'Lest we forget, the Seventies was a decade in which people bought salted
pub-nuts in the hope that the landlord might pull the staple on the bag that
would reveal a small square patch of Page Three stocking-top; in which millions
of satisfied viewers watched speeded-up footage of Benny Hill chasing models
around a car park; in which cinemagoers made Come Play With Me Britain's
longest- running and most profitable domestic movie - a record it still
retains. Whether you consider them evidence of depressing ideological
backwardness or a refreshing absence of modern prudery, these phenomena are
just as much part of the fabric of the period as Arctic Roll, Anthea Redfern
and Hector, Kiki and Zaza.'
- Matthew Sweet (The Independent on Sunday, 16/05/2004)
In this film, which opened on 21st March 1978, there are mildly grainy shots of 1970s London locations and we hear hazy disco era music in the background. A Financial Times article in April 1981 revealed that What's Up Superdoc! along with the likes of Erotic Inferno,Boobs and Diary of a Space Virgin,had received subsidy from the state-backed British Film Fund, the so-called Eady Levy. This sex-comedy tendency was the flipside of such obscure, challenging late-1970s British films as The Shout, Radio On and Jubilee. By and large, it was the Great British Sex Comedy which kept actors and film crews gainfully employed as the 1970s progressed.
I watched this, curious to see Beth Porter in another role after her central performance as Kitty Schreiber in the stupendous Rock Follies of '77. Unfortunately, What's Up Superdoc! is the anti-Rock Follies. Its writer-director Derek Ford's dialogue is thunderously inane, where Howard Schuman's is finessed and punchy.
Here is an all too liberal sampling of Ford's wit: "Not 'arf!"
"Maybe it's on the National Health..."
"Like a bull in a china shop..."
"That word! [...] That could even give Mary Whitehouse a baby!"
"They didn't tell me he was a WANKER!"
"Bloody women..."
Christopher Mitchell's titular 'Superdoc' - Dr Robert Todd - is entirely without social context. He is a moustache and eyebrow twitching atom in a world of cardboard amorousness. He is the male 'hero' who indulges in the usual wish-fulfillment fantasies and is every bit as annoying as Robin Askwith and a good deal smugger.
Obligatory Soho strip club scene alert
What must Harry H. Corbett have been thinking when he was making this film? He plays Goodwin, a gormless, gurning ex-army caricature with occasional sad echoes of Harold Steptoe's vocal mannerisms. There is a scene in a public park where he is floored by a little kid's punch and a drenched Mitchell laughs at him, stood in a pond.
Corbett ponders the Faustian pact of being in this film
Just when you think it can't get any worse, Hughie Green enters: playing the 'humorously' named 'Bob Scatchitt'. Playing himself basically: a mountainous TV presenter and staunch British patriot with a mid-Atlantic accent (he had spent four years in Canada in his early life).
Green's massively popular talent show Opportunity Knocks had been axed in the same month this film premiered in the UK, following his regular use of the programme as a bully pulpit for his right-wing views. An open supporter of Thatcher's Tories, he had performed his reactionary monologue 'Stand Up and Be Counted' on the show in December 1976, railing against the unions, the Labour government and various shirkers. It was Thames' Head of Light Entertainment Philip Jones who sacked him and went onto commission the excellent Shelley (1979-92): a double blow for enlightenment in British television.
In July 1978, Green was booked by the peelers for drink driving. A year later, he was telling the Daily Express: "The Reds aren't under the beds. They're right in there, running the programmes [...] Evil people are putting out anti-British propaganda." (25/07/1979)
Green had complained that TV was being deluged with filth; he clearly cared so genuinely that he decided to appear in this irrefutably moral caper! And I assure you, he doesn't use the word 'wanker' three times...
The film is a deeply unedifying spectacle. We get the most gobsmackingly crass, inapt reference to Jimmy Cagney in White Heat ever committed to film; we get the apter fact that some filming was done at the troubled British Leyland Motors. We even get a Bill Pertwee cameo, with the Dad's Army actor essaying an appalling American accent. It lacks even the down-at-heel bathetic appeal that Matthew Sweet just about discerns in the most successful film of this peculiarly British genre:
Once the lights had gone down on Come Play with Me(1977), for instance,
those punters who had slavered over the ads which promised "10 girls being
screwed by 10 guys at the same time culminating with a group of Hell's Angels
coming to an orgy party," found themselves watching Alfie Bass capering
about in long-johns, bowler hat and Hitler moustache, droning his way through a
weak music hall number; Irene Handl, mumbling her way through a script upon
which she has only the slightest of grips; and production values so low that
when Henry McGee dries up and looks into the camera for help, the shot stays in
the picture.
