Christmas TV Review

There was a time that Christmas television required the planning and logistical organisation of a military campaign to accommodate all the highlights and essential programmes.
It is not so now, though, and instead of covering the schedules in rings of biro, one has to scour them in the hope of finding some scrap of entertainment, even if it is only an evening of On the Buses on ITV4.
The obvious choice was always going to be John Hurt in the re-make of Whistle and I'll Come to You on Christmas Eve and it didn't let us down. Sparse dialogue, lots of darkness and minimal cast made it as if re-interpreted by Beckett, especially given Hurt's gaunt look which seemed like a visual inter-textual borrowing from the bleak Irishman. Previews had played down the scariness quotient of this adaptation but it was plenty worrying enough for me, thank you, and Hurt, the English coast in winter and some crescendos of anonymous door-hammering provided a real classic and all one might have hoped for from it.
Somewhat more formulaic was the return to Upstairs Downstairs, now in 1936, with Jean Marsh returning to the house she had run for the previous generation. The comparison was clear. Here the acting was as hammy as the sandwiches and the plot telegraphed well ahead of it happening so that as soon as a character appeared their story wrote itself for them. As the first episode set out the situation, the best moment came when Mrs. Simpson was expected to bring the King to a house party but turned up with Ribbentrop. But the second episode took off into a quite moving and more coherent piece on the rise of Oswald Mosley, blackshirts and fascism in general after the house had taken on a Jewish lecturer as a maid. The final episode perhaps tried to include one more story line than necessary, each being told in a series of set piece scenes, before the baby was born at Christmas, the King abdicated, the reformed servant got his old job back and Lady Percy high-tailed it to Germany so that it all ended as happily ever after as it could have hoped.
So far this year Celebrity Mastermind hasn't produced any moments comparable to Stuart Maconie doing C20th British Poetry or Beverley Knight's heart-warming win over Michael Howard but it's been good to be able to pick the winners with so much horse racing cancelled. I thought Hilary Kay looked a good bet in the first heat and then picked Samira Ahmed to beat Giles Coren, who looked somewhat crestfallen to find he had blown his half-time advantage. It's hardly Mastermind, really, and so one can feel quite know-all about it by getting more answers than the worst of the contestants and you know who that will be because they used to play sport.
On the subject of which, the award for Gormlessly Misplaced Lack of Perspective of the Year went to Radio 5's Breakfast Show, woefully hosted by substitute Ian Payne, when it asked the listeners to vote for the Feel Good Moment of 2010. The shortlist had Ann Widdecombe nominating the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton, Phil Tufnell with the Ryder Cup and Russell Howard with the Chilean Miners. This was supposed to involve a choice. I know Radio 5 is partly a sports channel but this was an appalling bit of misjudgement.
I didn't hear the result but if the golf and the royals got 2% between them then there needs to be an enquiry.

Rimbaud - The Double Life of a Rebel

Edmund White, Rimbaud - The Double Life of a Rebel (Atlantic)

Whoever 'they' are, they say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The little I knew about Rimbaud had suggested he was not my type at all, seemingly over-rated, juvenile, flashy, rambling and unpleasant. But I thought I'd take Edmund White's account of him for the Christmas holidays as a bit of entertainment and see what happened.
White is a fine writer who has not let me down before and he does great service to Rimbaud here, too, by overturning the most assumative of my assumptions and it just goes to show that you can't make any judgements until you have something more solid than hearsay and prejudice to go on.
It might just be the respective biographers who are responsible for all this re-organizing of judgements in French C19th poetry but whereas I thought I liked Baudelaire until reading the book by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Edmund White has taken Rimbaud in the opposite direction.
Rimbaud was a dedicated radical aesthete, devoted to his anti-bourgeoise agenda and a genuinely out of order misfit that puts more recent puny hell-raisers to shame.
It is his friend, Paul Verlaine, who is presented in this version of events as hopeless and dependant although it has to be said that both halves of this unworldly couple were drama queens incapable of maintaining themselves that kept on running back home to their mothers whenever anything went wrong or they ran out of money, which was most of the time.
Rimbaud's poetics move on from Baudelaire with new forms and an insistence on impersonality, the dark interest in the exotic and the wilful 'systematic disordering of the senses' and the 'double life' referred to in the title here designate the 'wild rebelliousness' and 'dry-eyed realism' as contradictory.
So, rather than ever credit Ezra Pound with quite so much of the invention of the modern or modernist in poetry, it is to Rimbaud I'll be going in the new year to see if the poems hold up to the sympathetic claims made for them here. Yes, of course, the boy was a nightmare and the litany of self-styled wannabe wild boys that cite him as vital to their very art (the likes of Kerouac and Jim Morrison) mean he's got even more to answer for than he thought. But the most convincing part of the story is the coda, after abjuring poetry at the startlingly early age of, was it 24, he lives on in an even more adventurous style, as an entrepreneur in all kinds of things, largely in Africa, and whenever asked about poetry, he doesn't even want to talk about it,
Rimbaud had nothing but scorn for his previous literary life. When his boss, Bardey, for instance, asked him about his time in London, he dismissed it as 'a period of drunkenness'. And when another curious colleague in Africa asked him about his career as a poet, Rimbaud said, 'Hogwash [rincures]- it was only hogwash'.
And that, after being such an ardent revolutionary in the subject, is the part I found the most heroic.

