I'm also aware that The Perfect Murder and Walking on Water are titles that have been used before, too, but I'm not quite so concerned about that. Donald Davie wrote of poetry not avoiding cliche but re-making it. I was only saying earlier this week that I'd never put it in writing or say so in a serious way but here it is already - both of those titles refer metaphorically to poetry itself, in the way that there is no such thing as 'the perfect murder' and in my poem there is no corpse to be found, there is only rumour. Like the way that poetry might bring something vividly to life that isn't really there- it is only words. And 'walking on water' is a miracle, something that can't happen but poetry seems to attempt the impossible. In that poem, the water could be walked on because it was frozen solid and thus poetry does something with language that might not otherwise be possible.
And now you can see why I never intended to express such dubious tosh in anything but casual conversation.
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And I wonder how many times it is possible to watch episodes of a situation comedy before one turns down the opportunity. How many hours has the UK Gold channel cost me because if Fawlty Towers or Blackadder is on then it is difficult not to watch them. I've surely seen some episodes twenty times.
Early Doors has been on late at night recently and BBC4 has been showing Ever Decreasing Circles. Which does rather prompt the inevitable list of TOP 10 Sitcoms.
For me, the list has to begin with those first two, Fawlty Towers and Blackadder as paragon examples of character, plot, acting and for passing into the language as phrases and lines from Shakespeare have so abundantly done. The Office will always be there to remind us that Ricky Gervais was a genius once and Dad's Army hangs on in after all these years, not only for all the requisite criteria but for the inversion of English class in Cpt. Mainwaring and Sgt. Wilson and especially a tremendous episode shown again a few weeks ago in which the platoon have to try to retrieve a lost item from a coffin and the sequence of frights that it causes.
The brilliant deadpan writing of Craig Cash and his co-authors in The Royle Family and Early Doors make those essential and, for longevity that kept delivering classic moments, one can't leave out Only Fools and Horses.
Steptoe and Son was a marvellously claustrophic set piece reasonant of Sartrean themes of 'l'enfer, c'est les autres' and the inability to escape selfhood. Which leaves two places which, if they count, would have to go to Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns and The Simpsons but perhaps they don't count and so we could have Hancock, Sykes, Bilko, Men Behaving Badly, Not Going Out and possibly Yes, Minister but personally I'm having George and Mildred and, in a stalwart act of defiance against political correctness, a celebration of a golden age and in honour of the great Bob Grant, On the Buses.
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And, as the year has already got underway with a tremendous Messiah and next Friday brings Florilegium to play Bach's Musical Offering, amongst other things, in Portsmouth, it is time to plan it out in terms of cultural events. I'm afraid the Swindon Literature Festival has dropped off my schedule these last few years because their booking of a couple of big name poets each year has given way to the inevitable and they can fill the auditorium more easily with better known media figures, people who are regularly on television really. And that is a great pity.
