that all franchises in the Bristol area be cancelled in her lifetime, leaving a giant drum-stick shaped hole in the city’s fried spicy chicken market to be filled. This is why, until recently, Miss Millie’s was the name on all Bristolian’s lips when it came to fried chicken. Interestingly, during the time in question stories were widely circulated around the country about rats, their tails especially, being found crisply fried and battered in mixed spices in among the more usual wings and breast. And for one reason or another, many KFC franchised outlets did indeed close, seemingly overnight, in Bristol. But most amazing is that Colonel Saunder’s competitors in Bristol had a sense of humour, because his grumpy great grand-daughter was, apparently, called Milly.

The Feral Chickens Of Knowle.

Sightings of rogue wild chickens in South Bristol, especially Knowle and Southville, abound no evidence, photographic or otherwise, has ever been forthcoming. The chickens are thought to have escaped from the back gardens turned free-holdings of families attempting a ‘Good Life’ style back to the land existence, although there are at least two ‘explanations’ in circulation. The first is that the chickens were in crates in the back of a farmer’s van, when it stopped at traffic lights some passing youth ‘liberated’ a couple of crates to see what was inside. Discovering chickens, rather than the Playstations or whiskey most visiting farmers can be reasonably expected to be transporting through Bristol, the youngsters freed the contents into nearby wasteland - where they thrived. The last, and I think most plausible, story is that a South Bristol shopkeeper acquired a large amount of free-range eggs from a less than legal source. Leaving them in his lock up one particularly hot evening he was surprised to discover the next morning that at least one tray of knock off eggs had hatched...

The Phantom Car-Parking Attendant Of Bristol Zoo

Outside Bristol Zoo there is a car-park where hundreds of cars and dozens of coaches park on a daily basis. Until recently there was a very genial fellow with an official looking hat, yellow waistcoat and a ticket machine charging cars £1 and coaches £5 for the privilege.
This parking attendant worked there for about 25 years, through wind, rain and scorching Bristol summers, eight hours a day, six days a week (and Bank Holidays). He was an industrious worker with an exemplary sickness record.
One day he didn't turn up for work. “Oh dear” say Bristol Zoo management as chaos descends on the car park, “we’d better phone up Bristol City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant.”
“Err...no” say the Council, “that car park is your responsibility.”
“But” say the Zoo, “he was employed by you, wasn’t he?”
“Not us”, say the council.
Sitting in his villa in Spain is a very genial fellow who had been taking the car park takings for Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years...

He Looks Just Like, Y’know, What’s His Face...

Rock & Roller Eddie Cochrane - possibly the only real contender to the crown of Elvis - played his last ever concert at the Hippodrome in Bristol in 1960. After the gig he got in a car with his pal Gene Vincent, girlfriend Sharon Sheeley and driver George Martin (not THAT George Martin) and set off for London. Just outside of Chippenham the car crashed and Cochrane was fatally wounded. He was pronounced dead at St Martin’s Hospital in Bath.
Cochrane was 21. But, legend has it, singing to a packed Hippodrome wasn’t the only rocking and rolling Cochrane did in Bristol. Apparently there was a part-time Hippodrome usherette who could testify to that nine months later when into the world arrived a Cochrane Jr. He grew to be the spitting image of his late dad, albeit with a local accent. Apparently his heritage has been hushed up, but if you’re male in your mid 40s and often find yourself humming “Three Steps To Heaven”, now might be the time to ask your mum what she did for a Saturday job.

Urban Myths Updated

Bristol office workers (this office included) were recently panicked by the following e-mail.

“Please be aware of new car-jacking scheme.
Their Method:-
You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and put into gear or reverse. You look into the rear-view mirror and you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window.
So, you put the vehicle in neutral, unlock your doors and jump out of the vehicle to remove that paper or whatever it is that is obstructing your view. When you reach the back of your vehicle the car-jackers appear out of nowhere, jump into your vehicle and take off!! Your engine was running, you would have left your purse/wallet/documents/briefcase/equipment in the car and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your vehicle.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME THAT IS NOW BEING USED IN GLASGOW AND MANCHESTER AND IS MAKING ITS WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY!”

This seemed plausible at first, but you have to ask, isn’t car-jacking an opportunist crime most likely to be carried out in desperation? Would a car jacker really loiter in a car park with a pack of Post-It notes to stick on rear windows?
Some research, then, is called for. I called the news desks of the Manchester Evening News and The Glasgow Herald. Were those fair cities being plagued by stationery packing criminal masterminds? “Er... no” said Manchester, “um..I’ve never..I don’t...is this a serious question?” asked Glasgow. Strathclyde Police (Glasgow’s force) were equally sniffy because, the reluctantly revealed, they took the information seriously and classed it as ‘intelligence’, despite the fact that no such crime had ever been reported. Manchester’s police authority did the same, but answered my enquiry with good humour, so I think I know where I’d like to be car jacked in future.

Why Bristol Wouldn’t Let Go Of Betamax.

Back in the early 80s there existed two formats of home video systems (younger readers may have to ask their parents), VHS and Betamax. The smaller Betamax was arguably better quality but for numerous reasons VHS won the format wars and became the standard system and Betamax went in the technology bin. Except, that is, in Bristol where it thrived.
The reason? Because, allegedly, light fingered dockers at Avonmouth stole the latest Betamax players and pre-recorded films on Betamax video in wholsale quantities before they had even been released. Certain pubs and drinking establishments were seeing more business than Blockbusters and a generation of local film buffs was created. Even when international business dictated the end of Beta, there were enough blank tapes and players floating about the city for no one to take notice. To this day there are many in town who will talk proudly of the superior technological advantages of Betamax over VHS. Ask them how they know and they will simply wink.

Box Out
How To Spot An Urban Myth

The general rule of thumb with urban myths is that if somebody tells you a story in a pub it should be treated with caution. The closer to chucking out time the less likely the story has any basis in truth, whatsoever.

Always be wary of stories that start “It’s the God’s honest truth”, or “Honestly...” and especially, “I swear, this is true...”

Urban myths are personalised and localised to suit the story but they are always generalised and rarely contain any fact beyond slight plausibility. They nearly always concern friends of friends, distant relatives or the person who sat at your desk at work before you were employed by the company. They happened ‘last year’, ‘last month’, ‘in 1996’ but never ‘this morning’ or ‘yesterday’. Urban myths are always anecdotal and are never accompanied by newspaper cuttings, videotaped news bulletins and independent witness testimonies. Largely because pubs don’t encourage power-point presentations and secondly because the story didn’t happen in the first place.

People who relate an urban myth aren’t necessarily trying to reel you in with malice. They might actually believe the story they are telling and think they have your best interests at heart. So, they’re misled, but their saving grace is their kindness. That’s worth bearing in mind before you publicly deconstruct their story with forensic brutality. Others relate urban myths simply because they’re a good yarn, or to make them seem more interesting then they perhaps are. Telling a party of people about the time your wife’s cousin’s husband’s head was stuck on the end of a pole by a mad man on Dartmoor is certainly an icebreaker. On the other hand urban myths can sometimes suit people’s prejudices and are used as ‘evidence’ to back up their hatred of a particular group. In this instance gently pick at the numerous loose threads in the story and watch it unravel to expose the narrator.

Unless it reads, “the building is on fire” and you can smell smoke, never trust a ‘Round Robin’ e-mail you receive at work. Ever. If you are sent a ‘true’ story by e-mail from a colleague a simple way of finding out if it’s myth or not is to highlight a phrase from the mail and paste it into Google, topped and tailed with quote marks. Seven times out of ten you’ll find the phrase, or variations of it, repeated over thousands of internet pages stretching back years.

Looking A Gift Horse In The Mouth

2007-03-19T11:13:00.000Z

2007 being the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade means it’s inevitable that Bristol take a long sober review of it’s past. The city has done a pretty good job of sweeping the issue of its involvement in the slave trade under the carpet for the past couple of centuries and it’s only in the past two decades that projects such as Pero’s bridge have provided some sort of acknowledgement. There’s a long way to go.
Many Bristolian's, of all backgrounds, will say that the past is the past and we should let the issue lie and look to the future. But there are also many who say that the city is full of references to the despicable trade, street names, schools, public buildings that act as a reference, an almost approving subliminal reminder as to how the city made its money.
One name over all stands out. Colston, the city benefactor of the 18th century who made his fortune from slavery.
Civil rights campaigner Paul Stephenson is calling for The Colston Hall, the most famous city dedication to the man and currently under conversion, to be renamed after it is rebuilt. It’s a story that’s generating huge interest in the city, because if successful it could be the catalyst for a major reinterpretation of Bristol’s history and even what it means to be Bristolian. Or it could simply be seen as an exercise in politically correct point scoring benefiting from a highly charged and emotional issue that has riven local opinion for some time.
Bristol band Massive Attack, for example, refused to play the Colston Hall on the grounds of its namesake‘ business interests. As gestures go this was genuinely felt and noble.
But, disappointingly, it was then rendered somewhat hollow by the band’s announcement that they would be playing a rare hometown show not at, say Ashton Gate or the grounds of a local school but in Queen Square, once the administrative quarter of Bristol’s ‘respectable’ trade and named after the industry’s poster girl, Queen Anne.
This highlights the modern day confusion in Bristol about the city’s involvement in slaving - whether directly or indirectly - during the 18th century and how easily the ‘facts’ are misinterpreted, not necessarily intentionally, to suit the ends.
Why it is unacceptable for performers to play in a hall named a hundred or so years posthumously after a man who made vast profits from slavery, but it’s ok to perform in the centre of a square dedicated to Queen Anne, a 22.5% shareholder in the slave trading near monopoly that was the South Sea Company, in which still stand merchant buildings that were mortgaged by the blood of Africans.
Bristol, the city, embraced the slave industry (so did Bath, by the way) and made an awful lot of money out of it either by sugar and tobacco trading, direct slave trading or by forcing slaves to work on plantations in the West Indies owned by Bristolians. The facts are in stone all over the city.
This, I think, needs to be acknowledged on a practical, workable and city wide sense, but can it be done by focussing on just one skeleton from Bristol’s 18th century closet, i.e. Colston?
This is a big talking point in Bristol and while it might be wide of the mark, there’s passionate debate between the pro and anti Colston camps.
While I don’t agree that Colston is the be all and end all of Bristol’s slavery connection, he is the most prominent historical figure and his name still looms large in modern day Bristol. I’ve long thought that this is wrong. Many Bristolians disagree with me.
Criticise Colston and the two responses you are most likely to hear are: “But, you need to put it into context of the times, it was an accepted trade etc.” Well, no it wasn’t. It was a widespread trade but that doesn’t make it universally accepted in any context. There were many in Britain during the 18th & early 19th century who were dead set against slavery; William Wilbeforce wasn’t just whistling in the wind vaguely hoping that someone might pick up the tune.
The next most common, and perhaps most specific, argument for celebrating Colston’s commitment to Bristol will be along the lines of his great philanthropic works, his personal zeal for providing education for the poor and easing the hardship of the aged and infirm.
This is undeniable fact.
But at whose cost was it achieved?
Because you could, reasonably I think, counter the praise for his good works by pointing out that Mussolini got the trains running on time in Italy while at the same time over in Germany Hitler oversaw a revolutionary programme of mass motorway building (thanks in large to slave labour). Neither of the pair have a major concert hall dedicated to them.
What good, though, does it do to keep going over old ground, picking at scar tissue and flicking the accusatory scabs across the divide? How are we, as a city, going to find a practical and workable solution before most of us get so bored with the subject that its rendered practically meaningless?
I don’t know, but, for what it’s worth...
We can’t re-map Bristol and wipe away the references to Colston that abound in the city, it would be little more than a Stalin-esque editing of history and inconvenient truths that ultimately would prove nothing. We could, though, initiate some sort of scheme that would see plaques positioned next to street signs and buildings that explained their history and origin.
That said, I back Paul Stephenson 100% on renaming the Colston Hall.
The hall is about to undergo a £20million restoration, when it’s completed it will, ostensibly, be a different venue. So let’s seize the opportunity and give it a different name. Who we should honour should be for the city to decide by public vote. There’s still the question of the statue of Colston brow furrowed head in hand that dominates the Centre. Some say kick it over. But why not commission a statue of a newly emancipated slave, shackles waving in his hands and place it directly opposite him so that they can look each other in the eye.

THE KIDS AREN'T ALRIGHT

2007-03-15T10:12:00.000Z

News that children as young as 11 could have their fingerprints taken and stored on a government database has met with predictable uproar from woolly liberals, hippies and Parliamentary opposition parties, as a further step towards a complete surveillance state.The plan, mooted as part of preparations for biometric passports and identity cards, could, says everyone who doesn't agree, herald the end of the presumption of innocence.

The story's this. As of 2008, all adults who apply for new passports will have their fingerprints recorded in the National Identity Register. But top civil servants are worried that some youths with child passports, valid for five years, could then be travelling on passports without biometric details when they turn 16.

That's carte blanche to commit crime and blow things up. Clearly.

So, to make sure all passports held by those over 16 have biometric details, the Identity and Passport Service proposes a fingerprint database for 11 to 15-year-olds. They estimate that they will take the fingerprints of 295,000 children who apply for passports in 2010, and that eventually 495,000 youngsters a year will be getting inky fingers.

Of course, if you had a massive new database of fingerprints, what other uses could you find for it. Hmmmm...wouldn't the police, for instance, find it useful?

Yes, say the hippies and the Jesus sandal-shod geography teachers and the Conservative Party, and it's the death knell for the presumption that everyone is considered innocent before they are found guilty.

But wait a minute. If we have the resources to nip things like crime in the bud, shouldn't we all be sleeping a little sounder in our beds?

I think so. In fact, I don't think the Government is going far enough.

Rather than having an age of criminal responsibility - currently applied to 10-year-olds - let's introduce an age of criminal inevitability and arrest anyone suspected of being 10 years old.

Habeas corpus could do with a revision, too. It would be easy enough to pass. For starters, it's Latin so how can anyone in state education nowadays possibly know what it means?

Getting rid of it needn't burden the overcrowded prison system. Ten-year-olds can already be easily incarcerated at home for the price of a PlayStation, a daily dose of fizzy drinks and industrial-sized packs of Cheesy Wotsits.

Thanks to the best efforts of the anti-conker Nazis of the Health and Safety executive, drivers conducting 60mph conversations on their mobile phones and scare stories of a paedophile on every corner, a fair proportion of under-16s are already institutionalised in every way but name by their concerned parents, so to implement lock-downs at home by stealth law could hardly be easier.

So, I say, ban habeas whatsitcalled.

Who in their right mind would complain when you look at the evidence, anyway? Ten-year-olds are a shifty lot by their very nature and the streets would be a safer place without BMXs and scooters strewn across the doorways of newsagents and footballs flying around public parks. I don't trust them, personally, with their scabby knees and pockets full of dead daddy longlegs, Panini stickers and recommissioned, decommissioned Kosovan firearms.

I admit, I have some personal reasons for locking up 10-year-olds and throwing the wardens away. A brush I had with a member of the tweeny underclass still makes me wake up screaming. I was in a supermarket a few years ago when I saw a lad of about nine filling his pockets at the pick-n-mix.

Rather than making a scene, I thought the best approach would be to sidle up to him and quietly but firmly tell him to stop what he was doing.

So I did.

But was this young Fagin ashamed but appreciative of my tact, my attempt to quietly put him back on the right track? Did he say "thanks mister, it's a fair cop. I was lost, g'vner, but now I'm found out"?

Did he hell.

Seemingly deranged, mouth foaming from a gobfull of sherbet lemons, he lobbed a handful of rhubarb and custards in my face (which, by the way, are sharp and smooth in all senses, especially if you get one in the eye) and then offered me outside for a fight.

He actually wanted to have a street fight with me, a man three times his size and eight times his weight.

Now, in a situation like that, a number of questions whizz their way brainwards.

Such as, is he bluffing? Because if he isn't, he's probably pretty tough and not going to observe the Queensbury rules. So how badly will he hurt me? Are we talking nursing a bruised shin, or being fed through a straw for the rest of my life?

That aside, the law's a bit hazy on the whole adults fighting with children thing and anyway, it's not very, well, dignified, is it? Never mind if the adult in question thinks he stands a good chance of losing.

So, instead, I stood at the picking-a-fight-n-mix, pride dented by sharp-edged boiled confectionery, thinking of options.

"Right," I finally said, "I'm going to tell on you."

I sloped off pretending to be in search of a responsible, hopefully gun toting, member of staff but really looking for an exit to leave by or a crack in the Earth's crust to leap into with the sound of "ooh, shown up!" ringing in my ears.

In the sober light of five years later, I concede that it's probably a good thing that our great government would never take an ego bruised by a mini-criminal as a recommendation to rush out ill-thought new laws.

They would never do that, right?

The idea to fingerprint, rank and file our children in a society that is already under more surveillance than any other country in the world is just 'blue sky thinking', nothing sinister. If you think your civil rights are eroding faster than the cliffs of the south coast you're paranoid. If you say so, expect a knock on the door.

Take their word for it. It will never happen. Until it does.

Anyway, personally speaking, I'm tremendously reassured by such a forward looking, nothing to hide government. I look forward to further 'blue sky' debate, such as bringing back hanging, and abolishing the vote.

Punk's (not) Dead.