The Christmas Sledging

Thus far, the academics at Hull University don't seem to have found any evidence of Philip Larkin sledging on Christmas Day. I did it yesterday, however, for the first and last time in my life. The first little run was okay but the second attempt, on Swindon's answer to the Cresta Run, was somewhat more traumatic and after early turbulence in which my hat flew off in awkward reverence, pilot and conveyance also went their separate ways.

The Christmas Sledging

That Christmas, it was great sledging away
And not until
My second run ended in disarray
At the bottom of a much steeper hill
Was my short-lived sledging career packed up.
Something that perhaps shouldn't have started,
Or, having done once, shouldn't have again.
It's faster than it looks and didn't stop
That time until I and sledge were parted
And felt something somewhere becoming pain.

Photographs by Pam Chadwick. Thank you very much.

Daisy & Davey's Christmas Annual

DAVEY, DAVEY, QUITE CONTRARY,

HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

I DON’T KNOW.

---

That's my highlight from Daisy & Davey's Christmas Annual.

For more, please visit http://daisyanddavey.com/

Top 6 - Christmas Carols

My favourite Christmas carol is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, a dark, surging piece, apparently a political invocation, ‘Redeem thy captive Israel’, with no mention of a cute baby. It says here it comes from the C12-13th and they certainly wrote them to last in those days. More recently arranged as a Percussion Concerto by James Macmillan and given a memorable performance in Portsmouth Guildhall by Evelyn Glennie with the composer conducting, its power is carried forward and renewed into our time.
Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter is very different but just as brilliant in doing what it does. ‘Earth stood hard as iron’ could be from Hardy and I always liked singing the mysterious, meter-satisfying line, ‘Yet what I can I give him’.
But it doesn’t all have to be dark and bleak and I’ll always have O Come, All Ye Faithful, with the chorus building through the first plaintive, ‘O, come, let us adore him’, with more of the congregation joining in for a second time and then a full blast from the whole assembly which ought to be made as rumbustuous as you can. ‘Very God’ is a great line, too.
I was always interested to know that the Feast of Stephen was the last time that Good King Wencas had ‘looked out’. It made me wonder what he had been hiding from since. Even now, many years after going to his cathedral in Prague, and realizing his name was Wenceslas, the early misapprehension hasn’t quite left me. But it is a heart-warming story of a grand man who is kind to a peasant seen gathering winter few-ew-ell. And there he is in the picture.
Ding Dong Merrily on High is another tremendously rousing effort with its extended Glorias, the obvious way a little lad who knows about little more than football hears ‘Chelsea’ in ‘hosanna in excelsis’ and the way that I have managed to outgrow the nickname ‘Ding Dong’, which I suppose I might have earned after some infant fascination with it and perhaps even impromptu performances of.
And in the tradition of making the sixth selection of this feature a bit of a novelty, I must give my usual seasonal mention to Michael Jackson’s passionate and wonderful rendition of Little Drummer Boy.

Portsmouth Poet Laureate

http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/newshome/Portsmouth-in-search-for-its.6657362.jp

What a coincidence. Just when you think you might be needing a new job shortly, the fates provide you with one. The Poet Laureate of Portsmouth.

Of course, there is an accumulating bandwagon of support suggesting that I should 'allow my name to go forward' and it could have its moments if one were to be given the job. One thinks about it for about a nano-second before remembering that one is Portsmouth's answer to Philip Larkin, not John Betjeman.

One shudders at contriving the invitations to go into schoools to promote poetry without a bodyguard; one realizes that 'civic occasions' will require more celebrations of Nelson, the Ark Royal or 'Play Up Pompey' than satires on council corruption, Mike Hancock's latest dolly bird or unpatriotic thoughts about not going to war; there might be a need to present odes and panegyrics at the Portsmouth Festivities; one might need to research naval history, Dickens, and ignore the fact that although this city is the main gateway to France and the rest of Europe, it often prefers to look inwards rather than outwards.
And, of course, the post is 'honorary', which means there's no wages. Not even the big pile of bottles of booze that I've seen a picture of Ted Hughes with. That would at least be a start.