It is just dully preposterous bunkum: watching it is like being forced to inhabit the psyche of UKIP idiot Godfrey Bloom for ninety minutes.
The one element that momentarily beguiles is the library music-style soundtrack; lounge disco with copious guitar and those late-70s synths. It isn't Moroder or Dee D. Jackson: see a piece on neglected 1970s music that David Lichfield and I put together here. The music is proficient and curiously sedated - like those honed, becalmed recordings you used to hear on Ceefax late at night after the main BBC programming had finished.
The strangely serene music is often cut off 'amusingly' in scenes of excruciating dialogue, for little or no purpose. While some of the music is very pleasantly of its time, I doubt the titles-song 'Hold On! I'm Coming!' will be gracing Jonny Trunk's excellent OST Show on Resonance FM anytime soon.
The film is prurient and witless: a deadening combination. You don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to find its objectification of female flesh one-note. Only Porter displays an inkling of character, albeit within the constraints of playing that sex-comedy archetype the uncontrollable nymphomaniac. The New Yorker essays a very passable Scottish accent and has a magnetism quite unlike any of the other identikit actresses who parade for the Superdoc's attention.
1978 was a year of British cinematic atrocities: this joins two other films that would have to be among my ten least favourite films: the bleak, dismal Carry On Emmannuelle and the painful Cook & Moore debacle The Hound of the Baskervilles. What's Up Superdoc! represents a mainstream British culture happy to turn out utter shite at the same time as Post Punk, disco, experimental theatre and television drama were proving far more progressive forces.
It's rubbish. It's British rubbish. No buts about it.
120. Typically Tropical - 'Barbados' (1975, #1, TM)
DL: More borderline racist and embarrassing novelty tripe, once again documenting the 1970s plight of Brits abroad. just as bad as the Vegaboys hit that it inspired. Mercifully, this no longer happens.
AN: Is there something recoverable in the communitarian aspect to this, the call and response, the singalong element? Just playing Devil’s Advocate. Obviously I don't like it really.
JG: Typically Western staging of a troubled Third World state (as was) as the usual island paradise. Later revived by the Vengaboys to inform us that they were going to eat pizza.
TM: It wouldn’t be half as annoying if the singer didn’t adopt the cod-Caribbean accent, auditioning to be Sting seemingly. That 70s synth sound is grating, rather than charming as it can often be.
119. Bobby Goldsboro - 'Honey' (1968/75, #2 - both times, RC)
DL: Gooey dreck that makes 'Seasons In The Sun' sound like 'I Know It's Over'. Thinking about 1970s pop makes me feel so very tired. A constant in these kind of lists, and quite rightly so. Make it stop!
AN: I’d never heard this before. When it started up I was ready to defend it as Bacharachian orchestral kitsch. But then the chorus spectacularly failed to happen. Not good. A Westlife antecedent.
JG: This is completely forgettable easy-listening fluff, somewhat enlivened by the curious line: “I impressed her with a puppy.”
TM: Treacly ballad, monotonous enough to make ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ sound as adventurous as Nick Nicely’s ‘Hilly Fields (1892)’. “Guess you could say” such vapid smugness deserves a neck-wringing.
DL: One of my nominations and a staple of free CDs from the Daily Star circa 2004. Selected on the grounds that I couldn't imagine why anyone would possibly want to own it. Cinematically short of epic.
AN: Republican gym pop rock fuck.
JG: If you think about it hard, the individual elements (a continuous pulse-like rhythm, lots of synth bits, muted guitars) almost have something of Can or Neu! about them, but recalibrated for heinous Reaganite celebrations of jingoist toss.
TM: I resent the infernal persistence of these sort of films and this species of chugging, airbrushed 80s rock. Transformers: the Movie is nostalgic viewing for me and its music is at least enjoyably ludicrous.
117. Reverend and the Makers - 'He Said He Loved Me' (2007, #16, DL)
DL: Laughably simplistic social commentary from the man who must have been dragged through several hedges backwards clinging onto the Arctic Monkeys’ coat-tails. Educated enough to lyricise better too.
AN: 2007 was a dark time for music. But then again, so is 2012. Will somebody please just do something good? It’s getting fricking desperate in here.