2007-01-31T15:57:00.000Z

A colleague recently bemoaned the lack of flair demonstrated by today’s youth.
We were looking out of the office window watching a group of lads sauntering past four floors below.
“Look at them, they think they’re it but they’re all in uniform” he said, preparing a mental inventory, “baseball caps, white trainers, track suit trousers, jackets printed with graffiti tags, pasty faces, nothing to do, nowhere to go, scrawling crap on the walls that nobody wants to read, it’s like dogs marking their territory, where’s the individuality? They all look the same.”
I didn’t want to ruin the moment by pointing out that here we were both wearing identikit suits, both working in an office that could be like any other office anywhere, both paid to scribe stuff that no one wants to read, obsessed about getting our bylines on pages like dogs marking their territories.
Where, indeed, is the individuality?
“When I was a kid I was a punk” he announced, in the same slightly unconvincing way people who ache to be hip claim to have once been a member of the Dug Out, the influential Bristol nite-spot with room for 300 and an apparent membership of 64 million.
“Really?” I’m impressed, “a punk? How old are you?”
“41”
“So, you were an 11 year old punk?”
“Yeah” sheepish grin “alright. Truth be told I always rather preferred Leo Sayer. But I had the spirit of punk later on, I wanted to be different, not like them” he points out of the window, to a crisp packet blowing along an otherwise empty street and turns to find I’ve gone back to my desk to assert my individuality by quietly panicking about .
It’s thirty years since punk first exploded, like a big sneeze, snottily into the living rooms and onto the suburban street corners of middle England.
Many will assert that it started in London, or even New York, they’ll cite Malcolm Mclaren, his shop Let It Rock. How he was Fagin to a legion of surly, disaffected youths whom he taught to pick the pockets of rock and roll and joyously fleece the music industry and the record buyers alike.
This is true. But not, I think, the full story. Because everywhere else Punk was something that just happened. It was an umbrella term for a scene that was as different in Manchester as it was in Glasgow, Bristol as it was in Wootten-under-Edge.
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but my eldest sister was an early convert.
One minute it was that blisteringly hot summer of 1976, I was seven with an unruly mop of ginger hair (like McLaren) and with my granny, who we lived with, looking forward to the next year’s silver jubilee celebrations (like McLaren, just not in the same way).
She was tall and pretty in garish Bri-nylon, who when she wasn’t reading was dreaming of the drummer of Flintlock.
The next minute it seemed to have been raining for a month and a lot of boys, one of them, Adam, with pink hair, were pogo-ing around her bedroom declaring that there was “no future” and looked at me as if they’d just stepped in me.
Bri-nylon was dispatched for mo-hair and spray on tartan trews. Flintlock - over whose bubblegum pop stylings a big sister and gawky little brother had just weeks earlier bonded - were fired and upgraded to the more devastating sonic firepower of the Sex Pistols. Everything was different.
When my sister was out, probably hanging on a corner terrorising first world war veterans with her ripped stockings, I’d be in her room hogging the record player.
While I quickly gained a working knowledge, even a liking, for Wire, X-Ray Spex, The Clash and, of course, The ‘Pistols, as their 45s piled up on top of Flintlock, Leo Sayer and Middle Of The Road (Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep - still a classic) I didn’t really ‘get’ them. I hit a wall of Edwardian silence when I asked my Granny what an Orgasm Addict was. I found out the answer for myself when I hit puberty. That’s another post.
I still have the record. It’s got my sisters name on it, written with big looped joined up letters that only adolescent girls can do. The full stop is replaced with a love heart. Hardly the signature of a threat to society as we knew it.
In general, I found punk then to be utterly confusing. Which was, I realise now, sort of the point of a movement that set so much store in pointlessness. To be a punk was to not be like you. That was enough.
But all that self-righteous, humourless indignation at the world was also highly amusing for a seven year old. And, it turned out, his step dad.
Once a punk ‘face’ came to our house. He sported a full Mohican, with spikes of hair rumoured to have been dipped in Super-Glue, a studded leather jacket, bondage trousers and a chain that linked his left nostril to his right ear lobe.
When he walked down the path there was a race between my sister and my step dad to answer the door. To her horror, she was last and could only bear agonising witness to the following exchange. My old man gave the punk icon the once over. He pointed to his facial decoration. “If I pull that, will you flush?”.
Reactionary git, they would have thought. But two decades earlier he was sharpening his button down collars in readiness for weekends at the legendary Eel Pie Island and The Crawdaddy club, a sweaty South West London hole and both the Capital’s equivalents/challenges to the Cavern, that outraged with their habit of booking the hairiest, loudest and lewdest r&b acts of the early 60’s, the Yardbirds, The Who, The Pretty Things, The Birds (not to be confused with those dyslexic hippies from the States), and The ‘Stones.
What goes around, etc.
Those lads at the top of the post don’t represent a failure on punk‘s part to make us all individuals. Teenagers today are not any less relevant or rebellious or even revolutionary. They might look the same but in their heads they’re just not us. And that’s enough.

Modern Ghost Woe

2007-01-31T08:55:00.001Z

My friends Burley, Palmer and Gunn and I recently invented a family- friendly game that combines our two greatest interests, pizza and the paranormal.

Taking the gist of the original spirit-medium's tool, the Ouija board, we've added a taste of Italian cuisine and called it The Lou-iji Board.

We've already scripted the advert which we intend to be five times more annoying than the classic MB Games ad for Operation - you remember, the one with the architecturally coiffured mum whose dubbed- over voice asks: "Can I have a go?"

Our ad is even better. It goes like this: A 1980s open-plan front room. Four children dressed in bad clothes are crouched around a pizza-shaped Ouija board. They have their fingers on an upturned glass which seems to float magically around the board, over an alphabet of shaped cardboard pizza toppings such as anchovies and peppers.

A mother, in mourning dress, but grinning inanely nonetheless, overlooks the game.

As does the spirit of Lou-iji, a spectral Italian chef, who rises, with the aid of terrible 1980s video effects, through the centre of the board. To the tune of Joe Dolce's Shud Up A Ya Face, he sings:

"What's-a matter you?

"HEY!

"Lost your dear Papa?

"HEY!

"Need to change da will?

"HEY!

"Contacta da dead!

A cod Italian voiceover announces: "Lou-iji board! It's-a da great new occult game from NB Games for all-a da family."

Then a group of smiling ghosts, one of them headless, enter the room through the walls and join the grinning kids. Kid One asks: "What's it like on the other side - are there really fields full of lollypops?" All the ghosts nod eagerly in the affirmative.

Kid Two wants to know if puppies "grow on trees in the afterlife". Again the ghosts cheerily nod.

Now mum wants in on the action. Waving her husband's last will and testament, which has some questionable entries clearly circled in red pen, she asks, with a giggle: "Can I have a go?"

Everybody makes a mock tut and laughs. The cod Italian voiceover announces, "Lou-IJI board. It'll keepa da spirits up!"

A blink-or-you'll-miss-it subtitle flashes on the screen, reading: "Not suitable for the under-threes or the recently bereaved."

The fact that we've already written the advert before launching the product might suggest to you that we don't have faith in the Lou-iji board. Far from it. There's just one technical hitch to smooth out before we unleash the other world on the living public. We don't know how to turn it off.

Product testing started well. We had originally intended that the board be made of dough that the players shaped and baked themselves. This turned out to be unimaginably boring to undertake so instead we took a photograph of a large Domino's pizza, cut it out and stuck it to some cardboard.

Using a marker pen we drew the numbers 0-9 and the letters A-Z around the pizza.

After pouring ourselves a mood-setting pint of Chianti each we sat down around the board and proceeded to knock up any passing members of the spirit world. Imagine our surprise when, after an hour's play, the room was packed with ghosts.

Among the spooks vying for space on the sofa were Florence Nightingale, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakir, Van Gogh, Matisse and Andy Warhol, Sasha Distel, the entire Light Brigade (of charging fame) two men claiming to be Dick Turpin, Lady Jane Grey, Brunel, Satan the great dark lord of the underworld, Rod Hull (but not Emu) and, somewhat surprisingly, TV presenter Phillip Schofield.

With so many dead historical figures - with the possible exception of Schofield - in one place, you'd imagine a fabulous party to simply burst into life - if you'll excuse the pun. But being dead isn't all it's cracked up to be. Whoever said you shouldn't meet your heroes, especially if they're dead, was right and the whole affair was somewhat miserable.

We couldn't think of any interesting questions to ask. Sasha Distel refused to comment on whether he was bullied at school for having a girl's name, Van Gough tiresomely pretended to be deaf and when we asked Rod Hull if in retrospect he'd would have considered cable TV he stormed out in a huff. Well, we thought it was funny.

A week or so later we still can't get rid of the ghosts. It's like Truly Madly Deeply at my house, only without some blubbering thesp playing the cello.

Biggie and Tupac insist on catching the bus to work with me and make obscene rhymes about local transport providers First.

When I got home last night Satan had eaten the batteries of the TV remote control and Van Gogh had stencilled a sunflower border all around my living room, which is so mid-90s I could've cried.

I've been in touch with the local priest and he says as soon as he sorts out the mess caused by some local kid who's been doling out fish sandwiches and walking on Henleaze Lake, he'll pop round.

In the meantime, he advised, why not pass the time with my unwelcome guests by inviting them to play a nice board game.

Novel White Lies

2007-01-27T20:26:00.000Z

A third of British adults have lied about reading a book to appear more intelligent and one in 10 men will pretend to have read certain books in order to impress members of the opposite sex, according to a new survey of 4,000 readers by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council (MLA).

The findings (you can read them all in the news section here ) are PR guff working some reverse psychology riff to tempt people into libraries, but there are some tasty nuggets to chew on and spit out; 15 per cent of readers lie about the books they have read to new colleagues, one in 10 of 19 to 21-year-olds will trip up when quizzed about a book they have claimed to, but haven't, read. That kind of thing.

Almost half of respondents said that reading classic titles like War and Peace, Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice makes you appear more intelligent. What I was most surprised about was that five per cent said they lied about their reading habits to their employers. Just five per cent, surely some mistake?

Leading someone up the garden path is all very well if you want a roll in a flower bed, but if it's for your career's sake, getting your foot in the door at the top of the path calls for some really creative fibbing. And not just about the unbroken spines of the "classics" on your bookcase.

Employers know that a fair percentage of CVs arrive with a modicum of embellishment. It's not condoned but it's almost expected of applicants.

And depending on how much you want the job, can you really be blamed for a semi-innocent typo that transforms your grade three French CSE result to a masters degree in French literature? Is it really so objectionable to lie barefaced that you count opera, theatre, fell-walking and bringing to justice Nazi war criminals among your favourite hobbies, if you think that you could really benefit the company you're applying for?

I'm no captain of industry but I think that, yes, actually, it's probably not safe for anyone to lie about their qualifications. Or at the very least, it depends.

If, for instance, you want to work on the milk floats for United Dairies I say knock yourself out. Don't forget to mention you've read War & Peace so many times you've actually been approached to write the sequel, Peace & Then A Lot Of Little Wars. They won't care; as long as you can whistle tunelessly, the milk round's yours.

If, on the other hand, you have, say, political ambitions you really should try and be honest because the moment you garnish your credentials - you put Oxford University instead of the local Higher Education college, say, or you boast of a glittering early start in political analysis when in actual fact you did work experience on an obscure weekly rag and made the tea between copying press releases about the nation's reading habits - is the moment somebody cries, "Actually...."

But in politics that shout often comes too late, or is buried. Or both. You can trace the path of career-before-principals politicians by following the trail of exaggerations they leave in their wake. Often they are incredulous when exposed as phoney, usually because their wide-eyed duplicity is so convincing they believe it themselves. They'll also have a whole team of equally careerist sycophants feeding them plate after plate of deceit, boiled and fried in the juices of their own self interest. So the wheel turns.

Because it can be hard to stop a lie from spiralling out of control. Announcing that you admire Dostoyovski when your bookshelves say J K Rowling is one thing. But sex up your CV to get a foot on the bottom rung of the political ladder and see how quickly and casually you'll find yourself in front of your peers swearing blind that you have "concrete", "irrefutable" and "God-given" evidence that Iraq is harbouring enough weapons of mass destruction to blow this world into the next.

I can't claim to be living it up on the moral highground here, a lie's a lie whatever its scale and I've employed a few to gain employment.

The CV that got me my first staff writing job stated boldly that I was a "lifelong Bristol Rovers fan" after I received a tip-off that the then editor held a season ticket for the Pirates.

To measure my knowledge of football, more specifically Bristol Rovers (and this is despite the fact that I have lived in North Bristol all my life and, not only that, but in the shadow of not one but two of Rovers' three home grounds) you would need the kind of equipment reserved for scientists investigating really tiny, miniscule, little things that nobody else should really concern themselves with. Put it this way, I'm no expert.

"Gary Penrice" who was then a mustachioed player with the Gas, "is practically a god, don't you think?"

I knowingly without knowing announced to the interview panel, praying they wouldn't ask me why I thought that was even thinkable.

Naturally I got the job. Nothing to do with whether I could write stories, all to do with spinning a yarn.

I was found out. Eventually. I'd got pretty good at avoiding any serious debate about Rovers and would study the back page of the Evening Post on a Monday, which I could rely on for about four sentences worth of bluff if I was in a particularly tight conversational spot.

Sadly, one small oversight, (how was I to know Bristol Rovers had moved to Bath - I mean, does that make sense to anyone?) saw my web of deceit come crashing down. Luckily, by this time, I was indispensable to the magazine, namely because in three years I hadn't asked for a pay rise and, secondly, because I told them I was indispensable and nobody suspected me of being stupid enough to fundamentally lie to them twice. But I didn't see the love in my editor's eyes for a long time after that. And even then he wouldn't let me use his pristinely-kept Rovers' mug when all the other cups were dirty.

Four Murders

2007-01-25T15:52:00.000Z

For no particular reason other than it's bloody cold, here are four Bristol murder stories.....

John Horwood was convicted of the murder of Eliza Balsum in 1821, although the case was on shaky ground from the start. Horwood, from Bristol, had been romantically pursuing Balsum, from Kingswood, for some months. When she finally put a stop to his advances he threw a stone at her in frustration.
She was bruised by the incident but otherwise, it seemed, unharmed. But two days later, and after walking from Kingswood, she reported to the Bristol Infirmary feeling unsteady on her feet. She was treated for a head wound but died within days. The surgeon Richard Smith inspected her body and found an abscess. The fact that this was more likely to have been caused by a dirty bandage applied in the hospital was not considered and Horwood was arrested and charged with her murder.
Horwood enjoyed the distinction of being the first prisoner to be hanged at the new Cumberland Road gaol (the original was burnt down during the Bristol Riots). The moment he was pronounced dead, Horwood’s body was commandeered by Richard Smith, the surgeon who accused him of the crime. Smith dissected the body during a public medical lecture.
Smith had Horwood’s body skinned and tanned. After it was given a further chemical treatment in Bedminster, what was left of Horwood was dispatched to a bookbinders in Essex who used it to bind a book, written by Smith, about the Horwood case. The book remains in the city archive and the gruesome tome is made available to the public by appointment.

As if inspired by the pages of a crime novel, the murderer of cinema manager RN Parrington “Jacko” Jackson, in 1950 waited in the packed cinema for the exact moment a shot was fired in the Ronald Coleman thriller The Light That Failed, before he empty a barrel into the ill fated impressario.
Despite a huge police investigation Jacko’s murder remained a mystery until fairly recently. His killer was never brought to justice.
There appeared to be no motive for the killing.
Just moments previously Jackson had been laughing and joking with the restaurant staff and had just returned from the box office with the takings from the day.
But none of that £800 had been stolen.
The police had just one tip off. An anonymous caller said the man they should be looking for was clean shaven, aged 30-35, about five feet seven inches tall, of medium-build with dark hair and a ruddy complexion. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie and had been sitting in the balcony lounge reading a newspaper.
Inquiries ranged across the whole country - even to America, where a GI was questioned - but no arrests were made. The murder weapon - a Colt 45 revolver - had been found in a water tank in the city. Then the trail went cold.
In the mid 70s the case was reopened when a homeless man called Fred Jesser contacted the Evening Post with his theory that ‘Jacko’ was whacked by a jealous boyfriend.
It was a theory not without substance. ‘Jacko’, apparently, was a suave smoothie who had a reputation as a ‘ladies man’.
But in the 1990s a death bed confession appeared to close the case for good.
The killer was named as Billy "The Fish" Fisher, a petty crook who had travelled with his accomplice, Duckey Leonard, from South Wales with the sole intention of robbing the cinema. They panicked when Parrington Jackson walked in and "The Fish" shot him twice.
Fisher's son, Jeff Fisher, told police that his father had confessed to the killing and that he believed that he may have murdered more than once.

William Hay, who killed his 17 year old boyfriend and buried his dismembered body in the docks, was gaoled for life at Bristol Crown Court in July 1978.
Hay had denied murdering Keith Whalen saying that the act was manslaughter after he had been provoked. The jury did not accept his plea.
Hay took Whelans body in a tin trunk to a lonely spot near Severn Beach after stabbing his lover to death in his flat on Luccombe Hill in Redland.
Hay initially tried to dispose of the body by burning it, but it wouldn’t catch and he left it. The next day Hay returned with a saw and set about removing Keith’s head and left leg. Hay then loaded the body into his car and returned to Bristol. At Cumberland Basin he dug a shallow grave and placed the body in it.

The last person to be executed in a Bristol prison was Russell Pascoe at Horfield in 1963. Pascoe was the coconspirator of a botched burglary of a remote farm in Cornwall. Russell, and his accomplice Dennis Whitty, had heard rumours that the reclusive farmer William Rowe hid a fortune amongst the chaotic piles of waste at his farm. Discovered by Rowe as they searched for valuables, Pascoe and Whitty set about the old man with iron bars, they then stabbed him a number of times and slashed his throat. Pascoe was arrested at a roadblock a couple of days after the murder when his answers to a routine set of questions failed to convince the police officer. Whitty was taken by the police soon after and both defendants blamed the other for the murder. Whitty was taken to be hanged at Winchester while Pascoe would see out his last days looking at Gloucester Road through the bars of his cell.
By 1963 support for the abolition of hanging was growing stronger in Britain and protesters gathered outside Horfield as Pascoe prepared for his final trek from cell to gallows.
Tony Benn, then MP for Bristol South-East, told the vigil on the night before the execution: "I think this will be Bristol's last execution. I am sure the death penalty will be abolished." Benn was prescient. Hanging would be abolished for most crimes - it technically applies to treason and regicide - later that year and Pascoe and Whitty would be the two of the last four to hang for their offences. The last two hangings, again involving coconspirators, took place in Liverpool and Manchester in August 1964.
Between 1875 and 1963, Bristol's Horfield Prison hanged 17 people, the eldest of whom was 49, the youngest just 21.

