“I’ve got those… ‘but what do you know?’ blues.” The real Shakespeare and conspiracies (Part one)

“A bright and shining lie.”

Once again, a conspiracy theory, supposedly based on fact, is on the big screen. A nobleman passes off his plays under the name of an actor, who then becomes known as the greatest playwright of all time. This is of course the movie Anonymous, based on the theory that Edward de Vere, the Duke of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.  It starts off with distinguished actor Sir Derek Jacobi looking the audience in the eye and making some misleading statements, and goes rather downhill from there.

Anonymous commits one of the greatest sins known to cinema – it’s dull.  And actors who should know better do some pretty ordinary work. The villains do everything shy of twirling their moustaches, all the while looking at each other thinking, “I’m being evil. Are you being evil?”  Rhys Ifans as de Vere spends most the film trying to look noble and thoughtful, but mainly comes across as if someone is standing on his foot and he is far too polite to say anything. Each character seems to have been given not so much a one-dimensional character as a one word – ‘evil’, ‘jealous’ ‘drunk’, ‘shrew’ ‘slut’ etc. 

It’s one of those conspiracy theories that a lot of people know about but no-one says a word. His enemies the Cecils knew all about it, but never seemed to use his alleged transgression as a playwright against him. Queen Elizabeth I knew about it, and (I’d say spoiler alert but I don’t care) punishes de Vere at the end by proclaiming he will never be known as the author of his plays. As this was one of de Vere’s motivations throughout the movie, I failed to see the punitive aspect. It was a beautiful moment on de Vere’s deathbed when he handed over King Lear to be produced. I don’t know if he handed over a production schedule for all the plays produced after he was dead, including the ones with topical references to events also after his death, but I can only presume he did.

Obviously I was not convinced by the central premise, nor was I ever going to be, but I was at least hoping for a few entertaining hours in the dark. As it was I got bored, and the more bored I got, the more irritating the film got. As a piece of history, it made Shakespeare in Love look like an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As entertainment goes, it was the other way around.

I won’t go on and on with the argument that Shakespeare wrote the plays he wrote. Read about it here, or grab James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who wrote Shakespeare?, an examination of the various conspiracy theories (there are at least 70 contenders for this already filled position). You can also read Jack Lynch’s Becoming Shakespeare: The unlikely afterlife that turned a provincial playwright into The Bard, which will answer your questions as to, yes, how did an obscure playwright get transfigured into the voice of the ages? Both Shapiro and Lynch take an unusual approach – they examine actual evidence and see where that leads them.

The arguments for de Vere or anyone else tend to be either snobby or ignorant. All conspiracy theories hold an element of snobbishness i.e. I know better than the rest of you blinkered fools, but this one depends on people with degrees and qualifications up the yinyang unable to believe that a country hick could write so well and with such insight. Why a nobleman should have particular insight into humanity denied a commoner is unanswered. And Shakespeare’s admittedly  limited education contained more Latin and Greek from Ovid to Homer to Caesar, and lessons in rhetoric than you and I have encountered. Languages, history, mythology and rhetoric – good bases for a career as a playwright.

‘Oh,’ you say, (I’m being very presumptuous about you, aren’t I?) ‘It’s only a film.” Roland Emmerich the director and his writer John Orloff have already congratulated themselves in several forums for having the courage to tell this story, warning us against those terrible Shakespearian scholars who have a vested interest.. Meanwhile education kits have been sent to schools with the message ‘teach the controversy – it’s only fair both sides get a say.’ It is not just a film, it is propaganda trying to teach a lie. And lie it is. There aren’t two sides to history. There are the facts, and interpretation of the facts. Interpretation of course can and does differ, but ignoring and creating facts to manufacture some sort of controversy is not history, it is marketing; marketing at best.

And as weasel writers such as Oliver Stone and Dan Brown have done before him, any time you point out obvious falsehoods and mistakes and misinformation in the work, Emmerich and Orloff respond with ‘It’s only a movie, entertainment.” Po-faced they tell us they are courageously giving us the truth, all the while carrying their get-out clause. Damn them all. Sod off.

History, despite what some will tell you, is not something you make up as it suits you.  Reputable historians and scholars confronted with facts and evidence that go against their theories, change their theories. In the words of Professor Richard Evans, a professor of History at Cambridge, the past “really happened, and we really can, if we are scrupulous and careful and self-critical… reach some tenable conclusions about what it all meant.” There is not a conspiracy theorist that I have come across who is scrupulous. All evidence against a conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The lack of evidence for a conspiracy is proof of the conspiracy. The evidence that points anywhere else is part of the conspiracy. There is nothing that can injure a conspiracy theory so it is safe and easy and brain-dead to espouse.

Sorry if this is insulting to anyone but this idea makes my blood boil. The theory denies imagination has any part in creative writing. It takes that clichéd advice to young writers ‘write what you know’ as the only approach to writing that exists. As to Shakespearian scholars and their vested interests, I doubt highly that their conferences begin with a toast ‘To Evil’ followed by a money fight. These sorts of things insult centuries of scholarship and the personal morality of generations of scholars just so people like Roland Emmerich can make a buck. Who really has a vested interest in this “controversy”? A scholar in a university or a director with a film to sell?

“Oh,” you say again (you do enjoy poking the bear, don’t you?) “The play’s the thing. It doesn’t matter who wrote them.” This sounds reasonable and on one level is. However who said or wrote something is important. It colours our perceptions and our interpretations. Martin Luther King Jr talking about his people’s destiny has a different effect to say Joseph Stalin making a similar statement. Several fauxtations have floated around the Internet of late, misattributed to the likes of King and Thomas Jefferson. If they were attributed to Anonymous, or the geek in front of his computer who wrote it, people would have seen them for the meaningless, tendentious self-serving pieces of crap they were. Emmerich has de Vere writing plays that have as their ultimate effect a political one, reducing the plays to propaganda, as if politics is the highest calling of humanity. No, politics is the shit politicians go through so they can get to a position so they can do the good they entered politics to do. Shakespeare’s plays (apart from the ordinary and crap ones (let’s not forget they exist)) are so extraordinary as to defy categorisation.

The real Shakespeare wrote to keep an audience happy and coming through the doors to make a buck. He made up words because he didn’t have sufficient education not to. The plays are badly structured with characters that change names or disappear and plotlines that don’t get played out. This was a man writing for a playhouse giving out the pages almost as fast as he could write them, without little chance to rewrite or revisit. The phrase “the word ‘genius’ is bandied about all too easily these days” is in itself bandied about all too easily these days. But Shakespeare was a genius. As we so benighted, so lacking in imagination, that we cannot accept that?

