PATERNAL VIGILANCE

What a relief never to have had children. So many eventualities are routinely accounted “every parent’s nightmare” that I imagine every mum and dad must pass their lives suffused with dread.

The latest outing for this cliché was conducted by Sami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, on Any Questions?. The panel were contemplating the occasion – now fairly ancient but only revealed this last week – when David and Samantha Cameron were having Sunday lunch at a country pub with friends (the Charlie Brookses, perhaps, in which case their preoccupation would be quite understandable). When they got back to Chequers, it was noticed that one of the children was missing. Mrs Cameron phoned the pub, ascertained that the child had been found in the ladies’ convenience and drove back to retrieve her.


The Camerons shrug off security

The neglectful father has received a wave of public sympathy or at least of empathy. What parent – it seems – has never left a child behind, sometimes even in a foreign country, only noticing the lack a few weeks later? The lapse evidently makes Cameron seem human. It can only be a matter of days before his opinion poll rating bounces back into the black and the Tories go on to win a landslide at the next election.

Even the left has been in forgiving mode. “Actually, I don’t think Cameron did anything terribly wrong,” wrote Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. “Nothing happened to the child”. Oh well, that’s all right then. But you’d think Moore would be old hand enough to notice the implication of her words. A lapse is a lapse, whatever the upshot. Drink-driving, for instance, is not rendered ok because you happen not to plough into somebody.

In any case, Cameron is far from being “every parent”. I don’t imagine Moore goes to the pub of a Sunday with a detail of security guards as well as her children in tow. The chance of one of her brood being kidnapped and held to ransom must be considered relatively low. The chance of this happening to one of Cameron’s children is surely at the top level of consideration when contingency strategy is being planned for the Cameron family movements.


Cameron downs another pint

So what the hell were Cameron’s security officers doing on that Sunday jaunt? Don’t they, as a matter of course, do a head count every time the family makes a move? “Oh, I thought she was in the other car” may be good enough for parents with little other than their faces to lose. For Cameron, it could be the difference between a news story that makes him seem a (loveable?) putz and a major terrorist incident that ends in a tragedy.

It’s hard not to feel that security around the government and the establishment errs on the lax side. On the Any Questions? panel with Chakrabarti was John Whittingdale, chair of the parliamentary select committee on culture, media and sport. Had I been a panellist that evening, I would have made a connection between the security lapse at the pub and the one last summer that allowed politico-comedian Jonnie Marbles close enough to Rupert Murdoch to pie him while he was giving evidence to Whittingdale’s committee.


Jonnie Marbles pies Murdoch

Then last month a man crashed the Leveson Inquiry and had leisure to denounce Tony Blair as a war criminal before being apprehended. In the time it took him to deliver his diatribe, an uninvited guest could have killed Blair one of several ways or indeed detonated a bomb and killed everyone in the room. Lord Justice Leveson ordered an immediate investigation of the security breach, the results of which, you may be sure, will not be made public.


Jonnie Marbles apprehended by Mr Plod

Three such lapses in a year are enough to make anyone with evil intent against the PM and/or the legislature rub his hands in glee. How hard would it be to nab a member of the royal family and demand the release of convicted terrorists? Could a suicide bomber get into the chamber of the House of Commons during prime minister’s questions when the maximum carnage could be inflicted? Could a mole be embedded at number 10 Downing Street?

The tenor of these matters is set by the top man. A lackadaisical approach to potential danger is all of a piece with Cameron’s attitude to government, which has given rise to the horrible coinage “chillaxing”. He seems to wish to temper his impersonation of his political idol, Tony Blair, with the laid-back, not to say bibulous, style of Charles Kennedy. That’s where coalition politics leads you.


Blair's assailant

Serious security wallahs must be tearing out their hair. After all, Cameron has already committed a colossal breach of vetting protocol by allowing his then director of communications, former Murdoch editor Andy Coulson, to attend security briefings for which he had not been cleared. To my eyes, this constitutes a prima facie breach of the law governing state security committed by the prime minister himself, surely a unique situation.

It is all well and good for Cameron to play fast and loose with his own safety and that of his family. Perhaps he would imagine it a neat and desirable summation if, exactly two hundred years after the only other assassination of a British PM (Spencer Perceval), his own career should end while he has his boots on.

But modern assassins spare no thought for the fate of innocent bystanders – what the brutish military jargon calls “collateral damage” – and Cameron needs to heed the danger to others, let alone the danger that the state itself might totter in such a circumstance.


Spencer Perceval

A much misquoted and misattributed sentiment comes in fact from the 18th century Irish lawyer and orator John Philpot Curran: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance”. It seems inevitable that David Cameron’s downfall, one way or another, will derive from an inability to keep his eye on the ball.

•••••••••••••••••••

Since my last posting, we in Britain have been wrung out by the conclusion of two great American teledramas. Desperate Housewives ran out of road after eight seasons. The show had its idiocies, particularly its murder subplots which could not be made credible even by such classy guest actors as the wonderful Alfre Woodard. But led by four strong roles for women – well, three out of four ain’t bad – it kept up a lively and sometimes satisfyingly surprising plot development and often enough put together something quite magical.

Certainly, after the near-climactic pull-together of strands central to continuing drama – birth, marriage, death – in a perfectly conceived and paced montage to the hauntingly creamy 1957 number ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’, I shall never again hear that first hit for Johnny Mathis without thinking fondly of this show.

Writer-producer Marc Cherry caught my eye by frequently giving episodes of Desperate Housewives subtitles there were song titles of Stephen Sondheim’s or otherwise related to Sondheimiana (the second episode of Season 1, after the inevitable ‘Pilot’, was titled ‘Ah, But Underneath’, which even some mainstream Sondheimians might not recognise). The last episode was called, very properly, ‘Finishing the Hat’. Had Cherry anticipated that Channel 4 would push successive episodes of the eighth season further and further down the schedule until ‘Finishing the Hat’ went out at 12.00, he might have called it ‘The Last Midnight’.


Kathryn Joosten was herself terminally ill as she played Karen's death in the last episode of Desperate Housewives

Dexter ended a couple of nights later, though it will be returning for at least a seventh and an eighth season. Like Desperate Housewives, it maintains a high standard of writing and direction and is able to attract guest cast of distinction. One might imagine that the premise of a police department blood analyst who moonlights as a vigilante serial killer would offer limited scope for sustained interest and development, but the compelling nature of the tension between these two roles has been remarkably consistent. Series 6 ended on a beautifully revealed crisis that will doubtless dictate the major pattern of the succeeding episodes. I can’t wait.

The last of the three-parter God Save the Queens (the first two parts of which I dished last time) revisited the notorious remark that knocked the career of Julian Clary off course almost twenty years ago. Coming on to present an award at a show broadcast live on ITV, Clary was asked by the host Jonathan Ross what he’d been up to, whereupon, plucking from the air the name of the most unlikely of his fellow guests (the then Chancellor of the Exchequer), Clary replied: “I’ve been fisting Norman Lamont”.

Sky transmitters go in for a lot of censoring – Joan Rivers’ potty-mouthed show Fashion Police is frequently bleeped – but it made a nonsense of almost every reflection on Clary’s outrage given in the programme when the word ‘fisting’ was obliterated. What possible rationale would there be for such nannying? Anyone likely to suffer a stroke on hearing the word would have long since switched off the programme in disgust. A word transmitted on prime-time ITV in 1993 can surely be permitted in the much looser environment of minority satellite broadcasting in the multi-channel age.

I like to think that, in the utterly unimaginable event that I were a guest on a chat show and the present Chancellor were another guest, I would have the gumption to pay a graceful tribute to the national treasure that is Julian Clary and reply to the host’s question about my recent activities: “Well, naturally, I’ve been fisting George Osborne”.

