Callan - any good? - any opinions?

Short and rather pathetic request for help...

I have been offered (at a very cheap price) two new, shrink-wrapped box sets of DVDs which between them cover series 1 and 2 of the old Callan TV show (in monochrome, including the original pilot programme A Magnum for Schneider) and series 3 and 4 (by which time the programmes were filmed in colour).

Apart from the legendary wargaming scenes (which I do not believe I have ever seen, even on YouTube), I feel that this is probably a worthwhile buy at the price anyway, as a piece of vintage TV.

Problem is that I probably saw maybe two of the original shows (they date from a period when I mostly didn't own a TV), and I have found on recent nostalgia trips that vintage TV was often embarrassingly poor. So I am torn - half of me says "Yeah! - Callan! - great", and the other half says "but what do I know about Callan? - I never saw it - I have no opinion".

Anyone out there a Callan fan? - would you recommend the series? (it is very cheap).

Hooptedoodle #167 - More Buses for the Non-Collection

The original scope for this ad hoc collection was that they had to be real buses, with some relevance to my childhood years on Merseyside. In the wider interests of personal nostalgia, the range has increased a little, I guess, but I am still fighting off any suspicion that I may have become a bus enthusiast.

Here are three more - two which arrived this morning and one which I received a while ago, but never got around to photographing.

Another Crosville, this one a little later than the previous photos, but still 1960s -
Route H16, Elizabeth Rd, Huyton to Liverpool Pier Head. This picture is
dedicated to the bold Mr Front, whose dad used to drive Crosvilles out of their
West Kirby depot.

Eastern Scottish service bus from Edinburgh to my present home village, 1970s
period. Route 124 survives to this day, but the buses, of course, don't look like proper
buses. In those days, on the rare occasions I journeyed to North Berwick I'd have
used the train.

This is a real nostalgia feast for me. Edinburgh Corporation service 16, Oxgangs
to Silverknowes; for many years, I travelled to work on this route every day
- South Morningside School to St Andrew Square. I remember that at one time
I read the whole of Loraine Petre's book about the 1813 campaign on my bus
journeys. Tricky unfolding the maps on the bus, I recall.

Hooptedoodle #163 - The Grand Prix at Aintree

I’ve been very busy with the dreaded Real Life for a couple of weeks, a situation which is likely to persist for a little while longer, so I have done no painting and there has been no progress with the ECW campaign. None of this is a problem – it was all expected and planned, and the sector of Real Life I have been busy with is something I am very enthusiastic about anyway. There is a wargames-related development shaping up in the form of some forthcoming figures I have commissioned, but I’m not allowed to say anything about that yet.

Things should get back on track in February in the Campaigning and Blogging Dept, but, to avoid the Prometheus saga shrivelling up altogether, I decided to publish a rather long nostalgia post which I drafted up some weeks ago for my own amusement. Here goes.

The Grand Prix at Aintree

The Grand National - one of the smallest fences

A little while ago I was sorting through some folders of my photographs, and I found some pictures that I took about 10 years ago, on a visit to Aintree racecourse.

As I have mentioned before, I was born and raised in Liverpool, a large and workmanlike industrial city and port in the north-west of England. To its children, and to people who have grown to love the place, it possesses a certain vigour, not to say charm, but I grew up when it was still extensively wrecked from the air raids of WW2, when there was not enough money to get on with rebuilding it properly and things were, to use a fashionable term, austere.

There was not a lot of organised fun about life in Liverpool at that time – I think we had a couple of active theatres, we had a very famous orchestra which was resident at the rebuilt Philharmonic Hall, we had two so-so football teams whose glories were mostly in the past, and there were a number of other attractions, but nothing really to write home about (assuming that home was somewhere else). The relative boom time of the 1960s was still mostly in the future.

