Poetry

Ben Johnson’s Encomium To Shakespeare (1623)

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For some years now I have been interested in the Shakespeare authorship question: did the man from Stratford really pen the plays and poems attributed to him, or was he just a front for some other true genius? Anti-Stratfordians (those of the latter persuasion) point out that the sheer breadth of education, knowledge, experience and erudition displayed in the works of Shakespeare is simply incompatible with a man born to illiterate parents, raised in an unremarkable provincial town and educated (maybe) at his local grammar school. Evidence exists to show that the Shakespeare of Stratford engaged in grain-dealing, money-lending, and acting, and was a shareholder in an acting company…but nothing that shows he was an actual writer.

In a rigorous piece of research, Diana Price compared the extant documentary evidence of various kinds with two dozen other big-name Elizabethan poets and playwrights. She looked at the literary paper trails of the likes of Edmund Spencer, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Green and Thomas Nashe and found plenty of evidence of correspondences about literary matters, having patrons, having extant manuscripts, notice at death etc, but found precious little evidence in favour of the man from Stratford; look at the empty final column here (click to enlarge):

Elizabethan literary paper trail summary

It certainly seems strange that no-one seemed to notice when Shakespeare died – where was the fanfare? Some might point to Ben Johnson as one who explicitly lauded Shakespeare in his encomium To the memory of my Beloved the Author, Mr William Shakespeare, in his preface to the First Folio (the common name for the collection of 36 Shakespeare plays published in 1623), but this was published seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Plenty of standalone editions of the plays, with his name emblazoned on the cover, existed prior to his death, so why the radio silence?

The scholar Alexander Waugh, a leading Oxfordian (those advocating for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the true author), has a field day with this poem, reminding us that Ben Johnson was known by contemporaries for his double meanings, classical allusions and use of numbers to reveal hidden meanings to the learned few. Waugh argues that Ben Johnson, along with all the other dramatists of the age, was “in the know” about the true identity of the writer of the Shakespeare plays, and he peppered his encomium with clues pointing to Edward de Vere.

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

There is no room in this blog to explore that argument, as compelling as it is, so instead let’s just take the content on its prima facie meaning. It is, after all, in praise of the greatest dramatist of all time, responsible for all those works of genius, and that praise is surely justified whoever that man was!

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much;
‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th’ ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion’d Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Tri’umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature’s family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet’s made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

Ben Johnson

 

Literature

Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (1959)

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Back in 2003, whilst on a cruise of the Black Sea, we dined each night with an elderly couple, Evan and Vivien Davies, who turned out to be charming and interesting company. They were clearly well-connected and rather posh, and Evan in particular had lived what sounded like a pretty adventurous life back in the day: British Commando during the war; member of Special Branch’s anti-terrorist unit, responsible for protecting Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin (1945-50); and Assistant Superintendent of Police, British Malaya (1950-52). We got on tremendously well despite an age difference of some four decades and I’ll never forget Evan, responding to being gently nudged by Vivien to calm down at one point, stating to the table: “I do apologise – I do tend to get giddy when in good company”! To cap it all, Vivien mentioned that she had recently attended the funeral of Sir Wilfred Thesiger…

Wilfred Thesiger! I knew that name…one of the greats of British exploration, perhaps the last great British explorer. Between 1945 and 1950 Thesiger criss-crossed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, with the help of the Bedu people with whom he acquired a lifelong bond, and with whom he endured hardships and real-and-present dangers on an almost daily basis. Carrying basic supplies and water stored in goatskins (to be refilled at waterholes perhaps hundreds of miles distant), Thesiger set out with his Bedu companions on camelback across hundreds of miles of arid, sun-bleached dunes and gravel plains. In certain areas where there were tribal tensions and they could be violently robbed of their camels, they had to be constantly on their guard and prepared to defend themselves, whilst in other areas Thesiger had to be passed off as a fellow Arab otherwise he could easily have been shot for being an infidel Christian.