ART ISN’T EASY

Last weekend, on a brief visit to London, I caught a preview of Road Show. This is the latest and very likely the last of the musical plays with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the pre-eminent practitioner in the field for the past half century. It was his only show that I had never seen, not having been able to get to the public workshop in New York in 1999 or the world premiere production in Chicago in 2003 (followed by a brief Kennedy Center run) or the unveiling of the show in its present form at the Public Theater in New York three years ago. All of his earlier masterpieces I have seen – most of them several times – in New York, London and English provincial productions and I know them backwards.

Road Show poster, London

Road Show is Sondheim’s difficult child. It has been rewritten, reshaped and rescored as often as Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, if by fewer hands; its legend seems as elusive as that of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Allegro. Unlike those two shows, it has also had a series of name-changes. In Sondheim’s original conception, it was Strike It Rich! When first knocked into shape and workshopped, it was called Wise Guys. For a while, a decade ago, it was known as Gold! named after what, for the duration, has been one of the score’s most characteristic numbers. In Chicago, it was presented as Bounce and, under that title, was first recorded on CD. It was for the Public Theater production that it became Road Show which, though in many ways its least satisfactory title, is surely what it will now remain.

Road Show CD

And after all that, how is it? Well, it should be acknowledged frankly at the outset that it is second-rank Sondheim. It sits in the canon with the works that pre-date Follies (1971) and post-date Into the Woods (1987). By any other artist’s standards, this is rich company. But the eight shows created at Sondheim’s peak – with the pardonable exception of The Frogs (1974) – are musicals of such sublimity, of an ambition, profundity, innovative grace and emotional daring that could not be imagined before they were wrought, that it is idle to expect Sondheim to have the wind and limb to approach such heights again.

The nearest kin in his previous work to Road Show is Assassins of 1991, the second Sondheim show to have John Weidman on the book (Road Show is the third). Both scores – sometimes subtly, sometimes directly – evoke traditional American song and you find yourself surprised not to have a banjo turn up in the new show as it does in the old. Each score carries a whiff of burlesque and an undertone of satirical commentary.

Road Show poster, NYC

Road Show draws on the five real-life Mizner brothers, four of whom, at the dawn of the twentieth century, went a progress separately and together in search of the American dream. Weidman and Sondheim only treat of the youngest two, Wilson and Addison who, they would have us accept, stand as handy exemplars of the contradictions at the heart of the American character. Given this emblematic quality, neither Willie nor Addie could exactly be claimed as fully rounded or complex characters, certainly not when compared with Phyllis, Ben, Sally and Buddy in Follies, Desirée and Fredrik in A Little Night Music, Kayama and Manjiro in Pacific Overtures (despite the conventions of Kabuki), Sweeney and Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, Franklin, Charley, Mary and Gussie in Merrily We Roll Along and George and Dot in Sunday in the Park with George, not to mention Fosca and Giorgio in the later Passion.

Bounce poster, Chicago

With one exception, the other figures in Road Show are ciphers. That exception is a character who did not appear until the Bounce stage of the show’s evolution: Hollis Bessemer, a young, disaffected heir who longs to act as a patron of the arts. The basis for the character is the developer of Palm Beach, Paris Singer, but whether Singer became the lover of Addie Mizner as well as the business partner (as Hollis does) I cannot discover. I suspect he didn’t, hence the change of name. Paris Singer was a lover of – and fathered a child by – the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. The real Addie, however, does appear to have been discreetly homosexual.

Bounce CD

One way in which Road Show scores over the Bounce stage of the show’s evolution is that the lilting ballad ‘The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened’, first written for Willie Mizner and a woman character no longer in the dramatis personæ, is now performed by Addie and Hollis, thereby becoming Sondheim’s first gay love song. It is almost certainly the score’s highlight and a tune that remains deep in the brain.

Explicit homosexuality would certainly not have been permitted to inform a mooted Mizner musical of many decades earlier. Intriguingly enough, Irving Berlin, who knew the Mizners personally, tried several times to fashion a musical about them, his own first title for which was Wise Guy. Other titles the unfinished show went by were The Mizner Story, Sentimental Guy and – this one only about Addison – Palm Beach. I have just discovered that there is a CD entitled Unsung Irving Berlin containing several of the numbers that Berlin wrote for this show that never made it to the stage. Sadly the CD is not available as a download from Dress Circle, iTunes or Amazon, otherwise I could have incorporated further detail into this posting. I shall have to order it as a CD, pricey though it is.

Unsung Irving Berlin CD

But back to Road Show. I don’t much care for the number that Mama Mizner sings about Willie, ‘Isn’t He Something!’, though I know many others rate it highly. One rather fetching song, the lyric of which has necessarily been comprehensively reworked, is the title number from when the show was called Bounce. Rather shockingly, the original lyric contained the kind of misrhyme that Sondheim so scorns in his fascinating book Finishing the Hat: “bounce” with both “counts” and “accounts”. ‘Waste’, the new version, avoids such solecism but is less effective in setting the agenda for what follows, drawing in too many of the plot’s succeeding strands for the first-time listener to grasp.

Willie (David Bedella) and Addie Mizner (Michael Jibson)

At the other end of the score, before a reprise of ‘Waste’ wraps it up, there is a “big finish” number, ‘Get Out! Go’, that doesn’t hold a candle to comparable songs from earlier Sondheim scores: ‘Next’ in Pacific Overtures, say, or (emotionally anyway) the finale of Passion or, supremely, Sunday in the Park’s overwhelming, transporting ‘Sunday’, Sondheim’s greatest choral achievement.

Road Show also has its inspirational, anthemic declaration, ‘It’s in Your Hands Now’, framed as Papa Mizner’s vale to his boys, and pretty routine it is too. Compare and contrast the ecstatic ‘Our Time’ in Merrily We Roll Along and even the cod varsity song ‘The Hills of Tomorrow’ from the same show.

Hollis (Jon Robyns) and Addie

I dare say it seems grudging and mean-spirited to carp at Road Show for not being Follies or Pacific Overtures, as it would to grumble that Pericles is not King Lear. On the other hand, I’d far rather see Road Show a second, third, fourth and fifth time than Phantom of the Opera or Spiderman the once (and I’ve no plans to see either the once). I think that, at heart, the story of the Mizner brothers just does not urgently lend itself to musicalisation in the way that Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and Ettore Scola’s Passione d’Amore did (as respectively A Little Night Music and Passion).

Tossing hundred dollar bills

The characters, such as they are, struggle to be sympathetic for the audience. Such success as the brothers make of their lives seems a little arbitrary. Willie at least is clearly a champion blagger and we can believe that promotion comes naturally to him. Addie’s unsuspected talent for architecture is harder to fathom. For him, I guess, art is easy. It’s not a convincing notion from Sondheim of all people. That the Mizners’ successes bring them fleeting fulfilment is of course the (pretty thin) point. On the way to making that point, the plotting is too discursive to suit simple, emblematic staging. Perhaps that is why Berlin could never crack the subject and why Weidman and Sondheim have struggled with it for so long.

John Doyle

Director John Doyle has terrific form in Sondheim, including in this show (he staged the Public Theater version). In particular, his wonderfully inventive revivals of Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park took those shows to new heights of achievement. For instance, veteran Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince (who directed Bounce in Chicago) worked wonders with the premiere production of Sweeney but Sondheim has revealed that he always meant it to be a chamber piece and so Doyle’s version must have thrilled him as it did us.

Road Show nearly defeats him, I feel. The sequence covering Addie’s travels goes for very little, the (somewhat middle-aged) supporting cast’s neutral costumes no more evocative than the unimaginative lighting and routine movement. Maybe some kind of atmos track would have helped. The convention of tossing hundred dollar bills into the air pays diminishing returns too.