Oh I have gone on long enough. But I called this Part One. Like any good conspiracy theory, there is more to this than meets the eye.

"Not since Lincoln." Lincoln's struggle with slavery.

We live in a shallow age. Not only are Tony Abbot’s swimwear and Julia Gillard’s accent considered two to the top political issues of the day, we are content to find one statement, one epithet, one action from a politician we don’t like and base our judgment on a person or a career on that. We think ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, ‘homophobe’ or whatever the appropriate word and reject that person and all their works. (Mind you, if you can apply all three to one person, you may be on to something.)

But take this statement:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.

Surely this appalling man was condemned to the political fringe, or at least ended his career in ignominy. However, the formal language and the vocabulary is a bit of a giveaway that this is a politician from some time ago. The speaker is Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and the man who did more for the advancement of black Americans in one stroke than anyone else.

But the man is a racist! Surely we should condemn him, say that history is telling us a great lie, and insist anything he did was motivated by a grasp for power and nothing else.

We could do that. Look up that quotation on the internet and commentators indeed are way ahead of me. But they are wrong. You could say they are wrong in part, but that part is such an enormous part let’s just call them wrong.

I have just read The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner, which traces Lincoln’s attitudes and actions with regard to American Slavery from his youth through to his assassination in 1865. And what he finds is a man whose attitudes towards slavery and Black Americans evolved as he went through his life, both personally and politically. Imagine that! A politician whose ideas evolve! Who responds to what he hears and sees and experiences. No! We have caught Lincoln uttering racist remarks in a political debate, we must condemn him forever!

Lincoln was a product of his time. But even as a young man he found slavery abhorrent. But being opposed to slavery did not mean feeling the Negro (to use his language) was his equal. You don’t need me to tell you that Emancipation didn’t lead to social equality. That struggle is still going on. Those calling for immediate abolition of slavery weren’t necessarily calling for full citizenship for the slaves. There were many gradations of beliefs between the radical abolitionist and those slave owners who refused to see there was even a problem.

Despite what people will tell you, the Union broke on the issue of slavery. Lincoln, along with many other politicians, was satisfied to limit the spread of slavery while allowing it to remain in the states where it existed, believing, probably rightly, that the ‘peculiar institution’ would die a natural death. The laws governing slavery, including runaway slave laws and rights of transit for slave owner in non-slave states were complex and often changing. But that solution was not good enough for many slave state who insisted the Federal Government had no rights to place limits on slaveholding anywhere. (It didn’t impress Abolitionists or black Americans much either.) The Southern States insist they broke away over state rights. But the state rights they were worried about were all to do with slavery.

Lincoln then moved to gradual, compensated abolition, with the children of slaves made bondsmen instead, which meant eventual freedom, and owners compensated for any loss of their “property”. This too was rejected not only by the Confederate States, but by the border states, slave-owning states that had remained in the Union.

All the while, Lincoln was a big believer in emigration for freed slaves, either to Africa or South America. He believed both whites and blacks would be happier separate. He was to hold to this belief for a long time, but it too was one he would eventually alter, convinced by arguments from anti-slavery activists, both black and white.

During the early years of the Civil War, Lincoln insisted the war was about preserving the Union, treating the Confederate States with the rights of any other state under the Constitution. This was his way of trying to reassure the more conservative elemens of both sides that they had nothing to fear from being part of the United States. It was only when the war was going badly and the North’s fighting spirit need reinvigorating that Lincoln finally talked about the enormous elephant in the room: the war was about slavery.  As Lincoln had said many times before, the country could not exist half-slave and half-free. Here is another Lincoln quote:

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "All men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, "All men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Lincoln knew that if you allow discrimination to one group, you prepare the way for discrimination against more.  He also knew that “all men” included those brought over in slave ships and their descendents. In a later speech, he referred to “Americans of African descent,” thus including them with all other American descended from other lands. How Lincoln would have handled the Negro question in post-war American, of course we shall never know. Doubtless he would have struggled and changed and moved between ideal and practical, the way he dealt with the slavery question.

The Emancipation Proclamation, though limited in its scope, gave the Civil War a moral and clear purpose. The war wasn’t about a poltical principle it was about a humane one. Without slavery the war may well have never come about. Without its abolition, there was no point to carrying on the struggle. The Proclamation was not a military turning point, but a moral one, for the country as a whole. Once again, the United States was reminded of the principles on which it was founded, and its people, led by their President, insisted they be upheld.

Lincoln may have been by our standards racist, but he was intelligent and open to new ideas. He was also courageous and stood up for his beliefs. If Lincoln did not genuinely believe in the intrinsic wrongness of slavery, he had many opportunities to allow it to continue and let later generations deal with it, but he did not. He played a tough political role in keeping his party with radicals and conservatives united and fought a war rather than let slavery continue. In the end, he was killed for it, the victim of a group led by a Southern white supremacist. Lincoln’s greatness, while marked by speeches and actions, may be due to his ability to evolve as a human being. He was not held by his time, or his upbringing or any other constraint. He admitted when he was wrong, saw what was right, and strove to bring it about.

The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.

Foner’s book is a good read, if a bit dry and academic, dealing as it often does with legislation and political manouvres. But it shows a great man struggling towards greatness. Or if you like, a great soul struggling towards its ultimate expression. There are very few Abraham Lincoln’s around, then as now. But part of our political responsibility it to listen to arguments and to engage with them. Many people such as Frederick Douglass were appalled by some of the things Lincoln said and did.  He could have dismissed him as racist, insulted him in the press and made fun of his beard. In 2011, this is the sort of thing that often passes for political debate. But he met with him, talked with him, argued with him and helped to change his mind. Listening, talking and thinking– still powerful tools.

Lincoln was one of what we all are – a flawed human being. But he rose above his time, his upbringing, his own prejudices and the pressures of his political career to end one of the greatest injustices of all time.  His methods and solutions are not perfect, but I still don’t understand those that now want to denigrate his memory. Thank goodness for historians like Eric Foner.

You may not know – I did not - that 27 million people are in slavery today, more than in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Evil goes on, demanding our best efforts. I hope we are equal to the task.