What we did have, though, was the Grand National, at Aintree. For the benefit of non-British readers, the Grand National is a very old, very famous horse race, run over very large, permanent fences, of the type which in Britain is known as a steeplechase. This was a mighty event, run every year, which attracted huge crowds and lots of money to our humble corner of the Provinces. The racecourse and the event, at Aintree, on the northern edge of the city, were owned by the very wealthy Topham family – I think the chargehand of the day was Mrs Mirabel Topham, an impressively large and strong minded lady. Though her horse race brought a great deal of welcome money to the city, she seems to have spent a lot of time arguing with the City Council. One of the areas of contention was Melling Road.

Mrs Topham

Melling Road, you see, was a public thoroughfare which ran right through the middle of the racecourse area, and the track crossed it at two points, which required the road itself to be closed whenever the track was in use and turf and straw to be temporarily laid on it to provide a continuous surface for the horses.

Modern aerial view, North at the top. You can see Melling Road splitting the
area into two, and that the links joining the two portions of the road circuit have gone

Sometime around 1953, someone in the Topham empire had the brainwave of constructing a race track for motor cars alongside the steeplechase course. It was a flat and rather uninspiring circuit compared with the great European tracks, to be sure, but, since racing on public roads – even closed public roads – was illegal in the UK, a track on private land provided a much-needed venue, it was at least as interesting as the perimeter tracks of retired WW2 airfields (which provided most of the British venues at that time, for a sport that was growing rapidly in popularity) and – spectacularly – it could share the very substantial grandstands and spectator amenities built for the Grand National, which was a very attractive proposition indeed. At the time, it was announced as “the Goodwood of the North”, which seems odd now, but the idea of a combined horse and car racing facility on private land (as had been built by the Duke of Richmond, near Chichester, in Sussex) was very appealing. Naturally, race reports and films of the day refer sniffily to the unattractive nature of Liverpool itself, and the “throat catching stink” of the British Enka works next door. Monte Carlo it certainly was not.

Start of the 1962 Aintree 200 (by this time the race was 200 Km, not miles),
showing the impressive grandstands

Just to prove they weren't really monochrome cars, here's Bonnier, the Swedish
driver, in a factory-entered Porsche at the 1960 "200" race - his car was, erm, silver...

The Aintree circuit had a 3-mile “Grand Prix” version, which utilised the big Grand National facilities and required closure of the Melling Road, as discussed. The Council may just about have been prepared to close it for a big honey-pot like the country’s biggest horse race, but motor racing was a different proposition altogether, and a sniping war between the city’s elected and the Tophams was a feature of the period. There was also a smaller, “club” circuit which did not need the road to be closed, but which therefore did not use the main pit building or the big grandstands. It did, however, allow crowds to stand on the romantically named Railway Embankment, from which you could see almost all of the track (if you had remarkable eyesight).

The first motor race meeting was long before my time, and the cars ran anti-clockwise – I think this was simply because it was the same direction as the horses. Afterwards, the racing was always clockwise, which is more normal for cars (for some reason). Mrs Topham was thinking big right from the outset – she obviously had designs on hosting the world championship British Grand Prix at Aintree, and – location apart – the venue had some very obvious attractions. She got her way very quickly – in 1955 the British GP was held there, in very hot weather in July, and it was a huge success. There was mixed feeling about the German Mercedes team finishing 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th in the big race, only 14 years after the Luftwaffe had been busily bombing the port of Liverpool into ruins, but the German team were smart enough to arrange for young Stirling Moss to win the race, ahead of his great team-mate, Juan Fangio, so everyone was very happy.

