Low life
Wars and peace
Jeffrey Bernard Ihave just watched an episode in a series of documentaries about the first world war. Anything to do with that tragedy is a dreadful tear-jerker for me, but I never think that films made up of ancient library footage and in particular stills work very well. There are always the inevitable shots of the gassed blind literally leading the blind and those imperial cousins strutting on their horses behind the lines and they would still be strutting even if they had been filmed with modern cameras.
But there is one obligatory event always included in anything about the first world war and that is the British and German armies getting together and pausing to play a game of football on Christmas Day 1914. That is one event which always makes me smile wryly because it reminds me of the occasional armistices that occurred during my marriages. I was reminded of them by a combination of watching the film and also by the fact that I had just been writing some Christmas cards rather early in the day, It is odd how these films plus anything in sepia can make even horrors nostalgic. But one which is regularly trotted out by televi- sion which is getting very boring is the one about anything that has the remotest con- nection with seafaring. There is usually a sequence of stills of old men dressed in sou'-westers in. heaps of fishing nets and with a non-stop soundtrack of a sailor singing an unintelligible sea-shanty and it's all frightfully jolly. Well, you don't have to be 150 years old to know that it wasn't quite like that.
Although we are not at war any more there was something like an armistice a couple of weeks ago when my second wife came over here for a short visit from Spain where she now lives and subsists on heaven knows what. Unlike the troops of old we don't exactly play football but we talk for a while about our daughter and then get round to the nitty-gritty. There are no more recriminations because it saves a lot of trouble and boredom to own up and admit to anything at all and just nod in agreement to anything that follows, 'Do you remember how awful you were that night when . ..?' 1 hope to God there is some metaphorical football this Christmas although I'm tempted to go to a hotel and simply play with room service but that would be a waste of money. After all, the television in the hotel won't be any differ- ent from my own which will be showing The Great Escape, The Sound of Music and The Magnificent Seven as per bloody usual. Perhaps i should now go to a hotel, manu- facture a row with the chambermaid and return on Christmas Eve and play football under the mistletoe as Big Ben strikes mid- night.
In 1962 I worked on some of those sup- posedly ,nostalgic films myself when I worked in the cutting rooms at Ealing Stu- dios for the BBC. Unfortunately, I was lumbered with thousands of feet of film about King Edward VIII or the Duke of Windsor and that was nowhere like being sepia but a pretty nasty black and white. Someone like Alastair Forbes who proba- bly had afternoon tea with him every day probably thinks he was wonderful, but he came over to this humble assistant editor as being an absolute wanker. God knows who his wife thought she was. That was his cine- matic obituary. Understandably enough Winston Churchill liked his obituary so much he came to see it two or three times to look at the additions that were his latest achievements as they were added, but that was a terrible job.
I had to work hour upon hour of over- time, what with working on Z Cars as well, for which I got no extra money or time off in lieu, but was nevertheless given a severe reprimand by the head of the department one morning for being ten minutes late. That was — and probably still is — par for the course at the BBC. At the end of my time there they could have filmed some of us leaving the club at Television Centre at closing time like the gas-blinded soldiers in the first world war. In black and white, not sepia.
Its from our dentist. We didn't floss regularly, so now we're going to be extinct.'
Previous page
