Stop the Week 4

Mine eyes have seen the glory of our cricketers not just beating the feared and loathed Australians, but pounding them into an Antipodean pulp. It’s a wonderful feeling, but it’s tinged with nervous anticipation of the next three test matches. Never trust a beaten Aussie; he’s always likely to get right up again and administer an even sounder beating. I can’t rest easy in my bed at night until England notch up the second victory that will guarantee the return to these shores of that miniature urn full of the ashes of burnt bails. Strange the way we get so worked up over such a tiny trophy.

I see it as one of my missions in life to pass on my love of film to our daughter. Just in case she is ever called upon to deliver a treatise on Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. This week it was Mike Leigh’s wonderful Secrets and Lies under the spotlight. We love Tim Spall in this house and his portrayal of the sweet and slovenly brother, Maurice, was as touching as they come. Mike Leigh’s methodology inspires actors to get so deeply into their characters that they come up with lovely telling details like the miniature rucksack that Maurice’s assistant wore during the climactic get-together.

Friday night is music night on BBC Four. I look forward to it every week. This week, the two lovely folk-singing Unthank sisters – Rachel and Becky, they of the heavenly voices, the frumpy frocks, the old-fashioned charm and the kind of earth-mother figures that would send the cartoonist, Robert Crumb, into a sexual frenzy – presented Still Folk Dancing After All These Years. (Or ‘yairs’, as the sisters would pronounce it in their frost-melting Northumbrian accents.)

The Coco-Nuts

It was a six-month tour of Britain in search of obscure folk-dancing troupes and traditions. Before I fell asleep in front of the telly, I witnessed some courageously daft groups, like the leaping Morris dancers of wherever it was near Oxford. I once went to a traditional Breton wedding in the heart of ancient Brittany that featured hurdy-gurdies, obscure reed instruments and prancing hanky-wielding dancers in jerkins and/or lace dresses, and it stirred my soul.

The Prime of Mr.
Wilko Johson

But I’ve never seen any folk dancers as gloriously lunatic as the blacked-up Britannia Coco-nut Dancers of Bacup, Lancs. It was like something that Spike Milligan might have dreamed up for Q9, or whatever his show was called. These are the real Mad Men: one day each year they get dolled up like a troupe of pantomime dames to slap and shuffle their way around Bacup, Lancs, a one-horse mill town in the shadow of the Pennines. Mar-vellous!

Good as it was, though, it wasn’t one of those Friday night programmes that you want to record for posterity – like the Black Sabbath story, or Julian Temple’s Oil City Confidential, the story of Dr. Feelgood, fronted by the manic but utterly loveable Wilko Johnson, or, best of all perhaps, the heart-wrenching story of Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane and the tragic aftermath of a reunion concert with his fellow New York Dolls.

Roll on next Friday; roll on the next test match.