Brighton Three Ways From Sunday

I.

Trudging slowly over wet sand,

Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen.

This is the coastal town

That they forgot to close down :

Armageddon - come Armageddon!

Come, Armageddon! Come!

Every Day is like Sunday.

Every Day is silent and grey.

Hide on the promenade,

Etch a postcard :

"How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here."

In the seaside town

...That they forgot to bomb :

Come, Come, Come - Nuclear Bomb.

Every Day is like Sunday.

Every Day is silent and grey.

Trudging back over pebbles and sand,

And a strange dust lands on your hands

(And on your face...)

Every Day is like Sunday.

"Win Yourself A Cheap Tray."

Share some greased tea with me.

Every Day is silent and grey.

II.

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.  With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anyone could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd.  They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down the Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian watercolour;  a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens, in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

 

        It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in Brighton.  Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics whenever his programme allowed.  For he had to stick closely to a programme: from between ten and eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square;  from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one on the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry-go.

 

        Advertised on every Messenger poster: ‘Kolley Kibber in Brighton today.’  In his pocket he had a pack of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route;  those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand:  ‘You are Mr Kolley Kibber.  I claim the Daily Messenger prize.’

III.

 

        These two girls were walking from the direction of the Palace Pier towards the West Pier, which they had nearly reached.  

        At about a hundred yards’ distance from the West Pier some sort of suggestive nudging took place between their interlocked arms and they turned away to the left to the railing overlooking the sea.  They leaned over these railings and gave an imitation of observing the beauties of what remained of the sunset. 

        ‘Go on,’ said the pretty girl to her companion.  ‘Have a look now.’

        ‘No,’ said the ugly girl.  ‘You look.’

 

        ‘No – you look,’ said the pretty girl, and she was in due course obeyed.  The pretty girl is usually ultimately obeyed on such occasions, for, in addition to her ascendancy for other reasons, she is the initiator, the senior officer, the skilled and experienced campaigner in operations of this nature.

        ‘Yes,’ said the ugly girl. ‘Here they come.’

        She was alluding to three young men whom they had believed to have been following them.  

        ‘All right.  Just pretend to be looking out at the sea,’ said the mature strategist, in a quiet, steady tone which in fact betrayed some nervousness by virtue of its quietness and steadiness.

        ‘It’s a lovely evening,’ she added.  ‘Ain’t it?’

Reader Key:  I. Everyday Is Like Sunday (Morrissey-Stephen Street); II. Excerpt from Graham Green, Brighton Rock (N.b., Lobby Lud pictured above is the actual newspaper promotion contest that Graham Greene used as the basis for Kolley Kibber); III.  Excerpt from Patrick Hamilton, The West Pier. (Graham Greene once described The West Pier as the best novel ever written about Brighton, a place I've visited several times and love. I have had no sinister experiences there, however, just rough late winter weather.)

Doctor Who's 47th Anniversary

 

William Hartnell as Doctor Who in "An Unearthly Child"   


     Today, November 23rd, is the 47th anniversary of the first BBC transmission of ""An Unearthly Child", the first episode of Doctor Who, and I believe it is an anniversary worth marking.

     Given its 26-year original run and subsequent revivals, I assume Doctor Who will always wear the mantle of longest-running television program ever. For any and all of its ups-and-downs, the show is deservedly well loved.

     During the years I worked as a lawyer for CBS/FOX Video, we acted as BBC's home video marketer and distributor in North America.  CBS/FOX released an enormous amount of Doctor Who programming, all of it for the first time on home video, on a regular basis to a fairly sizable, ultra-fanatic audience.

     When you work as in-house counsel for a media company and have acquired a good reputation for problem-solving,  all of the weird and unclassifiable telephone calls and inquiries the company receives are sent your way.  Because of this, I found myself regularly dealing the "Who-vians" (i.e., Doctor Who ultra-fans), who would call enthusiastically and persistently with the most obscure questions imaginable about anything and everything. An earlier stint working in a record company publicity department  prepared me a little bit for the excessive level of personal devotion some people are capable of exercising regarding matters outside of their family, friends and work life, but the Who-vian passion surpassed anything I had previously experienced or could imagine.  Because the calls sometimes produced  unsatisfactory endings for the caller (not every question elicits the "right" answer) or tedious follow-up work for me (while it's good and important to "keep the customer satisfied", there are practical limits), I eventually formed an unfair negative impression of the show.

     However, this ended when one day I decided that I needed to learn more about the Doctor Who series in order to prepare for a substantive work project.  Over a weekend when I was bedridden with flu, I began watching the series.  The first shows I viewed featured Tom Baker in the role of Doctor Who (our head of Marketing, Mindy Pickard, told me that he was the most popular and highly regarded of the various Doctors). I immediately "got it" and understood the show's appeal. 