Menier Chocolate Factory: the small stage is in the bowels

There’s a lot to be said for chamber production, inevitably if we are to see big-canvas work in these straitened times. The Menier Chocolate Factory, whose laudable policy ensures that nothing is too ambitious for its small space, has mounted many musicals that London would otherwise have been denied. One of which Road Show put me in mind was Richard Maltby Jr & David Shire's Take Flight for which John Weidman also wrote the book. Given my own level of disappointment with Road Show, I tried to re-imagine it on a big stage with bottomless funding. A little spectacle might help it a lot. But I still don’t think it would work because I believe that the flaw is in the very subject matter. Notwithstanding, given such resources, Stephen Sondheim would for sure want to do another major rewrite and perhaps find yet another title. I’d be tempted to offer Busted Flush.

Perfect fare for a caption competition

NOTHING to HIT BUT the HEIGHTS

Yesterday, Stephen Sondheim turned 80. I’m sure he would agree that this makes him an old feller. Nevertheless, as he belongs to a profession not noted for longevity, it’s a good age. Jerry Ross only lived to be 29, George Gershwin just 38, Lorenz Hart 48, Kurt Weill 50, Frank Loesser 59, Jerome Kern 60, Sondheim’s beloved mentor Oscar Hammerstein II 65, Johnny Mercer 66, Dorothy Fields 68, Leonard Bernstein 72, Noël Coward, Cole Porter and Alec Wilder 73, Cy Coleman 75 and Richard Rodgers and Andy Razaf 77. But Harold Arlen got to 81, Yip Harburg 84, Ira Gershwin 86, Harry Warren and Adolph Green 87, Jule Styne 88, Betty Comden 89, Eubie Blake 96 and the grand old man of all, Irving Berlin, to 101 (not to forget the phenomenal George Abbott who was said to be playing golf every day until just before his death at 107; I saw the incredibly sprightly 1985 revival he directed at 98 in London of Rodgers & Hart’s On Your Toes, for which he wrote the original book in 1936). So there’s still something to aim for.


Mature Sondheim

It’s a curious coincidence that Sondheim shares his birthday with Andrew Lloyd Webber, now 62. In another part of the forest, those Titans of cinematic horror, Vincent Price and Sir Christopher Lee were both born on May 27th, the day after Peter Cushing, though obviously all in different years. Sondheim and Lloyd Webber may both have written many musical plays but within that field that have little in common. They did, however, once and very unexpectedly collaborate. It was for the spectacular charity benefit in honour of Sir Cameron Mackintosh, Hey, Mr Producer!, given in London twelve years ago. In a dropped-in recorded sequence, the two men sat at the piano and performed a satirical pull-together of songs from their respective repertoires for which Sondheim had buffed the lyrics. I particularly enjoyed his reference to “the overwritten music of the night” which Lloyd Webber seemed to take with decent grace.

(Sondheim has a brilliant satirical gift for rewriting the lyrics of others. For Leonard Bernstein’s 70th birthday celebrations in 1988, he twitted his old friend with a version of the Ira Gershwin lyric, ‘The Saga of Jenny’, rewritten of course as ‘The Saga of Lenny’. Where Jenny “would make up her mind”, Sondheim’s Lenny wouldn’t, guying Bernstein’s notorious propensity to spread himself thin. What Sondheim kept in his listeners’ subconscious minds was Bernstein’s notorious sexual ambiguity, about which it would have been disobliging to be explicit, even had Lenny’s formidable nonagenarian mother not been present. Lauren Bacall performed the song with exactly the required insouciance, so that Bernstein was delighted even while deliciously embarrassed).


Sondheim by Hirschfeld

My regular readers will be aware that I have few words to bestow on Lord LW. But my admiration – love, even – for Sondheim’s work knows no bounds. I feel privileged that my life has overlapped with his so that I have been able to follow his development and witness so many of his works when they were new-minted and see again how they have matured. Sondheim’s contribution to American theatre and music is certainly the equal to that of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, David Mamet, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, Duke Ellington, Elliott Carter and the giants of musical theatre I listed above. He is a great American artist.

Where to begin when urging him upon those who have yet to appreciate fully this extraordinary œuvre? I recall that when I was covering for Time Out the imminent arrival of A Chorus Line in London, the line I was getting from the creators of that epochal show (all, apart from composer Marvin Hamlisch, now dead) was that, great as Sondheim was, they wanted to do something really emotional, which Sondheim’s stuff somehow wasn’t. In particular, Michael Bennett, the incredibly charismatic director and choreographer, who had created the dance numbers for Sondheim’s Company and Follies, told me how passionate he was to tap into emotion. But this was profoundly to confuse emotion with sentiment. I cannot watch any production of middle-period Sondheim (Follies through Sunday in the Park), however humdrum that revival, save through a mist of tears.


Angela Lansbury, Catherine Zeta-Jones in Broadway's current Little Night Music revival

That is not because my heartstrings are being urgently pulled; far from it. The emotional charge comes in quite unexpected places. Take the bracingly spirited number given to Petra the maid, a previously unregarded character, right at the end of A Little Night Music, when the “smiles of a summer night” have all frozen on the faces of the grand figures. Petra has enjoyed a tumble in the grass with a visiting butler, now asleep, and she confides to the audience her lofty yet practical plans: ‘I Shall Marry the Miller’s Son’. She has no doubts about it: “Friday nights, for a bit of fun,/We’ll go dancing”. But that’s for later: “Meanwhile …/It’s a wink and a wiggle/And a giggle in the grass/And I’ll trip the light Fandango./A pinch and a diddle/In the middle of what passes by”. And why not? Because “It’s a very short road/From the pinch and the punch/To the paunch and the pouch and the pension”. So “a girl ought to celebrate what passes by”.

You now know she’s got her head screwed on. Then she lets herself dream: “I shall marry the businessman./Five fat babies and lots of security./Friday nights, if we think we can,/We’ll go dancing”. But still she’s anchored in the present and catching her fun where she may: “It’s not much of a stretch/To the cribs and the croup/And the bosoms that droop and go dry”. And then she starts blissfully to fantasise: “I shall marry the Prince of Wales –/Pearls and servants and dressing for festivals./Friday nights with him all in tails,/We’ll have dancing”. But she’s quickly back in the triumphant present: “There are mouths to be kissed/Before mouths to be fed,/And there’s many a tryst/And there’s many a bed./There’s a lot I’ll have missed/But I’ll not have been dead when I die!/And a person should celebrate everything/Passing by”. And she ends with what, at the song’s outset, seemed hubris and now is seen as a proper, doable ambition: “And I shall marry the miller’s son”.

It’s a marvel of a lyric, driven ahead by the busy three-four rhythm – all the show’s numbers are in waltz tempo – and subtly developing its ideas. I adore the modulation from Petra and her miller’s son going dancing “for a bit of fun” to her and a businessman more cautiously going dancing “if we think we can” to the smart perception that powerful people will “have dancing”. In the first London production, Diane Langton, then in her splendid prime before she became a barrage balloon, sang it with such lusty conviction that you just had to cheer, the tears streaming down your cheeks. I cannot read the lyric now, let alone hear it well sung, without filling up.


Japanese actor Mako in the premiere of Pacific Overtures

Another song that packs an unlooked-for punch comes in Sondheim’s musical about Japan. I was lucky enough to catch Hal Prince’s original production of it on Broadway in 1976 and if I ever see anything on the stage to equal its beauty and enchantment, I’ll eat my hat … indeed, to pick up an idea from another Sondheim show, I’ll finish the hat. Pacific Overtures depicts Japanese society before and after its opening up by the arrival in 1835 of Commodore Matthew Perry and the US fleet. It makes brilliant use of kabuki techniques and, having seen authentic kabuki in Tokyo, I can attest to the skill and respect with which this is done. Sondheim’s score, growing organically out of John Weidman’s book, is dazzling, penetrating, witty, moving and original in equal measure. In the number ‘Please, Hello’, it even contrives pastiches of four other (non-Japanese) composing styles of the period.

