James Bond, incidentally

Inspired by a couple of tunes somebody has added to the TV Cream Spotify playlist, plus watching The Spy Who Loved Me on DVD and chuckling at some of the music cues, plus the fact it’s a holiday weekend when thoughts invariably turn to Universal Exports, here’s a new playlist comprising the best bits from the Bond soundtracks.

Not all of the original albums are on Spotify. There’s a complete run up to and including Moonraker, then a gap until – erk – Licence To Kill, while only Goldeneye from the Brosnan years is represented, and naturally everything since then, i.e. the James Bourne era, doesn’t count.

But from those selections that are, by expediency and taste, available to hear, a fine brew can be prepared. By way of some sleeve notes:

Things kick off with the brilliantly-named Twisting With James and the liltingly exotic Jamaica Jazz, both from Dr No, a film which doesn’t so much have a soundtrack as a vague collection of Caribbean sounding noodles, implausibly penned by Eric “Carry On” Rodgers.

John Barry makes his entrance courtesy of The Golden Horn, one of those I-wonder-what-foreign-music-sounds efforts with a parping horn and fluttering tambourine, and the short but sweet Guitar Lament, off From Russia With Love.

From Goldfinger comes the spectacular Into Miami, which should have been the film’s theme tune, and the intriguingly-titled and fabulously eerie Teasing The Korean. Barry hits his stride here: low strings, unnerving rumblings from the harp, and that trademark fluttery flute.

After just one from Thunderball – Cafe Martinique, which sounds (correctly) as swish as its name – comes a dose of Paddy Kingsland-esque Orientals from You Only Live Twice, the epic Capsule In Space and the shamelessly lush Mountains And Sunsets, then about the only decent thing in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: an untrying piece of music called, unhappily, Try.

Diamonds Are Forever, being the best Bond film ever, naturally has the best John Barry soundtrack, which is why a grand total of four tracks make the playlist. The Whyte House is all sublime swagger; Tiffany Case has the most gorgeous vibraphone to ever star in a 007 flick; Diamonds Are Forever (Bond And Tiffany) has those fluttering flutes jousting with a sadly sauntering version of the theme; and Death At The Whyte House has fluttering flutes AND vibraphones AND swagger. “You appear to have caught me with more than my hands up.”

A quick passing of the baton and it’s over to George Martin for a salsa workout in Baron Samedi’s Dance Of Death, a groovy harpsichord boogie in the splendidly-named Bond Drops In, and some fat funk strutting in Trespasses Will Be Eaten, all from Live And Let Die and all great stuff.

Why Martin wasn’t kept on is a mystery; Barry came back for the next film, The Man With The Golden Gun, which was shit, especially the music, so nothing from that makes the list.

Instead things move on to The Spy Who Loved Me, and a one-off score from Marvin Hamlisch. Synthesiser alert! Brace yourself for the first bit of electronica to ever appear in a 007 film, and ace it is too. Bond 77 has the works: squeaky glissandos, farting bass lines, swooshy strings, plus a honking saxophone and wicky-wicky-wacky-wicky guitar riffs. Ride To Atlantis sounds like Bouquet Of Barbed Wire crossed with The Onedin Line, and End Titles is just that: the glorious bit from “Shall we get out of these wet things” onwards, although sadly lacking that brief burlesque Broadway rendition of the theme.

To end with, there’s Bond Arrives In Rio And Boat Chase: John Barry’s last hurrah, from Moonraker, replete with an aah-aah-aah-aah choir and a continent’s worth of percussion.

And that’s your lot. But maybe that’s no bad thing, as everything post-1979 (bar the soundtrack to Never Say Never Again) is, as Bond himself says, like listening to The Beatles without earmuffs.

Photo clippage #50

To celebrate reaching a half-century of graphical archivery, here’s that official new Countryfile presenting line-up in full:

On the Spotify

Hello, I’m Norris McWhirter, and I’ve just popped out from a meeting of the Freedom Association to tell you that TV Cream has relaxed its rules about its Spotify playlist.

