See how they murder – a masterclass

It’s late 1952 and the cast and creatives of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap are celebrating reaching an incredible 100 performances. 

But behind the scenes, there is conflict about a contracted Hollywood film version – the author having decreed that not even filming should occur until at least six months after the original stage production has closed.

Then one of those involved is murdered and the game is afoot.

Enter, stage left (but not pursued by a bear), come world weary Inspector Stoppard and policing ingenue Constable Stalker to take on this celebrity murder case, shorn of other resources as a serial killer stalks London.

 

See How They Run is, on one level, a very clever conceit in terms of bringing the play to the screen – even while it still runs in London’s West End, given that Christie really did decree that that could never happen until it had closed its initial run, but it is also much more than that.

 

It's a gloriously arch look at the tropes of a certain type of crime entertainment. Incredibly clever – but not smugly so – there are countless little puzzles and references for the audience to solve and spot.

 

It won’t detract if you don’t get them, but as an example, Inspector Stoppard’s name might well reference playwright Tom Stoppard – not least when one character describes the murder victim as a woman-chasing “hound, Inspector”: see Stoppard’s one-act play, The Real Inspector Hound.

 

Equally, is Constable Stalker a reference to John Stalker, the late deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester? The film takes pot shots at what could, in effect, be called ‘policing for honours’ and, thereby, The Establishment as a whole.

 

All this pretty much guarantees that I will watch this again. And again. And possibly even again. A few hours after seeing it, my brain is on a kind of churn with all this and I suggest that it’s not simply a bit of ‘light entertainment’ to be dismissed easily.

 

It’s beautifully paced. Mark (My Life in Film and Flaked on TV) Chappell’s first film is witty, intelligent and very enjoyably twisty. Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography is great and the editing – including the use of split screens – is so clever given the context.

 

All this should tell you  automatically that Tom George’s direction is pretty much nailed on.

 

In terms of performances, Sam Rockwell as Stoppard and Saoirse Ronan as Stalker are great – and their pairing works really well in creating a clumsy relationship. Adrien Brody is in top-notch form as the film producer. But the cast is good from top to bottom.

 

There are no weak links – and I commend Charlie Cooper for so wonderfully channelling Bill Nighy in one scene in particular.

 

See this if you can – it’s a joy on oh, so many levels.

Outrageous! Section 28 as a warning from history

Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker manages to be both a detailed history of the notorious, homophobic legislation and a memoir that is often very funny, recounting how the author grew up under what, before being passed into law, was Clause 28.

It was a badly drafted clause in the Local Government Act in 1988, banning local authorities – which have responsibility for local state schools – from ‘promoting’ homosexuality and the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

That ‘promoting’ bit was a major difficulty – did acknowledging homosexuality exists equate with ‘promotion’? If you played pupils a bit of Tchaikovsky, would that amount to ‘promotion’?

In the House of Commons, Labour MP Tony Benn put it like this: “... if the sense of the word “promote” can be read across from “describe”, every murder play promotes murder, every war play promotes war, every drama involving the eternal triangle promotes adultery; and Mr Richard Branson’s condom campaign promotes fornication. The House had better be very careful before it gives to judges, who come from a narrow section of society, the power to interpret ‘promote’.”

Then of course, there was the whole idea that an LGBT relationship was a ‘pretend’ one. Baker points out that the pace of social change since the 1960s – decriminalisation of homosexuality (albeit with strictures in place) only came in 1967 – had left many older people struggling in such a rapidly shifting landscape and in what many saw as ‘the permissive society’.

The process of how something comes to be on the statue book is explained in a good bit of civics showing how the Westminster Parliament works in terms of both houses.

Baker uses interviews with key figures, including Sir Ian McKellen, Angela Mason and Lord Chris Smith, to recount what happened, together with many quotes from speakers in both the House of Commons and the Lords when the subject was being debated.

Many of those quotes still have the power to shock now, with their brazen and even violent hatred. The usual names come up – Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge … together with ones that will be less well known to the wider audience, such as Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman, who was Baker’s MP when he went to work at Lancaster University, and mine too when I lived in that area.