But the particularly moving number is ‘Someone in a Tree’, in which an old man remembers, as a boy, watching the signing of the treaty. His child self runs up a tree to recreate the scene – old and young self correct each other charmingly (“He was younger then” … “He was only ten”). The eye witness account is further edited by a guard who was stationed in the cellar of the treaty house and so was able to hear “everything … First I hear a creak and a thump./Now I hear a clink./Then they talk a bit”. These reports, while unreliable, have their own legitimacy: “I’m a fragment of the day./If I weren’t, who’s to say/Things would happen here the way/That they happened here?”

As none of the acres of newsprint expended on the subject got close to achieving, I find that this song from an American musical explicates the phenomenon of the public outpouring at the death of the Princess of Wales, the need for so many people to participate in the event of her death, at least through being part of the mourning: “It’s the fragment, not the day./It’s the pebble, not the stream./It’s the ripple, not the sea/That is happening./Not the building but the beam,/Not the garden but the stone,/Only cups of tea/And history/And someone in a tree!” Some may find Sondheim’s stuff cold but I cannot hear that lyric – or even type it out – without my eyes blurring.


An ancient Buster Keaton in the Funny Thing Happened movie

Another canard about Sondheim is that he’s a nifty lyricist but he can’t write a tune you’ll remember, a notion Sondheim himself guys niftily in the cruelly underrated Merrily We Roll Along when the show producer Joe sings: “That’s great. That’s swell./The other stuff as well./It isn’t every day/I hear a score this strong/But fellas, if I may./There’s only one thing wrong:/There’s not a tune you can hum./There’s not a tune you go bum-bum-bum-di-dum” and he leaves humming a minor key version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

Unlike R & H, Sondheim can’t look to a certain movie future to reinforce the familiarity of the songs. Musicals are too expensive for Hollywood these days unless it’s a sure-fire proposition: even Chicago had to be revived on Broadway and sustain a much longer second run before film funding could be found, 27 years after it first opened. The 1950s hit stage shows, West Side Story and Gypsy, for which others wrote the music to Sondheim lyrics, were successfully filmed, especially West Side, which, few remember now, only really became a legendary musical on the back of the movie’s success. Sondheim’s music-and-lyrics show A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was made into a lively but not greatly profitable movie by the then trendy Dick Lester, who had the good sense to cast from the rich comic tradition of burlesque and stage comedy as well as silent movies. More recently, Tim Burton’s visually splendid version of Sweeney Todd missed the comedy but caught the grand guignol and preserved a generous proportion of the score. But Hal Prince’s movie of A Little Night Music is largely a dud.


Angela Lansbury, George Hearn in the premiere production of Sweeney Todd

And think on this: Sondheim’s organic scores don’t generate numbers that lift out for pre-opening promotion. They’re of a piece. When you sit down to see the show, you’re usually hearing all the music for the first time. It’s unfamiliar. It’s also relatively demanding. He studied composition with Milton Babbitt – Irving Berlin couldn’t even read music – and his composing is in a clear line of American classical work, through Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein yet also informed by a hugely eclectic taste in cultural input. But serious American music has always been cross-fertilised by popular as well as academic forms and the process is two-way. I always tell people that Ned Rorem’s angular art-songs are not at all difficult to grasp if you listen for the relationship to Sondheim numbers and, by association, the Broadway tradition.

Sondheim’s scores richly repay study. He may not write quite as many “tunes you can hum” right off the bat as, say, Jerry Herman but then Herman is apt to write three or four songs over and over again so that they seem familiar at the first hearing. But I could sing Sondheim songs all day, without repetition or consulting a printed score or a recording. His tunes are insidiously attractive, often using the old Noël Coward gambit of bitter-sweetness (a darkling notion set to a charming tune). And the Sondheim songbook is now as well-thumbed as any by the old Broadway masters.


The best performers love to sing his work

I was lucky enough to interview Sondheim 35 years ago when the fifth show for which he had written music as well as lyrics, A Little Night Music, opened in London. Needless to say, I found him charming and fascinating. He gave me a huge part of his afternoon, rehearsing history that I would have already known if I had done my research and making it vivid and vital. It is no surprise to learn how widely he is adored for his generosity and kindness and also for being a riveting teacher.

London played a crucial role in underwriting Sondheim’s claim to be taken seriously. A year after A Little Night Music opened at the Adelphi, David Kernan and Ned Sherrin put together the revue of Sondheim songs that became Side by Side by Sondheim, produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Joined by the great Millicent Martin and by long-time aficionado Julia McKenzie (whom Scott Meek described as having been born to sing Sondheim), they had a big hit that transferred, replete with original cast, to Broadway and has been revived and toured repeatedly ever since. The combination of small overheads and top-drawer material makes it a handy vehicle.


The young master at work

Sondheim’s place in Valhalla is now assured though it took longer than it should have done. His shows were never monster hits like Hello, Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables but performers and directors love to revive them and the fan base is big enough to make such revivals viable if not honey pots.

His youngest show, known variously as Wise Guys, Gold, Bounce and Road Show has been briefly seen in various manifestations in New York, Chicago and Washington over eleven years and its evolution is beginning to rival that of Bernstein’s Candide (to which Sondheim has made his own contribution as sometime lyricist). Like Assassins and Passion, the show’s appeal is more specialised and limited than that of, say, Into the Woods or A Funny Thing Happened. But perhaps like Follies, The Frogs and Sunday in the Park with George it will be more and more valued as it settles into the general consciousness and if it enjoys sympathetic revivals. I hope there will be more Sondheim shows yet. Happy birthday, Maestro!

OF ALL TIME (or 30 YEARS)

This morning, The Guardian unveiled its “50 greatest dramas ever made” for television. Cue apoplexy in the Gilbert household, predictably enough. The apoplexy was not exactly ameliorated by the on-line version of this exercise, which, unlike the newsprint original, was headed “The Guardian’s top 50 dramas of all time” [my itals]. Needless to say there was no “all time” about it. Television was first transmitted in Britain in 1936 but there was precious little on this list made before 1980. Here it is in full:


Michael Bryant, Judi Dench, Margery Mason and Maurice Denham in John Hopkins' Talking to a Stranger, which George Melly called "the first authentic masterpiece written for television"

1: The Sopranos
2: Brideshead Revisited
3: Our Friends in the North
4: Mad Men
5: A Very Peculiar Practice
6: Talking Heads
7: The Singing Detective
8: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
9: State of Play
10: Boys from the Blackstuff
11: The West Wing
12: Twin Peaks
13: Queer as Folk
14: The Wire
15: Six Feet Under
16: How Do You Want Me?
17: Smiley’s People
18: House of Cards
19: Prime Suspect
20: Bodies
21: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
22: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
23: Cracker
24: Pennies from Heaven
25: Battlestar Galactica
26: Coronation Street
27: The Jewel in the Crown
28: The Monocled Mutineer
29: Clocking Off
30: Inspector Morse
31: This Life
32: Band of Brothers
33: Hill Street Blues
34: The Prisoner
35: St Elsewhere
36: The L Word
37: The Shield
38: Brookside
39: 24
40: The Twilight Zone
41: Pride and Prejudice (1995)
42: Red Riding
43: Oz
44: The Street
45: The X Files
46: Bleak House
47: The Sweeney
48: EastEnders
49: Shameless
50: Grange Hill

There are some productions that are grossly – even grotesquely – flattered by this rating: A Very Peculiar Practice, House of Cards, This Life, 24, Pride and Prejudice, The Sweeney, Grange Hill. At least they omitted Doctor Who. There are several that I happily confess I am not qualified to judge: How Do You Want Me?, Bodies, The Shield, The L Word, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, the last two of which make me distinctly dubious even without the benefit of exposure. I don’t understand a rating for St Elsewhere but not for ER and, though they’re obviously hobbled by falling into the ill-favoured category of comedy-drama, I would put Desperate Housewives and even Ugly Betty ahead of some of these desperately serious American shows. I have no beef with The Wire but it would never have achieved half of what it did achieve if Hill Street Blues hadn’t done it (rather better) nearly thirty years earlier.