From now on, certain artists will be allowed more than one song. I’m calling these artists Norris’s Notables. They are people like Paul McCartney, Elton John and David Bowie, who have distinguished themselves in the field of songwriting, and who, like me, have been around a bit and have dubious political affiliations.

You’re welcome to submit others for inclusion in this category.

And if you ever want to know in which country you can find the world’s fastest land mammal - look it up in a fucking book.

The sounds of TV Cream

Commercially manufactured noises have already been dealt with. What about those non-musical, non-vocal sounds that should be recognised for somehow forever embodying an aural dose of Creamage?

For starters:

The sticky crackle of a coloured page being prised apart from a black-and-white page in a copy of Radio Times.

The clunk-thunk of the lock when pulling shut an external door from the inside of Inter-City 125.

Early morning birdsong combined with the purr of the electric battery in a milkfloat.

The low, warm hum of an overhead projector.

The indeterminate murmur of a radio station lightly clouded in a fog of static on the Medium Wave.

A guiro being scraped in a primary school assembly hall.

The ping of a bell attached to the front door of a corner shop.

Repeated strikes of the ignition inside a Calor Gas heater.

A bean bag being sat upon.

The click of a trundle wheel being pushed around a playground.

Any more?

“What do we want?” “More emphasis on continuity with seasons 19-21!”

It seems some of those much-hyped and secretly-wished-for “rogue elements” ((C) The Daily Express, The Daily Mail et al) slipped into Saturday’s anti-G20 protests after all.

None of the press appeared to pick up on the presence of the poster below, although it did make it into a couple of photo libraries. Will the same folk be attending today’s demonstration? Perhaps they’ll be shape-changing at pertinent moments to avoid the gaze of the police. 

“Good evening Miss Rantzen” “Do call me Esther”

In 1985 That’s Life! was in its imperial phase. It had an immovable berth in Michael Grade’s aromatic Sunday night line-up of hit shows. It was trying to save children’s lives and start up phone lines and close down sweat shops across the planet. Audiences of 16 and 17 million tuned in to titter at misprints and miscarriages (of justice and babies).

Clearly it was a show at the peak of its powers. That’s what your memory tells you, and what popular culture readily seconds.

How come, then, that the truth is bone-chillingly removed from reality? Here is the first 10 minutes of a programme from June of that year. Maybe the show was near the end of its annual 40-week (or however many it was) run. Maybe Desmond had been giving Esther a hard time about ironing the Boy David’s smock. Maybe everyone just simply couldn’t be arsed.

Of particular note:

1) The first couple of seconds of the clip, which comprises, entirely uncoincidentally, the last few seconds of a plug for a programme by Esther’s other half.

2) The quality of the film stock used during the That’s Life! opening titles. It is appalling. It looks like it dates from the early 1970s. In fact it probably does. On another technical note, the sound balance is dreadful, with the microphones on the audience turned up way too high, meaning you hear endless shuffling, coughing and non-laughing in the studio.

3) The ginormous set. Wogan never got a wall that size.

4) The on-screen captions to introduce the nancies. They are horrible. Where are the Paintbox pyrotechnics?

5) John Gould and Maev Alexander! On an MFI sofa, him in a bow-tie, she in a suit! This was a dreadful decision (thankfully shortlived – Doc was back the following year), evident from the moment they walk on, awkwardly, and sit down, awkwardly, side by side, awkwardly. John seems to be wearing the kind of microphone Cliff Michelmore and David Butler wore on Election ‘70.

6) The preamble, which is thin gruel indeed. There is a back-reference to last week’s guest Janet Brown in the shape of Esther trying to do a caricature of herself. There is also a non-amusing mug, a non-amusing cheque, and “two outstanding pictures” which aren’t.

7) Finally, the opening film package. This was clearly concocted off the back of someone who knows someone who knows someone in Esther’s husband’s drinking club. The ‘expert’ is rubbish, laughs at his own jokes and then blows the final punchline. Esther keeps trying to trump the expert with her own opinions, then runs around Covent Garden in a big mac like a flasher, failing to say hello to the people she collars and repeatedly trying to make a joke about ‘leg-overs’.

