blue jam

IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S RAINING OR IT’S FINE

/ whenisbins / 3 Comments

File_000(6)Andrew O’Hagan’s new book, The Secret Life, consists of three essays. The first of them, ‘Ghosting’, is itself about the process of writing, and his experience of trying to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s autobiography for Canongate Books, only to find that Assange cannot or will not commit to writing or exposing his real thoughts and feelings, who long ago gave up any professional and objective integrity for self-absorption and a studied cult of personality. Leaving aside everything else about Assange (and there is a lot of everything else about Assange), I keep picturing him as a man who spends a lot of his time staring in the mirror, stroking his hair while fantasising about being interviewed. ‘That was the big secret with him,’ writes O’Hagan at one point, ‘He wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.’

On Monday, I went to see Andrew O’Hagan speak about this new book at the London Review of Books Bookshop. Just minutes before the talk began, I learned of the death of a man who – while very famous in his day – never seemed to want to hog the limelight for its own sake. Brian Cant, truly I would say, was a hero to millions of us children who watched television between the 1960s and 1980s. On long-running programmes like Play School and Play Away, Brian – it would feel wrongly impersonal to refer to him by surname – felt like your television dad. With an eternal twinkle in his eye, he was the warmest, most generous and reassuring of TV entertainers.

There were some people on television in those days – we all know who – whom we felt we had to tolerate, mostly down to lack of other options. You never imagined Brian could be one of these bumptious, drunk-with-fame screen obstacles. Nor did he ever seem trapped by children’s television. In later years, when fleetingly interviewed, he expressed only gratitude and love. But it feels a shame that his full story remains mostly untold.

As I mentioned in last week’s blogpost, very little children’s TV was on offer in the 1960s and 1970s, and what there was existed in isolation. Often it was a single programme, a lifeline, a tiny island in an ocean of closedowns, interludes and testcards. Brian was often an inhabitant on these islands: Play School in the mid-morning on BBC2; Play Away the only children’s programme on Saturday afternoon while other channels broadcast hours of sport; lunchtime broadcasts for pre-schoolers, entertainment lasting just fifteen extremely precious minutes. In those latter lunchtime slots, Brian’s voice accompanied the action of Gordon Murray’s trilogy of stop-frame animated series, all set in the fictional county of Trumptonshire: Camberwick Green (1966), Trumpton itself (1967) and finally Chigley (1969). It was disappointing to hear on Radio 4’s Last Word this week that Brian was reportedly only paid a flat fee for his original voiceovers, and did not receive any royalties for their many repeats.

Brian began to fade from children’s TV in the mid-1980s – his last remaining link, Bric-A-Brac (1980–82), in which he played a shop owner who only stocked items beginning with the same initial letter, was repeated until 1987. Thereafter my encounters with Brian became sparser but each one was a delight, nonetheless. I reacted with surprise to his cameo in the final episode of the Esmonde & Larbey sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles (1989), having almost forgotten he was primarily an actor. (As well as a lot of theatre, his many TV acting credits also included Doctor Who, Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars.)

I never really saw Dappledown Farm, Brian’s subsequent breakfast TV series for young children, but his self-parodic narrations of ‘The Organ Gang’ on Stewart Lee and Richard Herring’s This Morning With Richard Not Judy in 1998 were hilarious. ‘The Organ Gang’ was a consciously cheap cartoon about a cast of disembodied innards with faces (Barry Bladder, Beryl Brain, Lily Liver) – imagine a cross between Mr Benn, The Munch Bunch and indeed Camberwick Green. I enjoyed the way Brian gamely pretended to express apathy and even annoyance with the formulaic, threadbare scripts: in the last episode, he couldn’t even be bothered to sing the theme tune properly. I hope he enjoyed doing them, because his infectious sense of fun was still very much in evidence.

And then a few months later, early 1999, I heard the track ‘Fish’ by the artist and DJ called Mr Scruff on Chris Morris’s late-night Radio 1 series Blue Jam. It sampled Brian’s voice from two different sources, both records I had been given when very young. One came from the Camberwick Green story album, just straight transfers of Brian’s narration and Freddie Phillips’ music from the TV series, and it was specifically from a story where Windy Miller went fishing. The other, which took me a little longer to identify, familiar as it was, came from a 1972 compilation album of Play School stories, an item called ‘All the Fish in the Sea’, written by Janet Lynch-Watson, and told by Brian and co-presenter Carole Ward:

CW: ‘Why should it be that the fish in the sea are all unable to sing?

BC: ‘Just listen to me, young fellow/What need is there for fish to sing, when I can roar and bellow?

These were my first records, my first awareness (apart from books) of on-demand entertainment, to be played again and again, whenever I liked. Until I was doing research for this piece, I had not listened to the Play School record in many years. The last time I had played it was in 1980, when I was ten, and really much too old to be listening to it – but by then I had started buying pop singles and even albums for myself, and I played it knowing full well that I was about to bid farewell to something.