David Rudkin's marvellous one-off drama Penda's Fen which Alan Clarke directed for BBC Birmingham (in colour, despite the still)

Now, of course, the whole modern “list” movement is a load of what the Irish call bollix. It’s comprehensively meaningless to start tabulating like against not-like in some cockamamie attempt to measure their respective value. Anyway, as soon as anyone puts any two items in a one-two order, 20 percent of commentators will say “that’s fine”, 20 percent will say “the other way around” and the other 60 percent will say “oh no, two other things entirely”. So I say: “don’t do it, Deirdre”.

But it’s done. So okay, let’s play. Let’s assume that this is not a totally idle exercise. In that case, first of all we have to excoriate the exclusion of one-off drama from the list. It’s easy to see why this was decided. One-off teledrama is effectively dead. Nobody commissions it any more and so nobody is writing it. But in the golden age of television drama, which extends roughly from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, dozens of fine writers were creating original one-off plays for both the BBC (The Wednesday Play, Theatre 625, Play for Today) and ITV (Armchair Theatre, Plays for Britain) and young, ambitious directors were realising those scripts both on location and (a forgotten drama resource, these days) in the studio.

The fabulous and important thing to note about these one-off scripts is that they weren’t genre pieces nor were they dramatizations of pre-existing fiction or of the lives of the dead, lightly or (more usually) heavily fictionalized. This is almost entirely what passes for teledrama today.

It seems extraordinary that the assembled Guardian critics can knock out an "all-time great" list of teledrama that lacks any work by David Mercer, Ken Loach, Harold Pinter, Julia Jones, John Hopkins, Alan Clarke, Mike Newell, Nell Dunn, David Rudkin, Nemone Lethbridge, Jack Rosenthal, Charles Wood, Trevor Griffiths, Jim Allen, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Moira Armstrong, Alun Owen, Philip Saville, Rhys Adrian, Mike Apted, Howard Schuman, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Jeremy Sandford, Troy Kennedy Martin, John McGrath, Roy Battersby, Arthur Hopcraft, Rudolph Cartier, John Bowen or James Cellan Jones, to name a very few. And don't get me started on the creators of single drama in the States – Paddy Chayevsky, Tad Mosel, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Reginald Rose ... But then I guess it must be conceded that they pre-empted this objection by ruling out single drama. You may feel that is legitimate. I don’t.


Howard Schuman's dazzling Rock Follies, made by Thames and one of the last serials to be shot all on tape

Even given their own criteria, however, the list is nowhere near something that merits the description “of all time”. Here are a few pre-1980 dramas not listed that ought to be on any British telly-watcher’s “all-time” list: Z Cars, Talking to a Stranger, The Quatermass Experiment, Days of Hope, Diary of a Young Man, Roads to Freedom, Rock Follies, Gangsters, The Houseman's Tale, Law and Order, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The History Man, I Claudius, Thérèse Raquin, The Avengers, The World of Gurney Slade, Tutti Frutti and Minder, this last of which must surely be self-recommending if The Sweeney is thought worthy.

The lack of any of these candidates goes to an age-old problem with television criticism. Television is a vast subject (the BBC alone must sponsor more new work each week than the Arts Council does in a year) but newspapers have always insisted that television reviewers be generalists, which means that their ignorance is vast. No serious newspaper would employ a movie critic who didn't know Griffith, Eisenstein and Murnau or a theatre critic who lacked Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov (though even this may be less true than it was). But writers on television are not required to know anything before last week. And it shows in lists like these.

And here we come to the central dichotomy of such exercises. Do the organizers of these lists seek to reflect popular support or expert assessment? Some years ago, Channel 4 – in one of a long series of cheap pull-together compilations that purport to construct authoritative accounts of quality – gave us its list of 100 Greatest Musicals, voted by the viewers. Unlike (I am sure) the great majority of voting viewers, I must have seen at least a hundred musicals, being an aficionado of the form. Indeed, I suspect that a great many voters will barely have seen ten musicals in their lives and probably (at the time of voting some years ago) considered Buddy, the biography loosely draped around Holly’s songbook, as what a stage musical was meant to be. So what did these C4 viewers vote as the greatest musical of all time? Yes, it was Grease. Can you (or anyone else) even name the creators of this mediocre piece of opportunism? No, neither can I.

Grease wouldn’t make my top hundred musicals at all. I am loath to settle on a single all-time great musical. After all, there are two quite distinct forms and the stage musical (or musical play as they call it on Broadway) cannot properly be compared with the film musical, by which I mean the musical conceived from scratch for the camera. The hybrid form used to be the filmed musical play but in recent years, as theatre finances have become more precarious, the reverse hybrid has grown up, the staged version of a movie musical. Most who voted for Grease will, I feel sure, have been thinking of the movie version. I have seen both the stage original and the screen rendition and do not care to arbitrate between two such uninteresting pieces of work. Among my top-rated stage musicals would be several that appear nowhere on the C4 list – Sondheim’s Follies, Company and Merrily We Roll Along, Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey (not the ghastly movie version) and On Your Toes, Porter’s Out of This World, Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, Adler & Ross’s Pajama Game, Rodgers & Sondheim’s Do I Hear a Waltz? and, perhaps my first choice, Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the premiere production of which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway in 1976 and three or four revivals of which I have seen since.


Stephen Sondheim's stage musical Pacific Overtures of 1976 – though this is almost certainly a shot of a revival

Movies being more accessible, many of my preferred film musicals make the list (though rather low down) but among those missing are Golddiggers of 1933, Swing Time, The Gay Divorcee, Evergreen, The Band Wagon, Finian’s Rainbow, Victor/Victoria and – admittedly not a choice that many would make – At Long Last Love (a very underrated confection).

But my own lists, were I to trouble systematically to make any, would be subject to change over time, even quite precipitate change. I reckon my Desert Islands Discs eightsome would never be the same two days running. Is there really any value in such a pastime, or is it just exercise for the blood pressure?

CHESTNUTS

The Christmas album is almost as old as the long-playing record itself. It’s an odd sort of beast. An annual seller if you’re lucky but lousy as a gift because who’s going to be playing it after Christmas Day? So I guess most people buy these items for themselves and play them in the first three-and-a-half weeks of December.



No all-round entertainer of the 1950s and ‘60s would be caught not issuing a Christmas album. Though some few were devoted to slightly jazzed-up versions of carols and other church songs, most went the Tin Pan Alley route with a sprinkling of religion among the secular. So while Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas (1967) dares to range through ‘We Three Kings’, ‘The First Noël’ and the American version of ‘Away in a Manger’ (hugely preferable to the saccharine British version), Dean Martin’s Christmas with Dino (1966) sticks to the perennial secular favourites like ‘Winter Wonderland’, ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!’ and (of course) Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’, save for a smoochy version of ‘Silent Night’ with bells and “ooh-aah” choir.



The peerless Lena Horne – Merry from Lena (1965) – takes almost exactly the same path as Dino, setting ‘Silent Night’ among the showbiz slush, though with lush orchestral backing, harp and all and adding the ghastly, semi-religious ‘Little Drummer Boy’ (the song that creepily brought together Bing Crosby and David Bowie long ago), but otherwise playing safe. Lena is always best when she’s being humorous, even sardonic – nobody puts such a spin on “naughty” in the phrase “naughty or nice” as she does in her big-band take on ‘Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town’. As long ago as 1960, Nat King Cole could perhaps be hailed as the pioneer of the cross-over album in which a showbiz/jazz-inflected singer attempts a whole album of carols in his The Magic of Christmas. He even essayed ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ in its Latin manifestation, ‘Adeste Fideles’, which must have confused some of his fans who perhaps thought “ador-e-mousse” (sic) was something to eat.