She was a sort of handbagging Margaret Thatcher clone on ’roids – a deeply unpleasant woman that I personally had contact with when writing to her in the 1980s about Campaign for the Arts. It might have been a non-party campaign, but that didn’t stop her snotty reply effectively accusing me of being a ‘loony lefty’. I was barely getting over having started my political life, courtesy of my background, as a Tory, but she helped me further along that road.

Baker takes great care to be as understanding as possible of the motives of many who so strongly backed Section 28 and never falls into the easy trap of simply lambasting him, though is less obviously forgiving of their friends in the media who peddled a diet of hate to their readers.

But central to the book are the stories of those whose lives were negatively affected by Section 28 and the homophobia that it enabled. It had a lasting impact for many.

However, brought together disparate parts of the LGBT community to fight back against and, in the process, build the case – and support for – greater equality, with a campaign including some incredibly inventive, non-violent protests.

Following the repeal of the clause in devolved Scotland in 2000, it finally came off the books elsewhere in 2003.

Reading this today feels like having a premonition.

Toward the end of Outrageous! Baker says that “Tristan Garel-Jones, the deputy chief whip for the Conservatives, apparently called it [Section 28], a piece of meat thrown by Mrs Thatcher to her right-wing wolves”.

I finished the book the same day on which reports leaked out that Tory Party leadership frontrunner Liz Truss had said – according to her supporter and former party leader Iain Duncan Smith – that she regretted her involvement in the Bill to ban conversion ‘therapy’.

Duncan Smith – a Catholic convert who once used the word “sin” in a discussion on unemployment – suggested that she would like to bin the legislation altogether.

This was subsequently denied by her team, according to North London Tory MP Mike Freer, who told his local newspaper that he had asked.

Other reports have suggested that, if elected as Tory leader (and thus prime minister), Truss would also elevate the culture war loving, LGBT+ despising Kemi Badenoch to her front bench.

This is, of course, precisely the sort of raw red meat that Garel-Jones mentioned. The Conservative Party had a maximum membership of 180,000 as of 2019 (the party is not open about its membership) as opposed to 47.6 million Parliamentary electoral registrations in the following year.

Those who will select the new Tory leader/PM are a tiny minority of the electorate as a whole and, on the basis of their likely preferred news reading being the Telegraph, the Mail and the Express, they are still being fed a toxic diet of homophobic – and particularly transphobic – bile.

 

The first two of those, together with the Sun, have been cited as the biggest new media defenders of Section 28.

In the last couple of days, Suella Braverman, the attorney general, has stated that schools that talk about gender change could face Ofsted sanctions. Nothing like Section 28 at all, then.

Yet even within this constituency of the Conservative Party membership, YouGov polling has shown that just 8% of those members want “combatting the woke agenda” prioritised, so it’s difficult to see who is being appealed to here. A wider constituency of far-right voters that switched from the likes of UKIP and helped the Conservatives to a massive majority in 2019? Religious fundamentalists from across faiths who hate anything that isn’t heterosexual marriage? Groups that might vote for the Conservatives at the next general election?

 

It’s difficult not to feel deeply concerned about what the coming period will bring in terms of equality and for the LGBT+ community. Or not to feel that, once again, campaigns and protests might need to be organised.

 

Baker’s book is a salutary reminder of the harm of such intolerance – but also of how the fight back can succeed. It is very much worth a read.

• Outrageous! The story of Section 28 and Britain’s battle for LGBT education by Paul Baker is published by Reaktion Books

 

The Rat Pack – and in loving, joyous memory of Susan

When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

The cartoon version above, is by me and is not a joke. For clarity, that illustration also includes Mr Kenyon (physics) and Mr McKee (bowling), my music teacher. The latter was an absolute diamond, who I came to regard almost as a surrogate dad because of the way he seemed to genuinely understand me. And he was an absolutely superb teacher who essentially gave me a lifelong appreciation of classical music. 

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

 

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 

It was Susan who came up with a plan. Remember that I said she was the detail one of us? She knew that the rules actually said that you had to have a school scarf … or a school beret.

 

I went to see Miss Bell again. She hadn’t thought of it, but was tickled pink and found me one – remember that I said that Big-O and Riggers unified the rest of the staff and the pupils?

 

My next appointment in Big-O’s office arrived one morning after an assembly. I had the beret with me, behind my back, as I entered her office.

