They were the first all-female band to write and play on their album to top the USA album chart, yet they never really broke the UK.
They were an American New Wave band and New Wave in the USA did not seem to mean the same as in the UK where it was very much a second generation punk (like The Boomtown Rats). By the time they achieved commercial success they had become more pop than New Wave.
They are The Go-Gos.
I first heard them one afternoon at the weekend on the Richard Skinner show (radio 1). They were in the UK promoting the first single from their second album. I think it was Belinda Carlisle and Charlotte Caffey. They played a couple of songs from the first album – Automatic and Our Lips Are Sealed (the Fun Boy Three co-wrote the latter and they had a hit with it in the UK the next year). They said their debut, Beauty and the Beat, had sold single figures in the UK.
I was intrigued and liked the music, so the next Saturday I bought their first two albums. Beauty and the Beat is a pop masterpiece
The second album shows the all too common sophomore slump (the first album has all the songs that have been worked on for years and toured a lot, the second the group has a few weeks to write). The title track is a tour de force though and must have made a fortune – it is used in films and on TV a lot.
They went to star producer of the day Martin Rushent for their third album, but it was not a success and the group broke up. They were all successful post Go-Gos, but especially Belinda Carlisle. Belinda will be on the list later as a solo artist and there has already been a solo Jane Wiedlin track. The power of plastic surgery can be seen by comparing the Belinda Carlisle of the early 80s with the way she looks solo.
There were periodic reunions, each with a money-making album, plus a couple of new tracks, like Return to The Valley of the Go-Gos and God Bless the Go-Gos. There were also lawsuits as, at different times, Gina Schock and Kathy Valentine sued the band. It always seemed to work out in time for the reunion tours.
They are an important group – all female bands were rare. All female bands that were just not singing groups were, and are, incredibly rare. The Go-Gos were as wild as their male counterparts, using drugs and tormenting male groupies. Not the kind of sex equality the world is really after – but what the hell, they were out living the dream that so many men had easier access to.
This is an early, live, version. Interesting to see how it evolved – plus Jane Wiedlin looks like she is so enjoying herself. And Gina Schock – she was the gorgeous one in the band – and you can’t say that the drummer is the best looking one in many male bands😊
This song sums up going on holiday – so exuberant. Never leave the Valley of the GoGos.
Some of you may know I have ME, some will not. When I realised that I was going to be at home a lot more I decided that I would try and watch all the Best Picture Oscar winners and as many of the nominees as possible. These are my thoughts on the 60s winners.
There are far too many musicals that are nominated or win in the 1960s. There is a definite trend away from them. Regular readers will not be surprised that I do not think that any of them should have won. Sorry to Kristina Row.
In 1960 Billy Wilder’s The Apartment won, a romantic comedy that still looks like something out of the early 1950s. It is not Some Like It Hot, but history has pretty much forgotten the other nominees from this year– deservedly so.
In 1961 West Side Story won over The Hustler, The Guns of Navarone (which I am shocked to find out was nominated and yet The Great Escape was not in its year). Judgment at Nuremberg should have won – a star studded account of the Nazi war crime trials.
In 1962 Lawrence of Arabia won. It is beautifully shot but someone should take the scissors to it and make it an hour shorter. To Kill a Mockingbird should have won – one of the classic novels of the 20th century about racism in the south, the film is not as strong but far and away the strongest film of the year. Read the novel if you haven’t already, it was a book that I went into with no expectations and it totally blew me away.
Tom Jones won in 1964. Shocking that Cleopatra did not win – it is the last of the big sword and sandals films for a long time and is a magnificent feat.
Another musical, My Fair Lady, wins in 1964 and Mary Poppins was a runner up. Dr Strangelove should have won. I had not seen it until last year but I would suggest it is Kubrick’s best film. A cold war comedy with a tour de force performance by Peter Sellers.
Another musical won in 1965. Would a musical about the Nazis even be made now – not one like The Sound of Music. A staple of the BBC’s Christmas schedule in the 1970s it really is a steaming great pile of crap, in my opinion of course. Dr Zhivago is a magnificent epic about the Russian Revolution and should definitely have won.