PS: And while we’re on the subject of changing people’s minds through talk, last night my home state of Queensland passed legislation recognizing civil unions for homosexual couples. Congratulations to everyone for that one.

"Denizens of the Deep." Kraken

I don’t know about you, but Squiddly-Diddly used to irritate the hell out of me. He was quite clearly not a squid, but an octopus. Actually, he was a hexapus, as he had only six arms. He was some sort of deformed hag-born cephalapod, and they kept pretending he was a squid.  I mean – bloody Nora!

Normally, anything with a cephalapod is enough to rope me in. Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Little Mermaid, any number of documentaries. Not only did I read Peter Benchley’s Beast, I watched the mini-series. It made Jaws look like North by Northwest. Actually, put an octopus and a hunchback into one book and you couldn’t stop me. I’d even pay to see a Nicole Kidman film if there were tentacles and a hunchback. (Now I feel I’ve just described a rather distateful Japanese porn film.) The lastest book to rope me in with promise of many-armed action is Kraken by China Mielville.

(And while we’re on krakens, what the hell was a beast from Scandinavian mythology doing in ancient Greece? And what the hell was it? I know cephalapods. Cephalopods are friends of mine. You, sir, are no cephalopod. )

Anyway, Kraken takes place in modern-day London but we almost immediately shift into an alternate London almost entirely unfamiliar. If it’s ringing bells chiming Neverwhere for you, I was almost deafened by them, right down to a ruthless pair of timeless killers.  A giant squid is stolen from the Natural History Museum, which is impossible, but it’s gone. Its curator, one Billy Harrow, soon finds himself in a world of alternative religions, cults, crime gangs, and magic.  There is a policewoman who is a witch, a talking tattoo rules the underworld with terror, oral messages are sent by post and delivered by street lights. People worship squids and badgers, bullets and the ocean. And somehow, at the centre of it all, is a dead squid in a very large glass case and a fast approaching apocolypse.

Mielville’s alternate London is very different to Gaiman’s. Gaiman’s is on an alternate plane, Mielville’s is here, we just don’t notice it. And Gaiman creates a magical place that I imagine thousands of readers have yearned to experience, while with Mielville, you feel rather glad you don’t know about it. With Mielville, the threatened apocolypse may occur.

My biggest trouble is I was trying to read a Gaiman book while reading a Mielville book. Here is a picture of Neil Gaiman:

Here is a picture of China Mielville:

You’d think their imaginary worlds are quite different, and you’d be quite right.  Miellville’s world is more brutal, more punk, harder and meaner. Characters die painfully and stay dead, no magic rebirths. The world at the end of the book is a very different one from the start, and the main character, and many of his friends and allies, have lost much.

Kraken, apart from being a fantasy novel, seems to be examining the power of faith, in having it, in learning it, and in losing it, what good it can do, and what harm. It being a fantasy, of course some of these effects are more literal than you would expect in realism, but the ideas provoked are interesting and worthwhile.

Mielville‘s greatest weakness, for mine, is his characters. They fail to come alive, which is a pity for they have great potential. I wanted to love them, but it didn’t happen. He also seemed to get lost in the world he was creating, losing narrative pace. There seemed to be a lot of wandering about searching for answers without a sense of the characters getting somewhere.

Still I did enjoy the book and it kept me reading. I may read it again, and read it as a Mieville book from the beginning. I will try another of his novels. He certainly knows more about squids than Hanna-Barbera ever did.

"Get up and go!" A prayer for Owen Meany

The Modern Novel worries me, as I think I’ve mentioned before. Creative writing courses and modern criticism have come together in an unholy alliance to produce unreadable novels we are told are brilliant. However, to be fair, I now think this only applies to a small number of books. Many modern novelists are still holding to E M Forster’s dictum: “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.” Not that a novel has to be easy reading. Great writing, like any great art, needs the audience to take the time and the concentration to appreciate it. The novelist didn’t toss off the book while watching TV and eating dinner at the same time. The least you can do is afford the reading a commensurate level of focus.

My own theory of the difference between a popular novel and a literary novel is the quality of the subsequent reading. Many people like to re-read their favourite books, like they like to re-watch their favourite films. But on the revisits, it is the quality books and films that reveal new facets, provoke new ideas where as the popular type let us revel in the comfort of the familiar. To take a film as an example, Where Eagles Dare is a piece of tosh but I love it. If I come across it on TV, I watch it through to the end. I have the same reaction to Citizen Kane but I keep questioning Citizen Kane, the characters, their motivations, and what they do, whereas Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood can keep shooting the Germans till the cows come home and I don’t care. I engage with Citizen Kane, I watch Where Eagles Dare; and enjoy the heck out of both.

I’ve just reread, for the first time, John Irving’s 1987 book, A prayer for Owen Meany. This book knocked me out of my socks the first time I read it, and it did the same again. Even though I could remember the ending (I defy anyone to forget it) this in no way detracted from the journey. If anything, it enhanced it – another mark of a great novel. (No-one goes to Macbeth to see how it ends, someone once remarked to me. On the other hand, friends of mine had never read or seen Hamlet till they saw Brannagh’s version. I was somewhat envious.) It’s been a long time between reads. I suspect I was worried it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered it. A baseless worry as it turned out.

Irving is one of my favourite writers and this of his my favourite work. His books are wonderfully readable, his characters vivid, and his stories are strong. One thing that struck me in this reading was how angry he can be. A prayer for Owen Meany is the story of the friendship between John Wheelwright, the narrator, and Owen Meany, a boy of short stature whose voicebox is stuck in a permanent scream, through the 1950s to 60s, culminating in the Vietnam War. Owen is an extraordinary character.  A tragic accident that marks both their lives convinces Owen he is the hand of God, on earth for a special purpose, a purpose that makes his height and voice necessary. This leads to an exploration of religion, spirituality, fate and belief, not light subjects. Owen’s belief sometimes seems ludicrous, at other time wondrous. While he tells this story, Wheelwright, who now lives in Canada, keeps turning to the contemporary Iran-Contra scandal. This is where the author’s anger is palpable. Yet amid the anger and the seriousness, this is a funny novel, a wonderful achievement. Too often both politics and religion can make people so angry and so serious they are off-putting. Irving avoids that trap with joy and verve.