Doris Day cleaved to commercial songs in her seasonal album, called (sadly not Christmas Day, which is what I would have called it, but) The Christmas Album (1964). As so many do, she included Mel Tormé’s ‘The Christmas Song’, also known as ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’, an imperishably undemanding number that must have been a nice little pension for Tormé, who reckoned he dashed off the music in 40 minutes.



‘The Christmas Song’ turns up, as hilariously as almost everything on the album, on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart, this year’s seasonal treat that no one saw coming. What odds could you have got in 1963 against Dylan ever recording Tormé, I wonder? Or him doing ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’. Dylan mixes religious and secular, pitching a soupy version of ‘Hark the Herald Angel Sing’ against a work-out for his ancient croak in ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’. It makes you long for the natural follow-up, his version of Rufus Wainwright’s recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary Carnegie Hall concert. What would you give to hear Dylan do ‘The Trolley Song’?



Showbiz Jews have always happily embraced “mainstream” goyim American culture – especially Christmas – so there’s nothing very unusual at that level about Robert Zimmerman/Bob Dylan doing Christmas. After all, Barbra Streisand – much more frankly Jewish than Dylan – has made two Christmas albums, both superb. Both mix in a certain amount of traditional Christian fare and each has a version of ‘Ave Maria’, Gounod’s on A Christmas Album (1967), Schubert’s on Christmas Memories (2001). The first time I heard a pop voice in the Gounod was that of Bobby Darin who made a 1960 album called The 25th Day of December; I bought an EP selection. The full album, which I did not acquire till many years later, is heavily characterised by white gospel-style singing so it was even more adventurous than the Cole album of the same year. I was a devoted fan of Darin who, single-handedly, introduced me via pop to the great songbook of standards that he recorded on his albums; but I didn’t think he quite got away with going classique. Nor really does Streisand, mostly because she is just too reverential. By contrast, her version of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘I Remember’ – not a Christmas song at all but no doubt included for the line “I remember snow” – is glorious; she doesn’t sing enough Sondheim whose acerbic music and lyrics suit her down to the ground.



This year’s most beguiling Christmas album has been Strange Communion by the excellent young English singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore. I love her Joni-Mitchell-meets-Annie Lennox-and-they-really-get-on voice and her writing, though clearly folk-based, is wide-ranging and always ambitious. A couple of the tracks are beautifully chosen covers of others, though certainly not routine ones: Elvis Costello on the one hand, Yoko Ono on the other. I’ll be playing this album a lot and not just at this time of year.



I guess my all-time favourite Christmas albums are, in chronological order, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963) and The McGarrigle Christmas Hour (2005). I bought the Spector when it first came out, being an enthusiast for his stable of singers. The Ronettes were the best, named for the lead singer Veronica whom Spector married. I saw them on tour at the Kettering Granada in 1964. They topped the bill; the first half was closed by a promising if somewhat disreputable English group called The Rolling Stones. I wonder what became of them.



The Spector album, concluded by a spoken track of consuming mawkishness by Spector himself (perhaps he recites it still in his prison cell), was the first pop album to become a serious collector’s item, changing hands for silly money in the mid-1970s. Sadly, I gave my copy away about five minutes before it suddenly became so unexpectedly desirable. This may be the story of my life.



The album by Kate and Anna McGarrigle and their circle is adorable. The choice of songs and singers is always interesting and unusual. The opening track, a version of the traditional ‘Seven Joys of Mary’ with a wonderfully wheezy backing of fiddle and organ, trumpets and pennywhistle, immediately sets out the stall and they never look back. Outstanding in a crowded field are a Jackson Browne song, 'Rebel Jesus’, strongly put over by Lily Lanken and Martha Wainwright, and Rufus Wainwright’s world-beating version of the lovely old Frank Loesser ballad ‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?’

The obvious requirement, I suppose, is that a modern Christmas collection be unexpected but have staying power. But then I guess that would be the formula for just about anything … sex, say …

MUSIC MAKES HIM WANNA TRY

The Neil Sedaka gig last night was absolutely fascinating. The audience in Colston Hall Bristol was not young. Even taking dye into account, I’d say the dominance of grey hair over not grey was three or even four to one. On this evidence, Sedaka’s constituency below 50 is negligible, below 30 virtually non-existent. There was a youngish-looking claque in the front row who were first on their feet at the end and who were rewarded with hand shakes from the man. Another youngish woman presented him with an inexpensive bunch of flowers and got a mouth-to-mouth kiss. But they were atypical. Generally we were sedate, though we certainly clapped and cheered our weight.

Now, let’s not beat about the bush. With obvious exceptions (my friends, for instance), men of East European Jewish origin are apt not to age well. And Sedaka looks like shit. He’s finally given up the piece, which is good in principle, but a bald run through the crown fringed by oiled hair that goes white where it’s too long at the back is not a good look. His distinct jowliness gives his head the shape of an inverted pear. I didn’t mind a bit sitting fairly far back.


Sedaka doesn't look like this
(from last.fm.com)

A passing comparison he claimed with Cary Grant was the most preposterous moment of the evening. Even when young, Sedaka may have been glittery glamorous in his Brilliantined, slightly exotic appearance but he was never, even remotely, sexy. (He actually dances better now than he did back then). Otherwise, though modesty, false or the other kind, is not one of Sedaka’s traits, he doesn’t pretend that longevity is not his strong suit. The second half began with a priceless Scopitone video of Calendar Girl from 1961. Sedaka says it was the first ever pop promo and if he wants to believe that I ain’t gonna argue. Each month is illustrated by a “girl” (as they of course were characterised then) parading in a supposedly appropriate outfit; this was a movie gambit for at least the fifteen years before that time. Neil himself has four (four!) changes of clothes in two-and-a-half minutes. It was shot in Rome in gloriously garish ‘60s colour. You can watch it here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BITaKu5Pm1g

but the print doesn’t begin to do the hues justice. Sedaka reports that he and his wife were sitting outside a Rome café when a woman came up and said “I was in your video. I was January”. Sedaka says “I didn’t believe her …” [perfect pause] “… she was old, old, old”.



Sedaka does look like this (from iCelebZ.com)

But here’s the thing. His voice is simply miraculous. It was always exceptional: those pristine top notes, as true as a bell, and the perfect taste with which it was deployed. His material could be icky but his delivery never was. And it’s still exquisite. No man of 70 should be able to sing like that. My partner David was at a gig by Crosby, Stills and Nash in mid-week and he reported that their voices took a couple of numbers to warm up and get into their stride (and Stephen Stills looked at death’s door, though Doctor Theatre kicked in pretty much as soon as he first attacked his guitar). At Bristol, I concentrated on Sedaka’s tone when the initial impact had passed (and my short hairs had lain down again) but the wear on it, even on sustained notes, was minimal. And the truth of his pitch never faltered through a two-hour set. When we were encouraged to sing along, I noticed that those early hits had been transposed down quite a few semi-tones. Fair enough. I also noted that not so many of us knew the lyrics to the verses as well as the choruses. He only did Oh Carol!, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen and Breaking Up is Hard to Do, interspersed with more recent stuff, but I could have joined him on at least a dozen others of nearer 50 than 40 years’ vintage, word-perfect. Was I alone? (At one point in a more recent song he introduces a piano riff from an early B-side called One-Way Ticket. I hoped he might ask if anybody knew it but of course he didn’t. He never leaves such things to chance).

