Memento Morley

What with the continual deaths of the people who built the media world we grew up in and seem to us part of the furniture of our lives, this could easily turn into one of those 'weblog's which constantly marks the passing of great actors, writers and directors and so forth.
I haven't written about Pinter or McGoohan here because there are others better qualified to talk of them, and besides you already know exactly who they are and what they meant to you just by reading those two surnames alone, and I didn't write about Ron Asheton, the man behind those incredible Stooges riffs, because I was away (and what could I add but a redundant extra 'wow'?).

There is however a lovely little story I was told some years ago about Angela Morley, the great and prolific radio, TV and film composer, arranger and conductor who has just died, that I'd like to pass on here, because I don't know if anyone else will.

Angela, who as Wally Stott wrote the Hancock's Half Hour theme amongst countless other pieces before her 1972 sex change, was to be interviewed over the telephone by a great expert on and enthusiast for broadcast music, who'd been given her number.
The expert rang the number and a very male voice answered. “I'm calling for Angela Morley,” the expert explained, uncertain if he was in fact already speaking to her. 'Oh right,' said the male voice, 'I'll get her for you,' and then casually called out 'Dad! It's for you.'

An illuminating interview later followed, but what I like is the caller's initial careful wariness in approaching the potentially awkward area of Angela's gender countered by the family's complete acceptance of it as utterly normal. I think it's a little story everyone comes out of well.

Hey there, authenticity fans!

"There's a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn't matter which you heard,
The holy, or the broken Hallelujah!"

Leonard Cohen gets the last word in first on covers in the original version of 'Hallelujah' on Various Positions, you know, the version from before John Cale's cover for the tribute albumI'm Your Fan album reconstructed the song using alternative rejected verses (some of which Cohen sang live) into what has become the now definitive version (like Hendrix's rejigging of ’All Along the Watchtower').
Cale's take on the song is the original version of it as it's currently known, right down to the singing 'you' instead of 'yah' (thus mucking up the rhymes) and the lyric tweaks that Buckley mimics.

I'm glad you like the Buckley version, but for me there are two guys in the queue due praise ahead of Buckley if you're coming on all purist and criticising later covers.

Let the kids have their charts- another cover won't break this song. If a Jewish Buddhist can write a hymn that Christians, Agnostics and Atheists all think is theirs, it's a song with a bit of strength in it.

Breaking Radio Silence

It's been a tricky couple of weeks in Lake Wobegon.

I did my Ken thing, which went okay, I wasn't script solid enough to fly solo, so the book floated around in my hand, leading to both a couple of fluffed bits and a couple of nice bits that surprised me. People were nice, appreciative, kind and asked interesting questions but almost as soon as it was over I began to feel rather snotted up, and, after a horrible delayed journey back from Liverpool Lime Street getting home in the early hours, the next couple of days were devoted to achey, man-fluey, feeling out of it introspection.
Since then, with my mind already on the fragility of existence, there seems to have been quite a run of people at death's door, suffering grim degenerative conditions and dying unexpectedly all around us. The end of last week was particularly bad for this.

In cheerier news, my book is definitely out and as I write is topping the amazon.co.uk TV History and Criticism section- though given the volatility of that sales chart I suspect you only need to sell about two copies a week to do that. By now I imagine an out of print Most Haunted tie-in book WHICH SHOULD NOT BE IN THAT CATEGORY will have pipped it again by virtue of someone getting a second hand copy for a Derek Acorah signing session somewhere.

Actually a book about Telly Cars is beating it now. It'll be Jordan's third volume of autobiography next.

In not very exciting to anyone much but I know my readership news BBC Radio 7 (as it now is) is playing Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange's Dreams and Peter Howell's Inferno Revisited as part of a Radiophonic Workshop tribute on December the 20th. This should excite half of you because they're interesting pieces of radio work, half of you because Howell first uses that running music from The Five Doctors in his piece (and I think recycles a couple of Meglos stings) and a third of you for both reasons*.