A Man For All Seasons was a film I was shown at school several times so it obviously was highly rated by teachers of history who wanted to put their feet up. It is the story of Sir Thomas More’s disagreement with Henry VIII over religion. I cannot ague with this – even though one of the runners up is the classic Alfie.
1967 and 1969 have the strongest lists and start showing that times are changing. In 1967 I would have given it to the Beatty/ Dunaway classic Bonnie and Clyde, with its antihero protagonists and some hints at Clyde’s sexuality. It was a year when The Graduate is a runner up as is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a film about interracial marriage. The winner was In the Heat of the Night, starring Sydney Poitier about a black detective in Mississippi – it had to be filmed in Illinois though, which goes to show what the problems were with race in the south. Watch all of these.
I tried to watch Oliver! From 1968 again recently, I had seen it as a chiild. The truth still holds that musicals are torture. It is not a great year and most of the films are not famous – I would pick The Lion in Winter, about Henry II in 1183, starring Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins and Katherine Hepburn as the best of a substandard bunch of nominees.
The fact that Midnight Cowboy wins in 1969 really shows how far the industry came in 10 years. A film featuring a male prostitute and so incredibly down beat. Apart from the obligatory musical (Hello, Dolly!) I cannot choose between another Henry VIII historical block buster – Anne of the 1000 Days and the brilliant western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The final nominee was Z, a French political thriller that I had never heard of before this and is really excellent as well.
Definitely watch all the 1967 and 1969 nominations apart from the musicals. Two incredible years.
All of the above in my opinion.
This is a story song. Hilariously the video implies it is about a tramp being a hobo, when it is a song about prostitution. I heard this on a 60s compilation and never heard anything else by OC Smith.
I know that Heavy Metal is not to everyone’s taste, but it is a big branch of rock music. Actually, the music is complicated, rather than the wall of noise that people accuse of it being. I do not mean the vast variety of sub genres (thrash, death, speed, hair, soft, NWOBHM, etc) but the fact that a lot of the guitar playing is intensely complicated.
Research was done some years ago showing that, on average, metal fans were more intelligent than fans of other genres (of course to really accept that you have to overlook all the issues with calculating intelligence or what intelligence even means). No one is saying that all metal fans are geniuses, just the average is higher. However, when you look at personality tests, there are many similar traits across high performers and metal fans. Not that heavy metal gigs are totally filled with brain surgeons and cosmologists – every metal fan will have stories about a fan who is not the brightest lightbulb.
Ronnie James Dio runs through the history of classic heavy metal. He started in the band Elf that supported Deep Purple. When Richie Blackmore left Deep Purple and formed Rainbow Dio was the lead singer on their first three albums (as well as other members of Elf playing on them). Richie Blackmore is famously hard to work with and Graham Bonnet replaced Dio in Rainbow for Down To Earth (Bonnet only managed one album which says something about Dio’s ability to cope with Blackmore).
Dio filled the vacancy in Black Sabbath left by Ozzy Osbourne leaving. It is actually my favourite period of Black Sabbath – Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules. He recorded another album with the band in the 90s.
After that he had his solo career which produced many great tracks.
He died in 2010 of stomach cancer at the age of 67. He has been acclaimed on many occasions as the best Heavy Metal singer ever and I am not going to argue.
Rest in Paradise Ronnie James Dio. From your Rock ‘n’ Roll Children
I first started keeping a diary 40 years ago. Dad, Anne, Mike, Alison, Frances and I only went on a few summer holidays all together – there were scout and guide camps, after that some of us became too cool for it, though sub groups did go away. This was special, it was in a hotel and in term time, ,not long before my third form end of year exams (I did take all my books to revise but I have to admit that I barely looked at them).
Going on holiday in term time is bad obviously, but whilst it was frowned on in 1980 it was not a legal offence as it is now. It was, and remains, so much cheaper. Market forces – supply and demand – capitalist bollocks. Anyone without kids should go at other times (I mean I prefer it anyway) as young families usually have less money and are get charged more.
The Trelawney Hotel was near Bude. It was run by a family and, apart from the owner’s children, we were the only kids there. The weather wasn’t that good, though we did spend time on the beach building sandcastles and belly boarding.
The weather being not great was a bonus in retrospect. We explored Cornwall. Tintagel was my favourite – I was aware of King Arthur but did not know much. I bought a proper book on research into Arthur which contrasted strongly with the Roger Lancelyn Green book of the myths for children.
We visited the incredibly picturesque village of Clovelly which steeply slopes down to the sea. Everywhere we went there were Cornish Cream teas. This was on top of cereal and fried breakfasts; lunches (inevitably including Cornish pasties) and roast dinners, gammon steaks and casseroles. We did not starve on that holiday.
When we got home I hoovered up every book on Arthurian myths that I could find in the local library, even including The Camelot Caper, which turned out to be an archaeological themed mystery romance. I was totally ashamed to enjoy it and I read a lot of Elizabeth Peters’ books. Later I learned that she was a professor of archaeology and the books were very accurate. For many years my favourite Arthurian fiction was The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley – the legends retold from the viewpoints of the female protagonists. MZB’s legacy has been tarnished due to her support of her paedophile husband – if you can separate the work from the author the book is excellent (though ignore the co-written sequels).
The absolute best Arthurian books are much more recent. Phillip Purser-Hallard’s Devices trilogy is set in the modern day but is deeply entwined on British myth. The Pendragon Protocol, The Locksley Exploit and Trojans are great books and very original. Philip is just one of many writers that work without the acclaim they deserve. In a fair world he would be selling millions.
Oliver Costello has had a varied and interesting career. Mike bought me a best of compilation for a birthday many years ago. Still my favourite of Costello’s songs. It always takes me back to Cornwall.
Part two
John Hawkins posted this on Facebook and I think John should write his thoughts down. I will only say that I never listen to the radio (my ipod has about 40,000 songs) so I never heard the version he talks about. Posted here with his permission.
John:
No major comment here on the main subject matter, of which I am no expert, apart form to question the use of the ambiguous word “support” in relation to MLB’s actions towards her husband. “Support” can mean a range or things up to supporting a loved one through treatment for an illness such as that. This doesn’t apply here. The word I would use is “facilitation”.
The song: I have expected this one to appear and was a little surprised that what I am going to comment on is not mentioned – even in passing 🙂
This song, although a true classic, is rarely played on commercial radio any more. A local station to us (BOB FM, nee Jack FM) regularly played it though, along with a truly eclectic mix of songs (I miss BOB, bought up a couple of years ago by Global in order to shut it down as competition for their main brands of Capital and Heart 😦 ) and it was always played in its original form. However, I have heard it a couple of times recently on “Golden Oldie” stations when driving round the country. It is now played in a (very clumsily IMHO) edited form, with the line containing an offensive term (which I will not use) replaced by a line from elsewhere in the song.
So to the point here: This editing does indeed remove an offensive word from radio play. However, it also changes the art. That line is part of a carefully constructed song and is designed to elicit debate about what is the meaning of language. In the context of the song it reflects what the thoughts of the Checkpoint Charlie are at the moment of pulling the trigger. In terms of a group of letters a word itself cannot be offensive without meaning or intent. It can indeed cause offence but is offence not in the eye of the beholder, like beauty? I can say something not intending to cause offence, maybe in the context of trying to stimulate debate about a subject, but I cannot say that it will not cause offence. Should I not then say what I intend to for fear of this? How will I debate the issue if I cannot instigate the debate?
For a bit of further context the same word is used, quite deliberately, by both a “black” and a “white” character in the film Pulp Fiction (I do note that the white character has been taken by the writer / director – this may not be coincidence). It is this juxtaposition of characters using the same language for different purposes that provides the meaning of this piece of art. The creation as a whole has less meaning if one or both elements are removed. This is offensive (and is used in an offensive context) but it serves a purpose which itself is not offensive. It is also extremely funny when taken in context. For further debate, it seems to me that the racist language of Jimmy has caused more audible offence than the homophobic language of Winston in the same segment.
I will, of course, always consider what I say in context of offence and people who truly know me know that I will never say anything deliberately to offend. However, words are simply language, the intent is what gives the spoken word meaning. If, as in this song, I wish to say something about the mental state of another do I limit the power of my language by diluting it? If offence is taken at the “words” then that is to miss the point of what is being put forward. Art has always had, and fully used, a power to shock and offend. It is this offence that stimulates debate and discussion about what ethics and morals are and mean. Without that we can have no progression.
I prefer art in its true form and to try to understand the meaning it is conveying. I apologise if my doing this causes offence (I am also caused offence occasionally as that is part of the whole) but that is not my intention and so I will not stop preferring this. By all means be offended by what you experience but do not let your offence drive your own prejudice.
I was such a fussy eater as a kid. Whenever the family went to a Chinese restaurant I would have omelette and chips. The Chinese restaurant on Royston High Street actually did a really good omelette and chips. All I remember about the Chinese food from then was the smell of soy sauce. There is a Mongolian/ Chinese restaurant on the same site today, over 45 years later. Mike remembers on our 1972 holiday in Pevensey where Grandad and I ate chips in one caravan andf the rest had Chinese food in the other.
When we went out for a Chinese meal at university I was too embarrassed to say that I would not eat it and discovered I loved it. I mean I never learned to be any good with chopsticks but I found loads of food that I liked/ loved.
In my first year at Grant Thornton we audited a BMW dealership called Stocks in Ipswich (another client that was bought out by a mega dealership so I never went back). The Finance Director, Paul, was ex Grant Thornton and was generous with his expenses account. At lunch one day he offered me the chance to drive his BMW back to the dealership. I got in trouble for that, because if I had crashed it, there would have been consequences – the worst being me being fired. At the end of the job Paul took us for a Chinese, but told us it was chopsticks only. I was still hungry when I got home.
It was on a Grant Thornton course at Bradenham Manor that I discovered crispy aromatic duck. It is hard to believe that there was a time when this was not a staple of Chinese menus but there was. On the course one member of the group was 25. Recently married, she had to spend her birthday away from home. We got a cake for her and then went out to dinner. We all got really drunk and went to the cinema. I never saw any of those people after the end of the week, but that was a wonderful night.
In Colchester there are a couple of great Chinese restaurants. We still eat at the Chef Canton for special occasions – like Neil’s 50th birthday. The Sun Ho takeaway in Brightlingsea was the place I had more Chinese from than anywhere – there were a lot of nights after drinking with food from there.
At NewVIc our restaurant of choice was the Lotus in Docklands. It was a floating restaurant and one of my team, Sheleena, knew the owners so we got a really good deal. We had lots of leaving meals for people there – including Diane’s and Sam Smith’s. It looked really exotic and was a lovely place to spend an evening with friends.
(Diane’s leaving party – from the left Diane Campbell. Barbara Graham, Sam Smith, Ivan Charatan, ?, Jazz Chaggar, Samina Aziz, Susan Barrow, Linda Daniels, Dorcas Fagbebe, Warren Malthouse)
(The Lotus outside at night)
The best Chinese food in London is at Yi-Ban near city airport. It does not look much from outside but inside it is the most sophisticated Chinese restaurant I have ever been to. A live vocalist at the weekend and a big selection of cocktails. A view across the airport to Plumstead on the south of the Thames and the best crispy shredded chilli beef you could ever want. My niece Sophie could not believe that she had been taken to a Chinese restaurant that had an extensive cocktail menu.
(Inside Yi-Ban)
Mike gave me this album. I’m not a big Green Day fan but American Idiot is a great album
I have never been to Ireland, so my perspective is that of an outsider, but it appears to have come a long way since the 1990s. By all accounts at the start of the decade it was still stuck in the 1950s and was a quasi-theocracy. Since then it has accelerated through the twentieth century and twenty first to become a liberal society with the Catholic church being pushed away from power. Thank goodness – all around the world religious states tend to be more about politicians using religion to further their aims rather than be pious. The Catholic Church is a particularly egregious example of this as it has its own power structure and uses its influence to accumulate power. Ireland shows what that leads to, with its scandals over church paedophilia and unmarried mothers (though the paedophilia and sexual abuse is not a Catholic exclusive and appears to be a problem in any patriarchal organisation where openness is banned and dissent cracked down on).
Even so some great music came out of Ireland against all the odds. The Boomtown Rats are still underestimated, despite their great music and impact. Their biggest hit was I Don’t Like Mondays, about a mass shooting in the USA. Well the USA’s government and a big chunk pf their population still hasn’t worked out the link between gun crime and mass murder (if the second amendment is so important only allow weapons that were available when the Constitution was drafted). So good to see the NRA mired in scandal – if I was religious, I would believe that they would all go to hell – they can have their thoughts and bloody prayers.
The Rats were banned from performing in Ireland due to their denunciation of the establishment, especially the Catholic church. The song Banana Republic was their response – very different from their New Wave origins. It was their last big hit in the UK just four years after their first (and scandalously The Elephant’s Graveyard from the same album was only a minor hit).
The Rats were a New Wave band and music had moved onto New Romanticism and a revived Rockabilly sound by 1980. Somehow the Rats seemed old by 1981 – the human race gets hung up on years, especially decade and century changes – they were just so 70s.
Maybe they could have come back, the talent was there, but Bob Geldof formed Band Aid and then Live Aid was organised. The world could do with someone as energetic and campaigning as Geldof leading the fight on climate change. All of this is covered in his 1986 autobiography Is That It? Out of print for years it is not a bog standard, thin, rock star autobiography – it is one of the must-read books about the industry.
Geldof is a latter-day saint. Not a perfect man by any means but after his wife left him from Michael Hutchence they had a child – Heavenly Hirani Tiger Lily. After Hutchence’s death and Paula Yates’s suicide Geldof adopted Tiger so she could be with her sisters. I’m not sure that many men would have done that.
In fourth form English (year 10) we had this track played to start a conversation and an essay writing exercise. Our teacher was Mrs O’Casey (an anglicised version of her name which was something like, forgive me as I never saw the spelling I only heard it, Mrs O’Cathaseigh). Mrs O’Casey was relatively young and already had advanced MS (she needed help walking to class even then) so I am sure she has passed on, but her classes were always thought provoking and she made a real effort to be different to other English teachers.
At least listen to a best of The Boomtown Rats compilation. I Don’t Like Mondays is a classic and an important track. This is from the same album and is also on the subject of death.
In organisations there always seem to be roles that have a high turnover and others that have stability. I was Finance Manager at NewVIc for 14 years. In that time there were six Estates Managers and periods when the role was empty (yet at Monoux Nigel has filled that role for 20 years and it is HR Managers that have come and gone).
NewVIc was only half built when John Gilbert spent a year managing the estate. He had everything to set up, as well as a building project to manage. He definitely thought that he was slumming it at the College and left to work on Eurotunnel.
He was replaced by Clare. Female Estates Managers are rare and were even rarer in 1994. Clare was good at the job but made a mistake. She went on a training course and the training provider rang up to ask if she was ill as she was not there. The next day she was asked about the course and talked about it. She was let go for lying. It was pretty hypocritical as one day when I had been on a half day course I was heading back to College. I used my lunch break to visit the Virgin megastore and saw one of the senior staff browsing, before heading off south on the tube (yes stalkerish I know). He was meant to be on a course in North London all day and did not go back to College.
Clare was succeeded by SG. He was typical of Estates Managers – agreeing terms and conditions that were hard to keep (such as payment 14 days from valuation date on a project – yet the builders would get the valuation a few days after the it was done then invoice and post to us, leaving one day for us to have to raise a cheque and courier it to them).
I queried some of SG’s contracts but was told it was not my area. When he left we had Karen (another female Estates Manager). She managed to cut costs by a phenomenal amount and told me that all of SG’s contracts were with freemasons. Either it was true, or he was truly bad at his job as our bills fell over 40%.
Karen was the best of the lot. Fun, talented and a real music fan. She had an iPod when you needed a fire wire for them. Sadly Karen left following some issues with management. This left us with post vacant and the College about to start a £3 million building project.
We broke the pay structure to get Malcolm to work at the College. He had been Estates Director at a big FE College and had taken redundancy but needed two more years week to maximise his pension entitlement. He ran the building construction but far more interestingly he had tales of what Further Education was like in the 1970s from the days before safeguarding was the important issue it is now.
Further Education colleges have a lot of adult students and the staff and students could be similar in age. He told us that joint staff and student parties were the norm and sexual relations not unusual between the two sides. Obviously, that was no longer allowed or even ignored but it does continue. Even at NewVIc there were certain rumours about some members of staff who had relationships with students. There was no definitive proof in most cases, but one department head left at a fortuitous time shall we say.
Malcolm was a flirt. Orville took us out for a Christmas meal (him and his managers). After several good bottles of wine Malcom suggested that there would soon be a vacancy for his next wife and suggested to Helen that she would be in pole position. Despite being nearly 30 years younger than him Helen was flirting. Our poor HR Manager decided that point it would be best for her to leave.
(The dinner at the Cork & Bottle in Leicester Square was an HR nightmare).
Despite this he was a great guy and a big cricket fan – we had long debates about the merits of Ian Bell (conclusion – plays beautifully but never changed the course of a match, for years he only made a century if someone else had made one first).
When Malcolm retired David Snazel, who had been the deputy for years, finally got the job that he deserved. Unfortunately, I left soon after that which was a shame as I would love to have worked with him in that role and he was a really great guy.
None of them liked this song (trust me I know) but I do.
Heat, sun, fair skin and blond hair are not a good combination. When I was in my twenties the object was to tan as much as possible. Factor 15 for a day or two and work my way down. I never used intensive bronzing lotion though.
Europe is nothing like India with heat. It is so incredibly hot all the time in India and we were there in October, not the hottest time of the year. Dad and I were on a tour that started in Delhi. Most of the hotels we stayed in there were incredible. The food was wonderful and never caused a problem at those hotels. The beer was a bit odd, even the European beer, it tasted fusty. The Indian beer was real Indian beer not the stuff you get in the UK.
My favourite place on the tour was Jaipur. Our itinerary showed it would be a six-hour drive from Delhi. As we sped out of Delhi on a motorway and I saw that it was only 180km to get to Jaipur I thought this was over generous. After a few miles the standard of the road declined alarmingly, with potholes ten feet across and broken down cars. It took the 6 hours.
Jaipur is the pink city due to the stone that it is built from. One highlight was visiting the Amber Fort that overlooks the town. Like many Indian attractions it reflects the incredible diversity of India’s history and the different Empires that have ruled it. You are accosted by beggars with eye catching conditions at every place that you go – Slumdog Millionaire is only the tip of the iceberg.
(Tour party at the Amber Fort – I’m in the red shirt at the back, with Dad on my left)
Jaipur was not packed like Delhi – far more open with wide roads and space to breath. It looked like a real city. We had lunch with the wife of a local Prince, in a very beautiful house with cool wide-open courtyards. She was lovely, but it was a business meeting tourists, so it was her job to be.
(Lunch with the Maharanee – the timer on the camera was wrong, it was lunch time).
The tour did feature far too much time shopping. The afternoon included a lengthy period at a jewellery shop. Our suspicions should have been raised by the fact that our tour guide said she was building up credit at the shop for a particular item. Tour guides only take parties to places they get a kickback. When we got home there was an e mail group for the tour party, some people had spent large sums and the items were overpriced by a factor of two.
There is also a fascinating outside observatory dating back several hundred years which is fascinating to explore.
I liked Jaipur so much that the Rajasthan Royals are my IPL team of choice😊
When I was a child and early teen I only read Science Fiction, even diversions into fantasy were a bit dubious. I bought most of my books second hand, which is why the books were skewed towards the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s (actually that turned out fine as the 1960s New Wave is something I have never enjoyed). There were three titans of that period. I never got into AE van Vogt (though Graham liked his work). Robert Heinlein, who it turned out was the kind of loony right winger that was the USA’s speciality, until other countries started breeding them. It is worth reading Starship Troopers – even at the age of 13 I was shocked at how mad it was (it is not really like the film) and definitely read Joe Haldeman’s Forever War afterwards for a more realistic view of space war.
I liked Isaac Asimov though. Maybe because his books were almost exclusively about men – none of those pesky girls getting in the way with feelings. This was concepts and plotting and intricacy. Asimov was (in) famous for not having women or aliens in his books. He explained it was the fact that he did not know many women (this was in the 1930s), I guess he did not know many aliens either.
Asimov invented the laws of robotics – a codified way of programming robots so they would not rise up and kill humanity (a staple of early science fiction) and created the Foundation series about one man’s plan to orchestrate the rise of civilisation after it fell the next time.
First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Asimov also wrote detective fiction. His books The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun combine SF with detective fiction. Satisfyingly depicting two very different societies with a mystery that gives you all you need to solve if you think through how those societies work.
My favourite of his books is a time travel story – The End of Eternity. Eternity is a time travel organisation that safeguards humanity by tweaking its history. The hero is disturbed by one of the few women to have a major plot role in his books who suggests Eternity may be doing more harm than good. This is one of his few standalone novels, not set in the robotics/ Foundation universe (though fans being fans have found a way of including it).
His final book I would recommend comes in the 1970s, after a long break from SF he wrote The Gods Themselves – featuring aliens and sex, just to prove he could do it. He won the major SF awards for that. His later work is sadly verbose and covers old ground.
One of the many writers who has actually influenced the way scientific discoveries have been used to this day. Not well known as he should be, you should really trey one of his books, Caves of Steel is probably a good place for a non SF fan.
This song is very twee and probably a complete cash in on the hippy movement. Jonathan King cashed in on lots of fads with novelty singles, like Una Paloma Blanca. This is so sweet though, a British version of all those San Francisco songs from a couple of years earlier. Jonathan King has been in prison for rapes carried out in this period. It is terrible and his seeming lack of remorse makes it worse. He obviously is a smart man in many ways but it seems like he is a monster too – sad when people you admire turn out like that.
There are two types of missing/ lost TV stories. Early TV was assumed to be a one and done kind of happening, like a stage play, though most of it was recorded as live, rather than actually live. Equity (the acting union) were worried that their members would lose work if too much was repeated. Even into the 80s the BBC had a very limited number of slots to transmit anything more than two years old.
Videotape was incredibly expensive in those days so it was actually worth wiping programs to use the tape elsewhere. Luckily some items were sold abroad and were meant to be destroyed or returned. In some cases the shows have been found.
Three early episodes of Dad’s Army are still missing (though recently re-recorded by a new cast, it was like watching karaoke, though if it was not shown non-stop on repeat the recasting might have been easier to take).
The first season of The Avengers is mostly missing. Ready, Steady, Go and Top of the Pops have huge amounts gone, including the Beatles last live TV appearance and Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett in the group. Over half of Z Cars is gone.
Doctor Who fans, being what we are, have tracked down missing episodes. Most recently 9 episodes from Patrick Troughton’s era were found and fans still hope that 96 of the missing episodes may be found (one was never sold abroad). Doctor Who had a magic right from the start as there are audio recordings of all the missing episodes – though the section aping a silent movie in the one gone forever is very strange to listen to.
There is another category of missing television. Where shows were cut off before they were finished leaving a cliffhanger. One of the most infamous examples was Deadwood. It is particularly infamous as HBO was meant to be a more forgiving organisation that American network TV and it was very highly rated by critics. At least it got a film to tie up some plot threads many years later.
My Name Is Earl is unfinished. The show had lost its way badly in the third and fourth seasons, but wrapping it up would have been nice.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles finishes with a young John Connor in the future and Sarah surrounded by enemies. It was not a great series but better than anything in the franchise since Judgement Day.
The Colbys infamously ends with Fallon being abducted by a UFO!
Shut Eye tears apart all its first season concepts for season 2. It was about a confidence trickster and his family who worked as fake psychics in thrall to a Romany family. The concept was that the lead character had head injuries that led to actual visions. The original showrunner was fired and season two retrospectively changes the season one ending by inserting other scenes and splits the family and The Romany crime elements onto separate paths. It spends the last 5 episodes setting up the next season and is then cancelled. I mean season two is crap but they could have resolved it.
There is the flipside. Babylon 5 had no fifth series confirmed so the ending was rushed to finish in season 4 and then it got renewed!
It would be nice if TV companies were as sensible as they were with Lost. Giving the team time to wrap it all up. More about Lost in another post.
I think the never made stuff is worse than the lost TV. Maybe it is all in Lucien’s library with the books that were never written.
Everything But the Girl were a fey indie group from the 80s, then this was remixed and became enormous. Totally untypical of their work.
Five Miles Out 