Moss wins the 1955 GP, from Fangio

And again in 1957, this time for the Vanwall team

Of course, there was more politics behind the scenes. The organising body of the British GP at Aintree was the Royal Automobile Club, and they made it a huge spectacle, rather upstaging the previous efforts at Silverstone, a converted airfield in Northamptonshire, where the organising body was the British Racing Drivers Club (a lot more blazers and moustaches at Silverstone, then). The rivalry produced a short-lived compromise whereby the respective organisers and venues took turn about to host the British GP. The Aintree “200” (200 miles) race was an international event held each year before the start of the world championship season began in earnest, and this quickly became established as a major event on the calendar each Spring. Aintree had its turn of staging the Grand Prix itself in 1955 (when Moss won his first world championship race, as mentioned), in 1957 (when Moss went one better and won in the Vanwall, thus becoming the first British winner of a Grande Epreuve in a British car since Henry Segrave’s exploits with the Sunbeam in the 1920s), in 1959 (when Brabham won in a Cooper-Climax – a rear-engined car – on his way to becoming world champion that year), in 1961 (when I was there, as I shall describe shortly) and – out of sequence and for the last time – in 1962 (when Jimmy Clark won it in a Lotus). Thereafter the British GP was triumphantly taken back to its “rightful” home and the blazers at Silverstone, where it has been held – apart from a few years at Brands Hatch, in Kent – ever since.

I was taken to the “200” meeting in 1959 by my “Uncle” Duggie, a family friend. It was a very long day out, and I was very young, so I think that, since I have no recollection of seeing Jean Behra, the French driver, win in a works Ferrari, we may have left before the end of the main event.

After that I went to the “200” race each year, on my own or – sometimes – with a school chum. The fact that nobody ever went with me a second time suggests that already, at that age, my obsessive brand of enthusiasm was a difficult thing to be subjected to for a complete day out! It was a real adventure. I would set off from home at around 7am on the Saturday morning, wrapped in my warmest clothing, with an old gas-mask satchel containing a day’s supply of sardine sandwiches and Penguin biscuits. The number 61 bus would take about an hour to get me up to Walton, in the north end of the city, and then the best bet was just to walk to Aintree and the circuit. I would get there around 9:30 to 10, I guess, and the public address system would be playing the BBC’s Saturday morning programmes – including the legendary “Uncle Mac” and his children’s musical request show. If I ever hear any of those novelty tunes from that time I can still see Aintree racecourse on a shivery, grey morning, with the odd sports car warming up on the track and the grandstands slowly filling up as the wealthier ticket-holders arrived.

Typically, a day’s racing would have events for Formula Junior (single seaters with production engines of about 1 litre – this was regarded as a great training ground for the future GP stars), sports cars, saloon cars and GT (Grand Touring) cars as well as the big Formula 1 event, so it was a long, long day. I used to get into the (cheap) public enclosure, and go to the top of the Railway Embankment, where I would sit on my plastic raincoat, armed with my plastic binoculars. You were a long way from the cars, but you could see a lot of the track, and the fastest part ran past the embankment. You could get closer to the action by going to the bottom of the bank, of course, but the cars were still the other side of the Grand National track, and the big jumps on the horse track meant that you only got a glimpse of the cars as they whizzed between two adjacent jumps. Up at the top was best – it was windy, and it was uncomfortable, but it was the place to go. Sadly, I did not have a camera, and I lost my treasured souvenir programmes years ago – they probably fell to pieces, in fact.

I only once attended the Grand Prix – in 1961. That was a very exciting season. The international body which ran the F1 championship had changed the rules so that the engines were reduced to 1.5 litres. The British had just started to become successful under the previous rules, and so did what the British always tend to do – they wasted the two years notice period protesting about the rule changes. The Italian team, Ferrari, of course, just got on with developing new cars for the new rules, so that by the time the 1961 season got under way the British teams were all using bought-in 4-cylinder Coventry Climax engines, developing around 145 bhp, while the Ferraris had nice new V6-cylinder jobs developing about 185 bhp, and increasing to around 200 bhp later in the season. The season should have been a walkover for Ferrari, but they had a team of drivers which was probably their weakest for some years (good enough drivers, but no real stars – they had two Americans, Phil Hill and Ritchie Ginther, and a German nobleman, Count Wolfgang Berghe von Trips), and also Stirling Moss produced some real virtuoso performances in his underpowered Lotus at Monte Carlo and at the German Nurburgring, and he really punched well above his weight. For a while, it looked as though he might be able to offer a heroic challenge for the championship title.