JG: Middle class types playing on their “northernness” to get away with writing some utterly ignorant Jeremy Kyle shite about chavs whilst having no more idea of such demographic environments than George fucking Osborne.
TM: Embarrassingly dire ‘northern’ vocals and sneering faces. The self-styled ‘The Reverend’ is a chancer, who claims to be influenced by John Cooper-Clarke. Evidence that Sheffield music is not always great.
116. Simple Minds - 'She's A River' (1995, #9, TM)
DL: A world away from their innovative early work, this arrogant drone marked their last real dent into the hit parade. Even U2 did this kind of stadium synth-rock more convincingly. Sounds like cocaine.
AN: I had this on a tape of the Radio 1 Top Ten countdown in the early weeks of ’95. This was a lowlight. Human League’s ‘Tell Me When’ was also on there: an underrated little gem of a tune.
JG: She’s a river??? What the fuck does that even mean??? That you sit next to her and smoke doobies till you’re blue in the face???!!! No wonder she fucked off.
TM: Clattering bunkum, with a U2 likeness and inexplicable Buddhist monk motif in the video. Once they had travelled; by 1995 their terminus was Stadium Rock gigs and lengthy features in Q magazine.
Hi, I'm Khalid from infamously masterly Dr Who adventure 'Time Flight', walking a tightrope
115. Tina Turner - 'The Best' (1989, #5, AN)
DL: Can't say it's one of my favourites, but for an omnipresent late 80s soft-rock track, it does its job. Can't see much in it actively worth loathing. It's just there and it's not going away soon.
AN: My choices were shit, weren’t they?
JG: I usually enjoy this song more if one completes the time-honoured trick of exchanging the word for “you” for “I” and vice versa.
TM: It’s hard to overstate the prevalence of this bathetic, overblown song in 1990-95: music for bland, kitchen unit magnates. It was SAFC chairman Bob Murray’s favourite and a perennial at Crosby-Buxton era games.
114. N-Dubz - 'I Need You' (2009, #5, DL)
DL: The very moment I heard "Facebook" name-dropped into the chorus of this, I decided I had dropped out of Radio 1's demographic. Light as an excuse for persistent online stalking too. "Bang bang shoes"?!
AN: An awful-sounding tune from a band with the most awful-sounding name in pop history.
JG: This is just an advertorial for Facebook, right?
TM: Petty, gormless anthem for misogynist stalkers: “I been searching all over Facebook”. “And that’s why we call them bitches” – pots calling kettles black and all that. Plus: silliest hat since #147.
113. David Gray - 'Babylon' (2000, #5, DL)
DL: If you're missing faux-hippy Jo Whiley's tenure at the above station, don't, unless you sadistically enjoyed having boring, prematurely middle-aged singer-songwriters like this pounded into the ears.
AN: I vividly remember being 16 and hearing Jo Whiley (who I saw as a sort of female John Peel) hyping this up on Radio 1 in 2000 and thinking, hang on, something has gone badly wrong here. This was a seminal moment in the bourgeois incursion into the “indie” centre-left.
JG: OK, the man can sing, but seriously, how is this excessively cosy shite any different to nonsense like Des’Ree’s notorious 'Life', only masked by a slightly more refined lyricism? Music for pre-9/11 “End of History” bores.
TM: It’s my ‘5’ rating that keeps this out of the Top 100. The opening is surprisingly wistful and evocative; then the familiarly dismal chorus enters – so odious! He is also culpable for this utter calamity.
112. Tottenham Hotspur FC - 'Ossie's Dream (Spurs Are On Their Way to Wembley)' (1981, #5, JG)
DL: This looks, sounds, and feels much more than thirty-one years old, featuring traditional football song platitudes that no one would ever actually say, not even pundits. But laugh at the funny Argie!
AN: Ossie Ardiles. Fucking hell.
JG: There was a whole generation of novelty football songs like this that in hindsight look like understandable attempts to create a happy image to counter the pockmarks of hooliganism and racism afflicting the Beautiful Game at the time. Still, none of the others feature Ardiles reading “in the cup for Totting-ham” off an autocue.
TM: Mild enough compared with a few of the football horrors to come in this list. Yet this is a tired, scarf-waving musical knees-up that even the most die-hard mockney wannabe could not rehabilitate.
111. Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin - 'Separate Lives' (1985, #4, DL)
DL: If you take some of his songs on face value (excuse the pun) then some of Collins' work is fairly agreeable pop. Not even the U.S. R’n’B community can defend this, though. Like an egg throwing a strop.
AN: Phil Collins. Fucking hell.
JG: Every bit as turgid as only something associated with the dreaded Phil Collins can be. Nashville non-entity Marilyn Martin ended up as a realtor and therefore contributed to our current economic misery just as she previously contributed to our cultural misery.
TM: Power Ballad exemplar featuring the receding one on auto-pilot, accompanied by Martin’s showy melisma. As far as separation songs go, not a patch on Peter Hammill’s Over. Not the last we’ll see of PC.
110. Kula Shaker - 'Tattva' (1996, #4, RC)
DL: Sometimes you wish The Beatles had not bothered going to India after all. 'Strawberry Fields'-looting cod-mysticism that was somehow not even their worst crime. Hinduism via Sky Sports and Carling.
AN: I don’t really mind Kula Shaker. The thing is, they used to get slapped down and ripped to shreds in the NME and Melody Maker, so you could just treat them for what they were: a sort of sixties pantomime. Fast forward to the noughties and Noel Fielding is hailed as a comic genius; no one bats an eyelid.
JG: Of the many atrocities committed during the Britpop era, the entire catalogue of Kula Shaker ranks among the worst. Tenth generation facsimiles of various ’60s radicals with the ink so worn it’s impossible to know what any of it might once have meant.
TM: Retro-rock with ludicrous mystical frills. Clemency for Mills’s ‘youthful indiscretions’ with the far-right would be more feasible had he not polluted our auditory senses with this unmitigated drivel.
109. Billy Ray Cyrus - 'Achy Breaky Heart' (1992, #3, RC)
DL: I've got a theory about MOR Country rock: it's fucking shit. Like most genres that happily live outside of the mainstream UK charts, it takes a novelty record to enter the popular consciousness.
AN: Fakey mediocre shit.
JG: Another easy target, but this is the kind of easy-going depoliticised noddy country music (a music that began life as a folk music of dispossessed poor people) that is Republican through and through. At least the Dixie Chicks came to understand the connection.
TM: Cocksure country-pop from a vain specimen of traditional masculinity. If this isn’t bad enough he is also notable for allowing George W. Bush to use another of his songs as his 2000 campaign anthem.
108. Rod Stewart - 'Every Beat of My Heart' (1986, #2, RC)
DL: Another mid 1980's power ballad with a heroic and patriotic sentiment. What commercial radio stations piped into wagons were invented for. Makes one think of amorous builders getting their oats.
AN: I’ve already expressed total incomprehension of the Rod Stewart aspect of life. This doesn’t change my view.
JG: Everything that is regrettable about patriotism – cloying sentimentality, the de-contextualisation of “national” signifiers (bagpipes in this case) and the screening out of real (Real?) social problems. All whilst living in tax exile.
TM: Absurd, bombastic Tartanry, with the Londoner Stewart bellowing: “Here’s one Jacobite!” Some of the most idiotically parochial lyrics ever, shouted out against a clattering 80s backdrop. Hell.
DL: Easy target, but about as funny as receiving a County Court Judgement on your birthday. Moronic to the point of nausea and more so when it was inescapable. Really, who pays good money for this stuff?
AN: I mean, this is a kids song isn't it? I find it hard to criticise this sort of thing without making vague gestures at the “infantilisation of culture” or something equally tendentious.
JG: An advert for various unethical food outlets performed by photogenic types who have clearly never been within 25 miles of any such establishments. Post-ironic in a bad way.
TM: As ‘amusing’ and appetising as an evening’s date with Andrew Lansley trying to sell his health reforms to you – if more coherent. It doesn’t exactly give Yeats or Donne a run for their money with its symbolic imagery.
106. Kaiser Chiefs - 'Ruby' (2007, #1, DL)
DL: A pub rock 'indie' band that were in the right place at the right time; it was horrifying to see the expensive video and crisp Stephen Street production values applied to something so undeserving.
AN: People are talking now about a Britpop/nineties revival but the Kaiser Chiefs are proof that it never went away. The Vaccines are just the Kaiser Chiefs with less interesting arrangements aren’t they?
JG: Their early singles were at least faintly amusing, but Kaiser Chiefs had well run out of steam two years on with this boring song about unrequited love. Not exactly ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, is it?