That’s one of his great strengths. His back catalogue is really vast. He’s recorded a few standards by other songwriters in his time – astutely chosen, beautifully done, even the tricky ones – but his stage act is all self-penned material and I swear he could play three or four weeks of gigs and never repeat himself. Not that repeating himself is against his nature; far from it. I know of no Sedaka album the content of which is wholly unique. He’s a compulsive recycler. Amazon lists 223 CDs over 19 pages, dominated by ‘Best of’ type compilations. Avoiding yet another copy of I Go Ape or Little Devil becomes a consideration when purchasing Sedaka.

Even so, he’s one of those songwriters who is simply full of music. The baroque composers – Vivaldi, JS Bach, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Telemann, the Scarlattis – were like that. In our time, Leroy Anderson, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and now Rufus Wainwright are others, perhaps McCartney (you don’t have to like their stuff to acknowledge the fecundity).

But musical composition is his thing. Howard Greenfield was his lyricist for twenty years and he had a marvellous gift for the succinct, telling line. Greenfield only gets one look-in among the copious programme illustrations and an elegant tribute to him came quite late in the proceedings, followed by an emotionally restrained version of Our Last Song Together. Sedaka worked with Phil Cody for some years and also does his own words (all the new lyrics on the latest CD, The Music of My Life, are his). Both Cody’s and Sedaka’s are typically somewhat bloodless and generalised. If there’s a story to tell it is done smartly but most of these later lyrics are nearer the quality of Tim Rice or Don Black than Stephen Sondheim. There’s no arresting phrase, only banalities.

It doesn’t matter. The creamy, easy but fresh melodies are what carry him forward. Sedaka has never extended the form or created a masterpiece, a truly original song. He works within his comfort zone. His control – of the shape of a song and, just as surely, of the contours of his stage act – is absolute. And within that compass, he achieves a kind of perfection again and again. His early hits were perfect pop songs of the kind known as bubblegum. His mature works are completely crafted, wholly successful pieces of very palatable vin ordinaire. Some – Solitaire, Laughter in the Rain (“Michael Jackson’s favourite of my songs”), I Found My World in You, Standing on the Inside, Love Will Keep Us Together, That’s When the Music Takes Me – are rather more than that.

And just as surely Sedaka knows his audience. The selection of numbers was exactly right, the balance and contrasts unerringly plotted. His last encore took the roof off. Of course it did: it was Amarillo. Every face leaving the hall was shining with pleasure.

AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER

Rewind thirty years and a few more. I was then working as television editor at Time Out, the London listings magazine. TO was at the absolute zenith of its success and the magazine had considerable influence in the corridors of television power because it was virtually out on its own – the boom in press coverage of the medium was still in the future. I was working alongside Patricia Williams who was on the section before my return to the magazine to take up the television post. By rights she should have become section editor but Tony Elliott, the proprietor and sometime magazine editor, was notably leery of politically articulate women.

Happily, Pattie and I hit it off and, with complementary qualities, quickly became a successful team. We built up the amount of insider information that the section ran. A BBC producer told me that each week Television Centre went silent for half the morning while everybody digested the new Time Out television section. Someone at the mag cut out a headline from The Guardian about Bruce Forsyth – “the most important man in television” – and pinned it over my pigeonhole in the mail rack. Heady times.

It got headier. After barely a year, I was invited to join The Observer, which was greatly expanding its coverage of broadcasting. All the national newspapers were looking at TO’s success and learning the lessons. I was, I believe, the first TO journalist to “graduate” to Fleet Street, as the industry was still called in those days – by no means all the national newspapers were located on Fleet Street even then; indeed The Observer was on St Andrew’s Hill at Blackfriars.

The obvious succession was for Tony to pick Pattie, but once again he flinched at the thought of an editor who, as he saw it, talked a different language from him. Pattie sportingly suggested that seeing her as “too political” was a slight upon me. At any rate, Tony made a totally unexpected move. He appointed a beanpole newly graduated from Oxford as the next television editor. His name was John Wyver. Pattie was rapidly scooped up elsewhere: she was offered the editorship of the trade magazine Broadcast, which she gladly accepted and of which she made a fine fist. We all felt that this was one in the eye for Tony Elliott.

In my own role at The Observer, I inevitably came across young Wyver immediately and then regularly. It was natural to me to treat him with decency – after all, he wasn’t the cause of Pattie being passed over and anyway he was a fait accompli. He was well aware that his appointment was controversial and handled it and himself with grace and poise. I gave him all the help I could to find his feet.

Now fast forward to rather more than a decade ago. I was about to publish my critical biography of the television playwright Dennis Potter. It seemed to me that a television programme off the back of publication would be a good idea, both for the book and for, say, Channel 4. I had appeared on television in a few fleeting capacities but had never fronted a programme. Still, I considered myself wholly capable of doing so. During the intervening years, I had worked as a television producer for the BBC and some independent production companies – I had hardly been at The Observer a year before I was headhunted by the BBC as a producer, surely the least qualified person (as I observed at the time) to be a producer since the pioneering days of some 25 years earlier.

Meanwhile, there had been a fracture at Time Out, the political contradictions at its heart inevitably coming to the surface. Many of the staff, including Wyver, had left to found a rival publication, City Limits. It lasted a while but was never distinctive enough and eventually folded. In the new television world after the birth of C4, Wyver had formed a production company, Illuminations, which carved itself a useful and evidently pretty lucrative niche in arts programming. So it was Wyver whom I approached with the notion of a programme about Potter.

We did lunch. I hadn’t seen him in a long time and I was astonished. The beanpole had turned into Robert Maxwell. A vast expense-account stomach sloped away from his still bony shoulders. Underneath this weird disguise, John remained the same slightly bashful, rueful boy I remembered, still looking slightly shocked to be having his career. We chewed over the proposal and John told me to put it down on a sheet of paper and drop it in. Then he took me back to his suite of offices and, less boyish now, showed me round with a proprietorial air. At one point, he introduced me to a woman working at a computer screen and murmured “Truly my mentor”. “Oh,” I said to her, “then I’m very pleased to meet you”. “No,” snapped John, rather irritated as he evidently suspected that I was sending him up. “You are”. It was a wholly genuine misunderstanding on my part. I hadn’t seen it coming and it’s often hard to tell if people hold you in high regard, even when they do. We all know those occasions when everyone is celebrating someone newly dead and we wish the departed could hear this and wonder if she or he would credit it.

I posted off my proposal the next day (the time had yet to come when all communication was by email). John called me to acknowledge receipt and said he’d look it over and call me by the end of the week. After a fortnight, I phoned to enquire if he’d had a look at it yet and he said he was really sorry, he’d been very busy and he’d be sure to get back to me by the end of the following week. That was fourteen years ago. I have neither heard from him nor seen him since. Just occasionally, when I’m feeling a little bruised, I wonder how, if that’s how he looks after his mentor, he behaves towards his enemies.

Now let’s come into this century. My partner and I had moved out of London and I had set about the task of attracting some income by writing what I wanted to write rather than what an editor – in journalism or book publishing – wanted. One day I got a letter from a chap called Simon Farquhar who was writing a book about television drama. He said he had read my play Circle Line and loved it. This play began my professional career. I was at university when the BBC announced a playwriting competition open solely to college students. I had been going to write the play anyway and it was about a student: what could be more suitable? The play won the competition, was put into production and, after a delay while the BBC decided to fret about certain of its content, was broadcast in the first season of Play for Today in January 1971.

Simon could only read the script because that is all that survives of it. About three months after its sole transmission, the annual list came round to BBC heads of department from which they were obliged to choose which of their output from the year should be archived. The Head of Plays, Gerald Savory (back in the 1930s the white hope of drawing-room comedy with his one stage success George and Margaret), looked down the list and didn’t check Circle Line. So the master tape was duly wiped. A friend had made an audiotape of the broadcast – characteristically he’d missed the first few seconds – and I had the copy of that … somewhere … in a box.

