Sesame Street is 40 years old, and I did wonder this morning why my children can’t see it. Could this PBS show that aims to reach out to so many people, not be on free-to-air TV in the UK?
But it’s not on Sky. It’s not on Nickelodian. It’s not on TV at all in mainland Britain. I’m stunned.
I love Sesame Street for its humour, its colour… and the fact that it taught me to read before I went to school. And count to 10 in Spanish.
Gowing up in North Somerset was good for something: apparently HTV showed it before anyone else.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8340141.stm
by Giles Booth, (then) aged 19 and three quarters
‘How many dragons did you kill today?’
Asks Philip Larkin in his turtle-like way,
Scarcely believing he’s worse off than most
Imprisoned by toads and his library post.
But last night I dreamt of his over-grown snakes,
Of clubbing his dragons. I reckon that makes
Six before breakfast, though it might soon be more;
Number seven lies bleeding on his office floor.
I’m researching an essay, but time after time
I’m totally flummoxed by the opaque last line.
His curriculum vitae might yield a clue
As to which of these poems is explicitly true.
Wellington, Leicester, Belfast and Hull,
How could he be so incredibly dull?
I can’t understand what he’s trying to prove,
Getting nearer the scrap-heap with every move.
He’s been out of tune with the Modernist sages
Since, expecting a Pevsner, he scoured the pages
With thick specs and torchlight under the bedding
Of Ezra Pound’s guide book, the one about Reading.
I was clearing out some of my old stuff from my mum’s house - my name’s Alex Drake and this box of old papers has taken me back to 1989 - and, amongst other things, I found this untitled poem I’d written out several times on both sides of an envelope addressed to my then-girlfriend’s mother. I had to look it up to find out who it was by. Good, though.
Oread by H.D.
Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us -
Cover us with your pools of fir.
I also found stashes of NMEs, lots of newspapers from the 1980s, most of which I have no idea why I kept, so I’ve binned them. And a shoebox full (okay, half-full) of letters and cards from an ex-girlfriend. An entire relationship in a box. The one where she tried (unsuccessfully) to end our relationship was a good read. Even better the one where, later, she explains why she cheated on me. Reading between the lines now I think I deserved it and she was doing me a favour. At any rate it made me smile and it’s quite a thing to think that it’s taken twenty years to get from there - standing, alone on Stockport station waiting for a train back home, my life falling apart around me, to now - standing alone in a loft reading her letter about her night with Andrew - with a big, silly grin on my face.
Today was the 18th anniversary of me joining the BBC. Normally me and my fellow trainees go and have a cheap meal and drink too much and get unwell. This year we decided to do something nice. So we went to The Fat Duck for lunch.
A few quick points. It’s clearly the best restaurant I’ve ever been to, but that’s not saying much; my starter was the best thing I have ever tasted ever anywhere ever, but everything was amazing; it’s worth every penny.
Just so I don’t forget, this is what I had - on the a la carte menu:
- Pommery grain mustard ice cream with red cabbage gazpacho
- Oyster and Passion fruit Jelly with Lavender
- Starter: Lasagne of Langoustine with Pig’s Trotter and Truffle
- Ice-filtered lamb jelly with braised tongue and cucumber
- Main course: Best end of lamb with onion and thyme fluid gel and hot pot of Lamb Neck, sweetbread and oyster. Never tasted lamb like it. Amazing.
- Cheese course - amazing selection of French cheeses, couldn’t begin to tell you what they were but some soft, some blue, some goat’s…
- Mrs Marshall Margaret’s Ice Cream Cornet
- Pudding: Delice of Chocolate - chocolate sorbet with cumin caramel. This was a work of art - a pure shiny chocolate cylinder which looked solid but was soft to touch. I was told to ensure I sliced all the way through to the crunchy base with each mouthful - and I found out why. The cumin caramel base was infused with something like Space Dust - a 1970s confection - which literally explodes in your mouth.
- Yellow tea. Well, I’ve never had a £20 cup of tea before. The making and serving of it was a theatrical event in itself. Lovely.
When I go again I’ll have the langoustine lasagne to start again, the delice of chocolate again - but the pot roast loin of pork for main course. Lee had this - it was divine, even better than my lamb.
The bill came to just over £1000 for five of us - this did include a bottle of champagne, white wine, two reds (2005 Cotes de Nuit I think), and a full bottle of desert wine - plus teas and coffees. Honestly, genuinely worth every penny. Heston Blumenthal clearly is a genius.
I was doing a bit of writing this evening and ended up at one point including the phrase ‘ee-ay-addio’ which had me wondering about its origins. Via Private Eye’s football reporter E I Addio, I ended up looking at football chants and then back to the nursery rhyme ‘The farmer in the dell’, where it comes from. The rhyme itself is alluded to in The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a book I love), and I’m pretty sure it’s referenced by Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective. It is also the source for the title of the book I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. For some reason I’ve been thinking about Robert Cormier recently, even though I’ve not read any of his books since I was a teenager. I went looking for any surviving Cormier books and found a long-forgotten copy of the screenplay to Jules et Jim. 
That and After the First Death are stacked up as the next books to read. And back at my writing - it’s a story about a computer - I finished a second draft, did a word count and discovered I had written 6502 words. The very first computer I used was my brother’s KIM-1, basically a development kit for the 6502 processor, and my introduction to computer programming was 6502 assembly language.
I can’t believe that Ken Campbell is dead, or that he was only 66. But it says so in his obituary, so it must be true.
I saw two of his live performances, one-man shows… one in Deptford and another in a tent on Blackheath. Both were wonderful. He was a master of surreal storytelling, he had the audience in the palm of his hands on both occasions.
I also remember a story that he almost halted recording of the second radio series of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because he was unable to deliver the line “Marvin’s got Poodoo” (or similar) without collapsing in laughter. Douglas Adams - who wrote it - and Geoffrey Perkins - who produced it - are dead too. Sad sad sad.
Despite two awful reviews and a lacklustre one, and Mark Kermode on The Culture Show (see! I don’t just watch it because of his co-presenter!) saying in effect they have (warning! contains spoilers!) jumped the shark by getting Mulder & Scully together… I went to see The X-Files: I Want to Believe last night.
Yes some of it is corny. Yes it is just like a long episode of the TV show. Yes you’d be forgiven for standing up, applauding and walking out at the point early on when Mulder says “I want to believe”. Yes, they may have jumped the shark by getting M&S together, spoiling the delicious unresolved sexual tension between them that kept us watching the TV show for so long - but if someone said to me “do you fancy watching a feature-length episode of The X-Files on the big screen in the Empire Leicester Square”, then the answer is “Hell, yes!”.
Just took my Richard Brautigan anthology off the shelf and it looks like I haven’t read it in a while.
The bookmark is one of the strips of paper BBC World Service studio managers used to write their shifts down on.
On this day I did shift A4 which consisted of the following:
- 1700-1730 Thai PO Box recording in S14
- 1730 in S35 for a Somali transmission, on air at 1800. Jonathan Haine was panelling
- 1930 in C33 for a Ukranian transmission on air at 2000. Tania Garner was the panel SM.
- 2045-2315 in the Newsroom. So, no change there, then.
On the back of the sheet I had written the words ‘Surplus Affection’. Mmm.
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