TM: “Due to lack interest”: the Chiefs show admirable foresight of their own deserved obscurity today, with their sole utility as a punch-line for all too obvious gags about the 2011 ‘England Riots’.
DL: King of a thousand Prozac electro-urban anthems, its lyrical themes are utterly depressing in that we're stuck with hearing this at any major social event we ever attend during the rest of our lives.
AN: Good call Dave. Empty hooks running riot.
JG: The prospect of devil-may-care hedonism has rarely sounded so joyless.
TM: Liked this initially when I heard it: though that was before it gained context. Relentless airplay has worn away some of its appeal, but I still wouldn’t put this anywhere near a Worst 200 personally.
104. Brotherhood of Man - 'Figaro' (1978, #1, TM)
DL: Tacky and tasteless as the Seventies efforts that have plagued our chart so far are, it's terrifying to imagine what the era has in store for us as we progress. An insultingly inferior ABBA pastiche.
AN: Novelty trash. Quite like the wah-wah guitars though.
JG: This is just embarrassing holiday music from the era when the Costa del Sol was a novelty. The roots of ‘Macarena’ and ‘The Ketchup Song’ can be found right here.
TM: Asinine simulation, nay, assassination of Abba’s daft but wonderful ‘Fernando’. This lothario lacks even the vaguest revolutionary credentials and this “magic” “Romeo” just seems a bit of a creep.
103. Nick Berry - 'Every Loser Wins' (1986, #1, TM)
DL: Funny how few soap operas have attempted to release singles on the back of an in-house band since 1986. I defended 'Heartbeat', this I cannot. Precedent for many solo soap star pop careers, however.
AN: Wow, this is pretty bad. I reckon there’s probably a degree of global consensus straddling race/religion/creed about this.
JG: Quite apart from Berry’s flat voice (which required extremes of reverb, the Auto-tune of its day), the message of this song is complete Thatcherite toss. Because if every loser wins, then those that never “win” must therefore be undeserving incompetents who aren’t self-reliant enough, etc.
TM: Garrulous piano tinkling does not disguise a rather dull song. Road / love metaphors, illuminating light in tunnels and pearls of existentialist wisdom: “Nothing is certain in a changing world”.
102. Viva Brother - 'Darling Buds of May' (2011, failed to chart, TM)
DL: This inspired our project, and is a laughable failure in terms of a supposed ‘resurgence’ in meat-and-potatoes indie-pop. Note the stolen 'Some Might Say' passage. Britpop is not coming back! Capiche?
AN: British art really is terrible right now right across the board isn’t it? Just risible.
JG: Kagouls? Check. Button-down shirts? Check. Boring non-entities playing at being lads? Check. Roaring commercial success? Un-check. Viva Brother – the new Heavy Stereo.
TM: Astonishing that this hasn’t quite made the Top 100! “IT. IS. WHAT. IT. IS!” This derisory, strutting shite should live in infamy as a cautionary tale for all budding British ‘guitar-bands’. Laughable!
'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now'
101. Staind - 'Outside' (2001, #33, JG)
DL: Nu-metal was fucking horrible, but when its key players slowed down the tempo to show off their sensitive sides, the results were scathingly bad. How is this not monotonous? Charmless, ugly music.
AN: Ha. This cheered me up.
JG: Self-pitying, disempowering shite that aims low by simply asserting that all those beautiful people are just ugly and unhappy inside too. But postmodern capitalism rewards superficiality and plasticity. Shallow people are pleased with themselves. This, shockingly, is why you are unhappy. Dig deeper and the insights will start to come.
TM: The dirge-friendly grain of his voice affronts almost as much as Lee Newell’s. Recently and somewhat aptly, a new Staind track entitled ‘The Bottom’ appeared on the Transformers: Dark of the Moon soundtrack.
'Of course, god never sleeps. For if he slept, what would happen to the solar system, and the growing plants, and the trees, and the tides, and the traffic? The whole universe would collapse.'
(Monica Dickens and Rosemary Sutcliff, eds., Is Anyone There? Penguin - 'A Peacock Book', 1978, p.66)
'I Am Lonely' presents an enormous contrast with 'La Plage'. There is one of the most pointed, individual narrative voices I have came across here; used expertly by Aiken to suggest a broader canvass of people with problems whom this voice could apply to.