Irving is openly influenced by Dickens, who shares this gift of turning anger to humour without losing its power. Irving also creates outlandish yet believable characters and byzantine plots.  (I’ve also read this book is influenced by Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum, but I’ll have to take their word for it. The Tin Drum has long been on my to-read list. Perhaps it’s time.) Nor is he afraid to take on big issues. Here’s a few I can think of just looking at the novel titles: abortion, family, feminism, incest, sexuality, and paedophilia. Sudden violent death is a common trope. And yet, all his books are richly comic. And full of life; funny, bizarre, sad, rich, and wonderful.

A prayer for Owen Meany is now over twenty years old and is still a fresh, entertaining and provoking read. The Iran-Contra scandal may fade in our memory, which is part of the point of the novel, but other government scandals will arise to take its place. What abides, what remains, what endures is what is important. I think that’s also part of the idea of this book. I try to think of why I write about the books I do (not every book gets an entry) so as to attempt to give each entry some sort of theme or spine. I love this book. That’s all.

"Tea and sympathy." Alexander McCall Smith

Barbara Cartland wrote 723 books in her lifetime. Can Alexander McCall Smith be far behind? I exaggerate of course, but McCall Smith is a prolific writer. He has five series he is writing concurrently, as well as other stand-alone novels. One series, 44 Scotland St, first appears in print in The Scotsman, before being published as novels. Another is published online in serial form. As far as I can tell, he has written at least sixty fictional works, as well as twelve works on law. So he’s a long way behind Cartland but considering his first work was published in 1978 (and his first novel in 1999), he’s doing okay.

I haven’t read Barbara Cartland’s work, but I have read several of McCall Smith’s. I started reading Espresso Tales, the second in the 44 Scotland St series. This series revolves around residents of the eponymous building, which includes a painter and his dog, a family driven by an ambitious mother, much to the consternation of her 6-year-old son Bertie, a rich but unambitious art dealer, and more, as well as their friends and relations. While the mode of publication is inspired by Dickens’ model of writing his chapters in newspapers, the stories lack any sense of an overarching plot. Instead we follow the doings and misadventures of these people, who are very loveable, knowable and plausible. I was hooked before finishing the novel, and have read all now except the latest. I realised on finishing the second-latest novel, The Importance of Being Seven” these books could keep going forever, if the author so desired. Each short little plot is entertaining, and there are many strands to keep us going.

The other series I have followed is The Sunday Philosophy Club featuring philosopher-amateur detective Isabel Dalhousie, who solves problems both real and esoteric. Each of these novels are self-contained, while there are continuing arcs involving her, her niece, her partner Jamie and so on. In The Importance of Being Seven, there is a reference to Isabel’s baby, so both these stories take place in the same Edinburgh.

So I assume it is the same world as the Botswana of Precious Ramotswe, the lady detective of his most successful series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I resisted this series as I was already hooked to two and I didn’t want to embark on a third. I saw the television adaptation of the first novel, and was so charmed I finally read one of them, Miracle at Speedy Motors. I enjoyed it too, but thankfully have not been pulled into the lure of the whole series. This may be pure contrariness on my part.

The key to his appeal is the word I used, charm. These are charming books, the characters are likeable (except the few we are not meant to like) and they have a wonderful warm quality, and feature small communities of people who know and care about each other. Even the difficult and unlikeable characters are viewed by their neighbours with sympathy and an attempt at understanding. I have written elsewhere of our focus on dark and awful subjects. McCall Smith writes humane, gentle, empathetic stories and they sell like hotcakes. His popularity is evidence to me of a world that craves connection and civility. Barbara Cartland appealed to our dreams of true love, McCall Smith to our dreams for humanity. Perhaps they are as idealistic and unrealistic as each other. I hope not, and I hope he keeps writing.

"Words and and music go together." Sesame Street

As a child, I had three pillars of TV: 'Sesame Street', 'Play School' and 'Here’s Humphrey'. My parents kept a tight rein on our TV watching so I didn’t see too much. Two of these shows are still going, fortyish years on, which is a testament to both their popularity and commitment to excellence. Poor old Humphrey has just been sold and is languishing in someone’s cupboard. Still, you never hear him complain.

So Sesame Street, which started a year after I did, has been a big influence on my life. I spoke of this earlier in my discussion of Sesame Street: A Celebration, 40 Years on the Street. A friend of mine, who understands these things, more recently sent me Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, by Michael Davis. I thought it might be a retread over travelled land, but it was not. They are good companion books. Whereas the first is a colourful, glossy survey of the show from concept to now, the second is a more scholarly book. Which does not make it dry. Quite the opposite, it’s a vibrant and heartfelt history of the show, but is, as the title suggests, a history. More than half of the book is taken up with the creation of the show, from its conception at a dinner party, through the gathering of television executives, writers, researchers, educators, producers, musicians, puppeteers, government support and actors, to the first broadcast.

The heart of the book, and Sesame Street, is Joan Ganz Cooney.  Cooney had a BA in Education, had worked as journalist, and had some television and government experience when she began the journey to Sesame Street. She had to overcome resistance to her idea as a woman, as a person with limited experience in education and children’s television, in order to bring her idea to reality. And she has managed to keep that show going over personality clashes, financial and political issues, and all the other challenges you would expect, as well as some you wouldn’t, in running a successful organisation. She is truly a remarkable and inspirational person.

The book gives due tribute to Sesame Streets (American) precursors, those children’s shows trying to give children a quality experience in front of the tube.  Many of the talents that ended up on Sesame Street came through 'Captain Kangaroo,' a long-running morning show whose creator, Bob Keeshnan was inspired through the negative example of Buffalo Bob on 'The Howdy Doody Show'. There were other shows as well that were trying to help children, with varying quality and success. But Sesame Street became the apotheosis, and the standard. If we ever meet, ask me about the monkey and raccoon story.

In later years, Sesame Street’s ratings were threatened by the egregious Barney. (One critic, quoted in the book, described the saccharine dinosaur as making Sandy Duncan look like a flesh-eating succubus.) The unexpected challenge made an enormous impact on Sesame Street, leading to changes of the show and personnel, some of which worked, some of which did not. However, Sesame Street still survives, while Barney seems to have joined his relatives.

Street Gang documents the creative, political and personal tensions behind the scenes. Many of the original creatives, including Jim Henson, Joe Raposo and Northern Calloway, died relatively young. Funding bodies tried to have more power, changes were made in response to politics, instead of research and creativity. But due to people like Ganz and her successors, Sesame Street has managed to do what it set out to do, educate, entertain and let children know that life has its challenges and its wonders.