A quick look ahead through the rest of show reveals all the boxes are lazily ticked: animals running amok in the studio? Check – some ducks! Befuddled special guest? Check – Spike Milligan! Problems with the welfare state? Check – here are some people living rough! And so on. Maybe TV Cream was misguided in its unqualified veneration of Sunday night telly.

Meanwhile, prepare to guffaw raucously like you’ve never seen it before at the sight of an old man, possibly in 1973, using his eyebrows to move a cap backwards and forwards on top of his own head.

The right kind of TV Cream politician

BBC Parliament has spent the evening reliving events from precisely 30 years ago, when Donald MacCormick stood on a gantry high up in the rain outside Westminster and announced the end of Jim Callaghan’s government.

Callaghan is most definitely a TV Cream Politician. Criteria for entry into this category, one that is never very far from threatening to become important, is, inconveniently for this blog at this precise moment in time, hard to put into words.

It’s easier to use comparison. While Sunny Jim and Sailor Ted, for instance, are most definitely TV Cream Prime Ministers, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher are not. The latter two both lurched large in the public domain and tried to cast much of the country in their own image, but neither won universal respect and/or pity.

Both divided the country down the middle. Jim and Ted did not. They united it – not necessarily in admiration (if ever), but in a more everyday, workmanlike fashion, in their stubbornness, or fallibility, or simply by dint of being human. And it’s in this sense that, while John Major is a TV Cream Prime Minister, Tony Blair is not.

It’s something to do with being ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Most of what TV Cream is about concerns everyday things being turned into the ultra-special and the uber-memorable, usually by TV, radio, music and print. So a TV Cream Politician is somebody who is thunderously ordinary and who leaves their mark on our lives through not being particularly special but having special things done to them.

This is all getting a bit convoluted, so how about a reassuring list to sort things out.

The following are all TV Cream Politicians:

Willie Whitelaw
For wearing pyjamas to Cabinet meetings.

Denis Healey
For the Nationwide panto.

Leon Brittan
For being ugly when ugliness was against the law (1983-5).

Bryan Gould
For being everywhere on TV then suddenly being nowhere.

Francis Pym
For sounding like Kenneth Williams.

Chris Patten
For forgetting to win his own election.

David Steel
For running a political party from a constituency in the middle of nowhere, making for much pitch black/reporters-standing-in-fields coverage on results night.

Virginia Bottomley
For becoming a ubiquitous anagrammatic common room joke.

The following are most definitely not TV Cream Politicians:

Norman Tebbit
For becoming his own stereotype.

Shirley Williams
For being called ‘a lovely gal’ by Norman St John Stevas in 1979. And for the fact that, while it’s good that much of what she says is right, it’s not good the way she revels it.

David Owen
For breaking up too many parties.

Edwina Currie
For substituting one vulgar cultural motif – poisonous eggs – for another – sex with John Major.

Roy Hattersley
For being the last ever Secretary of State for Prices and not doing anything about prices.

David Mellor
For being David Mellor.

Margaret Beckett
For telling Jim Naughtie to “pack it in” on the Today programme.

Photo clippage #49

Here are three folk clearly up to something agreeable…but what?

The Stuart Maconie catalogue

The nation’s most ubiquitous Wiganite has a new book out.

It has much in common with his previous publications: a breezy (i.e. rushed) style; sweeping generalisations rendered in whimsy; man-of-the-people rants; but above all, a crap title.

Adventures On The High Teas follows Cider With Roadies and Pies And Prejudice in sporting wordplay that somehow doesn’t work. The source of the title bears no relation to the content of the associated text; the title mixes metaphors and tells you nothing of what the book is actually about; and there’s an attempt at a pun that doesn’t come off.

Anyway, seeing as how the man seems to be stuck in a rut of sniffy inconsequential travelogues, the TV Cream Matrix Databank has come up with four possible future titles for Maconie’s consideration:

1) The Road To Wogan’s Ear
One man’s story of first hiding from, then working for, Radio 2. Besides referencing the nation’s most popular DJ, the title conveniently boasts not one but two puns that don’t work.