 

“So … have you got a school scarf yet?” she intoned. “No,” I replied simply. You could see her inflating with pleasure.

 

“But I’ve got the alternative,” and produced the beret from behind my back, on a single finger.

 

There was nothing she could say – she had been done. I wore that beret in class for days – a glorious sign of victory.

 

The legacy continued. Susan was the first of us to leave for higher education – and while at Oxford, wrote a tome that the rest of us had been contributing to with ideas etc. It was called Murder on the Medium Wave, which managed to combine … well, murder, the England cricket team – which at the time included Botham, Gower and the Rat Pack’s beloved Mike Brearley – plus radio commentary of the sport and a (very) thinly disguised roster of our teachers and ourselves.

 

Forty-plus years on, I look back on those times with absolute relish. It was a barking, utterly unrepeatable experience. My Other Half had listened to the stories with a sense of tolerance, over some time, ultimately believing that there was a serious degree of exaggeration going on.

 

Yet when he joined me and Susan in an east London pub and the subject of LGGS inevitably came up, he was staggered to hear the same – and other – such stories, realising that no, I really hadn’t been making it up.

 

I consider myself very, very lucky to have shared that extraordinary experience with the rest of the rats – and not least, with Susan.

 

I’m posting this on an evening when I should have been in Manchester to say ‘farewell’ to Susan at a celebration of her life, after she died very suddenly a few weeks ago. With the extreme heat and all the don’t travel advice I cancelled my arrangements.

 

So I’m posting this now as an act of remembrance – and celebration.

The Minions take on the culture war warriors

Most people who know me know that I love the Minions. Okay, I was late to the game – finally catching up via shorts, social media and mash-up fan art before watching the first two Despicable Me films on TV and then making 2015’s eponymous prequel my first trip to an actual cinema in 16 years. But these days, I even have the t-shirts.

Now I’m not, in general, a big fan of slapstick comedy – my father forced me and my sister to sit through short reels of Laurel & Hardy when we were children and it rather put me off. Later, I grew to appreciate Buser Keaton – though very different – I loved Steve Coogan and John C Reilley in 2018’s Stan and Ollie.

 

But once I’d seen stuff online, I got hooked on the Minions. As I said, the 2015 film tempted me back to a cinema where nothing else had, until that time, worked for a decade and a half, for various reasons.

 

We didn’t see much else that year – what we did see included Star Wars: The Force Awakens at an IMAX – but our cinema going did increase. In 2018, we made 21 cinema visits. In 2019, it was 18. In 2020 – year one of the pandemic, it was five. Last year – the second of the pandemic – 13. This year, the third of COVID, we have already managed five trips to the cinema.

 

In terms of COVID, we’ve been fortunate that our local cinema chain is within walking distance and, with 10 screens and an online booking system, it’s easy to pick times for films when it will be no difficulty to be socially distanced. In that way, it’s the one entertainment medium we currently feel comfortable using.

 

But setting all that aside, Minions: The Rise of Gru was originally slated for a 2020 release and, in my pre-release excitement, I’d had an idea for a blog to explore what I think may be an underestimated element of the Illumination studio’s Gruniverse success. Having just seen the new film, I remembered what I wanted to explore.

 

And the point is that is has an essentially transgressive nature.

 

Co-creator Pierre Coffin has noted that there are no female Minions. In 2015, indeed, he told TheWrap: “Seeing how dumb and stupid they often are, I just couldn’t imagine Minions being girls”.

 

In general, I have a problem with this – it rather reminds me of people who have commented that they struggled to believe that Margaret Thatcher was really a woman, as though women are, by their very nature, intrinsically Good and only go Bad, when influenced by men … The Patriarchy. It ain’t so.

 

But back to the Minions. And a lack of Minion females is not what you see on the screen in any of the five films to feature the little yella fellas. There are cancan dancers and maids, for instance. In the latest film, Bob becomes a female trolley dolly on a plane – who actually offers an infant a peanut. And Bob is far from being alone.

 

Within the wider iconography that includes collectibles, Stuart has appeared as a version of the Bride of Frankenstein to Bob’s Frankenstein’s monster.