Aiken captures the disturbing feeling of apartness from others, with the character logically extending this to think of themselves as a god, and that no other people or things have any life when they themselves are not watching over them. It is a bleak tale, which offers no easy ways out - crafted for a social purpose, as its placement within Dickens and Sutcliff's 'collection of stories and articles about someof the difficulties and uncertainties encountered by young people' attests. It is part of a book designed to commemorate 25 years of the Samaritans; founded by Chad Varah, a Lincoln-based Anglican, who represents the finer side of English Christianity, for example, campaigning for sex education and educating people about the dangers of cults such as Scientology. The Samaritans is a noble undertaking, as redolent of the post-WW2 idealism as anything; it is another mark of our times that fewer volunteers are now coming forward, and it has taken the likes of Phil Selway from Radiohead, himself a Samaritan, to promote the idea with younger people. The basic idea is well explained here:
'The Samaritans does not denounce suicide, but rather it provides entirely accepting and non-judging listening to callers. The organisation's vision is for a society where fewer people die by suicide because people are able to share feelings of emotional distress openly without fear of being judged. Samaritans believes that offering people the opportunity to be listened to in confidence, and accepted without prejudice, can alleviate despair and suicidal feelings.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samaritans_(charity)
Dickens (author of the Follyfoot series amongst much else) and Aiken clearly embody this enlightened vision, children's writers of much distinction, who, from the 1960s supplanted the prevailing conservative ethos (whether One Nation Tory or even at times actively far right) in children's literature which had predominated. The book also contains pieces from Roald Dahl, Leon Garfield, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Hill, Jan Mark, Brian Patten, Alan Garner and Robert Westall; a role-call of the cultural point we were at in 1978. Aiken's 'Wolves' sequence of novels clearly must be read, it sounds fascinating with its Dickensian elements and the alt-history of a Britain that was never ruled over by the House of Hanover.
The front cover to the edition of Is Anyone There? from my parents' bookcase is more striking than the one above (found via Google Images); a red telephone box is in the foreground, flanked by houses and two archetypal 1950s/60s tower blocks - all in monochrome. This symbolic use of colour, red representing life and human contact, was of course used by Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List (1993), for Hollywood effect.
Aiken captures how the powerlessness leads inevitably into a misguided sense of powerfulness; an overwhelming burden and responsbility that the unnamed 'I' in the narrative assumes. That the character is unnamed entirely fits the Samaritan ethos, steering readers away from thinking of this as only a story. Of course, that 'only' is a misnomer; Aiken uses her considerable artistry to turn this individual's concerns from being a microcosm to a macrocosmic picture of how many such people think: 'It was a terrifying thought, that, in a way: I was responsible for so much, and there was no one to help me.' (p.64)
This unfortunate person's visions are revealed; quite how he has been dehumanised is plain in the disturbing metaphor of people as 'like heaps of empty clothes', collapsing when he is not presiding over them. (p.64) Also, when assuming the mantle of godhood, it only leads him to petty cruelties, even further alienating himself from others and further harming any residual self-esteem; the episode where he makes the boy carrying the cat trip over has a bleakness and sadness redolent of the older European fairy tales - Andersen and the Grimms, who will of course be covered in this exercise.
One might actually perceive a link with the Ramsey Campbell story I read a few days ago; the 'I' here, has, like Russell, experienced the end of what is implied to be a relationship - this time with a girl called Ailsa, who it transpires has died, being run over a week ago. Both stories show how destructive it can be when one is rejected or bereft; there is a void, nobody to turn to in a society perceived to be uncaring. As with Russell, memories predominate and chide - taking on even greater significance in the retrospective mind's eye; the idyllic picnic that the protagonist shared with Ailsa: 'it was such a beautiful evening and we wanted it not to end.' (p.62)
These doomed reflections on what has gone before are prompted by the second movement of Beethoven's First Symphony coming on the wireless in the hotel lounge where he is seeking refuge from people - manifested by his reading. The reading matter is not explained; in this particular case, it clearly makes no difference, provides no escape route from the demons and shadows. The setting, including the uncanny visitation of Beethoven's fugue, only prompts the narrator into forlorn reflections and then hardened actions.
This story has a terrible beauty about it; we might gain something as a people if it were a set-text in junior and comprehensive schools, and young people were able to talk about it. It allows us an insight into the thinking of somebody in an awful position; like Atticus Finch argued, there is nothing more important than for those in a civlised society than trying to get inside the shoes of those that are different.
'Of course, god never sleeps. For if he slept, what would happen to the solar system, and the growing plants, and the trees, and the tides, and the traffic? The whole universe would collapse.'