I last heard Brian Cant on Radio 4’s The Reunion in 2010, reminiscing about Play School itself. Most of his memories seemed to be less about him than his happy experiences with fellow presenters and encounters with the public who loved him. It just enhanced all the affection for this gentle, dignified, generous but fun-loving chap. It would be nice to think that a proper BBC tribute is being planned; I suspect generations of viewers would welcome it.

Brian Cant died on 19 June 2017, aged eighty-three. It would be fantastic if I could link to a
Brian Cant at the BBC DVD here. Make it happen, someone.

Andrew O’Hagan’s The Secret Life is published by Faber & Faber.

 

 

 

THEN WELCOME

/ whenisbins / 3 Comments

There are two reasons why I constantly miss Chris Morris being a regular radio presence. One, inevitably, is for his comedy. During the 1990s, his output for the BBC on Greater London Radio, and then Radios 4, 3 and 1, marked him out as one of the medium’s true originators. Though justly acclaimed for his television work (The Day Today, Brass Eye) and latterly his feature film (Four Lions), I believe his comedy bones hail from radioland. And his radio shows – most famously On the Hour, co-created with Armando Iannucci – have been packed with heavily stylised packages of reportage (‘There’s been a large disaster at Bigg Street Station’) and fractured versions of tabloid headlines:

‘Dismantled Pope Found Sliding Along Road’

‘Left Wing Footballer Shoots Cat’

‘Brilliant Professor Unplugged By Careless Cleaner’

But there’s another reason I miss him. Chris Morris was, both as a technician and as a music lover, one of the finest radio DJs this country has ever produced. He had an extraordinary ability to mix the familiar with the unsung, every week offsetting his comedy content with an eclectic pile of records. His show was not in the vein of John Peel: the point wasn’t necessarily to unearth new bands; instead, he cherry-picked from the playlist, tossed in some neglected oldies and very occasionally unleashed the compellingly rank: Derek Jameson; Guy Mitchell’s comeback record ‘Have A Nice Day’, or Jimmy Tarbuck’s reading of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. Beck, Gil Scott-Heron, R.E.M., Stereolab and Sly Stone – among countless, countless others – were all heard regularly.

His Radio 1 show ended on Boxing Day afternoon 1994 with a selection of highlights from his seven months on the station. Stunts created and performed with sidekick Peter Baynham included claiming to find the corpse of fellow DJ Johnnie Walker in an adjacent studio, and supposedly removing a shell from a tortoise. Another correspondent, roving reporter Paul Garner, was heard to bother a taxi driver in Cambridge almost towards dangerous breaking point. Macabre and hilarious, it forced the listener to wonder if their ears were deceiving them. ‘Did I really just hear that?’

It took nearly three years for Morris to return to Radio 1. Blue Jam, which began in November 1997, was hailed as a wild departure from his previous work – markedly slower in tone, nocturnal, desolate – but it retained several familiar hallmarks. Firstly, the sketch material (though now performed by actors like Kevin Eldon, Amelia Bullmore and Julia Davis) was still about escalating crises, but because of its post-midnight slot and context, these items felt more unsettling: almost contemporary ghost stories, anxiety dreams about parenthood, mortality, sex, identity, health and workplace competition. I’ve always reasoned that Blue Jam’s content – regarded as some of the most extreme to ever make it to British mainstream radio – is justified on the grounds that the dreams and nightmares we have in our lives are entirely unfiltered by censorship.

I used to have a ritual with my Blue Jam listening in the late 90s. I would turn off the light, get into bed, set a tape running and then listen in darkness, still giggling at the comedy. Some of it was alarming. Some of it, it must be said, was also spectacularly bloody stupid.  But what I also enjoyed about it was the music. Every week, it was like receiving a new compilation tape, where new dance tunes shared space with French or Japanese pop, or oldies like “I’m in Love with a German Filmstar” – a song you hear all the time now on 80s flashback shows or 6Music, but rarely in 1999. The comedy was ice-cold but intimate; in contrast, the music was often warm, full of reassuring colour and zest. Indeed, that’s why I was less fond of Blue Jam’s television incarnation. Jam, broadcast on Channel 4 in 2000, reused many of its ancestor’s items, but inevitably could not house full tracks of music, and the pace was affected accordingly.

As I’m writing this, Radio 4Extra is broadcasting the third and final run of Blue Jam (first broadcast early in 1999). Its sound collage of samples, sketches (with recurring loops as counterpoint) and full tracks, remains fresh, original, and quite unlike anything else. And it’s often funny. But while I miss Morris’s comedy on the air, I also miss his choice of music. I feel sure that 6Music must, by now, have tried to entice him back to radio – so far, without success. But it would be a shame if he never treated us to his playlists again. He wouldn’t even have to talk.

PLUG: There’s a book called No Known Cure: The Comedy of Chris Morris. Published by Palgrave Macmillan and the BFI in 2013, it’s a collection of original essays on Morris’s career to date from a variety of writers. My contribution to that book, an essay entitled ‘Rockarama Newsbanana’, is concerned with the way that Morris used music, as a DJ, composer and musician, to enhance his comedy.

You can buy the book here. And no, not all these blog posts will be trying to sell you stuff.