 

In the era in which we live, we still have puritans (I have family links to the Plymouth Brethren, so I do know what this means) – in the US particularly, but not exclusively, and some of these are currently going full ‘snowflake’ about things like ‘drag storytime’ where … and take your time here, drag queens sit and tell children stories.

 

Heaven forfend that these far-right, reactionary twerps ever hear that British children have been being subjected to men dressed up as women and women dressed up as men for over a century in pantomimes – as essential Christmas family entertainment!

 

And let’s not even begin to engage with the broader history of cross-dressing and how it was and is used, and what it has allowed artists from Shakespeare to the present to do.

 

There is so much around at present about ‘men pretending to be women’. But there is a very long history of ‘women pretending to be men’ – hence the phrase ‘drag kings’. Those included people who successfully hid within general society to the likes of Marlene Dietrich donning male evening wear, including a bow tie and top hat.

 

And as with things like the Asterix books and much more, British pantomime would have content that children could innocently enjoy, but that also had deeper levels that their parents could find a different reason to giggle at.

 

For example, take Asterix with the Swiss. This includes a little Roman citizen in Switzerland repeatedly losing his bread in the fondue, even though the punishment if you do so is being whipped. He loses his bread deliberately.

 

The joke is quite clear – and perfect proof that Asterix is not only for children.

 

I will be 60 later this year. My attire at present (as for several summers since) is big, baggy, military-style ‘male’ shorts with loads of pockets (dear Odin how I spent decades hating ‘female’ clothing with no feckin’ pockets!), a t-shirt and a pair of Birkies.

 

Yesterday, while on Broadway Market to get a few basic fresh additions to our regular online deliveries from supermarkets, I was called “madam”. Later in the day, in the park, someone called at me: “Hello sweetheart!”. Today, I was addressed by someone as “Lady”.

 

It doesn’t matter how I dress, my fucking tits betray me every time – just as when, after I got the running bug in Lancaster in the 1980s, I’d get calls from drivers telling me: ‘Watch you don’t give yourself a black eye, love!’

 

How do you be yourself, authentically, really?

 

And can you now see, against such a background, why the Minions are, in effect, non-binary wonderful?

Oh ... and while there is nothing really new about the latest film, it’s huge fun, with enough gags and nods to other films to ensure it'll be watched more than once.

 

I peel

 

I peel dead eczema skin

From my palms

Peering close to see

What’s underneath

 

I pick at the ephemera

Of memory

Questioning closely

What’s hiding there

 

I worry at crusted sores

Of well-intentioned

Attempts to coax me

To normality

 

I scratch the surface of

Performative conformity

And try to find an

Authentic person

 

I scratch and pick and peel

And at long long last

I start to glimpse

What just might be

The real me

Amanda Kendal, 17 June 2022

Image courtesy of fdecomite

 

Stars: looking up at the heavens

Stars

 

‘We are all in the gutter,’ said Wilde

‘But some of us look for the stars’

 

Yet the heavens are blank over London

Since light cancels out such a view

 

So I travelled to Travemünde

And I stood on the Strand after dark

 

Below pollarded trees in the cold

Ursa Minor winked down from above

 

The sight made me breathless with joy

And I wept with a new sense of life

• Image courtesy of Wikipedia

 

Spring 2022: A poem for a troubled season

Spring 2022

A furious wind screams in across the Baltic,

Winter’s raging farewell that cuts clean to the bone.

Crows scythe through the air, scanning for mussels,

While decaying munitions dream beneath the churning grey

And the Gustloff lies at sleep.

Halyards yammer against poles on the Strand, as the flags,

Wrapped round and round and round,

Cling on for dear life.

Yet blossoms still prick through the eye of the storm,

And a sheen of green can just be seen caressing the skeletal trees.

Two and a half thousand kilometres south east

It is a different storm and a different spring.

There, fire is in flower and blood blossoms across pavements.

A pall of dust hangs over blasted ruins and

Settles on the charred bodies and cars in the graveyard streets.

Once more, the world wonders where the hatred springs from and

How to make it stop.

Seemingly impotent in the face of the tempest,

Fingers cross with the hope that it will blow itself out

So spring can come once more.

Until the seasons turn again.

4 April 2022

Photo: The Baltic at Travemünde, by the author