This quote is one that I heard a long time ago when I first saw the movie The Third Man. It’s probably the best known quote from the film and as our recent trip to Vienna brought a lot of the Third Man sequences to mind it seems timely to post it here.
Unfortunately our arrival in Vienna was one day too late to take advantage of the Third Man ‘sewer tour’, a promenade through the tunnels that allowed the films eponymous character to move surreptitiously between the ‘controlled zones’ of post-war Vienna. It had closed for the season so we’ll just have to go back again when it’s open!
This is a still from the closing scene of the film as Anna walks away from Harry Lime’s funeral and towards Holly “I haven’t got a sensible name” Martins:
A long, slow walk to the accompaniment of the haunting refrains of Anton Karas’ zither as Anna decides that a happy ending is far too bourgeois for one of the 20th century’s most pivotal films noir …
… and this is a not too dissimilar pic taken on our recent trip to Vienna:
The Hauptallee of the Wiener Prater in autumn – another of Vienna’s fabulously long, tree-lined avenues. Unlike Anna we decided to be extremely bourgeois and left for an altogether happier ending at a favoured cafe in the Naschmarkt.
Finally, the quote. When Holly and Harry eventually meet on the Wiener Riesenrad (the Prater’s giant ferris wheel) Harry seeks to justify his black market sales of watered-down and ineffective penicillin that had led to the deaths of sick children:
“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.“
The previous post was a bit too ‘heavy’, so here’s something a bit lighter. Berger and Wyse have had more misses than hits recently, but this week’s effort in the Graun is more like it:
One of the more depressing issues highlighted in this week’s news was about young people drinking the equivalent of a bathtub full of sugary drinks each year. The BBC News website reported the Cancer Research UK’s survey results as:
Pre-school children drink the equivalent of nearly 70 cans of fizzy cola
Children aged four to 10 drink the equivalent of 110 cans a year (nearly half a bathtub)
Teenagers drink more than the equivalent of 234 cans each a year (a bathtub)
Pretty horrendous figures by any stretch, but defended by the soft drink lobbyists with the sort of weasel words and tendentious arguments that were mooted by apologists of the tobacco companies decades ago.
A spoonful of sugar helps the chemicals go down …
Jacques Peretti wrote a compelling piece in the Graun a while back pointing out that we are, on average, 3 stones heavier now than in the mid-1960s. If you don’t believe that then simply gauge the average shape of teenagers walking down high streets today and compare them with the audience seen in the many TV repeats of Top of the Pops from the 1970s; your eyes won’t deceive you!
Given the potential for harm through the increased incidence of heart disease and diabetes, and don’t forget tooth decay, it’s hard to see why governments don’t take a harder line with the drink manufacturers. They seem to be in thrall to the drinks industry and agri-businesses rather than the promoters of a nation’s health (no surprise there!).
Not something to be made fun of, but I am in need of a topical limerick, so here goes:
A problem that’s facing our nation Is a young person’s choice of libation. ‘Cos a bathtub of sugar Is really a bu**er And leads to their health’s ruination
A nice Graun interview with Christopher Lloyd (‘Doc’ Brown in Back to the Future). He seems as eccentric in life as the ‘Doc’ does in the film.
I first remember Lloyd as one of the actors in the sitcom ‘Taxi’ from the late 70s and early 80s where he played the drug-addled rôle of ‘Reverend Jim’ Ignatowski.
I wonder about things, like, if they call an orange an “orange,” then why don’t we call a banana a “yellow” or an apple a “red”? Blueberries, I understand. But will someone explain gooseberries to me?
One of the online comments to the Graun article reprised the following exchange from an episode from 1980. It made me laugh, particularly as despite reading it 30-odd years after its original run, Reverend Jim’s lines played back in my mind in the same woozy, befuddled and bewildered tones that Lloyd brought to the character, so not so much a quote as an excerpt:
Elaine: Jim, you changed your name TO Ignatowski? Jim: Yeah, you know … it was the 60s and everyone was changing their names to stuff like Sunshine, Free, Moon Unit… Alex: Well Jim, why Ignatowski? Jim: Say it backwards. Bobby: Iskwotangi. Jim: Uh oh, that’s not even close to Starchild, is it?
I’d like to think that only classy items will be given a home in Priscilla the campervan. However, I wasn’t sure that the words ‘classy’ and ‘egg cup’ could ever go together until I saw these little buckets; just had to buy a couple …
Hard boiled eggs. You can’t beat ’em …
I once tried to persuade Management and the rest of the tribe to adopt the same colour scheme for our front room. They just laughed 🙁
Meantime, an egg joke …
A couple of days ago I found a heron’s nest and smashed all the eggs in it, but I’ve no egrets now!