Net Ache

2007-01-18T13:58:00.000Z

Computer scientist Robert Wilensky once joked at a conference, "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
I’m not sure.
While there’s little original content on the web to rival the Bard - intentionally or randomly - there’s an awful lot of people posting content designed specifically to make a monkey out of you. Hardly Shakespearean, but clever, admittedly.
While the Internet and e-mail are generally really rather good things they’re also a gift to scamsters, grifters and mischief makers.
The web is aptly named when you consider the amount of suckers glued to its sticky strands by the anonymous confidence tricksters who inhabit it. Motivated by a mix of greed and desperation it only takes one person to hand over bank account details for a share in a non existent Nigerian diamond mine to make the millions of badly spelt and grammatically dubious spam e- mails dispatched electronically worth the while.
Everybody who works in an office is familiar with the daily ritual of clearing their e-mail in-boxes of spam mails. Spam is relentless. As fast as new software to quarantine it arrives then new ways to evade the defences are devised by the spammers.
We have a pretty sturdy system in place here at The Post. I call it the spam-bot and its job is to read all of my e-mails before I do, scanning for expletives and profanities. If it finds a virus or anything questionable it blocks the e-mail thus preventing my ambitions to own a part share in a non existent diamond mind.
Despite spam-bot’s best efforts, though, plenty of offensive e-mails get through. I generally ignore the ones from my mother but must admit my interest is tickled by offers of Viagra in bulk, invitations to buy stock in pretend companies and urgent letters from Barclays Bank asking for my account details.
The latter I particularly enjoy since I don’t have an account with Barclays. I like to fill in the forms with completely made up information, using my colleague Tim’s desk phone number as the account number. Then I press send. I like to think about the wannabe criminal masterminds at the other end of the web going, “Hey, look, David Cameron and Jade Goody share a bank account...”
I replied to one Nigerian con artist to correct him on a few punctuation and grammatical errors when he contacted me to ask if I’d like to, “very kindly allow me to put what is nearly £6,000,000 into your account for a holding purpoise so that when I come to collect it I will give you a ten percentage as my kind thank you.”
I told him that while his assumption that I was stupid and greedy was on track, this whole ‘I have to move out of the country etc” schtick was as old as the internet hills now and no one was going to fall for it. “Do try and come up with something more original” I pleaded.
That was that, I thought.
But he replied with a “thank you”. I warmed to him. Later, because we were mates, he offered me a 15% slice of the £6 million he had to get out of the country.
Am I writing this while sipping a cocktail beside the indoor swimming pool of my new £1.5million house in Sneyd Park? No, ‘sigh’, the millions languishing in a West African vault are as real as my up market suburban Bristol address.
See? Nobody’s falling for the internet con thing anymore. So the £1000’s spent annually by companies on securing their systems from time wasting, often virus carrying spam has got to be money well spent.
An in house e-mail we got last week didn’t exactly bear that out.

“ALL DRIVERS - PLEASE READ THIS WARNING
Please be aware of new car-jacking scheme. This is the method now being used please be aware of your vulnerability
Their Method:-
You walk across the car park, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and put into gear or reverse. You look into the rear-view mirror and you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window.
So, you put the vehicle in neutral, unlock your doors and jump out of the vehicle to remove that paper. When you reach the back of your vehicle the car-jackers appear out of nowhere, jump into your vehicle and take off!! Your engine was running, you would have left your briefcase etc. in the car and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your vehicle.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME THAT IS NOW BEING USED IN GLASGOW AND MANCHESTER AND IS MAKING ITS WAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY!”

Since this was sent from on high from our transport division (the very same message was doing the rounds in a few other Bristol companies, so they weren’t alone in the sucker stakes) there was clearly cause for concern. Certainly it sounded convincing.
But wait a minute, isn’t car-jacking an opportunist crime? Would a car jacker really loiter in a car park with a pack of Post-It notes? Um...no.
But in the interests of being a proper journalist, I checked. I called the news desks of the Manchester Evening News and The Glasgow Herald. Were those fair cities being plagued by stationery packing criminal masterminds? “Er... no” said Manchester, “um..I’ve never..I don’t...is this a serious question?” asked Glasgow. Strathclyde Police were sniffy to but confirmed that no such crime had ever been reported. Manchester’s police authority concurred, but much more pleasantly, so I think I know where I’d like to be car jacked in future.
Paste a snatch of the e-mail into Google and you’ll find the message intended to make our lives just that little bit darker, while pretending to make us safer, is, in fact, spam, a net-age version of a chain letter. Of American origin, it’s been around since 1997, at least. Finally, with some details changed to scare a British audience, it fetched up here. Indeed Strathclyde Police took it seriously when it was passed to them as ‘intelligence’ two years ago, admitted a press officer there, which perhaps explains their curt response to the subject.
Nonsense or not, it had the desired affect, anyone reading it becomes paranoid. I don’t drive myself, but even I checked the back of my coat for pieces of paper just in case someone was lying in wait to mac-jack me when I left for home.
It was sent out in our office with the best of intentions. But it goes to show, however hip to 21st living you think you are, there’s someone, somewhere online who knows your weak spot.

Ginger Whinge

2007-01-11T11:07:00.000Z

They’re the breed everyone loves to hate. Stand easy you pit bull type terriers, you’re not out of the dog house but you’re way down on the list, I’m talking red-heads.
Yes, copper-tops, carrot tops, Duracell heads, strawberry and Titian blondes, gingers (to rhyme with kingers) call them what you will, and you’ve a thousand different options, they’ve been feared, revered but mainly mocked for millennia.
While the ginger inflicted have had their moments - stand up Boudicca, the Tudors, Churchill and, um, Robin Cook - they’ve also included Judas, Cromwell and Lizzie Borden the axe murderess among the ranks, which has hardly helped the cause.
To anyone not sporting a shock of red the very word ginger conjures up images of wild, Celtic temperaments, indeed, most natural redheads in this country can traces their genes back to Britain and Ireland’s earliest settlers some 40 to 50,000 years ago.
The largest percentage of red heads remains in Ireland and Western Scotland while Wales and Cornwall boast a sizeable ginger contingent.
As the British gene pool turned into a reservoir so gingerness spread itself thin, to the point that natural red heads became something of a rarity. There’s safety in numbers and there's safety in merging in with herd. Those of a ginger persuasion have neither luxury. They stick out and everyone lets you know it.
My name is Cris Warren and I have been ginger for 37 years.
Last summer I was sat outside a cafe with my then six month old daughter in my arms feeding her a bottle. A family was sat a couple of tables over and the teenage daughter observing my red bearded self, commented, perhaps louder than she had intended, “he looks like an orangutan.”Her father made a “shushing” noise. He needn’t have. With apologies to orangutans, who are of course apes, I couldn’t have given a monkey’s. In fact, I didn’t even look up (although I did note when they left, that she possessed a face resembling a bucket with a dent in it and a backside so huge only someone in severe denial or a degree in irony would think to encase it in pink Velcro track suit trousers).
It’s water off a ginger crested duck’s back for me. I don’t think a month has gone by in my entire life when some wag, be they complete strangers, work colleagues or lifelong friends, hasn’t felt fit not to make some comment or reference to the colour of my hair.
Sometimes these are complementary, sometimes surprisingly rude, most of the time they’re good natured barbs meant as terms of endearment, yet on any level all of them cite my distinguishing feature and my character as being somehow one and the same.
Never mind my drop dead good looks, huge intellect, generosity and general out and out gorgeousness. Or even my saint like modesty. The fact that I have red hair seems to act as a visual cue for some people to make snap judgements about my temperament, my lineage and my choice of sun block.
My hair is their licence to take the mick.
As a kid it used to get to me. Not any more, I simply don’t care. My skin might be fair and start to burn if I so much as look at a holiday brochure, but it’s also thick. I’ve heard every ginger dig and diss going, and now they just bounce off my expressionless face.
I don’t know why some people dislike red-heads or even like red heads yet idly make reference to Duracell and carrot tops (have they not noticed how the top of a carrot is actually, like, green?) and what not whenever the topic of gingerness crops up.
I’ve heard arguments that while the trembling majority always love a whipping boy, in this PC age, there’s precious few minorities left you can legally take a verbal pop at as a cover for their own insecurities.
Perhaps there’s some truth in that.
Here’s an example.
Following months of snide remarks and cat calls, all centred on the colour of her hair, the stunningly pretty, articulate and funny 13 year old, ginger headed daughter of a friend of mine has decided enough is enough and has dyed her hair brown, surely the dullest, most inconspicuous colour on the spectrum. Which, of course, was her reasoning.
I sympathise with her. Mainly with the fact that her contemporaries are such pathetic sheep that challenged with a classmate who stands out from the flock, their response is to bully and cajole until she becomes ‘one of them’.
By the time she’s in her late teens I’m confident that she’ll embrace her gingerness - certainly there’ll be many, many young men who will want to - and not have to rely on the approval of her classmates to live her own life.
In the meantime she’s keeping her head down and hoping the insults will go away as long as her roots remain covered.
What’s especially interesting about her story is the hypothesis it throws up, because her half sister, who goes to a different school, is mixed race. If she had come home and asked her parents for permission to bleach her skin because of the trouble her colouring was causing her what sort of uproarious reaction do you think there would be?
Of course, you’re on dodgy ground if you equate the half-witted comments of some towards ginger hair with those of racists and bigots. But, in the same breath surely prejudice is prejudice in whatever shade it manifests itself and I like to think I wouldn’t ever dignify discrimination by acknowledging it.
When my daughter was born the number one question I was asked was a loaded, “is she...um..y’know, ginger?”. “No” I found myself quite unashamedly replying, “sort of sandy, strawberry blonde...”

Lidl rocks.

2007-01-11T10:51:00.000Z

Budget food and booze stuffs from Lidl you shouldn't think too hard about but once you do:

Dates: You've all heard of the Three Kings and their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, but what about the fourth king, the one who turned up with dates? Exactly. Dates are the Christmas version of the pumpkin at Halloween. They're everywhere you look for a month and nobody eats them. And with dates it's even trickier to hollow them out to put a candle in. They sell the all year round here.

Edible Chocolate Body Paint ( with body brush): In theory, edible chocolate body paint has much erotic potential. In practice though it's about as erotic as a bucket. The instructions tell you to warm the satisfyingly gloopy sauce, and "apply a thick coat". They probably mean of the sauce, don't put on a thick winter coat, it's not very erotic and you'll never get the stains out. Having painted chocolate onto your partner you're then supposed to "let nature take its course". Needless to say your brown goo-covered partner will look as if nature has taken its course and they will never be able to look at a Mars Bar again without a tear appearing in their eye.

Cans of wine: You can drink this in bed without risk of corkscrew-related injuries.

Advocaat: Nobody really knows what the hell this yellow stuff is but the moment you turn 70 you begin to crave it. It's made of egg yolk and alcohol.There's an interesting omelette opportunity somewhere.

Irish Meadow - cream and whiskey liquor: Yes, it's a copyright defying Baileys rip-off. But it's much cheaper and you don't have to endure those rubbish adverts full of yuppies miming and licking their lips in time to a trip-hop tune.

Pina Colada-style cocktail: Note the inclusion of the word "style". Coco Chanel pointed out that you can't buy style, but at £1.29 a bottle of this stuff we think we can finally prove her wrong.

1999 Vintage Cava: I carried out a blindfold taste test to determine whether anyone really could tell the difference between a Champagne and a Cava. They couldn't. The fact that the testees were all from a local primary school may have muddied the results but it's not an exact science.

Salt-based snacks with the labels in German: Mmmm, salt-based snacks.

Avruga cod roe: As disgusting as caviar (note the cheeky name. Avruga - say it fast, sounds like Beluga) but £100 cheaper.

Extra expensive extra virgin olive oil: Olive oil is overrated already. Extra virgin olive oil more so. For starters it's not even made out of spare virgins (though at this price you'd expect it to be), it's made out of green bean things. Secondly, how can you be an Extra Virgin? Even Jesus's mum was only a virgin. Good only for putting on view in a prominent place in the kitchen when you want to sell your house.

Ferrero Rocher type rip off chocolates: Only Italy could produce a pretentious chocolate and only a German supermarket could go one better by making their cloned version both prentious AND cheap.

Tense, Nervous A to Z-ache

2007-01-05T09:09:00.000Z

Don’t bother looking for the most boring place in Greater Bristol. I’ve found it for you.
It’s grid reference B4 on page 88 of the Bristol and Bath A-Z (2003 edition).
According to the map the square of land, just outside of Stockwood, is almost completely blank. Ok, so Bifield Close, where Stockwood seems to run out of stock and, indeed wood, edges minutely over the B3 border. A couple of thin black lines venture inside the box, but they break off, despondently. What they happen to indicate, the map symbol reference table helpfully omits to mention.
Perhaps it’s the trail of someone who once strayed into the grid and then thought better of it. Either way, it’s a fair guess B3 88 is a part of the Greater Bristol region you can avoid visiting and never once have the slightest niggle that you might have missed something.
Possibly out of pity for this expanse of ennui, the A-Z folk have printed BS14 in the middle.
This might be in case you want to write a letter to it.
Perhaps something along the lines of:
“Dear B3,
anything happened yet?
Any idea what those black lines are.
Me neither.
Or the A-Z.
Love etc. xxx”.
Some might argue that neighbouring nothing spot B4 88 could also rank as Bristol’s most boring square quarter mile.
But look closer and you’ll see that B4 88 has a footpath running through it.
These are the marks of civilisation, B4 88 is the hanging gardens of Babylon and grand central station combined, compared to lonely primordial B3 88, with no one to visit it and no one able to find a route across even if they wanted too.
And I don’t want to.
Thanks A-Z.
I only wish the pocket sized maps could be used to indicate other spots to see or avoid in the city.
Like, say, a yellow un-smiley face over the Bear Pit (1A 68), “£££” over Sneyd Park (3F 55) and an icon of a rabid looking squirrel swinging a big stick over Brandon Hill (D3 67).
The A-Z could go further still and print helpful comments on the map like:
“Park Street, big hill, all the good shops replaced by generic bars”.
Or, “Canygne Square, Clifton: If you have to look it up you can’t afford to live here”.
With this in mind I’ve recently started to research the rudest, most impolite areas of Bristol, mainly to find something else to moan about at work. But I think it could be a valuable addition to the service already provided by the A-Z.
It’s a tricky task though, because, of course, Bristol is one of the rudest cities in the country - worse than Stoke where they at least have a good excuse to be bad tempered.
Although we shouldn’t be, we’re really rather proud of the fact that Bristol has taken impoliteness and turned it into a mission statement.
For example, Real Bristolians - by that I mean those citizens born in Southmead (A3 42) or St Michael’s (E1 67) (or St Brenda’s - 2C 66- if you’re over 30) - like nothing better than to boast of the city as a welcome port and sneer behind the backs of incomers with dreadful estuary accents (the people who actually run the city).
In general the city’s drivers are becoming too eager to mirror London car uses when it comes to driving badly, honking horns and shouting at cyclists, who mount the pavements and shout at pedestrians.
Good service in shops and bars citywide is a lottery at the best of times. And, is it just me or have you noticed how everybody in Bristol swears all the time, too. I heard a middle age man the other day describe his lunch to his wife thus: “This ******* pasty is ******* lush, mind.” She replied, “******* lovely.” They were pensioners practically. What’s going on?
Actually, thinking back on it, it was pretty ******** funny.
But finding the worst concentration of discourteous behaviour in an inch and a bit square is hard, so widespread is the rejection of day to day politeness.
It may take more research but for now I can say that may findings don’t look favourably on F2 67 and E3 67 where Haymarket bleeds into St Augustine’s parade and then the Centre.
In the past few weeks I’ve witnessed and been party to dozens of incidents of low level rudeness. I’ll mannered children mealy mouthing off at their mothers, beggars harassing passers by, people emptying their car ashtrays into the gutter, drunks urinating against walls, cyclists bombing down the pavements.
I caught a bus from here yesterday. It was packed but I notice that one seat at the back is partly unoccupied. I go to sit down. The lone occupant of the seat, a student, has placed his rucksack on the empty place. I have to ask him to move it. With great huffing, tutting and general petulance he moves his bag to allow me to be seated.
At the next stop nearly everyone on the bus gets off. There is now ample opportunity for me to move to a seat of my own. But now I want to make a petty and useless point to the student - the worst kind, too, jeans AND brogues - about seats being for paying passengers, not designer backpacks. And when he wants to get off at College Green I have to get up, and I sigh, barely audibly, under my breath.
There’s something about those two squares on the grid that’s infectious.
Maybe I’m too sensitive to cope any longer with the brash hurly burly of city life. I long to get through the day without incurring the brief wrath of complete strangers. Sometimes I long to escape to where nothing happens.
Thanks to the A-Z, I know just the spot.

IVF Tales

2006-12-28T09:20:00.000Z

It’s ironic that while in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was pioneered in Bristol, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby” in 1978, the city remains one of the most difficult areas in the country for couples to receive free fertility treatment via the NHS.
As if the chances of conceiving in the laboratory weren’t already stacked against infertile couples, they also have to contend with an IVF post code lottery.
To make matters worse the practice in Bristol is to exclude women over the age of 40 from treatment.
On the surface this may make sense given the numbers of couples looking to IVF - fertilisation of an egg by sperm in a laboratory dish - as a solution and the resources stretched NHS.
But, many couples see IVF as last chance to conceive and may not make the decision to apply for treatment until their mid 30s.
The average waiting list for treatment in Bristol is four years long, by the time their number is up they may well be pushing or be 40, at which point they are no longer eligible for help.
While the local NHS IVF programme should be applauded for its work, there’s little wonder that many couples will re mortgage their homes, take out loans or spend their life savings in order to avoid lengthening the already emotionally draining period of treatment.
D, a Bristol based teacher in her mid 30s, and her partner had already tried the inter-uterine insemination (IUI) technique, whereby the sperm are washed and then placed directly into the uterus, three times without success before being placed on the NHS IVF programme waiting list. In IUI, a treatment available through the NHS, the success rate is around 20%.
At 25% IVF offers better odds but, emotionally and physically the process is similar, and the waiting list is agonisingly long.
“In Bristol it’s a four year waiting list on the NHS, and also you won’t receive NHS treatment if you are over 40. It’s a big issue here and it’s very unfair because, of course, some women apply for IVF in their mid thirties and by the time their turn comes around they’ve just turned 40 so they just drop off the list. It’s cruel and it can be heartbreaking.”
While waiting for their number to come up D and her partner decided to go private.
The benefits of not having to endure years of waiting come at a cost though. Around £3,500 a procedure, and with no sure fire guarantee that the result will be a successful pregnancy.
“We went to Bath, we’d been recommended the clinic by friends but also, we’d been in Bristol for all the IUI treatment and it was nice to have a change of scene, like a fresh start.
We talked about success rates with the consultant, mine was one in four for my age, which obviously changes the older you get, and then, basically the procedure starts”.
The procedure starts with what’s known as ‘sniffing’. A drug, called a GnRH agonist, is administered via nasal spray, it temporarily shuts down the hormonal lines of communication between the brain and the ovaries and prevents ovulation.
In simple terms it creates a blank canvas for conception by flushing away all the hormones a woman produces to make way for fresh hormones created by a course of injections.
Says D, “The sniffing basically causes a mini-menopause and it can make you feel awful. So when I started injecting hormones back in you actually start to feel great, it’s a kind of artificial high, not all women get that, but I responded pretty well to it. I was using a drug called Menopur, it’s the hormone that helps you produce the egg and it’s one of the real costs of IVF because it’s really, really expensive. So I did that for about 10 to 13 days, but some women may take longer to produce their eggs so you have to keep buying it as you go along, it’s around £200 a packet and obviously the cost of your cycle keeps increasing. But once you have a satisfactory number of eggs, I think for me it was about 15 days”.
When the eggs are ready to be harvested the patient is put under a local anaesthetic in the clinic and the eggs are removed. It was ironic, because the day I had my eggs removed there was four of us on this little ward all waiting for the same procedure. The chance of success are about 1 in 4, I remember thinking that, in theory at least, one of us was going to be the lucky one. It was an odd feeling, there was one couple there, you don’t really get to know the other people in for treatment, but there was this one couple who had been through the process a few times and it was obviously a very desperate time for them, it is very emotional. The thing is, when you’re going through the procedure you feel ok about it, because you feel in control and that you’re actually getting somewhere. Infertility can make you feel like you haven’t a hope so when you start the treatment, there’s always a bit of hope at the end of it.”
Although the treatment gave D a feeling of progress, what she, and her partner, didn’t anticipate was the utter helplessness that would dictate the days that proceeded the removal of her eggs. “They take the eggs, put them in a Petri dish and add the sperm and then you have to wait for the ‘phone call to tell you how many embryos have formed. And there might not be any. It’s agonising waiting to hear. Really, it’s horrible. But it gets worse. Because even though I got the phone call to say that five embryos had formed they have to be graded, so it could turn out that none of them would be healthy enough to be implanted. So we sat in this room a couple of days later and were told the grades of the embryos, it was like getting your exam results at school. We had two that were good enough to be implanted and three that literally didn’t make the grade.”
With a healthy embryo implanted another two weeks of uncertainty follows before a pregnancy can be confirmed. “It makes you feel like you are no longer in control again, suddenly it feels like it could all come crashing down. You feel like you daren’t do anything, bending down, running up the stairs, carrying shopping... which, if you think about it is silly because you wouldn’t feel like that if you were pregnant at that stage and you hadn’t gone through the treatment, but...y’know, looking back I know why I felt like that, it is devastating if it’s not successful, I know from the experience of the IUI how awful it is when it doesn’t work, so I suppose I had that in mind and you’re on tenterhooks the whole time, you don’t want to get too excited or too hopeful because for every 25% that do work, 75% don’t, which isn’t good odds, is it? And you don’t even want to think about all the odds stacked against the pregnancy going full term itself. The word nervous doesn’t do it justice.”
The procedure, as D’s bonny four month old baby girl can testify, was a success. But the initial weeks of the pregnancy were no less nerve wracking. “When I found out I was pregnant we were both stunned, we just went out for a curry and didn’t really talk about it . I actually felt numb, I didn’t want to feel anything, actually, just in case it all went wrong. It took until the six week scan, in fact if I’m honest as late as the 20 week scan, until I convinced myself that I was actually pregnant. I hadn’t really anticipated how stressful the first six weeks would be, with IVF they wait for six weeks to scan to see if there’s a heartbeat - which is all you can really see at that stage - but I really hadn’t prepared NYSE for how hard I would find that time. The clinic were supportive in that they were very straight and factual with us about everything that but emotionally, I think some kind of support group, with people in the same boat, would have been really useful to help you get through the waiting, and also to learn what to expect and how to deal with all those emotions, especially if it fails. IVF is like being in limbo, it’s hard to describe how draining it can be, for the both of you. But I look at my beautiful baby daughter and I know it was worth it.”
For male partners IVF is just as emotionally (and physically) draining.
K, a civil servant, and his partner also opted to go private for IVF treatment.
Now the proud parent of a healthy two year old boy, K remembers the experience as an emotional roller-coaster ride with moments of surreal hilarity.
“From the male perspective it’s, fundamentally, a case of masturbating in a public building without fear of arrest, not to put to fine a point on it” quips K, “You have to provide sperm for testing and for introducing to the eggs so at the clinic you go to this nasty little room and, well, y’know. But everybody in the building knows what the rooms is for. All the men, all the women, everybody who works there. It’s close to the waiting room and you have to walk past it on the way to the toilets. The first couple of times I went there I didn’t realise that there was even a lock. Anyway, once you’re in there, there’s a settee a curtain you can draw and, believe it or not, a box of tissues. There’s also a box file with the word ‘EROTICA’ printed on it. It was full of quite unpleasant porn magazines, which I looked at briefly and then put away feeling slightly unclean. There’s an amusing sign in the room which I’m sure the staff get fed up of people pointing out to them, it says, ‘please pull for assistance’. There was also a CD player, but only one CD, “the Best Christmas Album In The World Ever”, trouble was, this was in April. I thought, what the hell would people think if they were walking past and they heard ‘we’re having a wonderful Christmas Time’ blaring out in the middle of April. I should think they could only draw one conclusion. So it’s not a great start.”
As it turned out K’s sperm sample was healthy, but this wasn’t necessarily cause for celebration. “When people knew that we were going for IVF treatment people kept saying to me ‘oh, don’t worry 99 times out of 100 it turns out to be the woman’. It was as if you could apportion blame to infertility somehow. It was a ridiculous thing to say to someone in my place, I mean how would that make us any more able to have a baby? It makes no difference whether it was me or my wife or both of us combined who were infertile. I was surprised by the number of times men would say that to me.”
The reason why couples put themselves through the rigours of IVF is, of course, because they want to start a family. But the process puts relationships to the test.
“I’ve always wanted children and to find someone who wants to have children with you and then you both find out that there’s a strong possibility that you can’t is gob smacking. It’s a shock”. Going through the IVF process was hard going for both K and his wife. “There were times when she was quite upset by it all, it’s not a cheery process by any stretch, I tended to make light about it to cope with it, it’s not that I didn’t take it seriously, but it was just my way, otherwise you resign yourself to despair that it’s never going to happen. I’m a glass half empty kind of person, when we were told we only had a 10% chance of success I convinced myself that we had no chance at all, that way it kind of cushioned the blow for me”.
Financially, says K “it was probably better not to think about it. I mean, you wouldn’t put £6000 on a horse with a 10% chance of winning, would you? We don’t have a bottomless pit of money, and you have to accept that it probably won’t work first time, so how many times are you going to be able to pay? It’s a long process and we weren’t getting any younger, I was approaching 40 at the time, what if were still doing IVF into our mid 40s, would we even have the energy to start a family then?”
Luckily K and his wife only had to endure one IVF procedure. “It was nerve wracking, as I said, I’m a pessimist about most things and in this case, partly to defend yourself against things going wrong I’d convinced myself that it was never going to happen, even though, at the back of my mind, I knew that the 10% shot we’d been given was still better odds than we’d had before IVF. I remember distinctly one morning we were at home. My wife was in the bathroom and I was drinking coffee in the kitchen, staring out the window. I watched the neighbour’s cat climb into our garden and be sick. Suddenly I heard my wife come thundering down the stairs. She ran into the kitchen waving a pregnancy test. She said, ‘guess what?’, and I said, “I know, the neighbour’s cat’s just been sick in our garden’. Of course, I knew that she was pregnant, which was wonderful. But even then, for about a month afterwards we didn’t trust the pregnancy test, it was only when we went for the first scan that it hit home that, ‘yes, we’re having a baby.’ which was the point in my life that, in most respects at least, I became an optimist.”

All The Booze That's Fit To Print

2006-12-28T09:10:00.000Z

Yeah, yeah, I know they did this on Celebrity Big Brother last year, but I pipped them to the post a whole bunch of months earlier, so.....

For the inquisitive mind the festive season conjures up many questions: Why do we put charms in the pudding? Is there such a man as Santa Claus? Will he appreciate the mince pies and the glass of sherry you left out? What sort of presents does he give his elves? What did baby Jesus spend his gold on? Why does it only ever snow at Christmas in the movies? Will the corner shop be open? Will aunty Anne go home before Easter this year?
Most remain unanswerable and are handed down like quizzical heirlooms to confuse future generations. We’d argue it’s best to leave it that way, too.
Like parlour games, the big Christmas questions are part of the magic and tradition peculiar to the season.
They’re harmless enough enquiries that need only tax us once a year – not least because to set out to solve them would require painstaking research and Nasa-sized budgets.
And anyway, what would you be left with at the end of your quest to solve a Christmas mystery?
Would you really derive any pleasure from watching the rosy glow drain from the cheeks of an excited tot when you pedantically explain – using a flip chart and laser pointer – that Santa Claus would find it impossible to deliver presents to all the children of the world in one night – even if he just singled out the ones who’d got through the year with an unblemished behaviour record?
No, I suspect you wouldn’t.
But there is one Christmas quandary that wouldn’t necessarily change the spirit of the festival were you to discover its secret.
Namely, how many chocolate liqueurs do you need to eat before you are over the legal limit to drive?
Come on, face it, you’ve always wanted to know.
Chocolate liqueurs are only ever eaten once a year, and with good reason. They’re a complete let down.
Sure, they look good, shaped and wrapped to resemble miniature bottles of booze. But once the foil is off and you’ve bitten through to the globule of syrupy, sugary boozy goodness within, you soon realise there’s a very long way to go before you’ll be standing on the table dancing with a turkey carcass and singing Mistletoe And Wine.
However, I'm convinced that with perseverance and a huge tolerance for chocolate filled with the cheapest booze in Christendom, it can be done.
And here’s how ...
First, purchase three boxes of Marks & Spencer Liqueur Assortments (£4.99) and three disposable breathalyzers (£3.99 from Halfords).
As a test, blow into the breathalyzer bag. The crystals above the blue line in the tube should remain orange. If they turn green at or above the blue line, your blood-alcohol content is 0.8 per cent and you should not be driving or operating heavy machinery such as a JCB or a word processor.
Each box of liqueurs contains 28 Scotch whisky, Amaretto, Irish cream, port, rich cream sherry, brandy and orange curacao (a pokey little number and definitely the strongest of the lot) syrup-centred bottle-shaped chocolates with an average alcohol by volume of four per cent – about the same as the AV of a lager.
How much alcohol it takes to render you dangerous behind the wheel is dependent on a number of factors such as weight, height and gender.
The only real failsafe is that if you have even one alcoholic drink you shouldn’t drive. But is this the case with chocolate liqueurs?
Being 6ft 2in and weighing 17 and a half stone, I find it somewhat hard to believe that a few dozen chocolates could render me senseless.
The results are almost interesting. I proceed to unwrap and eat/drink the liqueurs.
After four, I note that all the flavours taste the same.
After eight, my throat’s become claggy and my teeth hurt. I am, however, still able to drive home without fear of arrest.
After 28, I have lost the will to live and wish to seek solace in real booze. But I persevere. I have another 56 miniature bottles of syrupy boozy gloop to go.
By the last choc of box number two, I’ve started to slur to the rest of the features desk that I used to be in the SAS and I’d gladly take all of them on anytime they like. This, I think, is the chocolate talking – time perhaps for another breath test.
I don’t feel drunk. Just sick. But get this – the crystals in the next breath test are definitely turning green and edging towards the blue line, meaning that I’m, well, sober. But possibly on the way to being slightly merry. One more box for the road.
Like Cat Stevens didn’t say, the third box of chocolate liqueurs is the deepest. I feel sick to my very soul and am starting to hallucinate. Tiny chocolate bottles of Amaretto are dancing in formation on the table in front of me to the tune of the 1812 Overture.
Wee bottles of foil-wrapped port are telling me to stab my boss with a carrot. “Do it, do it, do it!” they scream as I desperately fumble around my desk for root vegetables.
I’m concerned that my colleagues are looking at me strangely and bite off the top of another liqueur to dull the pain and ease the paranoia.
After 84 liqueurs, I surely must be over the limit. I blow up a breathalyzer balloon. The green crystals are just touching the blue line, meaning there is some alcohol in my bloodstream and I’ve finally found the answer to the original question.
Yes, you can get very, very, very slightly inebriated if you eat three giant boxes of chocolate liqueurs. In the same way that you can from drinking a can of Fosters.
I am nowhere near drunk but I do think I am going to be sick.
Happy Christmas.

Nature/nurture

2006-12-11T15:46:00.000Z

As a teenager I had a holiday job cleaning the cells of Redland police station. On my second day I was asked to stop what I was doing — welcome, since I was elbow deep scouring a cell privy — and go to the Superintendent’s office.
Part of Redland nick is a Victorian building that from the outside looks charming, like a quaint village police station with flower baskets and cheery, ruddy-faced “bobbies”. But beyond the front desk I remember it as a cloying, institutional building greyly, grimly designed in that cramped, hopelessly unfunctional style the Victorians did so well.
Walking from the cells, up staircases and along corridors with walls that appeared to close in on you, I began to feel a sense of foreboding. Had I been using too much Mr Sheen? Not enough Brasso? Perhaps the Superintendent was just welcoming me on board?
In his office, sitting behind his desk, light bouncing off the pips on his shoulders, the granite-faced Superintendent was reading a piece of paper. Without looking up he grunted, “Are you a relation of ********* Warren? Is he your father?”
My heart sank as my head nodded. I knew what would happen next. (Was I about to be reminded that my father, a man I hardly knew, was a great, long-lost mate of the Super’s? That my dad had entrusted to the Super the deeds to a huge house, with buried treasure in the garden? That the Super had been asked to give the house to me on reaching the age of 16, after first conspiring to get me a job as a cleaner in his nick? No ...)
The Super’s otherwise motionless face coloured. Like a splot of crimson ink landing in a glass of water. Measuredly he asked. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”
Shrug. My father had been in and out of prison for various misdemeanours (breaking into chemists for speed, fighting, stealing, general idiocy) since his teens. The sheet of paper was obviously a list of his stays in various remand wings, prisons and police cells — maybe even the one I’d just cleaned.
And here was his son, the one he hardly knew, on the pay roll of the Redland nick.
Clearly, I was guilty as charged, whatever it was that I was actually being charged with.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on you.” he said, both a promise and threat.
Dazed, I went back to my cell.
Later, mopping the cell floor, the Superintendent popped his head around the reinforced door. All friendly, like. “History tends to repeat itself. You’d be advised to get used to the cells.”
Eighteen years later, I just found the perfect retort. “Unreservedly, you will atone for the sins of your fathers.” All I could come up then, though, was “shove it up your arse”. Although, of course, I waited until he was out of earshot.
It’s a shock to learn that simply sharing genes and surname was enough to get a jailer rattling his keys like a tambourine. I’d been condemned.
My father, who himself was fatherless, started adult life down the mines in Radstock. He was a Jack the lad; he dabbled in petty crime, went carousing and had a kid — a sister, whom I met first last year.
At the age of about 18 he discovered his talent for acting. After some heavy drinking, and a spot of affray, he went to Bristol Old Vic school; later there was some thieving and some proper acting (ironically, including a role in Z Cars). He had some more kids, became a jailbird, cider-house raconteur and alcoholic, leading to his current role: deceased.
Now with a CV like that you could, perhaps, see some reasoning behind the not-that-Super- intendent’s attitude that criminality is in the blood.
But I think I’m more qualified than him to argue that it’s nurture rather than nature that determines whether I clean a floor with the mop or I steal the mop and then strip it and sell it as parts.
Because, from an early age, I was raised by my stepfather. A patient, funny, honest, hard-working craftsman who, with my mum, provided a loving, safe, happy home for his five children and brought us up pretty much to be successful human beings.
My brother and I may have fallen by the wayside a few times, and I’ve even, I’m ashamed to say, spent a night in the cells much like the ones I used to clean, but he’s always been there, patiently putting us back on the right track.
When I have kids I want to be exactly like my stepfather. He’s my old man.
My biological father wasn’t. There’s a big difference.
He may have provided the sperm that developed into 50 per cent of me; he may have had a good reason for leaving my mother to cope with three small kids when he popped out “for some fags”; I may have forgiven him when we eventually met, bonded with him for a couple of years before I felt his hand lose its grip on a BRI ward, but I never once referred to him as my old man. Because he wasn’t.
All of the above I would have liked to have pointed out in the office of that pompous copper who acting above his station promoted himself to judge.
Instead, I have to be content with writing about it 18 years later. I still feel hurt by what he said, but then I figure maybe he was just projecting his own insecurities, wrapped up in a fancy uniform, on anyone lower he could find.
I blame the parents.

Glaxo Babies: Dreams Interrupted

2006-12-11T15:40:00.000Z

Glaxo Babies - Dreams Interrupted (Heartbeat/Cherry Red)

Awkward, shy, obstinate and bloody minded, the Glaxo Babies were the unsung pioneers of Bristol’s post punk scene. Frequently overlooked their handful of records and live gigs in the late 1970s would prove enormously influential. And important. Debut single This Is Your Life remains a true punk classic of focussed anger and dismay at the world of work, while the seething Christine Keeler pointed to cult stardom. Like John Profumo, it never came. Internal politics, alright ‘musical differences’, caused their death in infancy. The bile and contempt of the early releases were skewered through with disco in an attempt to create a funk-punk fusion. It was only partially successful, not everyone’s heart was in it by then. While the wrong-jazz experimentation Free Dem Cells is an eerie and chilling pre-cursor to the dreaded T*** H** of a decade later, the dancefloor directed Shake (The Foundations) just sounds like the Average White Band, with Mrs Mills on piano. And yet it’s strangely brilliantNow an esteemed music journalist, singer Rob Chapman’s liner notes are excellent, explaining just how stubbornly off message The GBs were in the face of fashion directives from London. A stance that would benefit later Bristol bands no end.