Pestered by a friend to write about his experiences, he eventually wrote Arabian Sands, which was published in 1959 and is now considered a classic of travel literature. I have just got round to reading it and indeed it is a remarkable memoir. The insights into the lives of the Bedu are profound, and I was certainly taken with a couple of the characters in particular – bin Kalima and bin Ghabaisha – who became hard and fast friends with the man they called Umbarak. This paragraph sums up the sense of satisfaction that Thesiger derived from his experiences:

In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilisation; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship that was inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction that comes with hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.

This also informs the sense of loss that Thesiger expresses elsewhere when he bemoans the inevitable erosion of traditional Bedouin ways by the march of modernity and the large-scale development beginning to be brought to the region by the American oil companies. How he would have been astonished and dismayed by modern-day Dubai and Abu Dhabi!

Wilfred Thesiger
Arabian Sands book cover
Literature

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

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You could have safely bet that at some point in this series of blogs I was always going to visit a certain trinity of British university dons who have done more for the literary fantasy genre worldwide than, well, any other trinity of university dons. Huge. Immense. The Ronaldo, Messi and Mbappé of children’s fantasy literature – I am talking of course about Lewis Carroll, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien. If your bet had been an accumulator you would be quids in, too, because I shall certainly be visiting C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien at some point in the future, but for today let’s look at the grandaddy, that long-time maths professor at Christ Church Oxford, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll (1832-1898).

Lewis Carroll, what an interesting character! First and foremost, he was a mathematician and long-time university scholar, specialising in geometry, algebra and logic; under his real name, he published eleven books on maths-related subjects. He was also an avid puzzler and is credited with the invention of the “word ladder” – you know it, that puzzle that involves changing one word into another, one letter at a time. He loved word play, amply displayed in his nonsense poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876).

However, it is of course Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (commonly Alice in Wonderland) for which Lewis Carroll will be forever remembered. As we all know, it details the story of a girl named Alice who falls through a rabbit hole (and boy, don’t we hear that phrase a lot these days: “going down a rabbit hole”?) into a fantasy world of anthropomorphic creatures. Carroll first outlined his story whilst out on rowing trips on the Thames near Oxford which he often undertook with members of the Liddell family (Henry Liddell being the Dean at Christ Church).

When he told the story to Henry’s daughter Alice Liddell, she begged him to write it down, which he duly did and then passed the manuscript to another friend and mentor, the novelist George MacDonald. The enthusiasm of the MacDonald children for the story encouraged Carroll to seek publication, and so he approached Macmillan Publishers, who loved it. After the possible alternative titles were rejected – Alice Among the Fairies and Alice’s Golden Hour – the work was finally published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 (followed up of course by Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871). The rest, as they say, is history.

The artist John Tenniel provided a brilliant set of wood-engraved illustrations for the book, of which we can see a gallery of some of the universally familiar characters here:

Lewis Carroll
Art

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Kalevala Paintings (1890s)

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Greece has its Iliad and Odyssey, Italy its Aeneid, Portugal its Lusiads, Iceland its Eddas, Germany its Nibelungenlied, Britain its Beowulf and Le Morte d’Arthur, and India its Mahabarata and Ramayana. I am talking of course about national folk-epics, those literary masterpieces that were originally an oral canon of folk-stories percolated down through the mists of time and later written down and integrated into the worldview of its people.

Well, Finland’s was the epic poetry collection known as the Kalevala, which was developed quite late – during the 19th century – but still from ancient traditional folk-tales. The Kalevala was an integral part of the Finns’ national awakening in the era of the Grand Duchy of Finland when they were under the yoke of the Russian empire, and it was instrumental in the development of the Finnish national identity, ultimately leading to independence from Russia in 1917.

This national awakening coincided with the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art roughly spanning the period 1880 to 1910. The Kalevala provided the artistic inspiration for numerous themes at the time in literature (J. L. Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål; Aleksis Kivi’s The Seven Brothers), music (Jean Sibelius), architecture (Eliel Saarinen), and of course the visual arts, the most notable of which were provided by one Akseli Gallen-Kallela.

