Comedy, Tragedy, and Radio 3.

I will be blithering about comedy this weekend, as part of BBC 3's Free Thinking Festival, if that’s the kind of thing that scratches your scrotum or tickles your cervix. There's lots of good stuff in the festival, but my event will be a gory battle to the death between Tragedy and Comedy, that will take place live in The Sage, Gateshead (near Newcastle), and be broadcast on BBC 3's Nightwaves some time later (not sure when). Wearing the black hat and jackboots of tragedy, Professor of English Carol Rutter and comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes. Wearing the white hat and extremely long floppy shoes of comedy, passionate comedian Janey Godley and me. It's ticketed, but free.

More details on that, including how to get free tickets, here.

The problem of comedy has certainly furrowed my mighty brow this month. “Reality Is A Bananaskin On Which We Must Step” addresses that very subject, in the latest issue of A Public Space. For those of you too lazy to click through to the whole thing, I’ll sum it up for you in a line:

The relationship of a rock to its mountain will never be funny, because the rock does not believe it is the centre of the universe.

Meanwhile, let me recommend a book, or at least 50% of a book: I am halfway through Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, and so far it’s the most enjoyable thing I’ve read all year. A splendid novel about Soviet economics in the 1950s, it reads like the satirical science fiction of the wonderful Strugatsky brothers. (They wrote the charming Roadside Picnic, which Andrei Tarkovsky filmed, in far bleaker form, as Stalker.) But it’s all true. A superb novel of ideas, deeply researched, deeply felt, deeply enjoyable, if it stays this good to the end it will be my novel of the year… I‘ll post a final verdict when I’m done.



They Didn't Teach Music In My School

Speaking of Toasted Heretic has reminded me of a small but annoying itch I'd been meaning to scratch. Here goes.

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has finally been published in Ireland. It is 2,000 pages long. It tells us that the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland (which ran most Irish schools until very recently, including the one I attended, the Christian Brothers, Nenagh), systematically sexually and physically abused the children in its care, particularly the boys. In particular the "industrial schools" run by the religious orders were tiny gulags. I have been reading, with mild annoyance, responses to this. John Banville's, in the New York Times, is typical:

"Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Hmmm. "Everyone knew, but no one said." Below are the lyrics of a Toasted Heretic song, released in Ireland (on vinyl and cassette) as part of the Smug EP in 1990 (well within Banville's definition of that "closed state"). The song is called "They Didn't Teach Music in My School". Its real title is, of course (as it should be in any good pop song), the key line of the chorus, "Sliding Up Seamus". However, we foolishly believed that it was a good song, that it was - in as much as a pop song can be - an important song, and that the national broadcaster RTÉ might actually play it, so we made life easier for them by giving it a title they could actually read out on air. They, of course, didn't play it.

They Didn't Teach Music In My School.

"When your calls go uncollected and the neighbours have electrified the fence

Then will you start thinking, will it sink in, will you exercise some sense?

Everybody hates you, thinks it's great you got the flu, do you know why?

It's because you're such a shite we'll laugh all night with sheer delight the day you die

Your hand inside your habit, you would grab it and emit a gasping noise

As you walked in your black cassock past the showers and slapped the buttocks of the boys

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're inside

For sliding up Seamus

In our religion classes you would glare through black-rimmed glasses down the back

And summon up the sinner who'd regurgitated dinner, to be smacked

Vomiting in terror was a tactical error, he'd find

As you lowered his trews and began to bruise his behind

Picture our joy when you were caught inside a boy behind the bike shed

Oh summer holidays forever, and much better weather, when you're dead.

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're still inside

For sliding up Seamus..."

Of course, pop culture never gets much credit for saying anything of any importance, though it often speaks truth well ahead of high culture. John Banville, who is an excellent writer (though of the kind of novel I don't like), and by all accounts a very nice, decent man, appears to be speaking for Ireland when he tells the readers of the New York Times "Everyone knew, but no one said." "What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours." "We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Well, it's not MY bleedin' shame, mate. "Sliding Up Seamus" was being played live in towns across Ireland, and being cheered to the rafters by pupils and ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers, twenty years ago, before it was even recorded. And my friends and I officially released our report, on vinyl and cassette, 19 years before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its report.

And, of course, being a disposable piece of pop, existing only in analogue recordings on vinyl and cassette, on an indie label,  before the internet, it has vanished almost entirely now. I don't even have a copy myself. But just to prove it existed, here is a rotten recording, with terrible sound, of a live performance of "They Didn't Teach Music In My School" - which we may as well officially rename "Sliding Up Seamus", now that it doesn't matter any more - in Róisín Dubh, Galway, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour Tour.

(The actual vinyl version was unusually well recorded, for a Toasted Heretic song, and sounded darn good. Renouncing our 4-track Tascam 244 for the first time, we recorded the Smug EP on 16-track in West One, with the great Pat Neary engineering.)

A final point: The song, rather optimistically, places the chap in the black cassock behind bars. In that, "Sliding Up Seamus" was less a description of the Irish present in the late 1980s, when it was written, and more a projection of a possible future, a wish-fulfillment exercise written to cheer up some friends of mine, who had suffered under the regime, and give them a laugh. No priests or Christian Brothers were getting jail sentences back when that song was written. But it is slightly sad to be reading this on Wikipedia, twenty years later:

"The report itself cannot be used for criminal proceedings (in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission to prevent its members from being named in the report) and victims say they feel "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions,^[18] and "because of that this inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete and many might call it a whitewash."^[17]"

Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys!

 

I've finally heard The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, and it's fab! Hurrah! Hugh Quarshie is a splendid Ibrahim Bihi, utterly real and grounded. And Sam O'Mahony-Adams as Jude is a terrific comic foil to Quarshie. The BBC economics correspondent, Stephanie Flanders, really threw herself into it, and her interviews from Hargeisa Goat Market are a delight. (I love creating such unstable moments, where the real and the fictional are perfectly mixed. A real BBC correspondent fiercely interviewing a fictional character about theoretical goats... Bliss!)

The director Di Speirs did a great job making all these elements, and performances, work together. A tricky task, mixing actors and non-actors, present tense and flashback, thoughts and actions, and keeping it all clear and artistically coherent. And I'm very happy with David's sound design... Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys! Beautifully blended.

That distant wind you hear is my great sigh of relief.

The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble

Well, my first radio play, The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, went out on BBC Radio 4 today, but my highly strung, indeed neurotic, computer wouldn't let me listen to it. I gather it is available for the next week here, so I'll try and listen to it tomorrow. But if any of you heard it, tell me what you thought, I'd be very interested... My parents heard it, in a shed in Tipperary (don't ask), and thought it was marvellous, but they are biased.

If any of you are BBC listeners looking for the original short story, it is here.

It will also be appearing as part of Jude: Level 2 later this year...