Babies Are Better Than Bands

2006-12-11T15:36:00.000Z

I used to sing in a band, I’m a drummer, really, but there were two drummers and I lost the toss up. I didn’t do too badly, though. In fact I practically did it for a living, once.
There were five of us, making a racket, enjoying the gang mentality. We weren’t very good, but in our teens, in the early 90s, it felt necessary, vocational.
Although that might have been a collective reluctance to sign off the dole, get jobs and move away from the parental home.
It was a life of ear splitting rehearsals in dank cellars with dodgy electrics during which egos bristled, single cans of Super Brew shared, deeply personal misspelt lyrics on folded sheets of A4 deconstructed and laughed at by Philistine bass players.
Dreams of Brixton Academy, gigs playing to four people, that kind of thing.
The highlight of my pop career was getting a phone call from John Peel. Swiftly followed by a low point. My mother answered it.
The band had just released a record. Released as in we made a half decent recording of two songs and got a couple of hundred singles pressed up for peanuts to sell at gigs. I kept forgetting to bring them along so they stayed unopened for months in a brown cardboard box under my bed.
Accompanied by a badly written press release, our campaign to reclaim the charts resulted in a total of two singles being dispatched to the radio. One went to Bruno Brookes, because we thought we were achingly ironic, and one to John Peel because, as the bass guitarist pointed out, “he’ll play any old tosh if it sounds like you recorded it in a toilet.”
Philistine.
Peel was God. Get a play on his show and things change.
Three to four weeks later: “A man from Radio One phoned you up this morning” says mum, matter of factly. Instant wake up, jaw hits floor, snakes alive in my stomach. “I can’t remember who he was, he didn’t leave a number, he just said he liked your record.” she looked at me, a little disappointed, “you haven’t made a record have you?”After frantic cross examination I worked out that it was John Peel and that he’d called to say he was going to play said record, sometime that week on his show.
Joy was matched to horror when Mum said she told him I was still in bed. Apparently there then followed a 10 minute conversation about how his sons spend most of the day in bed too and that he was sometimes at a loss to understand the teenage mind.
“He was very nice, actually” said mum, “he went on a bit, though”.
I wanted to fly and die at the same time.True to his word he did play the record. Twice, actually. It sounded a bit flat on the radio. But it was most righteously cool, nonetheless. And he didn’t mention the cosy chat with my mum, either.
As a result the band got wider attention. The three or four people who came to our gigs brought their girlfriends. But stranger still we were advanced some money by a proper record label as a “development” deal. We opened a band bank account. We were meant to spend wisely on rehearsing in a suitable environment and recording a really good demo tape with a proper producer so that we might develop as a tight, honed unit with chart potential.
We spent most of it at the pub at the end of our street and developed the DTs.
The drummer was never the same. Always delicately balanced between drunk and catatonic, being taken seriously by a record label sent him over the edge.
“This is the quiet bit, Phil” we would shout mid-song in rehearsals, “stop shaking”. Towards the end of our ‘career’ we decided, by necessity, to ‘go acoustic’, simply so Phil could just play the maracas.
When it came to making a really good recording with a proper producer we found, to our great surprise, that we only had a hundred quid left.
This was bad on many levels, the highest one, the one we would likely to be dropped from bound and gagged, feet dipped in concrete, was the fact that, technically, what we’d already spent wasn’t actually our money in the first place. We went to the pub to worry about this.
The brilliant idea we came up with was to change the name of the band.
As you may have gathered by now, our commitment to re pointing the wall of sound, to shaking up the pop charts to their very foundations with songs bursting with searing and catchy indictments of modern Britain, was questionable.
Truth is, I think we preferred talking about being in a band, rather than being in a band. We were a bunch of chancers with guitars who had a lucky break. And then broke it.
As it happened the record label who gave us the cash were bought out, ironically by a multi-national whose roots were in the brewing industry. The A&R man assigned to us was sacked, as were most of the label’s roster of artists.
Other than one phone call from a teenager in London who now claimed to be running the legal and contracts department we never heard from them again.
I guess we still owe them the money, and they still own the rights to the recordings we never made but we broke up pretty soon after that and moved to different parts of the country.
We’re all still friends, occasionally we meet up and discuss the possibility of reforming as a maraca ensemble for shaky Phil’s funeral. Phil, bless him, doesn’t think this is particularly funny, he’s done the 12 steps and hasn’t had a drop in a decade. He likes to remind us “teachers, journos and house husbands” that he is the only one of us who’s made a career out of rock and roll.
He sticks up fly posters for bands, £15 per 100.

Chelsy? Spare Us!

2006-12-11T15:32:00.000Z

She thinks that woolly mammoths still roam the earth, wonders why buffalo don’t prey on deer, has crashed four cars in the space of a year and has named her deformed toe ‘ET’.
So it is, then, that Chelsy Davy, serious squeeze of third in line to the throne Prince Harry, can claim exactly the right credentials and soaring intellect to become (all going well) a potential member of ‘the firm.’
With the exception of the comedy of the aristocracy recoiling in horror at the thought of a princess with a council estate name, so far, so what? Wild boy Hezza’s choice of a ditzy, perma-partying ‘Fergie’ to compliment his more regally behaved brother’s ‘Diana’ (real name Kate Middleton, but do you really expect the UK press to let her move out of the shadow cast by the ‘Queen of Hearts’?) is hardly news beyond the tabloids and lands somewhere betwixt ho and hum in terms of affecting our day to day lives in Bristol, right?
Well, no, actually, because the ‘zany’ Zimbabwean, whose multi-millionaire Pa was, until a recent tiff, great mates with that cheery despot Robert Mugabe and his cabinet, is moving here soon to take up a post grad course at Bristol University.Yes, hot from drinking South Africa dry of Sambucca during her recent £10k plus 21st birthday celebrations, Chelsy is staggering Bristol-wards to have a go at our stocks, between lectures at the city’s prestigious, but not exactly Oxbridge, uni.
Thankfully, going on her recent observations about the eating habits of buffalo, it’s not zoology but politics that Chelsy will be studying.
I’ll leave what that says for the future of political thinking in this country for you to ponder.
Chelsy’s move to rainy Bristol from sunny (but murderous) Johannesburg is apparently in response to Harry’s wishes for her to be closer to him when he’s on leave from the army - his dad’s modest little Highgrove pad is less than 30 miles away - which is sweet.
It’s a nice plug for the university, too and validates all the efforts they’ve made to move away from being the destination of choice for braying, pampered toffs.
The rest of the city can look forward to seeing itself as a backdrop to endless front pages, magazine splashes and news bulletin “and finally’s” of Chelsy doing this and that but nothing really in particular.
When Chelsy does slope into town the sheer volume of paparazzi milling around on the top of Park Street are likely to bring the city, already teetering daily on traffic grid lock, to a complete halt. Heat magazine will probably open a regional office. Points West and The West Tonight will think it’s Christmas come early.
For my part in the forthcoming media scrum I’d like to volunteer my services to the local paper as a ‘Nearly A Royal But Not Quite If Granny Has Anything To Do With It’ correspondent.
I’m no royalist but I am qualified to crash cars and neck flaming Sambuca’s with the best of them. It’s probably best not to ask who’s going to be paying for all the new security that will be deemed necessary, but if ever there was a reason your council tax bill isn’t itemised... Still, maybe Chelsy and Hezza will provide their own security.
Harry’s gran is the commander of the British forces afterall, so she could probably lend him a tank or an aircraft carrier.
And Chelsy’s dad is a big game hunter who made his fortune charging Americans to shoot the elephants on his reserve in Zimbabwe. Suffice to say he’s probably quite handy with a 12 bore and could provide adequate protection , although I think Bristol Zoo ought to think about applying for an ASBO, just in case.
So preparations for the ‘Chelsy in Bristol’ industry are well underway. But what about poor old snubby nose herself? Landing here is likely to be something of a culture shock for young Chels, nick-named Dubya by Harry not because of her political ambitions on a global stage but, well, because he thinks she’s a bit thick.
Sure, Johannesburg, where Chelsy’s currently finishing an undergraduate degree, is a racy place to live in; notable, among other things, for being both the playground of the rich and unpleasant and the murder capital of the world.
But Bristol is something else entirely and though we can’t claim to top the homicide charts the traffic’s murder and the accent outside of Clifton impenetrable.
So, where will she live? Where will she dine, how can she spend her trust fund when there isn’t even a Harvey Nicks here, and where’s the nearest polo pitch?
Lovely as it is to imagine Chelsy taking lodgings in Knowle West or Bedminster and catching the bus to Park Street everyday it’s pretty much a given she’ll move into a plush Clifton Village apartment - say on Saville Place, The Mall, The Paragon or if she’s really pushing her luck and Harry’s ‘I Do’ buttons, ultra posh Windsor Terrace - and not leave the square mile of the ‘village’ the entire time she’s studying.
While the small but loud brogues and jeans brigade that inhabit Clifton in term time think that going to the bottom of Park Street is slumming it the rest of the city can at least sleep easy in the knowledge that it’s unlikely we’ll be overhearing chats about hunting , balls and what a drag it is to own Cornwall on the bus into work. But when Chelsy comes to town we’re all going to be interested. Whether we like it or not.

Ode to a scruffy fiver

2006-12-11T15:28:00.000Z

It’s two weeks till payday and as usual I’m about to call on my overdraft to finance the next fortnight. This half in credit half in debt monthly cycle is a depressing indication that I’m living just beyond my means, but then who isn’t?
In fact with personal debt in the UK wavering around a staggering £3 trillion I should be feeling rather pleased with myself that I start each pay packet in the black, even if it is only for about ten days. Like many people, and nearly everyone I know my age, I’m in denial when it comes to my personal finances.
But, as is becoming the fashion in Britain, I’m looking for someone or something else to blame. And I think I’ve found it. In, of all places, my wallet. No, not my poor abused credit card or my equally maltreated debit card, but the crumpled, ripped and Sellotaped five pound note that, until I spend it, is the thin blue cotton fibre line between staying in the black and spiralling into the red. This flaccid, fading, worn piece of rag should read “I promise to pay the bearer this tatty rag”. I’ve torn it again getting it out of my wallet to inspect it, like my finances it is a mess. I’ll be almost embarrassed to swap it for lunch later.
It’s not just my current fiver that’s in a state, though. It seems to be every £5 note that’s passed through my wallet in the last few years. Unless I keep getting the same note, each time in an increasingly distressed state, I’d wager there’s something afoot here. “There’s no conspiracy,” says a spokesperson for the Bank Of England. Honestly? “Honestly. Although, I can see that it might look like that to some people.” Skint journalists for instance? No comment.
So what is the problem with £5 notes, then?
The Bank Of England say it’s down to the fact that there are so many £5 notes in constant circulation, over £1 billon worth. “The circulation really hasn’t changed for a number of years but the way we and business view £5 notes has. For instance, many retailers simply don’t bother to bank £5 notes any more, they keep them overnight in the tills as change which is given to customers who exchange it in other shops, so a five pound note will rarely get back to the bank’s sorting systems who would replace torn and scruffy notes when they encountered them”.
We the consumers are also to blame, reckons the Bank of England, “because we don’t really respect a £5 note like, say a £10 or a £20 or a £50, like the shops we view them as small change, we crumple them up and stuff them in our pockets, they get badly worn and torn and in quite a state, but because, unlike other higher denominations, they often don’t make it back to the banks they don’t get replaced. People seem to accept £5 notes in bad condition, even when they’re held together with old bits of sticky tape. As The Bank Of England we’re not responsible for issuing the notes, and as far as I know there aren’t any plans to recall the old notes and reissue new ones, it does happen but in a very slow trickle”.
So that’s why your fiver’s in such a state, it’s a cycle of abuse. We can’t live with them so we screw them up (I was once in a relationship based along similar lines - I was the fiver - but that’s a different story altogether) and we can’t live without them so we don’t take them to the bank to be cared for. Who knows, maybe the Bank Of England has a special section that rehabilitates old notes with a stern pep talk and a steaming iron.
As it stands we seem to be ashamed of them. In fact a fiver says you’re harbouring a dirty and tatty blue secret in your wallet or purse right now and you can’t wait to get rid of it. But I still think there’s a more sinister game at play and the banks are rolling loaded dice.
As it stands I’m still six pounds in credit with my bank, we’ll call them NatWest, but I won’t be able to go to an ATM and get another fiver out because banks don’t load them in their machines anymore. Which means I have to take a tenner out to buy lunch and bus fares tomorrow, which puts me in the red by £4 and kickstarts the bank charges a full day before they need to.
Yes, I know I could go to the bank and draw the money out, but I only get an hour for lunch and have you seen the queues? I do enough clock watching when I’m at work, I don’t intend to do it in my lunchtime as well.
Thankfully I’m by no means financially stricken (just embarrassed) and, like I say, I’m used to going into the red and have the facility to support it each month. But if I was on the dole or living on a pension then I can immediately see the benefits of being able to draw a lone fiver from my bank account.
The banks can’t, although when it comes to being able to make charges in a round about way I think they can. A spokesperson from one institution, let’s call them NatWest, tells me, “NatWest stopped dispensing £5 notes from its cash machines around ten years ago. Cash machines can only physically hold so many notes, therefore stocking the machines with notes of a higher denomination means there is more cash available for a greater number of customers. As the averagewithdrawal amount at our cash machines is £63, there is therefore little demand for a low value note like the £5”.“Low value” is a telling description that speaks volumes about our changing attitude to money, the one that’s shifted from a religious adherence to saving to a carefree accumulation of credit (and subsequently debt).
Once, a five pound not falling from a Birthday card made a child feel like a millionaire, now you’d feel sorrow and shame for the stingy well wisher.

Milk Round

2006-12-11T15:24:00.000Z

Although what I am about to relate could hardly be construed as a particularly earth shattering confession to past misdemeanours, I know that I will feel some relief for unburdening it onto a page.
During the 1980s I was a milkman’s assistant. My mother got me the position by leaving a rolled up message for our milkman in one of the empties. She told me it would be character building. And that I’d look cute in the uniform.
She was right about the uniform. I especially liked the peak cap worn at a jaunty angle.
Sartorial benefits aside though, I hated the job.
The resentment was all the more bitter because it was during the school summer holidays. When I should have been having long luxurious lie ins, followed by lazy days doing nothing in particular, I was dragging myself out of bed at 4am, loading a battery operated truck with heavy crates of gold and silver top and then being ordered to run up and down various garden paths depositing bottles on door steps.
All this in the company of a clinically depressed milkman who broke all the laws of milk delivery personnel by neither whistling or making cheeky comments to anyone who happened to up at the same time as us.
You might think that 4.30am on a summer’s morning is, on balance, rather a pleasant place to be, working to the soundtrack of the dawn’s chorus and illuminated by a glorious rising sin.
Don’t you believe it.
My memory of that summer is one of miserable drizzle and cold and the thankless, never ending travail of getting milk to the city’s cornflakes. It was a relentless and soul destroying task. By the second day of doing it I was planning of ways not to do it and it was an article in the Evening Post that gave me a cunning plan.
I’d read that blue tits had learnt that if they pecked through the foil tops of milk-bottles on doorsteps they’d be able to feast on the cream at the top. Blue tits were a growing menace to milk-men in the city because their customers were starting to complain that the thought of a greedy little beak supping their milk before them was putting them off their cornflakes.
Some customers were canceling their deliveries, opting for unsullied milk in cartons from supermarkets.
An idea was hatched.
The next day for every two pints I delivered to a house I would, out of sight of the milk float, poke a small, beak shape hole in the tip (using the lid of a Bic pen) and sip a little of the cream at the top.
This went on for the rest of the week.
In addition to all the extra calcium I was getting in my diet, it looked like it was having the desired effect. My boss was getting complaints. So many in fact that he took to taking a catapult along on the rounds - “just in case we see any blue tits”.
After about two weeks of my skimming milk, my boss and I actually bonded in a strange way. I would spy imaginary blue tits and he would dash off in pursuit, loading his catapult with gravel from his customers’s drives. And blue tit fever spread to the households.
We would start to see customers more regularly at dawn, waiting on their doorsteps to gather the milk in before the blue tits got there.
I noticed a physical change in my maudlin boss, people actually smiled and said hello to him, and he smiled and said hello back.
On my last week on the job he actually started whistling, like a proper milkman. Tunelessly and relentlessly, but at least he was happy.
Summer ended and I went back to school, older, wiser and, thanks to all that extra milk, with very strong teeth. I never do another milk round again.
My boss, my mother tells me, is still doing the rounds into his late 60s. Whether he’s still armed with a catapult I guess I’ll never know.

About My Gravy

2006-12-11T15:22:00.000Z

I often have friends round for Sunday dinner. They’re jolly affairs that last for hours with conversation that is lubricated by liberal quantities of wine and beer. I like to lay on a good spread and usually serve up a joint of beef, roast potatoes and parsnips, plenty of greens, Yorkshire puddings and gravy.The latter has become something of a talking point during the meals. Everyone comments on what a fine gravy it is, how gravy is the making of a meal and that my gravy really makes it. This is all very flattering and I must admit I soak up the praise poured on me like a particularly plump and smug Yorkshire pudding. My friends have said that they haven’t tasted gravy as good outside a restaurant. This is rather surprising since my gravy making skills are somewhat haphazard. I don’t tell the guests but my recipe for gravy varies from dinner party to dinner party depending on what’s to hand in the kitchen. Because I have decided to confess to being a sauce sham I noted down the ingredients of the last gravy I made. Into a two pint jug of boiling water I haphazardly bunged: two Oxo cubes, a spoonful of Bisto, the meat juices from the pan the beef was cooking in, a boiled sweet ( a barley sugar, I think), a splish of mustard, a slosh of red wine, a dash of gin, and a slug of lager at the bottom of the tin I was drinking, a few splashes of Worcester sauce, some chopped up onions that had roasted with the beef, salt, pepper, more red wine and a load of corn flour. I then poured my marvellous beef medicine back into the roasting tray, placed it on the hob and stirred it all in. I think I then added some more wine. As I say the recipe changes every time - once I put in a spoonful of Gentleman’s relish (anchovy spread) - but one constant, surely, is that this dreadful boozy concoction is no relation to gravy and could guarantee to render any proper chef foaming at the mouth and into a fit on the kitchen floor. I’m sure I could make proper gravy, there are recipes out there, but I like the spontaneity of it, the idea that one addition too many could potentially ruin an otherwise perfectly good meal. And, like I say, my friends rave about it, so why make them any more the wiser?