Lord, didn't it rain... here is the start in 1961, with the shark-nosed Ferraris to the fore

When I went to the British GP at Aintree in July, Von Trips, Phil Hill and Moss had already each won one race, and things were looking set for a real thriller of a season. Race day was awful – torrential rain of monsoon proportions was a feature of the main race. I was absolutely soaked through. In the early stages of the race, Moss took advantage of his ability in the tricky conditions and harrassed the more powerful Ferraris, but eventually he was forced to retire, and Von Trips, Hill and Ginther finished in line astern in the first three places, well ahead of the rather breathless opposition. After his retirement, Moss took over  the new, experimental, 4-wheel drive Ferguson car which had also been entered by his team, and circulated very quickly in the wet conditions. Of course, he was not challenging for the race lead, but I believe that I can thus claim that, in the Ferguson on that day, I got a glimpse of the last front-engined car ever to run in a Grand Prix.

Von Trips led for most of the race

Moss chased the Ferraris for a while...

...and when the rain was at its heaviest he got up to second place, but his car didn't last

So he had a shot in the experimental 4WD Ferguson, last front-engined GP racer
ever. In the background is the Railway Embankment, with the weather
gradually improving - I was somewhere near the top middle, soaking wet

So Moss didn’t win, and his world championship hopes slid further. With the fickleness of youth, I decided that if my British hero could not win then I would also support the Ferraris, the handsome young German nobleman seemed a suitable back-up hero, and the most likely favourite for the championship, so I transferred at least part of my allegiance to Von Trips.

Von Trips looks subdued at the end of the race. Perhaps he was as
cold and wet as I was. He was now the strong favourite for the
World Championship, but he was dead within six weeks

A few weeks later, Moss won brilliantly in the German GP, but the next race was at the very fast Monza circuit, for the Italian race, and no-one was expected to get close to the Ferraris. My new hero, Von Trips, was killed very publicly and in very gladiatorial fashion when his car crashed on the second lap at Monza and he was thrown out onto the track. Phil Hill won the race and claimed a joyless championship for Ferrari. I was appalled by the accident, but recovered sufficiently to take an interest in the start of the 1962 season, for which the British teams had new engines and were expected to be competitive. For reasons which have never been explained, Moss crashed in the Easter Monday race at Goodwood, before the championship season commenced, and was seriously injured. His life was in the balance for a while, but he recovered, though he never raced at the top level again.

That did it – I gave up on motor racing. It was 1980 before I started following F1 racing seriously again, and it was 1985 before I attended an international event again. As is the nature of things, those boyhood heroes were bigger and brighter, their cars more spectacular, their exploits more hair-raising, though in reality the racing of the early 1960s was a brave but feeble effort compared to the modern sport.

When I was in the 6^th Form at grammar school, I once “sagged off” during a free study morning, and, just for old times’ sake, took the old 61 bus up to Walton, trekked up to Aintree, climbed through the gates at Melling Road and walked around the old Grand Prix circuit in the rain – I think I gave up before I got back to the grandstands, but I waved to the empty Railway Embankment as I passed.

Here are a couple of the nostalgia visit pics from 2004 which kicked off this
reminiscence - here are three British Grand Prix cars from the 1950s, from
left to right, the green cars are a 1952 HWM, a 1953 Cooper-Bristol and a
1955 B-Type Connaught - all before my time!

A much more competitive car - this is a Maserati 250F - quite a low, late one
- maybe 1957

The Club Circuit still exists – there are races there, but none of them involves the full track, and they are all minor events. In 2004 I went down there with a friend to visit a special open day which featured guest appearances by Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks and Roy Salvadori – British stars from Aintree’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a bus trip around the track, which was fun, and there were a lot of old cars on display. We also signed a massive petition objecting to a planned redevelopment which would permanently destroy what was left of the old Grand Prix circuit – housing and new grandstands near the old Melling Crossing. In fact the fund-raiser and the petition gave the fleeting appearance of being a faint scam, since it seems that the planning permission for the development had already been signed off, and the changes were not up for negotiation. I imagine the Topham family had lost interest in international motor racing long before this date also.

