Thursday 26 March 2015

Today's reburial of Richard III furnishes me with an excuse to repost Peter Sellers doing Laurence Olivier doing Richard III

I'm not sure why, but there have been few stories in recent times which have failed to grab my imagination as comprehensively as the discovery of Richard III's bones. Okay, I'm not English, but I've lived here for 56 years, I love this country, and I revere its astonishingly rich history. Olivier's film version of Richard III was the first Shakespearean play I ever saw, and, even though I must have been very young at the time, and probably understood very little of what was going on, I sat spellbound throughout.

Later, I thoroughly enjoyed the detective story writer Josephine Tey's classic novel, Daughter of Time, in which her detective hero, Inspector Grant, uses an enforced stay in hospital recovering from a broken leg to examine the evidence for Richard having arranged the murder of the Princes in the Tower - which turns into a critique of the traditional view of the crook-backed monarch as a thoroughgoing villain.

Bit when it came to the discovery of Richard's bones and the subsequent brouhaha about where they should be buried, leading to a slew of articles and TV programmes on the subject, I found myself bored almost to tears. This might be due to a fundamental lack in me, because I felt just as uninterested in the discovery of the wreck of Henry VIII's warship, Mary Rose. And most archaeological sites leave me cold. It's not that I'm uninterested in historical artefacts - clothes bore me, but I respond readily to manuscripts, coins, jewels, crowns, works of art and everyday personal possessions (anything to do with novelists and poets in particular - pens, specs, desks, walking-sticks, notebooks, whatever). It's just that remains - whether of boats, bodies or ancient settlements - don't do it for me: a failure of imagination, I suppose.

My wife suggested that the the excitement over Richard's bones might have resulted  from the need for a people whose national identity and sense of community have been eroded over the last half-century by mass immigration, multiculturalism, and the denigration of their history by cultural Marxists to reclaim and reassert their heritage, their sense of nationhood. In which case, I wish them well, and hope that today's ceremony has helped revive their sense of Englishness - of belonging.

I'll leave you, once more, with the greatest comic screen actor of all time parodying - and celebrating -  variously, one of the greatest dramatic actors, the greatest playwright, and the most successful popular music group of all time. All English, of course.


Peter Sellers probably came to mind because of a recent appreciation of the comic genius over on Erik Bartlam's Low Cotton blogsite, here.

18 comments:

  1. I get a similar feeling almost every time I pull off the road and wind my way back to an Indian mound....Kinda cool but, mainly it's just a big pile of dirt with grass growing over it.

    There can't be too much love for Sellers. Thanks for the link.

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    1. For me, the worst things are iron age/stone age/whatever settlements, and how this was the living area and this was where they kept the goats (if the kept goats) and how this was what their axes looked like - I JUST DON'T CARE. But being from Lutheran/Presbyterian stock, I feel guilty about not caring.

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    2. Adamparsons makes his bread doing this stuff with Vikings...but, it's you know...Vikings! They have swords and shattered skulls.

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    3. Swords, menacing helmets, reconstructed longboats and Viking runic symbols on stone are all great - a reconstructed Viking village, not so much. Anglo-Saxon treasure's good too. And I'm a sucker for gold or silver medieval crowns, orbs, sceptres, swords, daggers etc., especially if they're jewel-encrusted.

      I know I'm supposed to a Christian, but there's something about the very sound of the word Viking that thrills. My God, they got around, that lot.

      Would Adamparsons be doing this somewhere near York?

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    4. If it's a big deal he was probably there....because he's kind of a big deal.

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    5. I just Googled him, and you're not wrong - Respect!

      Why would someone so evidently besotted by the Vikings not appreciate Samurai movies?

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    6. Woah. Are we talking about the same Adam parsons? The archeologist Adam parsons?

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    7. Yes, if he's this chap: "Adam Parsons is a lead author and illustrator of the Cumwhitton volume and has a keen interest in both researching and recreating the early medieval period. He has worked at Oxford Archaeology for 12 years."

      And the co-author of "Coal, Cotton, and Chemicals: The Industrial Archaeology of Clayton".

      I may have got the wrong Adam Parsons - common enough name - but if is him, he sounds pretty heavyweight to me.

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  2. When I was on my honeymoon in Queensland, Australia, my wife insisted that we visit "The Big Merino" [15m x 8m] and "The Big Banana" [13m x 5m]. Australia has about 150 of these large "sculptures" dotted about including one of a mosquito ["The Big Mozzie"]. In the film "American Vacation" the Grizwolds go off to visit the World's Biggest Mudpile. Who needs the Vikings - a bunch of psychopaths who happened to make the inhabitants of the East Coast of Britain reasonably good-looking

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  3. Still, I bet you didn't for one moment give even the slightest hint that you were less than rivetted by these marvels.

    The first time I visited the extremely attractive Portuguese northern coastal city of Porto, I couldn't understand why there were so many blond people around - especially as we'd travelled from Lisbon, where almost everyone was squat and swarthy. The answer, of course, was Vikings, who invaded the area around the year 1000.

    Given that their behaviour at that time tended to be a trifle exuberant, they mostly seem to have settled down happily after mingling with the local population wherever they invaded. Of course, when there wasn't a local population to help quell their psychopathic tendencies, they spent all their time murdering each other.

    Makes one proud, I must say.

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  4. Apart from which they popped back later as Normans ( Normen? ) to teach us how to build castles....and cathedrals....

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  5. ...and to give us the phrase "Die, Saxon dog!"

    Disconcertingly, Scandinavians pronounce "Viking" as "Veeking", which makes them sound like a 1950s doowop group - Freddie Vee and the Vee-Kings or somesuch.

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  6. ... anything to do with novelists and poets in particular - pens, specs, desks, walking-sticks, notebooks, whatever ...
    OK, how about Mark Twain's Iron Age typewriter?

    And this Neolithic film of Mr Twain (a) demonstrating that he can walk and smoke at the same time and (b) having tea with his daughters, one of them largely obscured throughout, Thomas Alva Edison being a great inventor but not so hot a director?

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    1. What do you think the thing like a lavatory chain does? Pulls the carriage back to the start position when you reach the end of a line, I suppose.

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    2. After an hour or so of Googling the subject I am none the wiser and can't answer your question.

      I can tell you that the YWCA put the first cohort of female typists through a rigorous physical examination to make sure that they could endure the stress. Eight of them came through alive.

      I can tell you that the engineers working on the design of typewriters borrowed from every other device they knew about, including piano keys and the foot treadles for sewing machines.

      Western Union wanted typewriters to make hard copies of telegraph messages more legibly and more quickly than clerks with quill pens.

      And I can tell you that the impetus came partly from the need for the Remington company to find some way to make money now that the Civil War was finished and people weren't buying so many guns, damn them, and there was a limit to how many sewing machines they would buy.

      Anyone remember the Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in joke about the Californian company that gave away a free shotgun with every sewing machine bought – "so messy trying to sew people to death"? Ho ho. They may have missed a piece of history making its forgotten presence felt.

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  7. I think Mrs.G.has a point about the English.
    To return to the Norseman thang,should Mr.G.ever go haywire,and you know,have his evil way and top half a dozen folks with his viking axe,the Judge schooled over and over again in minority grievance may take cognisance of his cultural sensitivities-a bit of rape and pillage being historically part of that-and put his name down for anger management classes;why not everyone else plays the card.

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    1. I'm definitely keeping that card up my sleeve for future use. I used to employ it as an excuse for drinking too much, and, when I was six and recently arrived in this country, used it to explain why I was weeing in the street rather than waiting until I got home - i.e. "Every child does it Norway." Which they certainly did when I was a nipper.

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