I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced I'm the public figure they have in mind.
I dare say they'll ideally appoint an outgoing, larger than life enthusiast for verses and most likely a 'performance poet' who can enliven an event with audacious rhymes and grand gestures. I'll look forward to supporting whoever gets the job, the Portsmuthian Ian Macmillan perhaps, but I somehow, and slightly reluctantly, I'm afraid, have to suggest that it isn't going to be me.

Stanley Middleton - A Cautious Approach

Stanley Middleton, A Cautious Approach (Hutchinson)

Stanley Middleton died last year just a few days before his ninetieth birthday. He left his forty-fifth and final novel which advertises on the front cover, 'From the Booker Prize Winning Novelist' and might well add, 'of thirty-six years ago'. For although this is by all means contemporary fiction from a respected author, Middleton's manner seems to come from a now bygone age. That is not necessarily a bad thing but the main character here, George Taylor, is 45 years old and like the friends he makes during the 219 pages, he speaks and acts with a civility and unerring consideration that isn't recognizably typical of anyone I know from my generation. Middleton can't help but write from his own comfortable, highly civilised point of view but perhaps hasn't noticed that most people wouldn't think like George who, having offered both custard and cream to his guests to go with their Christmas pudding, and the lady and Andrew 'confine themselves to custard', partakes of both and feels 'he'd be judged as a sybarite'.

Having had an intended moment of humour on page one, I increasingly had to wonder which of Middleton's linguistic niceties were meant to make me laugh and which were simply his genteel tone and found that I enjoyed it all as the latter while constantly wondering if the book was really set in the twenty-first century or a previous age of greater courtesies.

Middleton's method is to let his characters tell the story, much of it reported from one to another in conversations, sometimes on the telephone, and in lengthy accounts of their back stories and those of others and they are prompted by questions from their interlocutors, which although politely expressed, seem to me sometimes shockingly intrusive.

The characters enjoy each other's company and tell each other so, as well as how interesting they find each other; they make each other happy just by having a conversation, feed each other with delicious, carefully-prepared meals and occasionally chide each other with sharp retorts after perceived indiscretions in sudden changes of mood. It's a comedy of manners in a way but one is never quite sure when to laugh. Even, presumably, in 2009 we are asked to believe than an elderly lady had never got used to using the telephone.

But even though this is an attractively old-fashioned, middle-class world and the action is for the most part, sedate, we still get two deaths, two episodes confronting violent youth and a house fire and one is gradually led into to the story with its slightly creaking devices until it becomes more involving, gathers momentum in its last chapters and eventually proves to be a well-made novel.

Middleton is, in his way, a good painter of character, his story develops and then twists and it is impossible not to have sympathy for the educated postman, George, who can quote Doctor Johnson, Virgil and conveniently shares the author's enthusiasm for classical music and poetry. One does fear somewhat for George's life with Mirabel because the signs are that he's going to be second-in-command in that relationship, but there are men who prefer it that way.

For all that the book assumes that the status of a postman is less than that of a teacher, that people wouldn't be offended at being told quite so frankly what their new friends thought of them, or ask quite such direct questions, it becomes a modestly profound and perceptive story. Although readers new to Middleton might need a while to adjust to his way of writing, it is in the end more fluid and better than it first appears. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I was going to and, hopefully, mostly for the right reasons.

Your Correspondant at the Chess Match

You will have found me in the audience of the chess match, I know you will.

But here's the detail that provides the answer.

If I'm caught up in some difficult murder enquiry, by any chance, these arty pixels will be my best alibi.

Fingers crossed, then.

London Chess Classic 2010

London Chess Classic 2010, Round 3, Kensington Olympia, 10 December

The Times crossword is now so perfectly designed that it takes exactly the train journey from Portsmouth to Waterloo to do it and allow 10 minutes to put your pen back in your pocket and then artfully fold the paper to show anybody who wants to look that you've finished it.

8 Down, Cloisonne, was my favourite, 16 Down Maharishi was good, etc. but the real intellectual business of the day was to be the highest rated ever chess tournament to be held in Britain on the day that the top two players in the world were to play each other.