The circuit is mostly still there – the TV camera car drives along it to film the horse racing at Aintree – but the old Melling Road now has to be closed only for the horses, which is traditional and is probably as it should be. The upstart RAC British Grand Prix in the North is long gone, as is the 12-year-old with the sardine sandwiches, but it is still a little sad to think that the asphalt track where Fangio and Co raced is just a service road now.

Hooptedoodle #158 - Newton's Bollocks

In a former lifetime, when I was Lord High Panjandrum in charge of something-or-other for a nameless (and rather stupid) organisation in the finance industry, someone gave me a Newton's Cradle, which was the sort of well-intentioned, pointless executive toy that people gave each other in those days. It was fun for about 90 seconds, and after that it just sat on a dark corner of my meetings table and gathered dust. Eventually I got tired of people playing pranks such as altering the length of the strings so that the balls missed each other, and it got cleared out. I don't know where it went - there must be a lot of pointless executive toys from the 1980s and 90s lying around somewhere - perhaps someone collects them, buys and sells them on eBay - perhaps there is a weird museum somewhere.

Whatever, I have not seen or heard of Newton's Cradle for many years. As part of my Christmas present, my son (who, at 12, is developing into a mathematician of some considerable talent - I hope he ends up less nerdy and boring than his old man...) gave me - well, that's right - you guessed.

Sadly, it has not gone well - something had gone wrong with this particular example in its travels between China and here. The balls had become tangled inside the packaging, and the strings are very thin, transparent, nylon fishing line. Our attempts to disentangle it have met with no success at all - in fact, thus far, the combined attentions of me and my family have, I believe, made things rather worse than they were at the start.

I have an instinctive resistance to phrases like "hopelessly entangled", but I believe we may have a case of just that here, unlikely though it may seem. Things may improve, but time and frustration do not come entirely free of cost, so this may be your only chance to see an example of [roll on drums...] Newton's Bollocks.

Not a big seller, I fear - though I could be open to offers if anyone is interested.

Hooptedoodle #157 - Happy Tangerines to Everyone

Christmas is coming – among other clues, I can tell since I can no longer bear to switch on the TV because the advertising gives me hives, and also our washing machine has broken down and cannot be fixed until the 29^th.

This morning’s breakfast fruit reminded me of Christmases in my childhood – there were certain comestibles which I always associated with Christmas at home. I’m not talking about obvious stuff, like turkeys (I never had turkey for Christmas until I was well into my teens – we used to have a goose, sometimes a duck); I can remember my mum making her own mincemeat (to save money, I would guess), and I recall dates (in those distinctive boxes with a camel and a palm tree on the label), walnuts (which I have never cared for) and – in particular – tangerines.

At the bottom of my Christmas stocking, the tradition was that I would always find a couple of tangerines and a silver sixpence. I have no idea how Father Christmas remembered every year, nor how he carted around great masses of tangerines – assuming everyone got them, but they were always there.

I knew that you could buy tangerines at any time of the year, of course, but it seems that we didn’t, and it was such a Christmassy thing in our family that it would have seemed wrong somehow. A tangerine was smaller than an orange, and had a completely different taste – I liked them.

Tangerines seem to be regarded with special affection in folk lore, too – as I recall, both Blackpool FC and Dundee United were always called the Tangerines – not merely the Oranges.

Anyway, today’s idle question is, what became of the tangerine? Whatever it says on the supermarket shelves is gospel, as we know. We went through a period of buying something called mandarin oranges, which were small oranges, but I’m not sure they were tangerines, as in proper tangerines. Nowadays we can get clementines, which to me just seem like small oranges, and we can get satsumas, which I guess must be the same as, or very similar to, tangerines, but they don’t seem to taste just quite the same.

I hasten to add that I enjoy my breakfast satsumas, but I would be sad to think that the tangerine, like the real banana, had succumbed to progress. Any tangerine fanciers/experts out there?