I had a teacher at school who didn’t like Sesame Street he said because it brought children to school saying ‘zee’ instead of ‘zed’. Seemed then, and now, a minor point, but I do wonder about all the versions of Sesame Street that have been made and tailored to different markets, whereas we just get the unaltered US version. Mind you, ABC was one of the first to buy the show, which was lucky for me and others my age. Later though, I saw one episode with Mel Gibson and a map of Australia, with no Tasmania. He didn’t pick it up, nor did any researcher or writer or anyone else with the show. I wonder if they had any feedback from Australia, or Tasmania, subsequently. That was years ago. Perhaps they don’t even use the segment anymore. Actually with Gibson’s current reputation, they probably don’t, but for other than cartographic reasons.

If you are a Sesame Street fan, then by all means read this book. You’ll be surprised, informed, delighted and sometimes a little sad. 

"What I tell you three times is true." The myth of Lewis Carroll

Beware accepted opinion, it can lead you to believe silly things. Or miss things that are worth catching. These thoughts came to me recently when I watched Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the 1954 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, It’s actually a lot better than its reputation suggests.

I have written before about Lewis Carroll, and he is an author I continually revisit. Both as an author and as a person, he is fascinating. He cannot be pinned down, and any opinion about him or his work is subject to revision. The Alice books have been adapted frequently into film, television, plays, musicals and ballets. (Has there been an opera? I don’t know.) But they are a challenge to adapt. To be honest, I don’t think I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory adaptation. A lot of the magic is in the prose, which can be hard to preserve. And the books are very episodic with no real narrative drive, which presents the greatest challenge.

Some have shoehorned a heavy-handed metaphor onto the work such as Alice growing up with the jabberwocky representing all her fears (this was the basis of a 1980s mini-series and a more recent theatrical adaptation, which was more an adaptation of the mini-series than the book. I wondered if the adaptor had read the books, to be honest.) Tim Burton took the memorable characters and shoved them into a dull quest movie in the latest film. The best adaptation I saw on stage was Christopher Hampton’s ‘Alice’s Adventures underground’, which examined the relationship between Carroll and his supposed muse through the books, with the characters represented by actors wearing Victorian costume, no animals or masks in sight. It worked rather well. He may have stolen the idea in part from Jonathan Miller’s BBC version, which was proposed as a children’s show for Christmas but became more adult in flavour. Either of Dennis Potter’s takes on the books, one for TV and the other for the cinema are also worth seeing.

The book can appear to modern eyes as rather creepy and nightmarish. However, this may be our more limited imaginations. My grandmother thought it was a lovely fairytale. When I first read it, around age twelve, I didn’t care for it much. I reread both books when I was about twenty, and haven’t stopped reading them since. What I particularly love is how the books touch on fascinating and profound ideas then just as quickly move on. It’s why they are so re-readable.

One reason people find them creepy is the idea the Lewis Carroll was a repressed paedophile, an idea that also drives many adaptations. If he was a repressed paedophile, then three cheers for Victorian sexual repression! More recently argument has been made that Carroll preferred the company of young women in their early twenties. However, this meant they were having tea and worse, visiting the theatre, behavior that should have been leading to marriage. However, he had no such intention, but he did enjoy their company. Such activity could ruin the reputation of a girl at the time, and so Dodgson referred to them as his child friends, to give the impression they were much younger and so keep their reputations, and his own, intact. After he died, his family emphasised his actual, and genuine, child friendships as evidence of his innocence and purity, perpetuating the deception that his only relationships were with children. It was only in the second half of the Twentieth century that our collective dirty minds began to put the worse possible spin on that. However, argument rages on this point.

In any case, the Alice books were written to amuse children, and the Disney film does that very well. The books themselves are so immortal that like Shakespeare’s plays, no amount of bad adaptations can kill them. And this isn’t a bad adaptation. It’s funny, visually striking, and the characterisations and voice work are strong. Our picture of Alice in blue dress with white pinafore comes more from this movie than any other source. The Tulgey Wood is one of the more interesting sequences. I think it’s inspired by the chapter The Wood with No Names in Through the Looking Glass, and is full of animals that would not look out of place in a Muppet movie. I can give no higher praise. And I have to say that The Cheshire Cat in this movie leaves the Tim Burton/Stephen Fry Cat in its wake. This movie uses incidents I’ve never seen in other adaptations, such as The Wood of No Names and the mother bird screaming “Serpent!” at the over-tall Alice. And it nicely gets past the problem of losing the narrative voice in one scene by creating a talking doorknob on the door into the Garden. All in all, enjoyable.

And while I’m bending your ear, can we get past the idea that Lewis Carroll wrote on drugs? The evidence for it is so slim; actually to call it slim is to exaggerate the amount available, and to use the word ‘evidence’ is to compliment its quality. Yet how many times do I hear people talk about doing a ‘dark’ adaptation, ‘drugs and all that’? How sad that confronted with a unique imagination, the only explanation we can come up with is drugs and/or sex. When did we as a people become so dull?

Here’s a tip; if you want to write a dark version, tot up the number of jokes about death in the book. Actually the Victorians were much more comfortable about death than we are, which is why Carroll could joke about it with children, and no-one thought to comment on it. But that is another topic, for some other time.  I could also discuss the common idea that Disney films are sanitised versions of fairytales and at the same time too dark and traumatic for children to watch. Oh I could go on and on – and often I do.

"Ah, but underneath!" Gay playwrights

“The love that dare not speak its name” has become the love that just won’t shut up. So said Canadian writer Robertson Davies. Certainly after decades, centuries (depending on who you talk to and what history you read) of repression, homosexuals have taken full advantage of new freedom to express themselves, and heck, just be themselves and not have to hide. I’d suggest this is a natural reaction to being allowed to be, after so long. Not that the struggle is over, not here with bullying and bashings, and certainly not in more repressive regimes where homosexuality is illegal and severely punished. So I dare say the love that won’t shut up will keep talking for some time yet.

Sean O’Connor is a London-based theatre producer and director, and I’ve just read his 1997 book, Straight Acting: Popular gay drama from Wilde to Rattigan.  It struck me as an odd title, as there was very little gay drama as such (not on stage, at least) in that period. But O’Connor is writing about drama written by gay playwrights, who were enormously successful. His main focus is on Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, with sidelines on many others.