A Christmas Dilemma: And My Response

2006-12-11T15:20:00.000Z

The Dilemma:
I’ve been invited to a mulled wine and carols evening at my neighbour’s house. I went to a similar do last year and discovered it was traditional to be greeted by mein host on the doorstep with a glass of warm wine gloop. Very nice if your cockles are chilled, but there’s no such thing as a free drink.
In the other hand the host holds a huge sprig of mistletoe and insists on a kiss before he hands over the booze.My neighbour is a shrill, 21 stone homosexual with a personal odour problem and no respecter of body space.
Last year I managed to avoid his attentions by thrusting my wife in front of me and claiming I had a terrible cold. This year my wife has insisted I give him a kiss.
She says I was obviously lying about the cold - I was lying but as a solicitor I like to think I have been trained not to look obvious - and that I was rude. She adores out neighbour and, I must say, he is a kind and considerate fellow. That doesn’t mean I want to illustrate the fact by allowing my self to be embraced and slobbered over by him.
I don’t consider myself homophobic, in fact I can hand on heart say that the only prejudice I have towards some gay men - my neighbour included - is that I find camp gay men a bore and wish they would stop shoving their homosexuality to the fore of every conversation and making it the punch line of tedious jokes first aired in the days of Music Hall.
My wife says for the sake of humouring our host I should just give him a peck on the cheek. She asks me what possible harm can it do, it’s just a meaningless greeting not a prelude to a night of rough sex in a public toilet.
My dilemma is that I simply don’t want to kiss him. But nor do I want to offend him. I’m simply not a kissy sort of person when it comes to members of the same sex. I prefer a good solid hand shake. And maybe a pat on the back if I know the person really well.

The Advice:

Ahh, go on, give him a kiss. It’s Christmas. Flamboyantly gay or not your neighbour has gone to a lot of effort to be your friend (I note that it’s not you that’s having a drinks party) what’s wrong with showing your appreciation with a little peck on the cheek. I wonder, would you be fearful for your sexuality if you were French? Or a professional footballer. Footballers seem to do nothing but kiss each other when they score a goal yet Manchester United don’t come onto the pitch serenaded by Judy Garland, do they? And, like your neighbour, French men not only innocently kiss each other they also don’t wear deodorant. Anyway, why do you flatter yourself that your neighbour fancies you? Maybe he’s just jolly and full of Christmas spirit and displays that with welcoming kiss. Your attitude is a strange mix of 20th century prejudices. You judge your neighbour on his weight, his gayness, his odour and the volume of his laugh. By comparison you sound stuffy, strait laced and boring.
No wonder your wife likes your neighbour so much, he embraces everything that repels you. The fact that you also admit, cooly, that you are fond of him shows there’s a chance your ice-cap might melt. Your real moral dilemma is this; do you display the fears about gay men that you claim not to hold but actually harbour deep inside? My answer is, no. Try to change them. Get to know your neighbour, you say you already like him, well prove it to yourself. Accept him for who he is, that he does things in a different way to you, that he doesn’t want to get you into bed and I guarantee one peck will be the start of a beautiful, platonic, friendship.

Naked Plug For The Naked Guide To Bristol

2006-12-11T15:14:00.000Z

Soaked in history, rich in diversity and culture and with more vistas of an eye candy variety than is possibly really necessary, Bristol is a patchwork eiderdown stuffed with the fluffiest of feathers and filthiest of grit. Little surprise, then, that the local knowledge shelves of the city’s book shops groan under the weight of Bristol related tomes. To borrow from somebody else’s musical, “It’s a hell of a town / the Downs are up/ and Bedminster’s down”. So, it’s a place worth shouting about, that’s a given. Yet given the number of trees sacrificed to print those boasts, few books about the city really ‘get’ the place, nail the nitty gritty, expose your actual true Bristol soul. Possibly because the really interesting parts of the city are off the tourist trail, certainly because few books about Bristol are written by Bristolians. Of course there are exceptions. Veronica Smith’s ‘Street Names Of Bristol’ for example is a seriously researched and bona fide classic, the late, much missed, local writer’s labour of love. At other end of the spectrum are two comic and slightly educational masterpieces that could only have been written by locals: Derek Robinson’s (aka Dirk Robson) ‘Krek Waiter’s Peak Bristle’ and the similarly linguistically themed A Dictionary Of Bristle by Harry Stoke and Vinny Green.But for an over and under view of Bristol, one that capture the glorious contrariness of the place, bookshelves have been left wanting. Until, that is, the publication of Gil Gillespie’s ‘Naked Guide To Bristol’ in 2004. Part guide book, part history, part diatribe, all love letter it’s a full, frank and funny account of the city from Hartcliffe through Henleaze. And there’s no questioning the provenance of its writer - he’s Bristol through and through (we’ll forgive him the fact he was born over the bridge and technically Welsh for a couple of months), and something of a local legend himself.A journalist, writer and Henbury School alumni, Gil was already a well known face on the club and music scene in the city at the tender age of 14 and his fast and furious copy for magazines and newspapers locally and nationally have consistently captured the spirit of the city. Little wonder, then, that when former Post hack Richard Jones formed his own publishing company he went straight to Gillespie to pen the ultimate guide to the city. And no surprise that the resulting book flew off the shelves.“It was quite a surprise that the book got so much attention” says Gil “I mean it is quite a limited market if you think about it but here we are launching the second edition so we must have got something right. I suppose it’s appeal is it’s honesty, we didn’t ever want it to be just about the SS Great Britain, or the Downs. Bristol is much more than just that”. Ain’t that the truth. As a guide book ‘Naked’ streaks unabashed ahead of any other tourist book to the city ever published. It’s too good for the tourists, though. Here’s a guide to the city that should be standard issue at maternity hospitals and schools, the fact is no home should be without one It is of course packed full of handy information about where to be visit, to eat, to drink, to stroke baby goats and be culturally uplifted all written from the enthusiastic (and sometimes weary) perspective of those in the know. Gil and a cast of hand picked contributors sharing his love/bewilderment for the place casts a comprehensive gaze over the city district by district, not just Harbourside, Clifton and The Downs, putting the place into context and revealing just how diverse, complex and fascinating the make-up of Bristol actually is and what sets it apart from everywhere else. “What is unique about Bristol is hard to pin down exactly, in a way it just is, it’s perplexing, quite a misunderstood place because, I think, there’s so many different parts to the story. One thing that people often cite is that we’re far enough away from London to set our own pace here, but that’s just part of the story. I really don’t have a clue, Bristol just throws up a certain kind of person and attitude, it can be infuriating and life affirming. It’s small enough to bump into people you know everyday and there isn’t that kind of careerist thing that drives people in, say London”. But, notes Gil, there are some early warning signs of Bristol becoming just like anywhere else. “It’s starting to be driven by the market which goes against thee laid back grain. I mean Park Street and the harbour is all giant pubs where it used to be full of interesting, scene setting record and clothes shops. All it would take is one Starbucks on Gloucester Road to completely change the character of what’s probably one of the most diverse and interesting High Streets left in the country. So I suppose the book is also asking people to treasure what we’ve still got, because you never know when it’s going to be pulled down and turned into a Tesco or a luxury apartment block.”There’s still plenty to celebrate about Bristol and ‘Naked’ lifts up the foundation stones to reveal the real city crawling about underneath (local characters/ lunatics trawling the street, mugging hotspots, the worst public toilets, the city’s predilection for a good riot every now and then) and pokes local hot topics with a stick (moribund council policy, the world’s worst public transport system, where to stand on the issue of Justin Lee Collins). There are extensive, witty and awesomely well informed essays on how Bristol’s clubbing and music scenes met, merged, and created a completely unique noise that to this day everyone has heard of but few know how to label (tip: don’t ever, ever, ever mention T***-Hop). There’s also an exhaustive historical timeline stretching from the 55bc (hippy celts dancing around fires in Leigh Woods and vague plans for a tram system and a redevelopment of Broadmead - no change there, then) to present (the redevelopment of Broadmead) and some pithy discourse on the frustrating inertia of local politics matched to local activism that ranges from apathetic to outraged. “We knew that people from Bristol would be reading it, so it had to be completely honest and nobody here would stand for it if they thought we were trying to mug them.” says Gil, “we could only write about what we know, which is why there are a few personal anecdotes throughout, things like running away from mini riots in Old Market, or the public toilets you should avoid at all costs, you don’t really get that sort of thing in a guide book, but this isn’t just another guidebook”. And Bristol, despite the best efforts of the property speculators and drinks chains, still isn’t just another city.
The Naked Guide To Bristol - Gil Gillespie. Published by Naked Guides, £8.95. More info at http://www.nakedguides.co.uk/

Spend The Night: With a gentleman crime buster.

2006-12-11T15:13:00.000Z

A Perfect Night In For...Gentlemen Crime Busters.
The Saint In New York (1938. Dir. Ben Holmes) / The Falcon’s Adventure (1946. Dir. William Berke)
According to Hollywood lore back in the 1930s and 1940s if you wanted to bust a crime wave the last people you should go looking for were the cops. They might have had caps with shiny badges, truncheons and a duty to uphold the law, but when it came to ruthless racketeers the movie police stood aside to let foppish and wealthy playboys have a pop - usually with far more success.Hence a plethora of crime-busting movie shorts and serials that would draw up the blueprint of literally hundreds of TV shows, in which smart men with smarter tongues would show the justice departments of cities around the world how to do their job properly. RKO were one of the great Hollywood studios and beat all with their line in horror and crime movies during the 30s and 40s. They produced an outstanding array of out and out classics including The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Out Of The Past, King Kong and, of course, Citizen Kane, possibly the greatest movie of all time. But like any studio RKO had a production line of budget pictures, often released as serials and based on popular radio shows, comic strips (Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, for instance) and pulp novels of the time. Most of these budget flicks were memorable simply because they were so dire. But RKO’s reputation for quality film-making rubbed off on their budget movies. Their cheap but effective series of the Leslie Charteris’ Saint novels were given a boost by the casting of Louis Hayward as the slick super sleuth Simon Templar, but it was George Sanders, who took over from Hayward after The Saint In New York, who really made the role his own, before, bizarrely, leaving to star in a Saint rip off called The Falcoln, made by the same studio. We’ll come to them in a little while. There were nine Saint movies made in the late 30s and early 40s and the stories were also made popular adaptations on US and British radio at the same time. It would take Roger Moore’s smoothy, self deprecating take on Templar in the 1962 TV series for the Saint to steal the Sanders halo and spread the Saint gospel world wide. Leslie Charteris had once tried to produce his own TV version of The Saint with David Niven (a potentially inspired bit of casting) but it took the TV might of cigar chomping Lew Grade to bring the Saint to the small screen and part of the package was his insistence that Moore be the star. Moore would play the role until 1969 and he basically repeated it into the early 1970s as one half of The Persuaders (another Lew Grade smash hit), honing the persona of gentleman hard man that grabbed the attention of Bond producer Cubby Broccoli when Sean Connery’s 007 replacement George Lazenby didn’t work out. The Saint not only blessed Moore’s future career, it set him up financially for life. Sales of the show world wide generated hundreds of millions of dollars, Moore cannily made sure he bought the rights to most of the mid 1960s colour episodes and watched the royalties come flooding in. Compared to the sophistication of the TV show the 1930s versions look decidedly frayed around the edges, but there’s a rawness and verve (no doubt brought about by the budget restrictions) in evidence that makes them an interesting waste of an hour or so. They were almost all entirely identical, too and nearly always involved Templar going somewhere exotic (Bali, Havana, Stoke-on-Trent, etc.) to bust a gang of racketeers or Nazis. Or, as the war in Europe drew progressively nearer, both. Our chosen adventure sees The Saint go to New York (the clue’s in the title) and bust a gang of racketeers, some of whom, if memory serves, have heavy German accents.Having scored a huge success with The Saint, but mindful of the fact he was a Brit, RKO introduced a home-grown crime-fighting character known as The Falcon. What resulted was a perfectly acceptable, although workmanlike, series of crime mysteries (like The Saint, The Falcon took to kicking Nazi butt as the war in Europe progressed) headed up by the suave bruiser and his wise-cracking manservant. Originally the role was taken by George Sanders for the first outing in 1941 but after three episodes he went off to enjoy greater stardom as an A-list movie star. His real life brother Tom Conway took over the Falcon roost and steered the series through another 16 budget outings with plots borrowed from as many sources as possible – not least The Saint which provided plot lines for a good half of the output. By the time Adventure came out in 1946 the writers were repeating plots of earlier Falcon movies in all but title. The Falcoln’s Adventure is a rip roaring example of standard crime-busting fare. It’s wooden by today’s standards but is enlivened by Edward Brophy as the Falcon’s comic relief sidekick.

The Drink: The gentleman crime-buster will relax with a cocktail, perhaps a Gin-Martini from a hi-ball glass. Don’t confuse it with a screw-ball, that’s an ice-cream with a bubble gum at the bottom, you wouldn’t want to stain your tuxedo.

The Food: A gentleman crime-buster will always dress for dinner, it puts gangsters on edge. He will eat soup, correctly, but will be too busy making wry observations about his fellow guests to finish his mains.

Spend The Night With: The B List Of Brit Pop Movies

2006-12-11T15:12:00.000Z

What A Whopper! (1961. Dir. Gilbert Gunn) / Catch Us If You Can (1965. Dir. John Boorman) / Slade In Flame (1975. Richard Loncraine)

Richard Lester’s revolutionary, head spinning, mock-u-mentary “A Hard Day’s Night”, took a ‘typical’ day in the life of The Beatles and created the blue print for everything that was swinging, fab and gear about the 1960s.
At the time the mop-tops were teetering on the precipice of global fame. Lester’s manic jump cuts, hand held cameras and surreal vision (he’d worked his TV apprenticship behind the camera for Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan and it shows) matched to Alun Owen’s script (part Marx Brothers, part straight transcripts of the Beatles’ private conversations) and a simply brilliant collection of songs, saw the fabs metamorphosise into pop Gods and the film industry fell over itself to copy the look, feel and sound of the film.
A Hard Day’s Night was year zero in terms of pop exploitation pics. So much so that it’s hard to imagine anything that came before. But the pop-cash in genre was already long established. The trend for pop stars led movies was proving to be a cash cow for the mainstream UK movie industry by the early 1960s. Inspired by the US success of Elvis at the movies Cliff Richard had already proved his box office worth with The Young Ones and the likes of Joe Brown and Tommy Steele were swiftly being steered towards light entertainment, away from their rock and roll roots of the decade before.
It was natural, then, that Adam Faith, another handsome performer whose pop chart credibility was receding as fast as his hairline by 1961, would make the shift. Faith, though, had an edge. His personality was a complex mix of smouldering vulnerability and craven ambition that would see him through being a 50’s teenybopper idol, jobbing 60’s actor, a bone fide TV star in the 1970s with the smash hit series Budgie, a failed business entrepreneur, a TV chat show pundit and a sitcom star once again in the 1990s. He certainly enjoyed life to the full, whatever the circumstances, wether he could actually act, though, is a different matter.
Certainly you’ll find little evidence of any thespian talent in What A Whopper! (a title that conjures up everything that was bad and simultaneously great about British mainstream cinema in the late 50s early 60s) but as a springboard for later TV and stage success it didn’t do Faith any harm, his enthusiasm filling in any gaps left by his stage craft.
In the film Faith plays a novelist who fakes photos of the Loch Ness Monster and tries to convince the locals they’re the real thing in order to plug his new book.
Sadly it’s as trite and wooden as the fake monster at the centre of the plot.
What A Whopper! was the beginning of the end of the pop film the whole family could enjoy, though. A Hard Day’s Night put the killer boot in, but the genre it spawned would also find it difficult to keep up the quality.
Catch Us If You Can, starring Beatles rivals for the pop crown (although they came nowhere near)The Dave Clark Five, for instance wore the influence of A Hard Day’s Night as cufflinks on it’s sleeves.
Directed by former advertising man John Boorman (who would go on to direct the terrific Hope & Glory) it was packed to the gills with innovative jump cutting and scenes of England at it’s sixties swinging best with a fine performance from the sadly underrated British comic actress Yootha Joyce.
The trouble is it takes itself too seriously by attempting to give depth to what is an all surface exercise in escapism.
Band leader Dave Clark smoulders self consciously throughout, and the soundtrack proves that while they had their moments the Five were no fab four.
The over all result is an advert stretched to 91 mins. By the mid 1970s the pop exploitation theme was been turned on itself.
The excellent ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and its follow-up ‘Stardust’, featured a pop star turned actor (David Essex) ala What A Whopper!, Summer Holiday etc. but took the often murky world of the pop industry as it’s inspiration and stood back as we watched a talented individual eaten up by ruthless managers, opportunist mates and hard drugs.
Slade, one of the biggest British bands of that decade, opted for a similar story line when they were declared popular enough for the box office.
Here Noddy (who would prove later to be a strong character actor on TV) Dave (the gawping idiot in the spangly get-up) and the other two play the band Flame who against a back drop of grim terraces and smoke billowing factory chimneys find pop stardom but not without selling their souls to the marketing machine.
Unlike A Hard Days Night, which made being paid to make music, race around parties and sleep with beautiful women look quite a lark, Slade In Flame, pictured the pop process as a sausage factory, an industry that exploited it’s employees like any other.
Slade In Flame made pop look like work, which is why nobody went to see it.

Spend The Night: In The Fridge With A Monster

2006-12-11T15:11:00.001Z

The Thing From Another World (aka The Thing) - (1951. Dir Christian Nyby) / The Thing (1982. Dir. John Carpenter)
One of the first, certainly the best, big Hollywood movies to look to the stars and get everybody really worried. A team of US scientists defrost an alien space craft found buried under the Arctic ice and the wish they hadn’t when the other worldly pilot goes on the rampage killing all in its path. Christian Nyby gets the director credit but Hollywood producer/director/screenwriter Howard Hawks took a special interest in the project and was on set ‘guiding’ the course of the movie throughout, and it shows. Hawks’ look, style and eye for epic statements in confined places is all over the movie as is the very thinly veiled anti-communist metaphor. The reds are on ice but if we invite them for cocktails they’ll take over the world.Based on the John Campbell short story, 'Who Goes There?', The Thing... was made on the tightest of budgets and a no name cast. The result, though, is a taut, thrilling shocker with a sense of urgency and panic that stays with the viewer long after the action’s over. The casting, fabulous use of lighting and shadows and breakneck dialogue written by Hawks were the keys. And the spooky musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin sends shivers down the spine. The movie also has the distinction of being the first to actually show what a creature from another world might look like - not pleasant.Team leader Capt. Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), is the gruff no-nonsense boss, highly respected by his loyal crew who spend the first reel trying to set him up with the sultry scientist (who happens to bean ex girlfriend) played by Margaret Sheridan. Fate reunites the pair as she assists bumbling boffin Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), whose liberal sensibilities put the entire base in danger. His reasoning that the alien is only on a homicidal rampage because he is ‘misunderstood’ (a theme picked up in Rebel Without A Cause, teenagers on the rampage being another Hollywood pet obsession in the early to mid 1950s), turns around and bites him on the backside (literally) as the body count rises. James Arness plays the eponymous rampaging monster and the surviving crew must act fast to destroy him less he escapes the icy confines and attempts to destroy the entire planet. A bloodier, but just as good, remake was released in 1982 starring Kurt Russell and directed by John Carpenter. The premise was basically the same except this time the monster concealed itself in the skin of it’s victims with far gorier and graphic results. Carpenter’s take on the alien threat was released as the Cold War was spitting ice cubes, but the frosty threat and subtly icy fear that informs the original is dispatched for gung ho heroics and some extremely nasty (and very entertaining) set pieces.