Tom Baker as Doctor Who

     Fabled shaky scenery and low-tech special effects notwithstanding, Doctor Who is simply character and story-driven television at its best.  Once you've bought into the story and the fantasy (the successive incarnations of Doctor Who, Time Lords, Daleks and, of course, the TARDIS), you found that the show's creative team had worked very hard over the years to keep Doctor Who both fresh and developing, continually interesting and entertaining. And, as is well known, Doctor Who had the best theme music anywhere.

    The original Doctor Who incarnation was played by the veteran character English actor William Hartnell, who will surely be recognizable to fans of British cinema. (Among other well-known roles, Hartnell played  Dallow in John Boulting's 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.)   Hartnell was much scarier and a much tougher nut than the charming Tom Baker.  They are my two favorites Doctors,  but all the original series Doctor Who actors (the others included Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Peter Davison) had their moments.

William Hartnell entering TARDIS

     "An Unearthly Child" was originally broadcast on November 23, 1963, the night following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  That's a spooky, resonant thought and it's difficult to imagine what it must have been like to watch a new science-fiction fantasy show during those profoundly difficult days, even outside the U.S.  For what it's worth, the first week's ratings were disappointing, but viewership quickly picked up in succeeding weeks and the rest is literally "history".

     Following, if you care to read on, is an interesting summary of  "An Unearthly Child" and the early days of the series, which I have borrowed from a fan site in celebration of the anniversary.  Although I hesitate to recommend more television viewing to anyone (personally I'm trying to lay off:  things currently seem so grim, the days are getting shorter, and I think it would be good to get out of the house more), but it's easy for me to endorse Doctor Who to non-initiates.  Plus, for any concerned parents, it is definitely and edifyingly "family viewing".  In its odd way, the show is as thought provoking as it is escapist.  The Daleks, while silly, represent a solid and consistent vision of totalitarianism as evil.  And the TARDIS is still a very potent image and concept that has endured and animated a national consciousness for 47 years.

 TARDIS in South Ambersham, Sussex ("Secret Of Loch Ness" episode)

Regarding "An Unearthly Child", Dr. Who Episode, Original BBC Broadcast Date: November 23, 1963:

     "The very first person you see on screen in Doctor Who is a policeman (played by an uncredited Reg Cranfield, trivia fans), walking outside a junkyard in Totters Lane, London. This is the home of Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), a teenaged pupil at local comprehensive Coal Hill School. Susan’s strangeness attracts the attention of two teachers, science master Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and history teacher Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), who one night pay a visit on Susan and her eccentric grandfather, known only as The Doctor…...

     That’s the beginning of “An Unearthly Child”, the first episode of Doctor Who. The series was originated by Sydney Newman, a Canadian-born broadcaster who had had considerable success with ABC’s Armchair Theatre. He had been brought over to the BBC to breathe new life into the then rather stuffy drama department, and Doctor Who was an attempt to bridge a gap between the end of Grandstand and the beginning of Juke Box Jury, a half-hour gap on a Saturday teatime where audiences tended to drop. The BBC had been a rather tradition-bound organisation, but by the early 1960s, with competition from ITV since 1955, new winds were blowing. If Doctor Who seemed new, it was the creation of outsiders and young people: Newman was a Canadian, the producer Verity Lambert was then the only female producer at the BBC and twenty years younger than her youngest male counterpart, while Waris Hussein was the only Asian-born director working then.

     William Hartnell was only fifty-five, though certainly looked at least a decade older. He had become typecast as sergeant majors, notably in the first Carry On film, Carry On Sergeant, though Lambert had been impressed by his seedy bookie in This Sporting Life. By contrast, Carole Ann Ford, playing a teenager, was actually twenty-three and a mother. William Russell had been the star of the 50s series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (which survives and is available on DVD), and was well qualified to handle any action sequences going. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Hill had built up a distinguished CV since the 1950s.

     Hussein and Lambert had in fact two goes at making that first episode. Unusually, the “pilot” version still exists (and is included on this disc). Small changes were made, such as a generally faster pace, Susan’s costume being more like a 60s teenager (a Mary Quant top, no less), and the Doctor’s characterisation being made less aggressive. Also, the theme tune is somewhat different. In whichever version you watch, the first major coup comes halfway through that first episode, when Ian and Barbara follow The Doctor and Susan into what looks like a contemporary police box…and into the interior of the TARDIS, bigger inside than outside. Given that this and others of the series’ key concepts have taken root in the public consciousness over the last forty-two years, it’s hard to imagine the impact this must have had on its first screening. In fact, audience numbers were a little low, blamed on Kennedy’s assassination that day and also on power failures in certain regions. The first episode was repeated the following week, and an increase in viewers (up to 5.9 million) was noted." 