I was a bit worried that this book was going to militantly homosexual ie insisting that the plays have to be read from a homosexual point of view, cannot be appreciated unless read in that way, and that you straights have been missing the point for decades. I was completely wrong.  This is an intelligent survey of the writers’ work, with an acknowledgment and an understanding of the lives of these men, and the conditions under which they worked. O’Connor is a good writer.

The most important thing is that these authors wrote good plays. They worked for audiences whether or not they were aware of any possible gay subtext. We’re not that much smarter now than they were then, though it’s pretty to think so. Audiences could spot the characters that were sexually ambiguous just as easily as we can. Nor did the writers simply make all their gay characters women. O’Connor calls this accusation of ‘literary transvestism’  “easy, but not helpful.” Blanche Dubois is not Tennessee Williams in drag and it’s an insult to suggest she is. O’Connor calls this typical of the misogyny and homophobia of theatre criticism. Yes, in a different age, all these men would probably have written different plays. But the plays they wrote were so successful, and often so good, that one wonders what would have been better had they been different.

Rattigan in particular was quite open about what he would have changed if he had been able. The American version of “Separate Tables” was supposed to be quite different. If you don’t know the work, it is two one-act plays that take place at the same English boarding house, some months apart. The main characters are doubled, while the secondary characters appear in both. The second play concerns The Major, who by the conclusion is revealed as both a bogus officer and a man of dubious sexual practices. As written, he is interfering with women in cinemas. On Broadway, free from the Lord Chancellor’s interference, Rattigan wanted to make him homosexual. In fact, you can read the re-written scenes in Rattigan’s collected works. But the US producer thought it would lose audience and went with the original. The movie also went with the original, though it merged the two stories into one timeline. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were going to play both couples at the heart of each story but at that point stepped aside. David Niven gave his best performance as The Major, and won an Oscar for it. I don’t know if the play gets produced nowadays with the original scenes or the alternative scenes. And I don’t suppose it matters.

After reading O’Connor’s book, I bought second-hand The Rattigan Version: The Theatre of Character by B A Young, which is a little dull and disappointing. After O’Connor’s book I was hoping for something more interesting and insightful about his plays.  The readings are shallow. Perhaps Young felt constrained about delving too deeply into the plays with his friend Rattigan still alive, or perhaps he isn’t a good enough writer. Either way, it was a letdown. But Young is right; Rattigan’s is the theatre of character. The plot may be thin, but the characters stay with you.

I read O’Connor is making a movie of Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea,’ one of Rattigan’s major successes. I saw ‘In Praise of Love’ on the West End many years ago, which I thought was a lovely play, and enjoyed the recent film of ‘‘The Winslow Boy,’ less so ‘The Browning Version.’ Rattigan did fall out of favour as too polite and middle-class. But many writers fall out of favour, to our loss, only to come back. Perhaps O’Connor will bring us back Rattigan. 

PS Both these books are out of print - libraries and second hand dealers are they go if you want a read.

"I'll think about it tomorrow." Vivien Leigh

I’m not sure what constitutes a tragic life. I’m sure I don’t have one certainly. Some people’s lives might pass through tragedy or end in one, but I’m not sure you can have a tragic life. I mean, the whole life? It seems unlikely. Maybe those who are born into abject poverty or famine and die early, millions of whom we never hear, but outside of that, such a description reads as indulgent.

Vivien Leigh is one of whom it is often said had a tragic life. There was sadness in her life, haunted by bipolar disorder and battling tuberculosis. Her manic episodes were frightening to behold. They contributed to the end of her marriage to Laurence Olivier and cost her work in her career. And the TB eventually killed her at the young age of 53 in 1967, which sounds like the stuff of melodrama transplanted into late 20^th Century.

However, reading Alexander Walker’s 1987 biography Vivien: The Life of Vivien Leigh, one is not left with an impression of tragedy. The woman had so much joie de vivre I think she would kick you in the shins if you described her life as tragic or even sad. She had a happy childhood, three long-term relationships with the best men for that time of her life, a career that can be called, with all due caution, wildly successful, and died loved and cared for and wealthy, and had tremendous fun along the way.

Her hospitality and generosity were legendary. She took delight in decorating her stately homes and transforming their gardens. Friends had to put a curb on her spending for opening night gifts lest her impulses lead to her over-spending. Guests at her homes would find fresh flowers from her own garden, cut by her own hand, every day. The weekends, for multiple guests, would be filled with food, drink, games and sports. Few could keep up with her for long, but many loved trying.

She is a testament to the power of positive thinking. Her first sight of both first husand Leigh Holman and second Laurence Olivier prompted her to say to a friend,  “That’s the man I’m going to marry” and she did. She read “Gone with the Wind” and told friends who were positing her and Olivier as Rhett and Scarlett “Larry won’t play Rhett but I shall play Scarlett O’Hara” and similarly declared she would play Blanche Dubois and took that role from theatre to film to her second academy award. Not all her predictions worked out so happily but that’s not a bad average.

All of which is not to dismiss the pain and sorrow that was in her life. But I suppose in the end what you make of another person’s life is the same of what you make of your own. Focus on the positive and things can look good. Focus on the sad and soon that’s all you will ever see. I know where Vivien Leigh would have been looking

"A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Erast Fandorin

Detective novels are a nice trick to pull off. There are so many expectations and tropes and the readers can be so alert to tricks that the writer can have a tough time creating something new, different and at the same time, and in the best sense, generic. Part of their appeal is their familiarity, so the author is left walking the tight rope between doing everything as expected and making it different.

Erast Fandorin is the detective hero of a series of novels by Boris Akunin , a Russian essayist, novelist and translator. At the beginning of the series, he is a young man on the lowest rung of the Russian police in the 19^th century. He is young, thin and keen. It is his enthusiasm that leads him to discover the truth in the first novel, The Winter Queen, which also sees him leap several ranks in the Russian bureaurocracy.

Akunin has said his aim is to write a detective novel in every subgenre available. He has identified sixteen and so intends to write sixteen Fandorin novels. The Winter Queen is a conspiracy mystery. Now here comes a bit of a trick for English readers. I tried to then read the second novel, so I picked out Leviathan, a Agatha Christie type novel – exotic setting, the world’s biggest boat, a closed set of suspects, and a bizarre murder to kick the plot off. However, while this was the second novel translated into English, it is in fact the third novel in the series, after Turkish Gambit. Apparently that ends in Fandorin being appointed ambassador to Japan, which explains his presence on the boat in the first place. But you read the publishers list, and the positions are reversed. It’s not a huge deal, the stories are self-contained, but it is just a little annoying.