By the way – in passing – the washing machine problem. Bosch’s customer service very nearly got a Donkey Award this morning, but are spared at the last minute. Bosch cannot arrange an engineer visit unless you can give them some numbers from a plate mounted inside the door of the machine. You can see what’s coming: part of the problem with our machine was that we couldn’t open the door. Eventually we did manage to get it open, so the visit is booked, but if we had not opened it then we could not have had an engineer. Seems odd, but we’ll let it go, in the euphoria of having been granted a reprieve. The engineer’s visit, of course, costs £95, excluding parts, and even if he does nothing or cannot fix the machine, the £95 is compulsory. We’ll see how it goes – we went through this scenario in 2008, when the charge was only £69, which is still a handsome fee for telling someone their machine is knackered. You may have your own views on after-sales service scams, but it’s Christmas and for a little while I shall simply believe that a nice man will come and fix our machine. I have the paperwork for the Donkey Award standing by, though, just in case.

I wish everyone a contented and peaceful Christmas – may your satsumas be sweet and your rinse cycle run smoothly – may your eyes be bright and your clothes be dew fresh every day.

Have a good one.

Hooptedoodle #156 – Holidays with Clues

Themed Holidays - for loonies?

I was in Edinburgh this morning – I had a hospital appointment, so had to be on the 09:26 from our local station. Left my car at my mother’s house (private superstition – just in case the hospital keeps me in overnight – you know how it is…) and walked through a light snowstorm to the station. Blooming freezing, I can tell you.

When I got to Edinburgh it was still very cold, but the sun was shining, and Princes Street was looking as good as it can these days – very attractive, if you like mobile phone shops. Saw the famous tram – not so shiny-new now, but still exciting – I must go on it sometime soon – maybe out to the airport and back.

I had just a little time to kill, and as I walked along Rose Street I passed the rear of British Home Stores, and was very surprised to be reminded they have a restaurant – well, a “caff”, really. I haven’t been in, nor thought about, a BHS restaurant for maybe 25 years – in a moment of nostalgic perversity, I went in and ordered a cup of coffee – perverse only in the sense that I recall that BHS used to serve the worst coffee I ever tasted. I read my book for a little while in there – it was warm, the place was almost empty, and it was entertaining to watch the staff not quite managing to put up a big Christmas tree. Lots of shouted instructions and things falling. The coffee was undrinkable; it is reassuring in these days of uncertainty and slipping standards to know that some traditions, at least, are kept safe for us.

The hospital visit was trivial in the end – they took me early, as soon as I arrived, a quick X-Ray and I was out again. On the way back up to the station, my No. 29 bus was stuck in traffic, and a sign in a shop window in Stockbridge caught my eye. It was obviously a travel agency, but I couldn’t quite make out this sign. Eventually the bus reached the window, and I confirmed that the sign did, in fact, say “Painting and Pilates Holidays in Italy”, which I had previously discounted as meaningless – or at least unlikely. Painting and Pilates? Very strange – I can think of a whole pile of things I would like to do in Italy – especially on a cold Scottish morning – but wouldn’t have thought of pilates. Hmmm.

“Wandering Around Gawping at Tourist Sites in Paris”? That would work.

“Getting Drunk and Falling Over in Spain”? Not for me, certainly, but there appears to be a big demand for it.

I recall that, years ago, a widowed friend of my first wife went on a very expensive Cookery Holiday in Provence. A party of comfortably-off British women of a certain age all went on a conducted bus tour of Provence, watched local chefs in action and had a go themselves. Like the old school domestic science cookery lessons, they had to pay extra for the ingredients, and I understand that the holiday turned out to be more about the tastes and opinions of the English gauleiterin who organised and led the tour than it was about food in Provence. It was, in short, an exercise in rather shrill discipline and control, conducted in a foreign country at considerable cost to the attendees. Maybe we could have predicted this – I don’t know.

In truth, some of my own holidays over the years have been less than perfect – it might have helped if we had been given more clues up front – “Playing Boardgames in a Rain-Sodden Tent in Brittany for 2 Weeks” – “Trying to Get a Replacement Alternator for a Very Old Ford Cortina in the Jura Mountains” – these and a few others would have been useful, but it isn’t really like that in the world of holidays.