I found that Simon had an astonishing encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage teledrama, all of it broadcast before his time: he was in his early 30s. We took to swapping anecdotes, firm opinions, memories on my side for research findings on his. I had always intended to write a book of my own on teledrama, a field on which I reckoned myself a bit of an expert. Simon both drew on and bolstered my own knowledge. And he was clearly in earnest about his book and the place of Circle Line. Though he’s never completed the book and so of course never published it, he showed me the chapter that treats of the play and it was extremely gratifying, not least because it was such an intelligent assessment.

Meanwhile, Simon’s own writing career was blossoming. He had a couple of radio plays produced and then the Royal Court bought his play Rainbow Kiss and gave it a run at the Theatre Upstairs. He was in his element. Knowing that I had an unproduced stage musical kicking around, he persuaded his leading man, who had some track record in the field, to make off with a copy of the show. This was clearly a mutually beneficial friendship (though, not too surprisingly, nothing has come of the actor having my musical).

A different thread comes into my story here, but it will interweave, so be patient. Some eighteen months ago, I was beginning to feel that there might be a television programme in my own burgeoning disenchantment with the medium that I had championed so keenly in my youth. I alighted on the title British Television: A Dim View. After all, every programme title these days has to feature a colon. It would be what is called in the biz an authored piece, which to say a report that is shaped by the reporter’s opinion rather than a (supposedly) impartial documentary with voice-over by an actor. I kicked the idea around for a while and then tried it out on my old compadre Pattie Williams.

During the intervening years, Pattie and I had drifted a little but had connected up again in the 1990s when I sketched out an idea for a series about the history of television drama. By this time, Pattie had her own production company, Case Television, which was very effective across a wide range of programming. The series was offered to BBC Knowledge, the forerunner of BBC4, but eventually declined. Now Pattie had just wound up her company but that, it seemed to me, was an asset in my quest to make a really hard-hitting programme about the parlous state of British television. I had no ambitions of my own in the medium, Pattie now had none either, so we could both offend anyone we wished without fear of career damage.

Dealing with Pattie over the proposal became a long drawn-out business and it took me fully a year finally to get her to admit that her heart wasn’t really in it. While I was waiting for her to come to this realisation, I wrote a new stage play, a four-hander revisiting the student life of the late 1960s that had informed Circle Line. It was called Observations from a Hill, after a number by a rock group that we adored at the time, Family. I was pleased with it and the few people I allowed to read it (including Simon Farquhar) were complimentary and supportive of it. But I couldn’t get any theatre to take it on.

Finally, Simon told me of a friend of his who was stretching his wings as a director. He had an in at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and if he liked the play he might be able to persuade the artistic director to take it on. His name was Jason Lawson. I duly met up with Simon and Jason at the King’s Head where we watched the current production together. Jason was charming and very polite. He was about to start work on a new production but as soon as that was put to bed he would take a look at mine. At the end of the evening, he made off with a copy of my play. Meanwhile, Simon had told me a tale about how he owed a large sum of money and had been faced with threats of violence. He seemed truly scared. I immediately promised to pay off the debt for him but gave him to understand that he would have to repay me by the end of that year, 2008.

Jason duly read the play, said he liked it and thought it was very doable. I had hoped to see the production that he had been working on but he had never given me the details and it finally emerged that he was only the assistant director so seeing it would have taught me little. But we had a meeting to talk it over and I felt very bucked up. He asked all the right questions and he put his finger precisely on what was needed to improve the play. I came home and did some more work on it and posted off the rewrites. I was not alone in believing that I’d made an important difference to the play but Jason was not very forthcoming about what I sent him. However, he said that he would set up a reading with some actor friends.

That was last June. Since then all communication between us has been at my initiative and at greater and greater intervals. Jason remains elusive and nothing happens concerning the play. I sent him a Christmas card, which he did not reciprocate, and now I have given up on him.

Through the summer, the subject upon which Jason was most forthcoming was that of Simon Farquhar. I had not seen him since that evening at the King’s Head in March. His emails, at one time arriving almost daily, dried up. It turned out that he had moved house, though this had always been a regular occurrence. Jason, to whom it seemed he also owed money, tracked him down to a pub on the Hammersmith Embankment where he was said to be working. After many attempts to reach him by email, phone and text, I finally had a phone conversation with Simon in the summer, during which he enthused about his new job as a barman and reckoned the publican had taken to him, was appointing him assistant manager and was about to install him in the pub flat. Pub life, he maintained, was terrific grist to the mill of his writing, which he intended to resume before long. We didn’t speak of his debt to me.

Since then nothing. The deadline for his repayment to me has passed. A friend familiar with Rainbow Kiss reminded me that the main character in that play had unpaid debts and was threatened. Was Simon perhaps testing me to see if I was paying attention? Were he and Jason in cahoots to rob me? Well, tomorrow I go to town for a social event at the weekend and I shall take the opportunity to trawl the pubs of Hammersmith Embankment and find this ne’er-do-well. He will not find me sympathetic on this occasion.

After Pattie passed on British Television: A Dim View, I sought out an old chum from television days, Paul Kerr. I knew that, like so many of our generation, he was teaching media to university students – or, as he put it, teaching them to read and write – but he still took a bit of raising. We finally made contact and then met up. To no surprise on my part, we were of one mind on the state of British television. I was also glad to learn that his college was keen for him to continue to make occasional programmes. We agreed that I should set out some more of the proposal on paper and that he would look it over. I sent it off on October 7th and, after some chiding from me, he promised to read it in the first week of November. At the end of the week after that, I wrote to him expressing my disappointment at his silence. There was a distinct snappiness in his reply and since then he’s gone completely silent. I feel as if I am being punished.

In the summer, as the prospects for Observations from a Hilll dwindled, I came to the conclusion that I was going to retire from trying to make a living as a writer. Nothing since then has done other than reinforce that conclusion. The fact is that there is really nobody in the business in a position to determine that I get work whom I trust or on whom I feel that I can rely. Those very few organisations that are willing to consider unsolicited work, be it prose or drama, do not have readers who know how to read. In the early 1970s, I was trained to read scripts in the BBC Script Unit, a whole department set up to process unsolicited submissions. But of course that department was closed years ago and nobody now learns how to read, they just cast an unpractised eye over the work and guess at a response. I know from the rejection letters I receive – those few that risk any sort of assessment – that the reader has really no idea what a script assessment is. And frankly what is the point of trying to forge alliances with like-minded people in the business who then don’t have the time to deal with you, the kindness or courtesy to tell you where you stand or the conscience that would stop them treating you shabbily.

It was a hard and a quite emotional decision to give it all up. After all, to paraphrase Ray Liotta’s character at the outset of Scorsese’s Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer”. I started to write my first novel when I was seven and I must have completed two whole, if rather short, chapters. That my first income from writing came from a play that I wrote at 21 was no surprise to me or to my parents. The surprise, I think, has been at how difficult it has been to sustain a career as a writer.

The rebuffs and disappointments over the 40 years since I was 21 are too long to rehearse in a blog posting and at present too painful as well. I have contemplated a book about failing as a writer – that’s not something I’ve read so I’m hoping it would have some prospect of at least being an original idea. I have its title – it’s from Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful song 'I’m Still Here', which the character Carlotta sings in Follies: “Then You Career from Career to Career”. But of course nobody will publish such a book. I’m not a comedian or a footballer or a graduate of the Big Brother house. And although such a book would be written out of my ever-sunny disposition, editors will reason that people don’t want to read about failure and the business doesn’t want books that suggest that those who run the business are less than brilliant. So I don’t suppose I will write it, even if I could afford to do so.

You see, I do have to earn. I am retraining, something that doesn’t come easy at my age but needs must. More about that can wait for a future posting. Meanwhile, I won’t stop writing the blog because it keeps my hand in. It’s just that the novels and plays and scripts and non-fiction books that are at various stages in my head will stay there, unwritten. I still have the pleasure of them and, if no one else ever does, that sure as hell ain’t my fault.