Born Axél Waldemar Gallén in Pori, Finland, to a Swedish-speaking family (he Finnicised his name in 1907), Gallen-Kallela first attended drawing classes at the Finnish Art Society before studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married Mary Slöör in 1890 and on their honeymoon to East Karelia, he started collecting material for his depictions of the Kalevala. He would soon be inextricably linked with the independence movement as he produced his scenes from the old stories.

The most extensive paintings that Gallen-Kallela made of the Kalevala were his frescoes, originally for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, but painted again in 1928 in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki where they can be seen to this day. However, many standalone works exist too; here’s a flavour of his art, though if you want to know what they depict you’ll have to read the Kalevala!

Aleksi Gallen-Kallela
Literature

L M Montgomery’s Anne Of Green Gables (1908)

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Ah, the bookshelf in our classroom during my later years at primary school, I remember it well. Replete with titles and illustrated covers promising tales for children of adventure and derring-do in exotic lands: Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island. It had all the girls’ classics, too: Black Beauty, Little Women, What Katy Did, Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables. Of course, I never read any of the latter books…until recently, that is, when I finally read L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, having been inspired to do so by watching Netflix’s excellent Canadian TV adaptation, Anne with an E (2017).

The novel was published in 1908 by Canadian author L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874-1942). Set in the late 19ᵗʰ century, it recounts the adventures of 11-year-old orphan girl Anne Shirley sent by mistake to two middle-aged siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who run their farm in the close-knit community of Avonlea in Prince Edward Island, Canada. They had planned to adopt a boy who could help them with the farm work and so when Anne arrives, their first instinct is to send her straight back. However, her exuberant pleading persuades them to keep her for a trial period and soon her personality wins them over.

Amybeth McNulty as Anne Shirley in “Anne with an E”

Anne is talkative to the extreme, hugely imaginative, dramatic, an extractor of joy from life wherever it may exist, and a touchstone of youthful idealism, if a little prone to defensiveness over her red hair, freckles and pale complexion. She is also insistent that her name should always be spelt with an “e” at the end, hence the title of the TV adaptation. In this she was played impeccably by Amybeth McNulty, the more so now that I have read the book and see how accurately she nailed the character. The whole series turned out to be a largely faithful rendering of the book and certainly it was a heart-warming depiction of a simple turn-of-the-century lifestyle in rural Canada, well wroth the watch.

Since its publication, Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies – that’s actually not far behind J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books albeit having had a century longer to sell copies! And it has that accolade for good reason, so who knows, I may even have to delve into Black Beauty or Heidi next?

Anne of Green Gables, 1st edition book cover
L M Montgomery
Art

John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)

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Last Sunday I popped along to see Monet’s iconic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the centrepiece of a nice collection of key loans featuring various French en plein air precursors to Impressionism. However, whilst there, I was reminded that the gallery had also recently acquired for its permanent collection a piece by an artist a little closer to home, Leeds-born John Atkinson Grimshaw, known not for the Impressionistic brushwork or garden scenes of Monet and his ilk but for realistic nocturnal scenes of urban landscapes. The painting is Liverpool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine example of Grimshaw’s oeuvre. It was also something of a coup for York Art Gallery, given that it had been accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from a collection and had been allocated to the gallery for the bargainous price of £0.

Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked destined for a normal, anonymous life –  he married his cousin Frances at age twenty and got a job as clerk for the Great Northern Railway. However, the young John had an artistic gift and an ambition, and it must have taken a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dismay his parents by packing in his job and launching himself as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His primary artistic influence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he painted with accurate colour and lighting and with vivid detail. Although he did start out painting a variety of genres, Grimshaw was later drawn to depicting moonlit views of city streets in Leeds and London, and dockside scenes in Hull, Liverpool, and Glasgow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked later in his career in his Chelsea studios, said: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.

Unlike Whistler’s Impressionistic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” nocturnes were sharply focused and almost photographic in their quality, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than concentrating on the dirty and depressing aspects of industrial life (that he would have had no trouble finding), Grimshaw imbued his paintings with a lyrical evocation of the urban landscape and there is poetry in his captured mists, reflected streetlight in wet pavements, and dark figures wrapped up against the weather. His twilight cities became his “brand” and became very popular with his middle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were living at Knostrup Old Hall, in the Temple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.

Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a winter’s day like this.

 

Boar Lane, Leeds (1881)
John Atkinson Grimshaw
Film, TV, and Theatre

Spencer Tracy in Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

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The Cottage Road Cinema in Headingley is the oldest indie cinema in Leeds and has been continuously showing films since 1912. As such it is regarded with fondness by much of the north Leeds community and long may it continue. Anyway, it has a classics night every month, where viewers can watch a series of nostalgic ads and previews from back in the day, prior to settling back with a fairly-priced box of popcorn to enjoy a classic movie, selected for its historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Last month, for example, I went to see Hitchcock’s Rear Window; next month I’m tempted by Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager; and this month I went to see the subject of this blog, John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The term “neo-Western” does not signify a western movie as such, and instead implies the use of certain themes and motifs redolent of westerns but set in more modern times (in this case, 1945). Really, it’s a crime drama but it contains the wide, open plains and desert landscapes of the western, and Spencer Tracy’s “stranger comes to town and is met with unfriendly suspicion” persona is top-drawer Clint Eastwood.

Tracy plays a one-armed stranger, John Macreedy, who disembarks from the train that rarely stops in the isolated desert hamlet of Black Rock and is soon put under hostile scrutiny from the locals who lounge on the wooden verandas of the saloon and bar-and-grill and wonder who the hell this new guy is and what the hell does he want? At this point I should say that if I were harbouring a dark secret – which you can be sure these Black Rock locals certainly are – and a stranger comes to town asking questions, I would put on a friendly and cooperative façade to deflect suspicion. This lot, however, opt for the acute hostility and evasiveness approach and thus come across as guilty as sin from the get-go, with Borgnine and Marvin in particular pushing the envelope in the “I’ve clearly got something to hide” department.

Still, Macreedy’s been asking questions about a certain Japanese-American gentleman named Komoko, but nobody seems to want to engage. Robert Ryan’s character Reno Smith is clearly in charge and holds the rest of the town in his thrall, including the ineffectual, alcoholic sheriff. Smith claims that Komoko was simply interned during World War II but also reveals his virulent anti-Japanese sentiment developed after Pearl Harbor – we the audience are only too aware that something dodgy has gone down and not only that but Macreedy himself needs to be in fear for his own life. Macreedy gradually breaks down the omerta of the townsfolk and begins to separate the real culprits from the simply scared, some of whom are inspired by Macreedy to step up. It’s a tour de force of psychological drama, with great tough-guy dialogue and the stunning backdrop of the Mohave desert, and well worth my punt in venturing out on a Wednesday night!

Let’s watch Macreedy, despite his one arm, getting the better of thug Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine), in this tense encounter.

Spencer Tracy and John Ericson in Bad Day at Black Rock
Music

The Animals’ The House Of The Rising Sun (1964)

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If you’re a music history enthusiast, hours of fun can be had perusing the Roud Folk Song Index (https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud), the online database of around a quarter of a million references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, and named after its compiler Steve Roud. It correlates versions of traditional folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across the UK and North America. Take Roud number 6393, for instance: The House of the Rising Sun.

Although widely known from the most successful contemporary version, recorded by the Animals in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song with deep roots: it was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably goes back much further, emanating from the tradition of so-called “broadside ballads”. A “broadside” was a sheet of cheap paper used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to distribute news and so on, but also, most popularly, ballads. “Ballads” were narrative rhymes and songs developing from the minstrelsy of the earlier fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which told folk stories on every topic under the sun, from legends and heroes and religion to the more prosaic side of life.

The House of the Rising Sun ballad tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans, and is a classic cautionary tale, appealing to his listeners to avoid the same fate:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I’m one

Folk song collector Alan Lomax noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in at least two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs (Leeds dwellers may be familiar with the one on Kirkstall Road, albeit now sadly disused). He hypothesised that the location of the said drinking hole-cum-brothel was then simply relocated from England to the US by roaming performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called She was a Rum One (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning:

If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun,
There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one.