One of the long-odds outsiders, Luke McShane, pictured above in the foreground of a picture of me, had beaten hot favourite, Magnus Carlsen, on day one and so the cat was already among the proverbial pigeons and then with McShane winning again in round two, it was looking like one of those horse races where the 100/1 shot goes off much too fast for his own good. But, hats off to Luke, because with wins counting three points here rather than one, it makes a big difference.

Action was set in motion by a selected child making the opening move for World Champion, Viswanathan Anand. Organiser Malcolm Pein asked the mascot if he was going to ask Anand which move he wanted or if he was going to play a move of his own. It could have been bad for Anand as the junior player declared their intention to play a move of their own, but when it turned out to be e4, the situation was saved because that's what the Indian maestro wanted anyway.

Hikaru Nakamura, the American 'A bomb', did his usual blitz through his moves, using much less than an hour all told while David Howells took every second of his allotted time. The Nakamura Queen was unable to get beyond the Howells' Rook and Bishop fortress, though, and they were first to finish, drawing by repeated position.

On the opposite side of the stage, the British numbers one and two also made a draw when Nigel Short defended his awkward position with doubled pawns on e7 and e6 against Michael Adams.

McShane might have been making inroads into Kramnik but it was an interestingly open position that was probably always going to be drawn with possibilities for both. Having to leave soon after 7 p.m., I found out the result back here at home.

It was a shame that Anand had to test and ask so many questions of Carlsen before winning because I thought I was going to be able to see the finish of that and the inquest but I left thinking that Carlsen was losing but might somehow hang on. It wasn't to be. Anand prefers to stay in his chair, as does the highly concentrated Howells, while the other players wander about the stage, and off it, for a stretch of the legs or a nosey look at the other boards, as if they need even more chess than they already have in progress. Anand has the dignified demeanour and patience of a doctor and when I get poorly, I'll be glad to trust his diagnosis. Having contrived an attacking position against Carlsen, who was manning the barricades grimly in the corner, he had to fiddle and prod away at the Norwegian's defences with calm but terrible inevitability. When other sports are said to be 'like a game of chess', the commentators might refer to a game like this to see that only a game of chess can be quite as much 'like a game of chess' as this one. If you see what I mean.

But, Anand is the tip to win this tournament now with Carlsen perhaps not at his best for reasons of his own. And, for calm and carefulness, Viswanathan Anand, having seen him in the flesh, is probably promoted to my favourite current chess player, if I'm ever asked in a questionnaire to name one. Although it has to be said that out of all the people in the auditorium or commentary room, I probably had the least idea of anyone apart from a few juveniles as to exactly what was going on up there on the boards.

Kramnik didn't use the move I suggested (Nd4, yes, it was presumably a rubbish idea) to the spectator next to me in my most hushed of whispers. Conversations aren't encouraged in the room where the action is but I was potentially going to be embarrassed when this man next to me had his mobile phone go off and we were treated to a long stare from the adjudicator. Look, I've never met this bloke before and it can't have been me because I'm one of the last of the golden generation of old fogeys who don't own any gadget of mobile telephony.

But it was another entrancing day out and a look into a strange, heavily male-dominated world that I'll never feel a part of and will always have to guard against expressing an opinion about(which isn't like me at all) because I know that whereas on a train ride I can sometimes finish The Times crossword, there is no way I could finish a chess match with any of these people in anything other than second place.

Night Snow

There must come a time for some poets, perhaps many poets, when the biggest question they have to face is whether it is better to write no poems at all rather than write bad or somewhat unsatisfactory poems.
I've abandoned or ditched my last three efforts over the last few months, sure in the knowledge that too much poetry is written and that if I'm not happy with something I've done I can hardly expect anybody else to think much of it.
Those yesteryears when I, at least, was thrilled by my own work might have gone but I remember thinking and saying something similar when I was in my twenties and I'd like to think I returned to form and improved a bit after that.
If only one knew for sure it was all over, one could edit the Collected Poems, stick it on a shelf somewhere and concentrate on becoming moderate at chess rather than mediocre. But you can't ever be sure of that.
It snowed a lot here overnight, like it did in most of Britain. Snow poems are plentiful enough, like snowflakes themselves. But unlike snowflakes, which scientists have proved that under microscopes, they all look exactly the same, all snow poems are slightly different.
So, I give you my brand new, less than an hour old, and so fresh and unspoilt, Night Snow.

Night Snow

The snow that balanced picturesque
on spider’s webs that joined the fence
to the house just below where
the window looks out
passively on gardens, white again,
like they were this time last year,
a few weeks later actually,
was added to by more snowfall
that drifted silently all night
from thick, dark skies
unseen but no doubt beautiful.
But far too heavy in the end
for the fragile nets of silk
that weren’t there in the morning.