Akunin is a prolific writer with one series involving Fandorin’s son Nicholas, another with a crime-solving nun, a third series with every book in a different genre, and a fourth based on the political rivalry between Tsarist Russian and Imperial Germany, but Fandorin is his biggest success. The Fandorin novels are huge in Russia, selling in their many millions and three of them have been adapted into movies. Like Christie’s Poirot and so many other detectives, Fandorin has distinct characteristics. He is expert at reading people, and likes to list his findings and number them. In gambling he is invariably lucky, so finds it dull. Despite his luck, his life is marked by tragedy, giving him a sadness that along with his good looks and slim build makes him attractive to women, even if he is largely self-contained. His other feature is his vanity, shown by his fastidious dress and wearing a corset.

Akunin delineates the difference between the naïve Fandorin of the first novel and this more experienced character in Leviathan very well.  While the stories are self-contained, we seem to follow the life path of Fandorin much more realistically than Poirot or Holmes. I think this is a more modern take on the series novel. Now characters get older, their lives changed, and some of them even die – Inspector Morse for example – and they now longer exist in a mysteriously extended now, such as James Bond.

These are enjoyable books, the mysteries are good, and solutions satisfying. A couple of times I thought I was a bit ahead of the game in The Winter Queen but mainly by focussing on the least likely suspect rather than anything intelligent or insightful. This is part of the appeal of the detective novel, the reader can feel a little bit clever but the author, or the detective, is a little cleverer still.  Leviathan meanwhile had me flummoxed. Now I’ve skipped ahead to The State Councillor, where Fandorin is framed for murder and has to solve it while keeping ahead of the police. The period detail in the novels is fascinating, the other characters well-delineated, much better than Christie, and the writing, even in translation, literate and readable.  I look forward to reading more.

"The #!@ing words are awfully strong." Stephen Sondheim

The Canadian political writer Mark Steyn, who has a background as a theatre critic, says Stephen Sondheim doesn’t fit into the great American songbook tradition, as it is impossible to sing his songs in any other way that the way he wrote them. And when you see singers doing Sondheim songs, they always do them with the same tempi and in the same style as he wrote them.  You rarely hear jazz singers toy with the melody and pace of a Sondheim song as they do with, say, a Cole Porter.

Sondheim I suspect would take this as a compliment. Whereas Porter, Berlin, the Gershwins were by and large writing for the hit parade, with the particular show the means of delivery, Sondheim is very much writing for the moment and the character in the show. This is as much because of his aesthetic as it is because of changing times and expectations. So if his songs are difficult to understand out of context, and difficult to ‘re-interpret’, Sondheim would say he is doing his job.

(While I’ve got you here, I do find the habit of jazz singers of taking a classic song that we all love and thinking ‘You know, I think this would be improved with a different melody and a different rhythm and hell, a few extra lyrics. What did Porter know?” a bit odd, to say the least. Perhaps I am yet to hear a superb jazz singer, which is entirely possible.)

While Sondheim is currently a gold standard of modern Broadway, he is, like the gold standard, getting on. There have just been celebrations for his 80^th birthday, and as someone said, one feature of old age is a tendency to reminisce, what has also been called our anecdotage. When someone like Sondheim starts to reminisce, the best thing to do is encourage him.

And so we have Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim. This covers Sondheim’s career up to ‘Merrily we roll along’. Each chapter begins with a short essay on the provenance and history of each show. Then we have the complete lyrics, often with deleted lines, cut songs, and alternate materials included. And this is all sprinkled with commentary and anecdotes about performers and collaborators, as the title suggests. A second volume, Look I made a hat, taking the story up to 2011, is in the pipeline.

The endpapers are decorated with Sondheim’s three great principles: less is more, God is in the details, and content dictates form. All of which he explores in the body of the book.

Lyrics, Sondheim insists, are not poetry. This will find disagreement in those who want to push the likes of Paul Kelly, or (God forbid) Jim Morrison as poets. But, as Sondheim discusses, poetry is read at one’s own leisure whereas lyrics work with music defining the timing, pace and time you have to take the words in. If your songs are part of a show, there are even more constrictions. Therefore, the demands on the words are very different. Putting poetry to music is fraught with peril, you either work against the rhythm of the poet, or are trapped by it. By the same token, lyrics without music can be a bit flat and uninvolving. It is the relationship between the words and the music that gives lyrics their power.

And he is very particular about what makes a good lyric. Whatever else Sondheim does with words, he does not mince them. In sidebars on other lyricists, he is not afraid to criticise the greats, from Ira Gershwin to Alan Jay Learner to even his own mentor, Oscar Hammerstein.  He believes his pastiche of W S Gilbert’s lyrics in ‘Pacific Overtures’ is better than Gilbert. He praises too, often the same writer. Sometimes these are an aesthetic judgement, other times technical, sometimes bordering on the pedantic, but always well-argued and based on principle. And he is not averse to bringing this judgement on his own work.

His dislike for his work on ‘West Side Story’ is fairly well known. “Somewhere” he recalls as the “a” song, as that’s the word given an entire bar on the highest point of the melody as if it meant something. “I feel pretty” has a Puerto Rican Girl making sub-Cowardian internal rhymes. (He doesn’t like Coward’s lyrics too much either, for that matter.) But his self-criticism lasts into later and more mature work. So if you’ve picked a flaw or two in a Sondheim lyric, I suspect he got there first.

If you’re interested in musicals or writing, this is definitely worth a look. It’s an expensive book (I bought mine online, again a LOT cheaper) but it’s a book I can see myself going into over and over. What can I say? God knows how fond I'm of Sondheim.

"Thank God I'm an atheist." Melvyn Bragg on the King James Bible

As a society we like to focus on the negative. Why this is I do not know. But if an artist wants to be taken seriously, you need to focus on something ugly or horrifying, work out of a Jungian shadow. Everybody is up to something, everyone’s motives are ulterior. Cynicism is the ultimate virtue. But in doing this we miss a lot of positive things. Life is actually a mix of good bad and indifferent, as is art, history and any other field of human endeavour or study.