The oldest known recording of the song, under the title Rising Sun Blues, is by Appalachian artists Tom Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather who had got married around the time of the Civil War, suggesting that the song was written years before the turn of the century.

In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version; Lead Belly recorded two versions in the forties; Joan Baez recorded it in 1960 on her eponymous debut album; Nina Simone recorded a version for the live album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962; and Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. But it was the Animals, Newcastle’s own blues-rock band made up of Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine and John Steel, who scored a transatlantic number one hit single with it in 1964 and made it their signature tune.

The Animals, The House of the Rising Sun

 

Music

John Newton’s Amazing Grace (1772)

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Amazing Grace is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world – who hasn’t been exposed countless times to these iconic opening lines?

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see

It was written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725-1807), drawn very much from personal experience. He had grown up without any particular religious bent and after a time having been pressganged into service with the Royal Navy, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. However, in 1748 he was on a vessel caught up in a storm so violent that he begged God for mercy and underwent (having presumably got his feet back on terra firma) something of a spiritual conversion. Thereafter, Newton gave up seafaring, studied Christian theology, and became a vocal abolitionist. He once was lost but now was found.

Newton was ordained into the Church of England in 1764, and took a post as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he met and began to write hymns with William Cowper (who himself would become a celebrated poet and hymnodist). They wrote Amazing Grace to illustrate a sermon Newton was giving on New Year’s Day 1773 with the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God. It debuted in print in 1779 in their collaborative Olney Hymns.

At this stage, Amazing Grace, like all the other Olney hymns, was still relatively obscure but it took off in the United States when it was picked up and extensively used by Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Protestant revival movement of the early 19th century (the so-called Second Great Awakening). In 1835, American composer William Walker set the words to the tune known as New Britain and this is the version you’ll hear today.

The song has unsurprisingly become a staple of Gospel music, and has also crossed over into secular music with a particular influence in folk music. It’s been recorded thousands of times in the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards; today though, I offer a version by American folk singer Judy Collins, recorded in 1993 with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.

John Newton
Film, TV, and Theatre

Phil Cornwell and John Sessions in Stella Street (1997)

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A British TV comedy series that perhaps fell under the radar a little bit (you can actually find people who never saw or heard of it), Stella Street was nonetheless a great find when it began airing in 1997 and continued over four series to 2001. Its somewhat bizarre premise is that an ordinary street in suburban Surbiton is peopled by a group of bigtime celebrities going about their lives in ordinary, suburban fashion, but adhering to some well-known and exaggerated stereotypes pertaining to said celebs.

The show was conceived and written by John Sessions, Phil Cornwell and Peter Richardson, with the main characters played by Sessions and Cornwell (and Ronni Ancona for some episodes). The celebrities chosen to live in Stella Street were presumably influenced by the performers’ ability to do great impressions of them and whose personas lent themselves to some great send-up comedy. The programme takes the form of a mockumentary with filming done on a handheld camera and Cornwell as Michael Caine talking directly to the camera to introduce characters and situations (just as he does in the 1966 film Alfie).

Jack Nicholson is portrayed as the inveterate womanising bad-ass of his stereotype (or his real personality?) complete with bad taste Hawaiian shirts not exactly suited to the British climate. Michael Caine is full-on Sixties’ Michael Caine with the trademark laconic vocal delivery, shock of ginger hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Roger Moore is the quintessential English gentleman with impeccable manners, and with a loneliness theme ruthlessly exploited by Sessions. David Bowie is the self-effacing and slightly awkward superstar staying true to his Bromley roots. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards run the local grocery store, Mick with massive enthusiasm, Keith with time-worn, devil-may-care cynicism and a gleam in his eye.

Let’s enjoy a montage of Cornwell and Sessions bringing these characters to life: the mayhem of Mick and Keef’s corner shop, and then a glorious vignette of David Bowie and Roger Moore exchanging spectacularly mundane Christmas presents (with Roger Moore taking politeness to the next level when gifted an underwhelming £10 book token).

Mick and Keef

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