Isomorphisms of expectation

Resolutely stuck in the 1960s as I am, I recently watched yet another programme about the Great Train Robbery of August 1963. Concerned mostly with the identity of an alleged gang member who was never caught, the programme also discussed how the raid was carried out. One of the crucial requirements for the robbery to succeed was that the mail train needed to be halted at the precise point where the ambush was to take place, in rural Buckinghamshire. The gang lacked the technical knowledge to tinker with the railway signalling system. How then to stop the train? The solution, accredited to gang member Roger Cordrey, was to stuff a leather glove over the green signal, and rig up a battery-powered red lamp nearby. The train driver, speeding along in the dark, would see the red light and apply the brakes. He would assume that the red light was the signal; he had no reason to think otherwise. A signal, green or red, was what he was expecting to see. I’ve always considered this a clever, albeit criminal, illustration of lateral thinking.

Also recently, I’ve been attempting to watch the second series of “Hold the Sunset”, about which the only good things are the theme tune (“Have I The Right ?” by the Honeycombs) and fragments of pleasant Thames-side scenery around Richmond and Twickenham. This dire series has progressed from being merely negatively amusing to positively annoying. It’s so sad to see the long and illustrious career of John Cleese being tarnished by association with this dismal offering. However, thinking of Cleese in his former glory, and  in particular thinking of “Python”, for no very good reason I today recalled an episode first shown in December 1969, in other words almost half a century ago. Actually not featuring Cleese at all, this sketch concerns a psychopathic blood-crazed barber (Michael Palin) with his customer (Terry Jones). Wrestling with his own homicidal tendencies and with his customer settled in the chair, the Michael Palin character switches on a reel-to-reel tape recorder which plays typical barber shop conversations – about the weather, the football, etc – with suitable gaps for his customer to respond, and also the sound of scissors snipping away. Apart from the total absurdity of the situation the customer has no reason to suspect that the sounds he is hearing aren’t those of him having his hair cut. His expectations are anticipated … and fooled. An early outing in the direction of virtual reality, I suppose.

That is, until he susses the situation, and Palin famously confesses, “I didn’t want to be a barber anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack”. And we know what comes next.

Detecting analogies, finding structural similarities, patterns, isomorphisms across apparently dissimilar situations can be a route to creativity, it can be a symptom of hypomania or schizophrenia, and it can be extremely tiresome. But I wonder: the fake railway signal, the fake barbering sounds. There’s some sort of deep level similarity going on, but whether it’s worth anything, well, who knows. Are there other parallels to be unearthed in other walks of life, in other created works? I really don’t know. I never wanted to be a blogger anyway. I wanted to be a logger, leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia … The giant redwood, the larch … 

And that’s probably quite enough for one very warm Bank Holiday Monday.

Come right back

One of the themes of psychogeography is that the historical past can linger into the present, co-existing with the physical surroundings, if only we could see. Supposedly, events from long ago hover in the air above the city streets, or adhere to buildings, sometimes lending a frisson of evil or an aura of sadness, pervading the surroundings with a permanent mood for those sensitive enough to detect it. Physical science demands that, if no molecular or conventionally energetic traces remain, this is a delusional belief, and that any such claims are “all in the mind”. I lean towards the scientific viewpoint. However …

The centre of Nottingham is conventionally held to be the Old Market Square, known to some older residents as Slab Square, and colloquially simply as The Square. It is, in fact, anything but square, more of an awkwardly warped irregular quadrilateral, but it is the largest central space of its kind in England, allegedly, originates in pre-Norman times, for centuries functioned as a market, was rebuilt in the 1920s in an attractive but bastardised art deco style, and then again in 2007 was expensively reconditioned - despite popular protest - in a style felt to be more appropriate to our times. Which, unwittingly perhaps, it is. Along the southern side, known as South Parade, is the NET tram stop. Here I quite frequently alight, do what I have to do in town, and head home. Town isn’t somewhere I want to linger these days. To the extent that I notice anything at all, I see and feel the Square as it is today. Why would it be otherwise?

