Political profiles

Developing the press profiles of various politicians that I started on this site last year, there are some pieces on the Lion & Unicorn site (where I do most of my posting these days) that may be of interest.

On the Labour side (click on the names for links), there's:

Angela Eagle

John McDonnell

Tom Watson

 Hilary Benn

And, representing the Conservative Party, there's:

Theresa May

Michael Gove

There's lots of other good stuff there as well. Not just pieces by me, but also the work of Dan Atkinson, Sam Harrison and Paul Saffer. Do have a look.

some new writings

I'm still writing some stuff for the Lion & Unicorn website, including in recent times:

The odd story of thriller writer Hank Janson being prosecuted in 1955 for publishing obscene literature.

A consideration of whether Britain would be better off culturally outside the EU.

An unexplained disappearance from a Gloucestershire village in the 1660s.

A look at the continuing power of Ken Livingstone's London effect in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

Do have a read, if you wish.

What I would have said on Sky News

I was invited to appear this morning on Sky News to discuss Janet Smith's report on Jimmy Savile at the BBC. But the press conference launching the report went on for an hour or so longer than anticipated, and I never got an air.

You never know with these things where the conversation is going to go, but I'm not sure I would have had very much new to say in any event. I've written about Savile on a previous blog, as well as in a review of Dan Davis's biography. However, what I was planning on saying was this:

The stories about Savile were all over the music industry by the mid-1970s. Not the allegations that he was raping 10-year-olds, but the fact that he had a penchant for teenage girls and didn't bother much with the age of consent.

This was not unusual in the pop world. Anyone who knows anything about the history of rock 'n' roll should be able to come up with a couple of dozen names of those said to have similar taste. Admittedly, there was a difference between beautiful young rock stars and a seedy man in his fifties, but it's not one that is now - or was then - recognised in law.

Rumours aren't evidence, said Smith at the press conference this morning, and as a former judge, she would require evidence. But no one suggests action should be taken against Savile on the grounds of the rumours; merely that if they heard those rumours, then senior figures at the BBC should have made enquiries. At which stage, evidence might well have emerged.

It is possible, of course, that the BBC hierarchy never heard those rumours. And that may also be true of senior figures in the police force, the political world, the NHS, the charities, the local businesses, the prison service. Maybe none of them heard a whisper against him, and that's why they continued to work with him and to court his attention. But it seems a little unlikely.

Even more unlikely is that the newspapers didn't hear the rumours. Where were the investigative journalists? Where were the tabloids? Why did not one of them break ranks and pursue the story of Savile's abuse? If the allegation now being made against the BBC is that it turned a blind eye, then the same is surely true of Fleet Street.

Uh-oh, we're in trouble

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, I recently became fascinated by the idea of female vocal duos in British pop music. So I wrote a series of pieces tracing their history over a period of fifty years, from the Caravelles to the Cheeky Girls. The story starts here with the 1960s and '70s (including the Pearls, Snatch, Blonde on Blonde), continues here with the 1980s (Pepsi & Shirlie, Wee Papa Girl Rappers) and concludes here with the likes of Shakespears Sister, Shampoo and Alisha's Attic.

Save Kneller Hall

I have a great fondness for the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall - where I spoke only last November - and am saddened, though not surprised, to hear that the government is again trying to close it down. If you get a chance to sign this petition to save the place, it would be a good thing.

I've posted a piece about a previous attempt at closure here.

Hilary Benn: a press portrait

Following earlier portraits of John McDonnell and Theresa May, I've written a piece about Hilary Benn, who is currently being touted by bookmakers as the favourite to be the next leader of the Labour Party. The piece can be found here on the Lion & Unicorn website.

Uncle Bill: Discipline and sticky buns

I haven't posted anything here for a very long time. Partly this is because I've been busy, doing things that aren't suitable for a blog, and partly it's because when I have written something suitable, I've posted it elsewhere.

Here, for example, is a piece that I like very much about the broadcaster Bill Mitchell, who used to present children's programmes on BFBS radio in the 1960s and '70s. Unless you have experience of the British Army on the Rhine, you've extremely unlikely to have heard of him - but I think he's an intriguing figure anyway, and worth a few minutes of your time.

Armistice Day

I spent yesterday evening at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall, giving a talk on the Last Post as part of the Richmond Literary Festival. And very enjoyable it was too.

For those who missed my Radio 4 programme on the same subject, it is now available on iPlayer. And there's also an article I wrote for the BBC website to accompany the show.