Monocle

  

Winona Ryder as Veronica Sawyer in Heathers (1989)

A monocle is a type of corrective lens used to correct the visual perception in only one eye.  It consists of a circular lens, generally with a wire ring around the circumference, that can be attached to a string.  The other end of the string is then connected to the wearer's clothing to avoid losing the monocle.  

It was Baron Philipp von Stosch (1691-1757), the important, but controversial Prussian antiquarium, collector and (apparently) spy, who first put the monocle on the fashion map when he wore the device in Rome in the 1720s in order to more closely examine engravings and antique engraved gems.  Stosch's tome, Gemmae Antiquae Caelatae, containing Bernard Picart's engravings reproduced the images of seventy antique carved hardstones, including onyx, jasper and carnelian.  It is still considered an invaluable scholarly resource.

Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762), Neo-Classical Bust of Baron Philipp von Stosch,  1727, marble, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Stosch's collection eventually comprised over 10,000 cameos, intaglios and antique glass pastes.  (Most of these are currently housed in various Berlin museums.)  Like some other "intrepid" collectors throughout history, some of Stosch's acquisitions were obtained through shady methods, as the following story illustrates:

"It was in looking over the royal cabinet of medals that the keeper perceived the loss of one; his place, his pension and his reputation were at stake; and he insisted that Baron Stosch be most minutely examined.  In this dilemma, forced to confession, the erudite collector assured the keeper of the royal cabinet that the strictest search would not avail.  'Alas, sir, I have it here within', he said, pointing to his breast.  An emetic was suggested by the learned practitioner himself, probably from some former experiment."  (From Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, 1791.) 

Giovanni Battista Pozzo,  Cast bronze medal portrait of Baron Phillpp von Stosch at age 26 (1717)

It was not until the 1790s, however, that the monocle, introduced as a high fashion "dandy's 'quizzing glass'", became a more standard item of gentlemen's apparel.  This set the stage for its greater popularity throughout the nineteenth century.

19th century gold "quizzing glass" monocle

Like many people, I'm certain, I was intrigued by the monocle immediately upon first viewing. Although that specific event is forever lost in the sands of time, I think it might have been when I saw an encyclopedia  photograph of the famous actor and anti-vivisectionist George Arliss,  the first Brit to win an Academy Award (which he did in the Best Actor category for his portrayal of Disraeli in 1929).  Arliss was a great star and a fine man.  With his monocle in place, he  projected fully the image of the English gentleman. (In a  funny coincidence, Isaac D'Israeli, the source for the Philipp von Stosch anecdote recounted above, was the father of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister so memorably portrayed by George Arliss.) 

 

George Arliss (1868-1946)

Until yesterday I had completely forgotten that Winona Ryder had worn a monocle in some key scenes from Heathers, one of her best movies.  And today, I rediscovered the picture found below of the always impressive and somewhat frightening William Hartnell, appearing as the very first Doctor Who, as well as the strange internet photo of a Japanese girl who posted a plaintive request for someone, anyone to please send her a drawing showing her posing in her monocle.

William Hartnell (1908-75), the first Doctor Who

Female Japanese monocle wearer, 2008 

My own personal monocle avatar has always been the Romanian-French poet, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), a principal Dadaist, key early Surrealist, and always a charismatic, inspirational figure.  For me, one look at Tzara (I have provided three below) tells the whole story.   

Tristan Tzara (top two photos); Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Max Ernst (bottom photo)

I used to have a monocle too.  I spent the summer of 1971 on a student summer trip to Paris and when my school, the Paris-American Academy, scheduled a four-day excursion to London, I made it my main purpose to purchase a monocle there.  (I was already under Tzara's spell.)  Someone told me that I would probably be able to find one at the Portobello Road flea market and I was not disappointed, except for the fact that I found the monocle difficult to wear and it made me look ridiculous.  (How did Tristan Tzara manage to look so cool when I looked so uncool?)  I soon placed the monocle in a dresser drawer or a jewelry box and haven't laid eyes on it since the mid-1970s.  

When we moved into our current house three years ago, I  was finally able to retrieve everything I had placed in storage over the years.  Once again, I seem to physically possess absolutely everything I have ever owned.  I suspect the monocle may be in the attic, no more than 200 feet from where I sit.  I wonder if I will ever see it again?

19th century gold monocle fitted with "gallery" piece for greater comfort.

Mr. Peanut, Antonio Gentile and Unknown Artist, 1916