Until, that is, 7.30 on a Sunday evening a few weeks ago, and the first episode of BBC1’s “Hold the Sunset”. This is a gentle enough sitcom set in the leafy avenues of Richmond. The only reason I watch the series is because, along with Alison Steadman, it stars John Cleese, and therefore it ought to be good. Oh dear. How I long for Cleese to say something outrageous and funny. He plays a congenial character, one with which it is easy to empathise (we share similar height and paunch). But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could erupt with a torrent of that famously inventive invective, of surreal, over-the-top, Sydney Opera House and wildebeest sarcasm. It almost happened last week, almost, but no. I look at that face, a TV face I’ve known now for half a century, now chubbier and less angular, but the herald of literally hundreds of well-remembered priceless moments from ‘Python’ and ‘Fawlty’. I can almost feel the hilarity waiting to burst forth again, that curiously feline twitching at the corners of the mouth, an aged and updated version of that Anne Elk (Miss) look. Alas, no. No theories about the brontosaurus. Not this time. A couple of weeks ago I managed a smirk when Bournemouth, Weymouth and Ilfracombe were cited as “front runners” in research for a holiday destination. Conspicuously not Torquay or Weston-super-Mare, but in the same humorous direction. But that’s about it. Sorry, I digress.

The opening credits to “Hold the Sunset” are accompanied by the song “Have I the right?”, by the Honeycombs. The moment it starts, it is the summer of 1964, and I am in the Old Market Square as it was, no trams and pedestrianised nothingness, only buses and trolleybuses, chunky urbanity, boys and girls on their way home from school. Me, just turned fourteen, raging with testosterone and teenage angst, ogling a girl from the school across the road from ours, a girl whose name I will never know, who I will never dare speak to, a girl who will catch a different bus. But all the same, a girl with whom I imagine myself to be deeply in love. The Honeycombs are high in the charts and during the holidays they will reach Number One. I am waiting on South Parade for the No. 14 bus due at 4.35 at precisely the spot where – more than half a century later - I will step off the tram, with no recollection of the past and only the vaguest memory of what that girl looked like.

Now, back in the present, one unexpectedly re-encountered piece of music has succeeded in piercing decades of tired acceptance of a familiar scene and taken me back to somewhere that - so it seems - still exists, co-existent with the physical template of today’s Square. Instantly, it is all there, the total experience; in the (misappropriated) words of the song it has ‘come right back’.  A Proustian madeleine delivered via a record charged with adolescent hormones and produced by the brilliant but troubled Joe Meek and now used on a mildly disappointing comedy programme. Out of the blue.

A couple of other relevant points. One is that this experience seems to refer back to one of those moments when, slightly self-consciously, one thinks “I will remember this” – although often one doesn’t. I don‘t think this mental quirk has a technical name, at least, none of which I’m aware. The other point, more psychogeographic, is the old and very iffy business of thoughts and feelings attaching themselves to physical objects, so-called psychometry. As I implied at the beginning, I have my doubts, but this particular Honeycombs-triggered remembrance opens up for me two related episodes of musical thoughts “posted” at about the same time around the Square. On the north side, known formally as Long Row, is a large branch of Debenham’s, for many years Griffin and Spalding’s, somewhere I always thought of as an ‘old lady shop’. A Nottingham institution, after which we named our two goldfish when the kids were little. Now, once again, as it used to be until I forgot, attached firmly and at a slight angle to the columns in front of the main entrances to the store is an audio memory of “Concrete and Clay”, a catchy little number by an outfit called Unit 4 + 2, which reached the top of the charts in April 1965. A little way down, on the west side of the centre of the Square, where the 41 and 43 trolleybuses used to pause on their route down to Trent Bridge, is a sound trace of Tommy Roe’s 1966 hit “Sweet Pea”. I’m not sure whether this song title has any olfactory connection with the adjacent subterranean loos that were there then, so central and publicly convenient that they were “rationalised” at the last revamp, in favour of a less useful water feature.

 
I know people often claim that certain songs remind them of particular events or places, but I wonder if this example of induction of involuntary memory by music is unusual in the annals of psychogeography. Does it ‘take the biscuit’?  Without the promise of Cleese it would never have happened. I await to see what happens on “Hold the Sunset” tomorrow evening.