The Food: Frozen cod steaks in butter sauce would work - as long as you don’t defrost them. Equally good for flushing out aliens would be an ultra raw and bloody slab of steak. But it’s probably best to avoid the fridge altogether if you’re unnerved by deep frozen monsters.

The drink: A nice hot cup of tea with a liberal dash of rum will steady the nerves. How about an anti-freeze chaser on the side.

Spend The Night: In the cells.

2006-12-11T15:10:00.001Z

The Blue Lamp - (1949. Dir. Basil Deardon)

Although it now looks dated and almost twee The Blue Lamp not only caught Britain at a tumultuous time but shaped crime drama for decades to come. The look, feel and subject of the film drilled right to the gritty heart of social problems in Britain, and more specifically London, directly after the Second World War.Although the problems were by no means unique among British cities, London of the late 1940s and early 1950s encapsulated the huge anti-climax of the end of the war after the bunting of VE and VJ night celebrations were put back in the box. Despite the huge sacrifice to make the world a safer place there was little evidence that Britain was the victor. It was a grey and austere time in which huge swathes of the capital lay in bombed ruins, the economy slumped and male soldiers returned to find a competitive job market. Only ‘spivs’ seemed to profit from the ‘New Britain’. The black market in “off the back of the lorry” rationed goods matched that of the legitimate economy. Criminal gangs reconvening after the war also found that the pecking order had changed significantly, their patches taken over by a new breed of mobster, such as the Maltese gangs of London and teenage hoodlums. Exacerbating the fact was that in the immediate post-war period the underworld suddenly became awash with easily available ‘trophy’ firearms and weapons brought home as souvenir by returning service personnel and playing a significant role in a major and bloody crime wave.An entire generation of disaffected youth was beginning to assert itself and make it’s presence felt, questioning the old pre-war order of both the state and society. With a ready supply of weaponry to hand and a devil may care attitude a hard core of young offenders ran wild and were not afraid to dish out violence to anyone who got in their way. The hanging of Derek Bentley, despite being innocent of the shooting of a police office during a bungled robbery (in a rooftop stand off he urged his armed friend to ‘let him have it’ by which he meant ‘give him the gun’ but was interpreted by the jury as ‘shoot him’), was almost certainly an extreme attempt to re-establish justice and send a message to the young that this behaviour was not to be tolerated. For the Police at the time the shift in attitudes towards the establishment came as a shock to the system and policing methods were forced to update quickly. The cosy image of the friendly beat bobby who would turn a crime wave into a trickle with a judicious clip round the ear was shown by The Blue Lamp to be picture of the past. But despite this the film is a homage to the British sense of justice and shows the Metropolitan plod through a rose tinted camera lens. Nonetheless it failed to impress the Metropolitan Police at the time, who thought it a little close to the bone, yet as a piece of PR it eventually proved priceless and . The Blue Lamp follows a rookie copper’s first few weeks on the job in austere and bomb damaged London. His mentor, PC Dixon, played by Jack Warner, is shot and killed by a psychotic youth (brilliantly played by Dirk Bogarde) and the chase is on to catch him. It’s a little dated to eyes accustomed to NYPD Blue or even The Bill, and shows the Metropolitan plod through rose tinted camera. But it still packs a punch and was hugely influential on British police procedural dramas for decades, until The Sweeney turned things upside down. It also did avuncular Jack Warner a few career favours. PC Dixon was miraculously brought back to life for the BBC hit serial Dixon Of Dock Green which ran for over 20 years. Warner was 80 when he finally hung up his truncheon and died a few months after retiring. But Dixon the character was once again resuscitated and was recently revived as a radio play for Radio 4.

The Food: Irish Stew (in the name of the law), Truncheon Meat sandwiches, Just-Ice Cream.

The Drink: Not while I’m on duty, madam.

Spend The Night With: Cary Grant

2006-12-11T15:09:00.001Z

His Girl Friday (Dir. Howard Hawks. 1941)

Newspapers may have changed over the past 60 years but the people who staff them haven’t. The booze culture may have all but disappeared but the hack eat hack battle of wills for a byline still plays out daily in newsrooms across the world among a cynical, bitter, arrogant, dedicated, shifty, insecure and sometimes tremendously brave breed of people who have a sometimes shaky but nonetheless obsessive urge for the, or at least ‘a’, truth and who know only to well they are often as despised as they are revered. Little wonder many reporters make great writers but terrible human beings. His Girl Friday takes its cue from that observation and runs with it. Cary Grant as hard bitten newspaper editor Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as cynical hackette Hildegard Johnson (part Lois Lane part Rotteweiller) made the perfect newsroom team. Sadly they also make a lousy married couple whose love hate relationship has ended in a bitter divorce. When Hildy arrives at the offices of The Morning Post with her new fiance in tow, a nice but dim lad unwise to the cut, thrust and duplicitous side of reporters, she fully intends to quit to have her new beau’s babies.Burns, though, has other ideas. He’s still in love with Hildy (and she’s fighting against admitting she has mutual feelings) and hatches a plot to get her back by getting her onto the byline of her life - a miscarriage of justice case that points to corruption in City Hall - while he busily sets about framing up his rival for her affections. Fast moving with machine gun paced dialogue both leads spend the entire movie trying to out quip each other with barbed lines (during filming Russell noted that Grant had better lines then her in the script and hired an advertising copywriter to provide her killer lines which she then passed off as spur of the moment improvisation - all of them made it into the film.) resulting in a breathless, effortlessly clever and genuinely hilarious movie. But there’s also room for proper acting and Grant makes an early case here as one of the greatest screen actors of his generation. The scene when Hildy finally gets to tell Walter she’s engaged and want’s to leave the newspaper business to live a ‘normal’, domestic life is as touching as it is funny. Grant is, for the only time in the film, truly flummoxed.
Walter: You can marry all you want to, Hildy, but you can't quit the newspaper business.Hildy: Oh! Why not?Walter: I know you, Hildy. I know what quitting would mean to you.Hildy: And what would it mean?Walter: It would kill ya.Hildy: You can't sell me that, Walter Burns.Walter: Who says I can't? You're a newspaperman.Hildy: That's why I'm quitting. I want to go someplace where I can be a woman.Walter: You mean be a traitor.Hildy: A traitor? A traitor to what?Walter: A traitor to journalism. You're a journalist, Hildy.Hildy: A journalist? Hell, what does that mean? Peeking through keyholes? Chasing after fire engines? Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them if Hitler's gonna start another war? Stealing pictures off old ladies? I know all about reporters, Walter. A lot of daffy buttinskis running around without a nickel in their pockets and for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wives'll know what's going on. Why... Golly, what's the use? Walter, you...you wouldn't know what it means to want to be respectable and live a half-way normal life. The point is, I...I'm through.
Despite it’s age His Girl Friday feels fresh, honest and modern in it’s attitudes to news gathering and society at large “Why Hildy! you've got the old fashioned idea that divorce is something that lasts forever, 'til death do us part.' Why divorce doesn't mean anything now days Hildy, just a few words muttered over you by a judge”. There’s a cracking supporting cast, to boot and although it is a little stagey around the edges (it’s based on the Broadway hit of the 1920s ‘The Front Page - which in turn was made into a film by Howard Hawks before he saw the comic potential of casting a woman in the second lead) there’s much left to admire, laugh at and even, if you can catch your breath, think about.And watch out for an in jokes that will make Bristolian’s titter. When Hildy and Walter find themselves under arrest for aiding an escaped criminal and kidnapping they are told by the sheriff, in the pocket of the local mayor, that they face at least a ten year stretch in prisonWalter merely shrugs his shoulders at the prospect and when a flustered mayor ups the stakes and tells the pair they’re through, Walter smoothly replies, “Listen the last man that said that to me was Archie Leach a week before he cut his throat”. Archie Leach being the name Grant’s family knew him by as a little boy who played on the streets of Horfield.

The Food: Chewing gum (masticated rapidly) boiled sweets, Mars Bars, white bread sandwiches in plastic packaging, Cheezy Wotsits all should sustain you en route to your deadline.

The Drink: Black coffee in plastic cups and lots of it. Make sure you have bag full of 20p pieces for the machine.

Spend The Night: At The Opera

2006-12-11T15:08:00.001Z

A Night At The Opera - (1935. Dir. Sam Wood)

Never mind the creaking dialogue from the supporting cast, the tenuous plot and the fact that Groucho aside the rest of the Marx Brothers aren’t actually very funny (please direct letters of disgust and calls for sacking to the editor, I don’t care what you think), A Night At The Opera is still a thing of quick witted and breakneck joy featuring some of the trio’s best gags. At the time of its release the team were treading on eggshells career-wise. Their last film for Paramount - Duck Soup - was a critical and commercial failure at the time (although in hindsight it is a work of flawed genius and one of their sparkiest and more surreal outings) and Groucho, Harpo and Chico were being written off as a spent force in some quarters. MGM took a risk signing the Brothers up for their next movie but the gamble paid dividends.With the deadweight of Zeppo, the teams superfluous straight man, dispatched the Marx Brothers had a rethink and were fully vindicated by the sheer silliness and hell for leather pacing of A Night At The Opera, a worldwide box office smash that earned them their place as all time comedy greats. While previous Marxist comedies were every bit as funny and revolutionary, the suffered from poor and stagey production values and there seemed to be no one at the helm to reign in the brother’s more self-conciously anarchic moments, brilliant as the were played out live and onstage they often missed the target on celluloid. A Night At The Opera is arguably the first ‘proper’ Marx brother’s movie. There’s a plot (well, sort of) for starters, a lavish budget and the comedy is honed to an armour piercing sharpness.In truth it’s Groucho’s movie throughout - show us a Marxist outing that isn’t and we’ll show you turn of Russia in 1918 - and every false mustachioed quip (“When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay”), witty flick of the cigar and lecherous advance to the leading lady/nemesis, the long suffering Margaret Dumont is diamond cut comic perfection. But Chico and Harpo also shine as the broader, more physical counterpoints to Groucho’s skewed genius. Where romantic interludes and crumby show tunes acted as an interlude between sketches in the first Marx movies here they bring a depth and act like welcome beta blockers to the manic highs at the heart of the film.The gags, though, are what the audience really want and nobody leaves this song and dance disappointed. As Otis B Driftwood, Groucho attempts to get grand old dame Mrs Claypool to fund his opera scheme. “Don't you see” he tells her during one unconvincing pitch for her support, “you'll be a patron of the opera. You'll get into society. Then, you can marry me and they'll kick you out of society, and all you've lost is $200,000”. His attempts to woo Mrs Claypool are doomed from the start, but there’s full Marx for trying.
Mrs. Claypool: Mr. Driftwood. I think we'd better keep everything on a business basis.
Driftwood (insulted): How do you like that? Every time I get romantic with you, you want to talk business. I don't know, there's something about me that brings out the business in every woman.
The film is an embarrassment of comic riches, both dialogue and sight based - one long scene, for instance, set in a tiny cabin onboard a ship will have you reaching for the rewind button at least twice, just to make sure you didn’t miss anything - it’s remarkable that absolutely nothing goes to waste. What looks effortless and spontaneous though, was in fact the end result of director Sam Wood’s insistence of upwards of 20 takes for each scene and, when filming had finished, dozens of test screenings to gauge audience reactions. Anything that didn’t raise the roof hit the cutting room floor. The film is 70 years old but is still as sassy, sarcastic and stupid, deeply, magnificently stupid as the day it was released. Little wonder it is still one of the most successful film comedies of all time. What makes it such a gem is the sheer energy of the cast involved. Harpo - then 47 - performed all his own stunts in the movie, including swinging by from rope to rope in the eaves of the opera house without a safety harness. Perhaps it was desperation to prove their worth an urge to cock a snook at their detractors, either way A Night At The Opera truly established the Marx Brother’s legend and in the process dragged comedy out of the music hall of the 19th century and into the cinema of the 20th.

The Food: Food gags abound in the film - “Senor Lassparri comes from a very famous family. His mother was a well known bass singer. And his father was the first man to stuff spaghetti with bicarbonate of soda, thus causing and curing indigestion at the same time” - and a hearty bowl of spaghetti Bolognaise seems perfectly and messily apt for such a jolly romp.

The Drink: For a pasta dish we’d suggest a nice Chianti and, since unexpected belly laughs often result in red wine on the carpet, a packet of Stain devil.

Spend The Night: With 70's Brit-com spin offs

2006-12-11T15:07:00.000Z

Please Sir! (1971. Dir. Mike Vickers) / Dad’s Army (1971. Dir. Norman Cohen)

No self respecting 1970s sitcom was without it’s spin-off movie. Many of them were, frankly, poor and a sorry litany of underachievers includes ‘On The Busses’ (which had three film outings, each one more dreadful than the previous), ‘Steptoe & Son’, ‘Bless This House’, ‘Rising Damp’ (one of the best UK sitcoms ever but whose drab and claustrophobic setting simply didn’t work on the big screen) and ‘George & Mildred’. The honour of being possibly the worst of all goes to Are You Being Served? in which the Grace Brother’s staff go on a package holiday to Spain and....oh dear.Not all Sitcom tie-ins were dreadful. The Likely Lads and Til Death Us Do Part are hugely enjoyable films in their own right and stand up to the test of time. And ‘Porridge’, a sitcom even less likely to translate to the screen than Rising Damp due to its incarcerated setting, is an absolute joy of a movie.But, arguably, the best of all 70’s sitcom spin-offs was Dad’s Army in which the brave but bumbling Home Guard platoon fend off a German invasion of Warmington-on-Sea. There are numerous reasons why Dad’s Army worked so well on the big screen not least because writers Croft & Perry’s characters were already fully formed in the hearst and minds of the viewers and were absolutely perfectly, beautifully portrayed. Comedy isn’t just about timing, casting is of the essence. On TV the show was set bound and reliant on the interplay between the pompous Captain Mainwaring and his platoon of poltroons. The film gave the story a wider scope affording the action to take place in countryside and village settings that even by 1971 hadn’t changed too much since the 40s. Dad’s Army - although still funny to 21st century eyes - tapped into a still raw British nerve about the war and the fact that all that stood between us and the Nazis was the English Channel and a thin green line of pensioners and feckless draft dodgers. Part of its enduring success is that it has always been viewed with a mix of affection and skin of our teeth relief. And, of course, the dialogue is still yet to be bettered.
Cpt. Mainwaring (on an impending invasion by the German army): I could have sworn that they would never break through the Maginot line. Sgt.Wilson: Quite right sir, they didn't. Cpt.Mainwaring: I'm a pretty good judge of these matters you know Wilson. Sgt.Wilson: They went round the side. Cpt.Mainwaring: I see... they what! Sgt. Wilson: They went round the side. Cpt. Mainwaring: That's a typical shabby Nazi trick, you see the sort of people we're up against Wilson. Sgt. Wilson: Most unreliable sir.
But looking back the general rule of thumb seems to be that a show’s success on television (and this was at a time when viewing figures for sitcoms where in multiples of millions) is not a guarantee of a blockbuster. Cinematic features differ enormously from TV shows and the likes of Rising Damp and Please Sir! were weighed down with exposition and back story before a feature plot could truly develop, resulting in a flabby and incohesive 90 minutes. Often as not, Bless This House for example, the result was a film that felt like it was three episodes of a sitcom strung together. They also almost all date very quickly.Please Sir! was the brash ITV sitcom set in the tough working class London school Fenn Street Secondary Modern. John Alderton was the shy, idealistic, bumbling but big hearted teacher Bernard Hedges who between 1968 and 1972 tried to bring order to the blackboard jungle with comic results. As 5Cs form tutor (5C being played by a cast of actors who all looked like they’d left real school a decade earlier) he tried to instil a love of learning in his charges but was often left frustrated. The fact that his teaching colleagues were a collection of egotists, ditherers and idiots hardly helped. Nonetheless Hedges was fondly regarded by his pupils who would often try and help him out of the awkward situations he found himself in. This being a sitcom we should all be aware of what route their good intentions were paving. The show, inspired by the 1967 film To Sir With Love, was an instant hit and the feature film three years into its run was inevitable. Sadly it was also inevitably lacking.In the film Hedges takes his class on a trip to an outward bounds centre where the cockney fishes out of water run into trouble with a class from a posh school, fall in with a band of gypsies, abscond to the village pub and get accused of a crime they didn’t commit. There are a few laughs - mainly supplied by the esteemed Joan Sanderson, Fenn Streets pompous headmistress and the brilliant Derek Guyler as the quasi fascist school caretaker Norman Potter, basically a repeat of his Sykes character, police constable Corky - but by taking the characters out of the classroom most of the comic potential is lost. Still, as a period piece it’s full of bright 70s fashions and attitudes and makes an interesting diversion of a lunchtime. School-movie trivia fans may be interested to learn that Lulu who starred in and provided the lovely theme tune to Sir With Love also sings the closing song of Please Sir!

The Food: For a true 70’s TV dinner serve up Bird’s Eye frozen beefburgers with peas and chips (fried in a dangerously overflowing chip pan) followed by Arctic Roll.

The Drink: White’s lemonade or get ‘fizzical’ with a bottle of Corona. Take the bottles back to the Off Licence and keep the deposit money.

Spend The Night On A Desert Island

2006-12-11T15:06:00.000Z

The Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe (1964. Franco London Films)

If you’ve seen the title of today’s Perfect Night In and you’re over 35, I’ll bet you’re already humming the memorable and haunting theme music to this children’s TV classic. Introduced with a swell of timpani drums like waves breaking on the shore, the romantic overture by Robert Mellin and Gian-Pero Reverberi (the actual suite is around ten minutes long) is played in evocative three/four time and is guaranteed to set certain generations whistling and day dreaming of walking barefoot along a deserted shore line. Filmed in black & white in 1964 ,The Adventures was a faithful 13 part adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s 18th century novel which, in turn, was based on the true tale of Alexander Selkirk - whom Defoe met and interviewed at length in a Bristol dockside pub (possibly the Llandoger Trow which still stands on King Street).The Franco-London films production was a sober, even melancholic, study of loneliness and despair replaced by resourcefulness and hope and tells in flashback the trails of ill fated journeyman sailor Crusoe who must cope, seemingly on his own, after being shipwrecked on a desert island. Filmed in French on location in the Canary Islands, the series starred swoony Austrian actor Robert Hoffman as Crusoe who smouldered as he grudgingly accepted his fat. The show was dubbed into English which gave it an almost surreal edge - especially when the dialogue inevitably went out of sync. But British children’s TV audiences were more than used to the eccentricities of their entertainment. For various reasons - the entente cordial, an effort to embrace and unite the European nations after the war, the fact that Euro programmes were dirt cheap to buy in - European TV shows were common in the tea time and Saturday morning slots during the 60s and 70s. Strange foreign programmes with actors dubbed by plummy English voice artists abounded. The Singing Ringing Tree, Flashing Blade, White Horses, Belle & Sebastian, Heidi and many others introduced British kids to a different view on the world (in the case of White Horses that all gypsies are born horse thieves) which they mulled over with a mouth full of Black Jacks and realised here was a rich source of comedy at the expense of their woefully unhip European contemporaries. What European TV lacked was any discernible humour, it was po faced, slow burning and serious unlike the brash and funny US imports (The Banana Splits Show for instance) but in some cases, despite of the dubbing, it was thought provoking and emotionally charged, it was foreign TV in more ways than one and it made a deep impression. Crusoe managed to speak - albeit in a heavily dubbed fashion - to teenagers experiencing their own sense of isolation and desire to find themselves a soul mate, a Man Friday.But there’s another reason why Robinson Crusoe is so easily and fondly recalled by babyboomers of the 60s and 70s. From it’s first screening in 1965 it was on ALL the time, seemingly on a loop. In fact, during the Summer holidays it looked as if it was one of only three programmes for children the BBC actually had. Weekends appeared to be the same. You couldn’t turn on TV on a Saturday morning in the early 1970s without seeing The WhirlyBirds, Champion The Wonderhorse and Robert Hoffman arguing with himself over a coconut or hearing that dreamy theme music. Up until TISWAS and Multi Coloured Swap Shop shook up the Saturday Morning schedule and changed the face of kid’s TV inexorably the likes of Robinson Crusoe was pretty much it. Kids today, they’ve got it easy. Crusoe was eventually deserted by the BBC in 1982, distinguished as possibly the most repeated TV series in British TV history.It’s unlikely the show will ever be scheduled again. The BBC dumped all their prints in a skip and Crusoe is now almost certainly languishing in a land fill somewhere. There is only one set of English language episodes left on film, but they’re gathering dust in a French film archive. It’s sad to think of Crusoe all washed up on a desert island in an ocean of fatuous modern kids TV but at least the DVD age has afforded him some chance of a rediscovery. And if the thought of sitting through 13 episodes of existential castaway angst is a little too much like hard work rather than gentle nostalgia, you could instead seek out that brilliant soundtrack from www.silvascreen.co.uk

The food: Fashion yourself a shelter made of palms (or Yucca plants if your short of palms) erect it in your living room and enjoy a three course desert isle feast, namely; Coconut soup followed by coconut roast with a Bounty Bar for pudding.

The Drink: Coconut milk.

Spend A Night At: The Other Casino Royale

2006-12-11T15:04:00.002Z

Casino Royale (1967. Dir: John Huston / Ken Hughes / Val Guest / Robert Parrish / Joe McGrath / Richard Talmadge)

When James Bond writer Ian Fleming sold the rights in the 1950s for an obscure American TV adaptation of his even more obscure first super spy novel, Casino Royale, little did he know that the deal he struck would return to haunt him. Although written in the 1950s it would take until the early 1960s for Fleming’s glamorous and violent adventures of MI6’s finest to play in tune with the zeitgeist of a Britain supposedly swinging into the future but actually trapped in the past thanks to an economic and industrial slump and a crusty old establishment who despite rumours to the contrary still had a tight grip on Britain’s fate. James Bond and his derring dos abroad for Queen and Country was a fantasy release for a country that despite winning a major war was no longer a key player on the world stage. Producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli saw in James Bond a lucrative franchise of films and tested that theory with a relatively low budget and low key version of Dr No which became a huge box office success that kick started and defined an entire genre.Subsequent films, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice made the 007 brand a worldwide phenomena that belonged exclusively to Broccoli and Fleming. That Casino Royale such turn up like a bad penny should have been expected. Casino producer Charles Feldman originally approached Broccoli to see if he could ‘borrow’ Sean Connery for the film. Despite having a script and budget in place he was flatly refused and perhaps with of a sense of grievance decided to re-adapt his Bond as mickey taking spoof. it was hard to see how far a satire based on an already close to self-parodying set of characters could go to being successful. It certainly wasn’t an original idea. Almost as soon as Dr No opened various parodies grabbed hold of its coat-tails, most notably Our Man Flint with James Coburn and the US sitcom I-Spy and ‘ironic’ drama serial The Man From U.N.C.L.E. None of these were particularly good - although the two Flint movies have their moments - but while Feldman lacked originality he certainly made up for it in the budget stakes.A phenomenal for it’s time $12 million plus secured an all star cast that included Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Woody Allen, John Huston, Peter O Toole, William Holden and even Deborah Kerr yet the resulting film howls like a dog, albeit one in a very expensive collar. David Niven (who would have made an excellent straight 007 if the series had been made in the 1950s) stars as a retired James Bond, depressed by the image and sex obsessed legend that has been created around him and forced into one more job to avenge the death of his old boss ‘M’ at the hands of the international criminal gang S.M.E.R.S.H. Along the way he encounters half a dozen other 007s, all called James Bond and all on the same mission. Ridiculous gadgetry, flying saucers and awful double entendres abound. It’s a confused bordering on criminal movie that had five directors working on it at various stages. Never has the phrase ‘too many cooks’ rung so true. What’s most disappointing is that while you watch it you can actually see why it could have been a brilliant satire, instead it’s full of wasted opportunity and talent leaving the audience with just one question. “What was the point of that?” That said, if you want some justification for watching it Dusty Springfield sings an amazingly moving version of ‘The Look Of Love’ and Burt Bacharach’s music score throughout is jolly. Many Bond fans feel cheated by the film’s disrespect for the original novel - basically it shares only the title - but are no doubt relieved that this summer sees the release of of a proper version starring new Bond, Daniel Craig.

The Drink: You’ll be shaken not stirred by this so don’t waste the Martini. Get a bottle of Thunderbird fortified wine and swig it out of the bottle. It’ll make the pain go away. Or if you’re not in a boozy mood how about a bottle of MI5-Alive fruit drink. Not too much, though, it might make you MI sick.

The Food: A nice Spy-cy curry? Fish Goldfingers?

Spend The Night With: Peeping Tom

2006-12-11T15:04:00.001Z

Peeping Tom (1959. Dir: Michael Powell)

A brilliant and truly chilling British thriller consider so shocking on it’s release that it practically ended director Michael Powell’s stellar career. A psychotic photographer is obsessed by the subject of fear. He puts theory into practice by enticing prostitutes to his studio and murdering them, photographing their faces, frozen in their final moments of agony and terror. Carl Boehm is spectacular in the role as Mark, the cameraman whose perverse hobby, we discover, was ignited by childhood experiences. You’ll probably think twice about getting a family portrait taken after viewing this.Written by Leo Marks, Peeping Tom is terrifying and creepy but the audacious twist is to see the events through the eyes and lens of the killer, not the people pursuing him. We get an insight into Mark’s adult behaviour through a series of flashbacks to his youth. His father, an behavioural psychiatrist, uses Mark for experiments deliberately terrifying the child with mind games and nasty shocks, filming the results to use as data. Mark detaches himself from human contact by becoming a photographer, in effect he can direct his life from behind the lens. What the critics of Peeping Tom found so shocking was not the horrific and systematic murder of young women but the fact that the script found sympathy, even, in places, empathy, for the protagonist, Mark, the photographic psycho. The film is about the simultaneous detachment and involvement that is the nature of voyeurism. Mark isn’t the only voyeur in the film. We, the audience, are voyeurs too. By seeing the events through Mark’s eyes we somehow become implicit. It was food for thought that many choked on. When the film was released in the UK in 1960 critics and moral guardians (eg The Daily Mail) fell over themselves to have the film banned. Protests at cinemas caused one distributor to pull the movie from release a number of screens. Worse still, director Powell was stonewalled by invited guests at the film’s premiere "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it down the nearest sewer. Even then the stench would remain." wrote an outraged critic from the Tribune, this from a left leaning paper with pretensions of supporting the arts. Powell’s once glittering career was left in tatters. It mattered little that he was responsible for a number of pioneering and globally acclaimed films such as The Thief of Baghdad (1940), Black Narcissus (1946), and The Red Shoes (1948). Powell would be from heron forever associated with ‘that’ movie. Between 1959 and his death in 1990 the once prolific Powell would direct just three films.Soon after its original release Peeping Tom was shelved and practically forgotten. Branded tasteless and exploitative it may well have rotted were it not for a small band of film buffs and directors who maintained that in fact Peeping Tom was Powell’s masterpiece and a classic of modern cinema and a turning point for modern British film. In 1979 Martin Scorsese managed to track down a print for the New York Film Festival and the film was re appraised, this time given its proper due.

The Food: Take out pizza - you can use the lid of the box to hide behind when things get too scary.

The Drink: Neat gin has a similar flavour to photographic solution. Replace the lights with red light-bulbs and drink out of a shallow tray.

Spend The Night On: The picket line

2006-12-11T15:02:00.000Z

The Angry Silence (1960. Dir: Guy Green) / I’m All Right Jack (1959. Dir. John Boulting)

The legacy of the Thatcher Government was the stripping of union power in British industry. But recently there’s been rumbling and unfurling of banners as trade unions once again find their voice. The relationship between the work and the union has been a favourite subject one for film makers, but unlike American and continental films which tend to squarely back the worker, British films on unionism have tended to paint a broader, although not necessarily more accurate, picture. In ‘The Angry Silence’, Richard Attenborough gives a powerful performance as a factory work sent to Coventry by his work mates when he refuses to join a strike. The issue makes the national news and is taken advantage of by the Communist Party. At the centre being torn both ways is Attenborough tormented by his principals about his duty to his family at home and comrades at work. The question the film begs of you is to decide whether he’s simply a scab or an individual refusing to have his mind made up for him? It’s thought provoking stuff, although it fails on an emotional level and takes itself very seriously. Producer Brian Forbes and Richard Attenbourgh would work together again on the delightful Whistle Down The Wind. I’m All Right Jack, released a year earlier, took a similar subject to The Angry Silence, loaded it with satirical dynamite, lit the fuse and stood back to see what happened. The resulting explosion revealed far more about the relationship between industry and it’s workers and Britain’s class structure directly after the Second World war.Jack is to all intents and purposes a sequel to the Boulting Brother’s ‘Private’s Progress’ in which a nice but dim upper class student (Stanley Windrush, played by Ian Charmichael) is exposed to wide scale double standards, scams and shenanigans at every level of the British Army during the fag end of the war in Europe. In Jack, Stanley has been de mobbed and enters into industry to work at his uncle Bertram Tracepurcel’s arms factory. Windrush is persuaded to start at the bottom and work his way up in order to understand the business. But the truth is that the management have a hunch that Windrush’s arrival on the shop floor will not be taken kindly to by the workers, an ensuing strike means that Tracepurcel can pass a large order of missiles for an Arab country to his partner for a higher price and clean up on the profit. The shop floor, led by union leader Jack Kite (brilliantly played by Peter Sellers) do indeed take exception to Windrush, who somehow quadruples production at the factory just by making some naive observations, and a strike is called. But things don’t quite go as Tracepurcell or his nemesis Kite would like. As a satire I’m All Right Jack captured exactly the stand off between industry and the unions directly after the Second World War. The excessive buffoonery and greed of the fat cats of industry is shown up in a way few film-makers had dared to portray until now, but there is also little sympathy shown for the union leadership who are exposed as impotent, obstinate idealists who know who to work the system better than their own jobs.

The Food: It’s hungry work on a picket line but if you’ve got a brassier burning on full heat you could make up some kebabs and let them cook over the flame. For pudding you could stick some marshmallows on the sharp end of your placard and toast them.

The Drink: A few frothing pints of ale is the perfect overture to seizing the means of production and overthrowing the bosses.

Spend The Night With: Truly Madly Deeply

2006-12-11T15:01:00.000Z

Truly Madly Deeply (1990 Dir. Anthony Minghella)

As Marmite movies go Truly Madly Deeply is hot buttered and dripping with yeast extract. Not to mention ectoplasm. If you’re male and reading this I can already hear you retching, if you’re of the female persuasion, however, you’ve probably gone weak at the knees and are gibbering like a baby whose just seen its teddy crushed under the front wheel of a steam roller.Some people - women - insist that Truly Madly Deeply is the greatest British movie of all time. A beautiful tragicomic metaphor for coping with grief.Some other people - me - think it is truly the most gut wrenching, sick inducing and conceited indictment of middle class mores of the 1990s. The fact that it was shot in Bristol but pretended to be Hamstead just happens to be another nail in its cuddly, heartwarming coffin. Directed and scripted by Anthony Minghella who knew Bristol well since his family have been serving the city delicious ice cream for generations and therefore has no excuses to pretend that the location is London. On release the film was an instant smash hit. So much so that it appeared to have been royally ripped off by Ghost, an even more successful Hollywood movie based along similar lines but better because it involved phallic pottery sessions, spectral punch ups and car chases and Whoopie Goldberg and....well, everything TMD didn’t basically. Still it does seem like one informed the other but it’s just a spooky coincidence, because both films came out the same year.Either way. TMD is a brownie point movie. Watch this with your girlfriend once or twice a year and you have a licence to put The Bill/Match Of The Day/Futurama on whenever you like. “He’s got a lovely sensitive side” she’ll tell her mates “he watched Truly Madly Deeply with me last night.” Grin and bear it. TMD plays out thus. Juliet Stevenson has recently lost her lover - as in he’s dead, not misplaced - Alan Rickman. She’s not handling this very well on her own in their crumbling Clifton, sorry Hamstead, flat, so he comes back from the grave for some jam sessions on the cello and piano. Cue long smoochy bits and tearful dialogue. Rickman, though, begins to take liberties with his living partner’s hospitality by bringing deceased mates of his back to the flat to watch Woody Allen movies in the dead of night.Meanwhile Stevenson starts to become attracted to a new man - a self consciously wacky type who wears a ‘look at me’ hat and likes to juggle - crazy. Now she’s all confused because she likes the idiot with the stupid hat but she loves her dead boyfriend and now she feels like she’s cheating on him. “He’s dead” we all scream at the screen, “what the hell?” But no, she’s got to ‘work things out’. It’s that kind of film. And did I mention there are no punch ups or Whoopie Goldberg’s. Into the mix come some builders to finally start work on the flat and sort out an infestation of rats. This is a metaphor, I think, actually it might be a simile. Who cares? Anyway, the long and short of it is that Stevenson finally realises that what with her boyfriend being a ghost and everything there are some clear physical obstacles in the bedroom department and decides to settle for the clown in the hat. Oh well. Still, at least it means the film’s over.

The Food: A plate of Ryvita and celery followed by 17 litres of Semi-melted cookies ‘n’ cream Hagan Daz.

The Drink: You might want a can of lager but 10-1 says you’ll be quaffing Lambrini.

Stay the night with: Blithe Spirt

2006-12-11T14:58:00.000Z

Blithe Spirit (1945. Dir David Lean)

Ghosts. Can’t live ‘em, can’t live without them. At least that’s author Charles Condomine’s predicament in Noel Coward’s delightful tale of middle class spooks and the correct use of spectral etiquette. Originally written for the West End in 1941 the film version is practically a straight lift, with a few minor script adjustments and some non studio shots. Indeed two of the play’s stars, Margaret Rutherford and Kay Hammond, reprised their roles for the screen. With the exception of David Lean’s skilful lighting effects, the film retains a stagey, low-budget feel no doubt in part due to shoestring tight war-time finances. Nonetheless this is a delightful hour and a half packed with magic realism and sparky dialogue.Rex Harrison plays the huffy and self important novelist Charles Condomine whose otherwise idyllic second marriage is interrupted by the arrival of his first wife, Elvira. Inconvenient in any circumstances but more so in this case. Elvira has been dead for over seven years. Condomine brought it on himself, though. Researching a new novel he jovially hires the bumbling psychic Madame Arcati to perform a seance. Much to everyone’s surprise, especially Madame Arcati, Condomine’s bitchy first wife is summoned from beyond the grave and decides to stay. All to the considerable consternation of wife number 2, Ruth. Meanwhile, in a roundabout way, Elvira sets about various attempts to bump off Charles so that he might join her and Madame Arcati has next to no idea how to get rid of the spirit she’s (or at least she thinks) unleashed. It’s all jolly good fun, not least because the script retains Cowards biting edge and sharp social comment about the relationship minefield of second marriages. The role of the flustering medium Arcati made Margaret Rutherford an unlikely star and assured herself big screen tenure as bumbling maiden-aunts. Recognised as one of the greatest English comediennes she never forgot her big screen break, her gravestone is actually inscribed with the description, ‘blithe spirit’. The role lives on too. Bristolian actress Stephanie Cole was recently praised for her take on it during the West End revival of the show and it was clearly a big influence on the script writers of Ghost, a similarly spooked blockbuster of the 1990s, in which Whoopie Goldberg plays an accidental medium. Rex Harrison wasn’t originally a popular choice for the role of Condormine, Noel Coward felt he lacked the required comic aptitude for the part. In fact Harrison proved to be perfect and would later find himself typecast as blustering upper-middle class intellectuals who can’t see the woods for the trees - see My Fair Lady.

The drink: Condomine spends most of the movie drinking (spirits, naturally) which leads some to think that he may be imagining the spectral hectoring of Elvira. You could join him in a spot of ghost spotting with a few whisky and sodas at the Ouija board.

The food: What do spooks like to eat? Ghoul-lash, fondoooooooooooooou, ice-scream, Shrouded Wheat, Grave-y, Bacon and Egg-toplasm, cheese on ghost, boo-berry pie, spook-ghetti. Bone appetite!