Everyone’s favourite whipping boy at present is religion. People like to think they gain instant credibility, intelligence and perspicacity by declaring themselves atheist, and dismissing anyone who thinks otherwise as stupid, ignorant, or dangerous – or all three. Do not misunderstand me here; I know any number of atheists who are intelligent, perspicacious, and for that matter lovely, but I also know a lot of people with belief who I would describe the same way. And as for the stupid, ignorant, and dangerous – well, belief or disbelief in God doesn’t seem to affect those descriptors in any way either. Nor am I going to pretend that bad hasn’t been done either in God’s name or by those who claim to represent him, either on a personal or organisational level. Horrible, evil things have been done, and continue to be done, in God’s name. I don’t have to convince you of that.

But what I would suggest, and what is forgotten, is that much good has been done and continues to be done, in God’s name. (And please don’t direct me to ‘debates’ between celebrities, decided by the acclaim of the audience.) And much of it is forgotten and denigrated, because now of course, we are much smarter and more worldly than any generation that came before us, and can see things from perspectives they did not know. I know we think that, because every generation does. But it’s entirely possible we’re wrong.

Melvyn Bragg’s new book The Book of Books: The radical impact of the King James Bible 1611-2011 is the story of the King James Bible and its impact on its readers and the world. As this was the book of the British Empire, and taken to all corners of the globe, you can imagine its impact has been massive. Rather unusually for a modern writer, Bragg focuses on the positive impact it has had. Crazy, right?

The King James Bible is probably the last effective thing a committee ever devised, and while Shakespeare has given us more words, the King James Bible has given us more phrases. It was written to be read out loud, hence the beauty of its language and its rhythms.  And so its impact on our language and our literature has been enormous, right down to the modern day. But Bragg goes much further than that. He suggests modern democracy, wide-spread education, abolition of slavery, female liberation and the war on poverty are all, at least in part, direct results of people being able to read the Bible in their own language, in a beautiful language, and being able to interpret it for themselves.  In doing so, they found the intellectual argument and the spiritual strength to right the wrongs they saw around them. It even led to the Enlightenment and the questioning of the veracity of the Bible itself. A classic own-goal you might think. No, the King James Bible has survived all that and more. There is something to it, much more than can be measured or seen.

We often talk about universal human rights and truths. I’m not sure there is anything natural or universal about them. I think they were created and defined by people, many of them driven by their religious beliefs, and the spread of those ideas to the point where we think of them as universal has been difficult and costly. To dismiss those who did so, and the traditions out of which they came, is insulting and frankly ignorant.

The Book of Books is not as compelling a read as I would have liked but it is well-written and makes a good argument.  And it is a refreshing change from the gloom we have about our history and our culture. Here are admirable men and women and no matter what you think about their beliefs, as Bragg points out, you have to respect the ideas, the strength and the courage those beliefs gave them. These are people who left the world a better place than they found it. How many of us will be able to say the same thing?

The King James Bible: it’s almost worth going C of E for.

"Come sing a song of joy my brothers." The Bee Gees

I have a friend who for all her positive qualities has trouble telling stories. Not that her stories aren’t entertaining but she does tend to think every detail is equally important. Which can bog the stories down a bit, or muddle the point. Still it’s a minor fault, particularly as I don’t see her too often and I enjoy her company. Indeed, as she is aware of this aspect of her story telling it’s often charming and fun.

I thought of her as I waded through The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees: Tales of the Brothers Gibb by Melinda Bilyeu, Hector Cook, and Andrew Mon Hughes, with assistance from Joseph Brennan and Mark Crohan. It was with some trepidation I took this book down from the shelf in the library. There are three Bee Gees and they have had a long career from early teenage years to the death of Maurice in 2003, which effectively ended the band, but still the book seemed inordinately large. Was there that much to be said about any pop group?

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised. Before the second chapter was over, both Barry and Maurice had almost been killed in childhood accidents, both before they were two.  Later on, Robin is almost wiped out by a truck. And they become youthful vandals and troublemakers. This was evidently a story fraught with incident and accident and who knows what else.

But then the story slowed down bogged in unimaginable detail. The Bee Gees started performing as children and their career continued for five decades. They also had a career as song writers, a career that started early and continued alongside their performing careers. It’s an important facet of their story. More than once, Barry Gibb and the others have said they would rather be remembered as a songwriters than pop stars. If you doubt me, read this book. This gets stated at least five times.

In addition we get a potted history of just about every band that ever recorded a Gibb Brothers song. Or played with the Bee Gees. Or musicians who played a gig in the Bee Gees band then went on with their own lives.  Not potted in a sentence but in at least two or three paragraphs. And the vast majority of pop bands disappear without trace, so this is tedious detail on bands you never heard of. 

And all incidents seem to require the viewpoint of all three brothers at least, if not their wives, families and business associates. Which might be useful if these views were substantially different but often they’re not. It’s more often reiteration than clarification or diversification. It’s like watching those all-star films where the contract states they all get equal screen time.

And we get press releases and statements, not summarised or effectively quoted but quoted in full. For example, Robin moves to the country with his wife and buys a dog, and as pop stars do, makes a statement about it. This may be of interest to fans, and the private life of one of the Bee Gees is fair fodder for a book like this. But do we need three paragraphs quoted in full on the dog taking to the country life? Wouldn’t one sentence do?

Not that this is not a story without interest. Three brothers creating a band and a sound that lasts for decades, producing some of the great pop songs, with break-ups, arguments, triumphs and low points, personal tragedy, there is a lot to be enjoyed here. (And compared to another family band, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees are the Brady Bunch.) Meanwhile, their song-writing abilities alone deserve respect. They once wrote three number one hit songs in a fifteen-minute session. We learn their method of working, keeping rhythm by slapping their thighs, they set the melody first and never deviate from it, which may account for the tortured syntax some of their lyrics can have. This should be a scintillating and insightful read. But the book betrays its origins. It’s written by a committee (this approach worked once, with the King James Bible, and never since) and started life as a blurb for a program for one of their concerts. You’ve read one of those blurbs. Now imagine that going on for 700 pages. Not that it’s a hagiography. The band and its individual members get criticised and this is reported fairly.

Its major fault is a lack of editorial nous. There is no sense of what the authors are trying to do except get every thing they know about the Bee Gees into one book. Statements and information is repeated. One wonders if there was a final edit. This book is probably very useful as a reference book but as a read it’s tedious. The index is quite good. This is not damning with faint praise – lack of a good index has ruined many a good non-fiction book.

I wish this book was better than it is. I enjoy the Bee Gees’ music and in interviews they come across as entertaining and fun. The ultimate biography, despite the title here, is yet to be written.