What this subject really reminded me about was James Last Holidays [what?]. Ages ago, a friend of mine at work, and his wife, were passionate about the James Last Orchestra, and used to spend a lot of money going to see them whenever they came to Edinburgh. If you are unfamiliar with the JLO then you have my congratulations – well done. I understand that James (real name Hansi) is still alive and going strong, aged 85. In his field, he was almost uniquely successful – for many years he ran a big touring orchestra, with all the top instrumental and vocal soloists he could get his hands on, added rows and rows of very attractive girl violinists dressed in low-cut lace blouses, and charged an absolute fortune for tickets. Old Hansi had completely cornered the market in exquisite bad taste – everything they played was faultless, arranged and engineered to perfection, and it stank to heaven. If you liked over-the-top big-band versions of Presley hits, or excerpts from Mozart’s horn concerto with bass guitar and castanets, or grindingly sickly romantic ballads, the JLO was for you. It was, absolutely, a product of its age; a number of really top-quality dance-bands came out of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s – Bert Kaempfert’s was another – and what they specialised in was superbly engineered LP recordings of covers of other people’s hit songs – particularly on the German Polydor label. Elderly audiophiles who had a little money to spend (i.e. who owned a “stereogram” – remember those? – they were the ones you could hear from next door) bought their LPs by the lorry-load. Hansi made a great many people happy – especially his bank manager and the West German economy – so good luck to him.

Yeah - right...

Anyway – back to my story. My work colleague talked me into paying some obscene amount for two tickets, and my wife and I joined him and his wife at a JLO concert at the Playhouse. Unspeakable. Couldn’t be faulted in any way except that it made me feel physically unwell. Somehow we got mugged into going to two further concerts on subsequent tours – each dearer than the previous one, and all the old ladies in the audience used to call out to the singers, who blew kisses and so on, while Herr Last posed and minced and almost conducted, and played to the ancient gallery like a true old showbiz ham. We couldn’t turn down the offer of tickets because – well, because we didn’t want to offend anyone. How much evil in the world is carried on because someone didn’t want to cause offence? After two further helpings I eventually found some unbeatable reason not to attend the next one, and then we were, mercifully, off the roller.

The audiences at these shows were something to behold – all dressed to the nines, and all loving it, blue rinses and all. The relevance to my story about holidays is that you could actually go on a James Last holiday – if you were a registered fan. The programmes were full of adverts. You could go on a cruise from Bremen (Last’s birthplace), and there would be music playing all day, every day (guess whose?), and there would be dances at night featuring JLO tribute bands who had once received a pay-cheque from Hansi himself, and during the days there would be walking tours of Bremen, to visit sites associated with Hansi’s childhood etc, where you could buy signed souvenirs, and there would even be some gigantic organised swapmeets, where you could buy and sell your rare JLO albums and memorabilia. After all these years, I still cannot think of a better working definition of Hades.

Of course, Father Time catches up with all of us in the end, but the thought of what those James Last Holidays might have been like still chills me to the marrow. For me, the man is best revered for his starring role in a famous musician’s joke:

Q – What is the difference between the James Last Orchestra and a buffalo?

A – A buffalo has the horns at the front and the arse at the back.

Genealogy: The Descent of the Higgins Pikeman

This post was originally intended to be an email to Old John, who is the present owner and producer of the old Les Higgins/Pheonix Model Developments 20mm wargames ranges. John has supplied me with the greater part of my ECW armies during the last two years - especially in the Foot department, and I am very fond of these elegant, stylish little figures - I hope he will forgive this public version of what was intended as a private discussion, but I thought it might be of rather wider interest. In the course of buying in new castings, obtaining old stuff from eBay and receiving occasional samples from John of forthcoming products, I suddenly realised that there are more variants of some of the figures than I would expect, given that Higgins did not stay in business very long in their original form.

This is entirely a matter of idle curiosity - I'd be very grateful for any clues or expert views on how this all works, but it doesn't matter, really, beyond scratching a vague itch. As an example, here are some variations on one single pose - the standing pikeman. There is also a pikeman stooped to receive horse, and there is a pikeman involved in what looks to my inexpert eye to be "push of pike", and there are variants of these also, but, to keep things simple, let's just stick to the standing pikeman.