And finally, on the occasion of Armistice Day, a further plug for my piece about the National Union of Ex-Servicemen, the most radical of the campaigning groups in the aftermath of the First World War. This was the organisation that effectively made Douglas Haig found the British Legion, so worried was he by their revolutionary potential.

National Union of Ex-Servicemen

One of the things that intrigued me when writing The Last Post was the role of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen. The NUX, as it was known, was by far the most radical, even revolutionary, of the veterans' groups that sprang up in the years immediately following the First World War. 'Instead of being the means to save capitalism,' declared the Union's general secretary, 'the organised ex-servicemen will now be the means of destroying it.'

Unfortunately, I had limited space to explore this in the book itself. So I've filled in some more details in an article about the NUX on the Lion & Unicorn website.

The Last Post previewed

Some further advance publicity for my Radio 4 show on Wednesday morning. Paul Donovan in the Sunday Times:

Other Armistice Day offerings include Alwyn Turner's melancholic history of The Last Post (R4 FM, 11am), just after the two-minute silence

The wonderful Gillian Reynolds in the Daily Telegraph:

Alwyn Turner tells the story of one of the world's most familiar tunes. Once it was just one of a dozen bugle calls played every day in British Army barracks. In the 1850s it became something played at soldiers' funerals. In the First World War, it gained its greatest resonance. Now it is played internationally to mark the passing of an era or to keep alive the memory of conflicts past and present. It has become the music of loss, an almost sacred anthem in an increasingly secular society.

and again in the Sunday Telegraph:

The Last Post began as a bugle call in British barracks, played to show all was secured at the close of day but, from the 19th century on, has become one of the world's most familiar tunes, played at funerals and state occasions. Alwyn Turner tells its story with the help of men who've played it. Its very simplicity makes it hard to play perfectly but, as we hear, there's something about it that uniquely signals sadness, solemnity, respect.

And finally Liam Williams in the Independent:

It started as just one of a couple of dozen bugle calls played every day in a British Amy barracks - then, in the 1850s, it found a new role, played at soldiers' funerals. Alwyn Turner tells the untold story of The Last Post.

Whoever is responsible at the BBC for promoting programmes is clearly doing a fine job, and I'm very grateful.

The Last Post - another plug

David Hepworth's preview of the week's radio in the Guardian rather wonderfully singles out my programme on the Last Post, which is broadcast next Wednesday:

My thanks to Mr Hepworth. And indeed to Tom Goulding, who I regret I didn't acknowledge when posting his piece from the Radio Times earlier in the week.

PS And here's a piece from the Daily Mail:

Radio Times

A cutting from the new edition of the Radio Times, with a fine pick of programmes for next Wednesday, Armistice Day:

The Last Post on the Home Service

I've been a bit quiet on this blog (and elsewhere) over recent weeks. Mostly this is a result of a lack of time, because in addition to normal stuff, I've been making a Radio 4 documentary about the story of the bugle call the Last Post. Which has been a fascinating but quite time-consuming experience.

It's also been completely new to me and I'm deeply grateful to the producer, the admirable Ben Crighton, who has steered me through the project.

Amongst other interviews, we spoke with Peter Wilson and Basil King, who sounded respectively the Last Post and Reveille at the 1965 funeral of Winston Churchill. We also interviewed Paul Field, who played the Last Post at the 1981 funeral of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands - I'm interested in the way that a British Army bugle call was played on both sides in the civil war in Northern Ireland, and this was a rare chance to ask one of those involved about his perception of the call.

Anyway, I'm listening to a recording of the show now, and it's sounding very fine to my ears. Do have a listen: we're on air two weeks today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Last Post on the Bugle

Two weeks today - on Tuesday 10 November - I shall be doing a talk on the Last Post bugle call as part of the Richmond Literary Festival. I'm particularly pleased that this is being staged at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall in Twickenham, since I once wrote the history of the School. If you live in the vicinity, do drop in - it'll be good.

Three-minute heroes

I spent yesterday evening at the University of Warwick (which, obviously, is in Coventry), where they were staging a two-day Festival of the Imagination as part of the university's fiftieth birthday celebrations. I was appearing on a panel to discuss the Two-Tone movement that came of the city in 1979, appearing along with musicians Pauline Black and Horace Panter, novelist Catriona Troth and academics Trevor McCrisken and Jason Toynbee. It was, as I'd anticipated, tremendous fun.

Freddy Valentine

In a previous life, I used to have a website called Trash Fiction. Well, I still have the  site, but sadly I haven't had the time to update it for, oh, over a decade now. Despite which, I remain a self-proclaimed lover of pulp fiction and, in that capacity, I'd like to recommend a fabulous radio play/audiobook in the shape of David Chaudoir's Freddy Valentine and the Soho Ghoul.