2) The Cant & Murray Tales
How two men called Brian and Gordon joined forces to create one of the most iconic children’s series of all time. Again, the title handily tries but fails to be a proper pun, in the process rendering the sentiments of the source utterly irrelevant.

3) The Importance Of Being Furnished
Join the author as he pays loving tribute to the living rooms of the 1970s, an era he dubs ’the decade that taste forgot’. Note how some atrocious rhyming and vague sense of upper-class snobbery combine to create another money-spinning title.

4) The New Collins Dictionary
Stuart Maconie itemises everything he likes and loathes about his ex-colleague and sometime gag-writing partner for Clive James.

Sounds incorporated

Thanks to everyone who has added to the TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist.

Seeing as it how it’s all done under the cloak of anonymity, it’s not clear how many ‘everyone’ means. It could just be one person. But thanks all the same.

Like with most things to do with TV Cream, there are a couple of rules governing the playlist that perhaps should have been specified earlier, rules softly spoken but ruthlessly enforced. So, in case you’re wondering why your choice/s may have been deleted:

a) Only one track per artist is allowed.
b) No crap choices or ‘ironic’ selections are permitted. This is an uber-sincere playlist. Instant Sunshine aren’t on there for a joke.

Meanwhile, like they used to do in music magazines back when they were good, here is a list of 10 tracks from the playlist that, if there was a TV Cream Towers office, would be in heavy rotation on the cassette player by the overhead projector:

1) Something’s Jumpin’ In Your Shirt, MALCOLM MCLAREN AND THE BOOTZILLA ORCHESTRA
As with Norway and the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, the man should be able to bequeath an album to the nation every 12 months.
2) Danke Schoen, RAY CONNIFF AND THE SINGERS
Never ‘his’ singers. Ever the gentleman.
3) The Word Girl, SCRITTI POLITTI
Like having a bubble bath that lasts from 1980 to 1989.
4) Amnesia (Theme from The Roxy) BANANARAMA
Like walking down the best street you ever walked down when you were growing up.
5) The Pink Panther Theme, BOBBY MCFERRIN
Better than Mancini’s disco version.
6) Golden Brown, THE KING’S SINGERS
Better than the Stranglers version.
7) Wednesday Jones, STEPHEN DUFFY
Proving that in the hands of a master, even something like Chelmsford shopping centre can sound glorious.
8) Ordinary Angel, HUE AND CRY
Never let it be said they know Foucault about writing a good tune.
9) Merrily We Roll Along, MASSIMO FARAO
The wig-out begins 45 seconds in.
10) Never Say Never Again, THE FLEMISH RADIO ORCHESTRA
The second best Bond theme ever, now minus added Lani Hall.

I’m Hughie Green, ready to reveal another of my views of life

Do you see Britain old and worn? On the brink of ruin? Bankrupt in all but heritage and hope, and even those are in pawn?

Well fear not! Hughie Green is here with a valediction to elevate your hearts and enthuse your spirits. Friends, let us take, yes take, not borrow this year. Let it be our year. To lift up our heads. Freedom from strikes, better management, and from all of us, guts! Lest without these virtues, we lose our freedom – forever!

Altogether now (cue trumpets, timpani and ginormous choir):

STAND UP AND BE COUNTED, TAKE UP A FIGHTING STANCE!
THIS YEAR OF 1977 MAY BE OUR FINAL CHANCE…

Back pages

Maybe it’s stating the obvious on a blog like this, but there’s little that’s as evocative as the smell of a back issue.

The things we read when we were younger aren’t merely collections of words and pictures from bygone days; they are repositories of memories of how we used to live. One whiff of a yellowing comic, a dog-eared inky or a crumpled weekly and you’re transported back to another, usually better, age.

That most of those back issues now belong now defunct titles adds a layer of wistfulness to the proceedings. Not only do the publications hail from a portion of your life that no longer exists, but the publications themselves no longer exist, either then or now. Once-ubiquitous legends of the newsstands feel like remote relics, with no ties to today.

All these titles seemed better in the days when you first read them. This surely isn’t just the process of nostalgia. In many cases they were better in the days when you first read them, because that was when they were still fresh, exciting and fun.

The pinnacle in the lives of Smash Hits, The Face, Select and the newly-deceased Arena fell in the first half of their existence, which was, to essay a rash generalisation, when most of the people reading this blog probably also read those magazines.

On the other hand older titles, such as Look-in, Melody Maker and Sounds, were most likely already at their peak when you stumbled upon them. Look-in certainly was, and if inconsistency was a problem for MM and Sounds, they could always turn out a decent issue one week after turning out a crap one, thanks entirely to whoever was on the cover.

The extinction of so much childhood wallpaper keeps on getting faster as the rest of us keep on getting older. There’s possibly no more hurtful reminder of the passing of time, or the passing of fashions.

You could argue it’s difficult to mourn the non-existence of something that, say, turned so rubbish and fell so far. You could also argue that’s like saying Marlon Brando should only be remembered for Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, or Leonard Rossiter for Tripper’s Day.

Three bottles of whisky and ‘prices’

BBC Parliament has come up trumps again. On Saturday 28th March it’s devoting an entire evening to recounting the events of the same evening 30 years earlier, when the Labour government lost a confidence motion by one vote and were forced to hold a general election. Loads of shenanigans and skulduggery went on; as Tony Benn recalls in his diary:

“Roy Hattersley, it was said, tried to get a couple of Scottish Nationalists to support us by promising an inquiry into prices in Scotland and Wales, and had given Frank Maguire, the Independent Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, three bottles of whisky and offered an inquiry into food prices in Northern Ireland…”

Anyway, it was the night the government fell, and the evening of programmes is called, not uncoincidentally, The Night The Government Fell.

There’s a brand new documentary putting the whole thing in context, which is all to the good but the real gems follow on: an edition of Tonight from 28th March 1979, live from Westminster, with Robin Day and Donald MacCormick looking askance at the likes of Michael Foot, Francis Pym and John Pardoe; highlights from the actual motion of confidence debate, which given it was recorded in sound only implies there’ll be some newly-added, tantalisingly-basic illustrative montages/slideshows (caricatures, hopefully, or maybe cartoons from newspapers of the day); a message from Uncle Jim himself, transmitted the night the, erm, government fell; and “highlights of news coverage and other archive programmes from the time”.

This is the kind of thing BBC Parliament always does very well, and will surely be the perfect way to pass an otherwise imperfect Saturday evening. No mention of a linking host or presenter, though; surely Michael Cockerell is waiting for the call?

Ali Bongo RIP

An ultra-brief bit of business that doesn’t really do justice to the man’s ultra-brilliance, but hey, he’s sporting white gloves, gets into a tug of war with the volunteer, and there’s Anita Harris “looking very Chinese”.

What’s that noise: slight return

The TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist is now public property. Anyone can add a track, or a hundred tracks, of their own choosing. Maybe you know of a duet by Terry Wogan and Kate O’Mara that masquerades under a wry nom de plume. Perhaps you’re in possession of the moniker that represents a rare Fiddler’s Dram/Heaven 17 collaboration. Or maybe you just know of a good tune the TV Cream family (and that includes you) should hear. Pipe up.

Yorkshire TV studios: photo clippage special

A chevron-sized salute to those in or around its soon-to-be-emptied environs…

1) It’s May 1978, and a waspishly-posed Ted unveils The Gentle Secs, ahead of the very first edition of 3-2-1. Six swivel chairs was clearly a talking point in those penny-pinching pay policy days, though it’s a shame they couldn’t find half a dozen of the same model. The Secs, that is.

2) Richard Whiteley demonstrates the art of a good local newsreader, but more importantly the art of a good local newsreaders’s desk; to wit: modest glass of water; carefully-folded glasses; trimphone; stick microphone on specially mounted chipboard; stapled running order; rollerball pen (possibly); and a mystery object discreetly tucked away under a folder A3 document for viewers to speculate about while doing the pots.

3) More 3-2-1 photo opportunage. This time Cap’n Ted’s gone on a day trip up the river (with comically over-sized cap, naturally), along with six barely-dressed ladies (Secs status unclear) and, apropos a spot of girth and merriment, Harry Secombe.