The chap labelled A is (I think) from the original (drop-cast?) "subscription" series which Higgins produced in the 1960s; John has cast some of these, and I'm pretty sure he has them back in production now. D is the famous mainstream pikeman that Higgins produced in large quantities - I'd have chosen a cleaner casting if I'd had a second cup of coffee; I think this is one of the iconic wargame figures from the early 1970s, and is probably largely responsible for Higgins' range being still regarded with such affection. E is a welcome extension to the range which John has added - the same pikeman, but in a hat. The other two figures? - B and C - no idea. They appear to be production figures, and presumably are earlier than D, but they are different again.

The subscription figures are rather slimmer than the later ones, with slightly smaller helmets, and easily distinguishable, but here I seem to have two examples which are similar in stature and style to the famous fellow at D. Maybe the hand-on-hip pose was easier to cast in commercial quantities?

Any thoughts would be most welcome, and if you are interested in the ECW, Marlburian or Colonial ranges of Les Higgins, remember that they are available now, and please contact John via his blog.

Hooptedoodle #139 – Fave Guitar Solos

A few days ago, I got involved in that most perennial of lowbrow pub debates, one whose pointlessness does not make it any less enjoyable – the weighty question of Which Are the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?

On this occasion my companions were practising musicians (and I use the term “practising” deliberately), but it does not make a lot of difference, because the discussion is always pushed down the same lines by a couple of recognised (though unspoken) sub-clauses:

The solo must be from a (vocal) popular song – and one that everyone knows – none of your alternative stuff – no Brazilians, for example…

OTT categories such as Heavy Metal are normally excluded (or at least subject to drug tests)

The whole thing is so slanted by your age, what you like and everything else that it usually mutates into “What Are Generally Recognised as the All-Time Great Guitar Solos?” – i.e. it’s everyone else on trial here, not me.

As always, we came up with the standard answers:

Probably the solo from “Hotel California”

Probably the solo from Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years”

Probably the solo from that Carpenters’ record that we can’t remember, because we wouldn’t admit to listening to the Carpenters anyway

Probably the solo from Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over”, because it’s instantly recognizable

Probably the instrumental sections from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (which can still get you thrown out of most of the music shops I know)

Probably Dr Brian May’s solo on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (which is getting very close to OTT)

Probably the duet solo from “The Boys Are Back in Town”, though a number of other Thin Lizzy records must be up there too

…and a lot more of the same – supply your own list (fun this, isn’t it?).

It’s very easy to get sidetracked into artists one particularly likes, which is too close to Your Specialist Subject for general comfort, so we have to avoid that (in my case, it would involve people like Robben Ford and Toninho Horta, which would get me blank looks all round). I did, however, put forward a record which I don’t think is in any way a classic, and it certainly wasn’t a hit, and it’s not by a big-name singer, and overall I don’t especially like it (which feels as though all this underselling should make it OK) – it’s Dave Berry’s “My Baby Left Me” from early 1964.

Who?

A quick word on Dave Berry – when I was a lad, he had a band called The Cruisers, who were known as the second best band in Sheffield (I think Joe Cocker’s band was regarded as the best), and I once saw them at the Cavern in Liverpool, where, I have to say, I thought they were fairly average. Berry is still around, and still performing, so all the best to him, and I shall be careful what I say (in case he comes to get me), but my view on his band seems to have been shared by the people at Decca Records, because after contributing a couple of so-so B-sides the Cruisers no longer appeared on Dave Berry’s recordings, and instead Decca used some of the best session players in the country at the time (which is a whole other subject). My Baby Left Me is short, an unspectacular cover of Presley’s record, but it includes a little gem of a solo from Jimmy Page, no less, who was 19 at the time it was recorded (swine).

By the standards of the day, this was how to do it – say what you’ve got to say in one chorus – first take, if you please – then pack up your stuff and clear out – the studio’s booked for someone else after 3pm.

It still doesn’t get into anyone else’s list, but if you haven’t heard it, here it is.