Readers may recall my guarded amusement on hearing that Firstborn (MA in International Relations, St Andrews University) had elected to study statistics as part of her postgraduate studies (What Michael said #1, 15/9/16). Unfortunately for the mathematically non-intuitive like me (and apparently Firstborn too), the pursuit of a statistical education requires competent and sympathetic tutors, the corollary of which is that life gets hard if your teachers are crap.
So, in honour of Firstborn’s travails through the labyrinth of arbitrary standards, (so-called) significance tests and necromancy (ibid), I give you …
You’re a lass that once studied linguistics But have now confronted the mystics Who preach probability And expose your fragility To the priestcraft that we call statistics.
Postscript: The Peanuts cartoon, above, dates from circa 1982 when Management and I met at the University of York during our Masters year studying maths, stats and computing for masochists. It chimed with us then and I was delighted to find it on the internet for use here as it saved having to go through old albums and keepsakes to find the original.
As a statistical colleague once told me: “coincidences are the most paradoxical of things. They should almost never happen, but they always do“. So, coincidentally, and by chance and chance alone, the web page on which I found the Peanuts cartoon just happened to be a page of statistical jokes and cartoons curated by Peter Lee, the Bayesian statistics lecturer at York and quiz guru to whom I refer in the third paragraph of my earlier post: What Michael said #1.
(Twenty-something years after leaving York I decided that I needed to learn more about Bayesian statistics, so I bought a text-book written, again coincidentally, by Peter Lee. Once past the introductory verbiage, I didn’t understand a word of it!).
So, imagine all the hours and effort that you put into your studies for a degree in journalism (with honours, of course) and then instead of landing your dream post as foreign correspondent or leader writer of a prestigious ‘national’ daily, you end up on a weekly ‘local’ rag such as my hometown’s execrable Westmorland Gazette …
So, the current series of Poldark has just finished and we now have to wait until 2017 to get our next ‘fix’.
Regular readers will know that as far as Poldark is concerned I am on ‘Team Demelza’ and not ‘Team Ross’, partly because my ‘Party Seven’ can’t compare to Ross’s ‘six pack’, but mostly because I’m a bloke and Demelza is class.
Meantime, Ross has shown himself to be more crass than class by cheating on Demelza with Elizabeth (boo, hiss) in the most villainous and odious of ways and, as any fule kno, it’s not good for your health to p**s off a redhead and, boy, was Demelza pi**ed! Even Nicola Adams (our double Olympic boxing gold medallist) would have been proud of the blow with which Demelza later felled Ross (I told you she was class!).
DANGER – angry redhead alert (ANSI Z535.5 Definition: “Indicates a hazardous situation that, if not avoided, will result in death or serious injury. The signal word “DANGER” is to be limited to the most extreme situations”).
All of which leads to this week’s limerick:
So Ross, what is wrong with your eye? Is it a bruise that I seem to espy? It must surely be hell, sir To be thumped by Demelza ‘Cos, boy, does she not half let fly!
… or as Ross may have paraphrased the Duke of Wellington: “I don’t know what effect she will have upon the enemy, but, by God sir, she frightens me“.
(It may not have escaped your attention that in the final episode of the series and even with two of his retainers to help him, ‘Evil George’ Warleggan couldn’t fell Ross the way that Demelza did!)
Postscript: The ‘Party Seven’ was a can of Watneys beer that held seven pints – a small keg really, hence: “I used to have a six pack but now I’ve got a Party Seven” (a middle-aged man’s self-deprecating generational joke).
Thankfully the Party Seven disappeared in the 1980s (the beer was awful). I remember drinking from one shared between three of us (all under age) whilst watching a charity rugby match in 1974 between England and France at Twickenham; a game that was held to raise funds following the Paris air crash of that year.
The match was memorable for Michael O’Brien, an Australian, becoming the UK’s first mainstream sporting streaker. One photo of the event became the most syndicated press picture of the decade, LIFE Magazine’s picture of the year and the source of numerous humerous caption competitions (as I recall most seemed to involve a bad case of dandruff).
An Aussie in England: “Strewth, it’s cold mate. I thought I’d be charged with exposure, not die from it!“
And just to show that the old-fashioned policemen’s helmets were gender neutral, here’s one in use when Erica Roe repeated O’Brien’s stunt in 1982:
“So tell me, constable, how did you know I fit a 38G?“
I was too young to party at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club in the late sixties, one of the original Northern Soul all-nighter venues, but I did get to tread its boards circa 1976 during its disco incarnation as Placemate 7 – perhaps that’s why I never properly took to clubbing. Disco? Me? Really?
A Placemate 7 publicity flier from the same year that I bust a groove on its dance floor
I did venture to other nightclubs though. Three(ish) to be exact(ish). A Mancunian friend called Bernard, who I had met during my ill-fated time as a student in London, visited me in Kendal a few months after I had dropped out from the prestigious North East London Polytechnic (aka NELP) and suggested we go to an all-nighter at the famous Wigan Casino.
We were so naïve we didn’t know what it involved (seemingly drugs, an ability to ‘dance your own steps’ and a strong Lancashire or Scottish accent). We left before it really got going – before two actually in what was probably a first for Wigan Casino.
I still like the music, but Northern Soul purists would trash me for keeping the faith via the medium of a couple of ‘Best of’ CDs and not by the possession of rare and exclusive original 7 inch vinyl singles.
Can two compilation CDs be considered ‘keeping the faith’? Er, no!
A year or so later, a group I was with was turned away from the Mecca nightclub in Dundee due solely to my less-than-sartorial outfit (jeans and no tie). Fortunately, the city’s Barracuda club had no such sensibilities and thus, in June 1979 I stepped into a nightclub for the third (fourth if you count the Mecca) and last time.
So, you ask, what is the point of all this nostalgia? Well, although not a Northern Soul mainstay and probably a bit too disco for my liking, Stevie Wonder had released his double album Songs in the Key of Life just before my visit to Placemate 7 and while on the dance floor there I recall having to avoid the over-amorous attentions of one of my sister’s flatmates with whom I was dancing to Wonder’s SirDuke.
Needless to say, any mention of Stevie Wonder (or Sir Duke) since then has immediately transported me back to that dance floor. And “No!”, I didn’t take advantage of the situation. I’ve always been “too much of a gentleman for your own good” (Anne Somervell, pers comm, New Year’s Day 1981) – frankly, as a naïve North Country lad I was also terrified!
So, the astute among you may have guessed that these ramblings were inspired by a recent mention of Stevie Wonder. And you’d be right as finally I get to the quote that made me laugh. Here is Stevie Wonder’s take on the current American Presidential election:
“Voting for Trump is like asking me to drive!”
All together now, one, two, three; Keep you mind on your drivin’; Keep you hands on the wheel; Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead …
Jean Alexander who recently died aged 90 played Hilda Ogden, a pivotal character in Coronation Street during the soap’s heyday of the 60s and 70s.
Hilda was married to Stan, a hopeless and hapless layabout played by Bernard Youens. Everything in her life with him seemed to disappoint her. Yet when the make-believe Stan ‘died’ off-screen shortly after Youens himself had died, Hilda’s grief-stricken reaction was incredibly moving and remains memorable even 32 years later (Alexander won a Royal Television Society ‘best performance’ award for the scene).
I stopped watching ‘Corrie’ shortly afterwards when it ditched its warmth and humour in an attempt to match the more gritty ‘reality’ (aka ‘misery’) of the nascent EastEnders. (The same sad descent into miserable social issues also befell the Archers so ever since I have inhabited a soap-free zone). Anyway, this is for Hilda …
Your nagging just fell on deaf ears While Stan carried on downing beers But you sat there and cried On hearing he’d died, With genuine sorrow and tears.
The title of this post comes from one of Hilda’s last lines. She had a mural on her living room wall (that she always mispronounced as her ‘muriel’) and three plaster flying ducks (all of which Stan had damaged on the occasion that he let his bath overflow). On leaving the soap, Alexander’s character was to move away from the Street and her home of years at which point Percy Sugden suggested that she’d be glad to see the back of her decor.
Hilda’s reply was as dramatic as her response to Stan’s death: “I’ve come in here more times than I care to remember – cold, wet, tired out, not a penny in me purse – and the sight of them ducks, and that muriel… well, they’ve kept my hand away from the gas tap and that’s a fact“.
Hilda, Stan (right) and lodger Eddie Yates, with flying ducks and ‘muriel’
Postscript: The newspapers quoted some classic Hilda one-liners when reporting Alexander’s death; here’s a couple of them:
“Elsie Tanner’s heart is where a fella’s wallet is – and the bigger the wallet, the more heart she’s got”.
“Quite right Stanley, I wouldn’t give them to a working man, but since you don’t come under that category there’s no problem is there? Now get them ate”.