4) A visitor turns up outside the studio in 1986: it’s the People’s Princess! And Diana Spencer.

5) The dog days of John Major’s administration: canvassing for pretend votes in the living room of Betty Eggleton and Seth Armstrong.

6) Richard Whiteley’s warm-up essays a few gags about federalism. Not sure what’s on the YTV display stand behind him – Pete Postlethwaite in another heartwarming tale of a man overcoming the odds to become a shining example of human decency? Co-starring Su Pollard, by the looks of it.

What’s that noise?

Where might you find Instant Sunshine rubbing crisply-starched shoulders with Haircut 100? Prefab Sprout divided by mere seconds from Rolf Harris? The Art Of Noise staring across a single track listing at Bernard Cribbins? Why, on the TV Cream Towers Spotify playlist! Thomas Dolby, John Cale and Manhattan Transfer: together at last.

Her again

It being the week for retreading the path of La Passionara of Privilege, and what with the 30th anniversary of her arrival in Downing Street not being broadcast by the BBC looming, here are a few short clips of when the irreconciliable worlds of Margaret Thatcher and popular culture collided.

1) Maggie does stand-up. Cecil and Ken seem to love it,  Tom King is in hysterics, but someone else appears to be choking into a handkerchief and the second tier of people on the platform are clapping because everyone else is. It’s a shame you don’t have party conferences like this anymore, with everyone in rows on a giant dais below a huge cardboard logo. Thatcher sounds like she’s reading the agenda at a meeting of a local parish church council. The sequence ends with the cameraman attempting, and failing, to find somebody in the audience who is laughing through comprehension, not apprehension.

2) Another conference, earlier in the decade. It’s 9.10am and waiting for Maggie outside the lift doors is John Stapleton with a huge stick microphone. He ushers her and her party (including Denis, who almost gets caught in the lift) over to a small frontispiece saying ‘TV-am Blackpool’ and a birthday cake. “We shall have to have just a small slice”.

…but wait, because there’s a Cilla-esque look-at-a-monitor-over-there surprise: a live link-up with Eggcup Towers, where Carol is sitting on the sofa. Maggie talks about a cosmetic case in which “you can put shoes”. They swap memories about a cake made to resemble a roundabout (how would this have worked?), before Thatcher launches into a classic ramble. ”Children don’t want fruit cakes for their birthday, they want sponge cakes, something quite light…” John tries to interrupt, but her eminence presses on. “They also like Twiglets…”

3) More TV-am, this time from the confines of the studio. Thatcher, who has a bad throat, croaks at her interviewer with the kind of well-spoken rage that went out of fashion c. 1994.  ”Do you think Mr Frost that I spend my days prowling round the pigeon holes of the Ministry of Defence? If you do, you must be bonkers…I’m sorry, what did you say?”

4) Britain is broken, and some kids want something done about it. This involves yelling during the 1980 Tory party conference. Maggie does her best headmistress – “Never mind, it’s wet outside, I expect they want to come in” - before giving the nod to a group of men to kick the hecklers in the teeth.

5) Finally, it’s lunchtime on 22nd November 1990, and just before some “mystery art lovers are revealed in Neighbours,” Philip Hayton has some important news. You could always tell when there was important news on the BBC in the Birt era, because rather than cut to the presenter after the titles, the camera went straight into a clip. Or rather, a freeze-framed clip that then jerked into life once the music had stopped. Phil sits at his desk in a really strange position and cues in William Waldegrave (“Are you still behind the prime minister Mr Waldegrave?” “Yes I am”) and some dreadfully-filmed footage of Heseltine being interviewed at an acorn-planting ceremony. 

Wendy Richard RIP

In happier times, as they always say, with Christopher Cazenove, Peter Jeffrey and Jakki Brambles.

Photo clippage #48

It’s the 1990s, which means Danny Baker is arriving at or is leaving or has just resigned from another radio station. But wait; who’s that bursting through the door in time for another “tsk, look at us?!” photo opportunity? It’s Chris Evans, on his way from, or to, a job at a different radio station, or possibly the same one, for his first or last programme until the next one. But wherever they are on your radio, you can be sure it ain’t no country show.