There's lots of sound and fury and a brilliant bit of silence in Howell's play.

*I assume a readership of 6 obviously.

A better post will follow next week.

Answers to last March's cryptic quiz...

Ian was listening to the build up tapes for Delia Derbyshire's Blue Veils and Golden Sands.

Ian was listening to the build up tapes for Delia Derbyshire's Blue Veils and Golden Sands.

Amazing stuff.

The winner receives a limited edition Golden Hare by Lindt and Kit Williams.

Honestly people, the clues were all there.

There's finally been a press release about this great, great collection.

Eddie Mair gets giddy on the PM blog
The Telegraph uses the word 'posterity'.
The Times muses on 'irrevocable decay' and calls Delia a 'hopeless alcoholic'.

That probably tells you something.

Humph and George

I’ve been lucky enough in my medium-sized life to see two surprisingly long-lived Jazz men perform, Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly.
Humph was presenting I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and building his increasing frailty and stumbling delivery into the act just as another of my radio comedy heroes Peter Jones had in his latter years on Just A Minute.
Harry Hill sang ‘The Ugly Duckling’ to the tune of ‘I Can’t Live if Living is Without You’ that night. It was one of the happiest of my life.
Nice one, Humph.

Melly, I adored too, particularly for the delicious omnisexual geriatric flirtation he and Maggi Hambling used to indulge in on a fairly snobby Channel 4 quiz show on the arts. Only a pair of surrealists with a shared passion for Max Wall and less genuine sexual attraction than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis could have produced such screen magic.
When I saw Melly live he was incoherent, slurring, incompetent, but then the band started and he sang- note, pause, word perfect, sublime.

He told one great joke about getting old that night, if rather badly.
Now he was getting on he found he was having to come down to the loo more often in the night, sometimes several times, and thus, in one such middle of the night trip, had been delighted to discover his wife had set up a system in the downstairs toilet whereby the light came on as soon as he opened the door.
‘Excellent,’ he thought, and was rather happily relieving himself until his wife came up behind him and said ‘George, did you know you’re pissing in the fridge?’

I think Humph would have liked that one,

Manchester, so much to answer for...

Got to see the person who's my assigned radio producer for drama yesterday, as well as the writer Gill Adams and producer Polly Thomas whose work I knew but whose entertaining manner, in both cases, was new and a delight to me, in a very interesting workshop session at the BBC in Manchester.

In the break, I also grabbed time to talk with the people in Comedy about 'No Tomatoes', and firm up some of the schedule.
The vocal recording sessions are going to be very close to delivery date, due to availability of staff and studio resources, so it's a good job I planned to demo episodes to a decent level beforehand, really. Hopefully, this'll mean dropping the final voices into my demo structures can be a fairly straightforwardish process at the end of June!
It's not ideal obviously, but it's fine, and you can't really go railing against the structure of the organisation that wants to make some of your stuff too much can you...? If it was a different kind of place, it probably wouldn't want my work!
Sketch shows don''t normally take a long time in the mix, and there should be no expectation that they might, so I'll try to get the fiddly stuff that means mine will take longer than most done before the recording dates!

After that I nipped over to the University of Manchester's Drama and Music department to see my editor on the academic book on "the children's own programme which adults adore", and gaze on and listen to in wonder, a newly arrived archive of utterly gorgeous stuff there. There's a clue in the 'listen' bit, that there's sound material in it.

It's the personal archive of one of my favourite artists (although I'm not allowed to say who yet, as there's been no public announcement of this acquisition yet) , and I got the chance in my brief visit to hear an earlier transfer of one of the tapes there, featuring the build up of the backing of one of my favourite pieces. Extraordinary, and one of those moments where a tiny insight into the process just increases your respect for the result tenfold.

It's going to be a while before the collection's accessible, transferred and catalogued, but it's going to be very special indeed. Worth trekking across the Sahara in tagelmusts for I'd say...