On Trash Fiction I used to start with the blurb on the back of the book. This is the equivalent from iTunes:

Freddie Valentine is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, coated in a purple paisley veneer. A record producer, a nightclub crooner, the one-time manager of the heavy metal band Satan's Claw, the bastard son of an eccentric aristocrat, a dabbler in the dark arts - some or none of this might be true. It was the year 2013 but the man dressed in a purple safari suit and stack-heeled boots, and his hair was a matted bird's nest of the Jimi Hendrix Experience variety. He spoke like an East End barrow boy, read trashy women's magazines and kept a budgie called Grayson.

Detective Chetwyn has a problem. He believes his chief superintendent might be a vampire. He believes that Valentine might be one as well, and that he's going to be bumped off by Valentine's Polish hard-man Osaki.

This kind of free-wheeling, over-the-top camp fantasy is a tricky act to pull off. It's all too easy for weird to shade into wacky, for humour to come across as smartarse smugness. Happily, Chaudoir gets it right. This is genuine, unadulterated, Grade A pulp writing.

Picture this: Heavy Metal Kid Gary Holton as a decadent cockney fop with a talent for mind-reading; Richard Davies from Please Sir! as a Welsh copper, plagued with irritable bowel syndrome, who feels that his wife and daughters are conspiring to condemn him to premature middle age; and professional wrestler Mal 'King Kong' Kirk as a Polish misfit 'rumoured to have punched Lech Waleska in a bar fight in Gdansk'. All of them appearing in a story written by Arthur Brown (loosely adapted from an Arthur Machen original) and directed by Ken Russell.

Something like that anyway.

The central trio of characters are all splendidly ludicrous, the storyline is excessive without being (too) silly, and there's an unmistakeable intelligence at work. There are some fine turns of phrase: if the literary version of vampires were accurate, then the world would be plunged into a 'Mathusian fanged apocalypse'. And there are some lovely asides: the members of a golf club 'liked to have a senior police officer popping in now and again. It added to their misplaced sense of superiority.' In addition to which, I find it hard to resist a text that laments the state of modern cigarettes and yearns for the good old brands of Piccadilly, Woodbine and Gitane.

As far as I know, this is a home-made production, but it sounds professional enough: the narration and acting are convincing, and there are enough bits of music and sound effects to lift it.

I'd hope that this is the start of a continuing series (in whatever format) featuring the characters, but in the meantime, Freddy Valentine and the Soho Ghoul is available here.

Book reviews

I've never been very up-to-date in my reading. The majority of the books I own were bought in charity shops, which normally means I'm at least a decade behind the times.

But recently I've been doing some book reviewing, which has given me a chance to read newly published work. And very good a great deal of it is. Unfortunately, some of the reviews aren't available online - so you can't read my piece on Peter Doggett's fine Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the I-Phone - 125 Years of Pop Music unless you subscribe to the Literary Review. 

I would, though, direct you to my thoughts on a trio of excellent books: Charlotte Higgins's This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC, Philipp Blom's Fracture: Life and Culture in the West 1918-1938 and Dominic Sandbrook's The Great British Dream Factory.

And on the subject of the latter, I would also cite the enthusiasm expressed by Jessie Thompson in the Huffington Post, in which she praises 'a book that is written with the same clarity, energy and humour as Alwyn W Turner's brilliant books on recent history'.

Theresa May: a portrait

Having written some profiles of various Labour figures, drawn from their press cuttings, I thought I'd try a Tory. So here's a portrait of the home secretary Theresa May. She's very dull, I know, but there are some points of interest in her story.

John McDonnell: a portrait

Following my profiles of Jeremy Corbyn and the other candidates in Labour's leadership and deputy leadership elections, I thought I should do the same for the new shadow chancellor, John McDonnell. It's now available on the Lion & Unicorn site. Do have a look.

Harry Greene

Yesterday was the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of ITV. Which means that it was also the sixtieth anniversary of Round at the Redways, the first ITV soap, starring real-life married couple Harry Greene (billed as Howard Greene) and Marjie Lawrence.

I never met Marjie, but Harry was one of the nicest men I've ever known. He was a friend of the great Welsh writer John Summers, which is enough to recommend him for a start, and - apart from his TV and film work - he was also the stage designer for Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in its early days.

And he knew Terry Nation, when Nation was a young comedian in Cardiff, which proved invaluable when I wrote a book on Nation's career. So much so that I dedicated the book to him and to the memory of John Summers.

Harry died in 2013 at the age of eighty-nine. This is him and Marjie in Round at the Redways: