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Oliver Cross: Riotous night out
THIS week I went to the Leeds Irish Centre to see a show called Riot, Rebellion and Bloody Insurrection, which is quite a tempting title if, like me, you are in the mood to strangle a banker.
The show (described as a musical comedy, but clearly not to be confused with Salad Days) is mounted jointly by our friendly local anarchist music makers, Chumbawamba, and the Red Ladder Theatre Company, so you could see where it was coming from, which wasn't the pat de foie aisle in Waitrose.
It was terrific fun, using traditional pantomime elements, including cross-dressing, topical references, bum jokes, audience participation and rudeness (what a weird thing panto is), to tell a story of the Luddite riots of the 1820s.
The writers, Dom Grace and Boff Whalley, are not really from the Berthold Brecht school of left-wing theatre; actually, with their incessant mocking of authority figures and their penchant for breaking into song, they are more from the Gilbert and Sullivan school of hard-core anarchism.
Grace and Whalley say they want to be a post-punk Morecambe and Wise, which confused me because I've always thought that Eric Morecambe, with his suppressed rage and determination to destroy establishment figures such as Andrew Preview, was a pre-punk punk.
I also worry a bit about where the Luddites stand in labour history; weren't they a conservative, or even a reactionary, movement? If they had succeeded, would not the world's first industrial revolution have been so delayed that we would still be waiting for the invention, say, of texting, and how would we cope with that?
But, to get back to bankers, the good thing about Riot, Rebellion and Bloody Insurrection (well, apart from brilliant acting, irresistible music and bravura funny business) is its heart, which is in that place which naturally supports the poor against the rich and the inventive against the privileged, as should we all, although, and regrettably, we tend to leave that sort of thing to the lefties.
Anyway, if you want to shout 'boo' to a rich and nasty person, you can catch the show at various venues in the north (they don't do Cheltenham Spa) over the next month or so – see, or use a word I try to avoid because I think it sounds silly and I'm a bit of a Luddite, visit www. redladder.co.uk.
Not the average teenager
Teenagers today, eh? I mean, what a bunch of cyber-obsessed, bone-idle, whiney little twerps they aren't.
Well, not my granddaughter Zoe anyway, and although she is quite clearly a hugely exceptional girl, I do think it remarkable how teenagers in general have come on since I was a whiney little twerp (with spots and a temporary personality disorder) myself.
For a start teenagers aren't generally little any more; Zoe, at 13, may even be taller than her mum, although I haven't done a head-to-head exercise because how are adults supposed to maintain their authority in a world of giant teenagers?
But that's not the point; the point is that Zoe, no less than her two brothers, has the kind of confidence and poise which fits her height and also makes it irrelevant; she's just better than the average teenager used to be years ago – less awkward, harder working, more ecologically aware and more able to solve mobile phone problems.
Zoe has just been through her Bat Mitzvah, the female version of the Bar Mitzvah and equally challenging as a kind of benevolent ordeal designed to show you are fit for adulthood, even when most of your teenage hormones are telling you to stay in bed.
It's a big task and mastering very long passages of Hebrew is only part of it. The Bat Mitzvah girl also had to conduct much of the service herself; to welcome the congregation, to project her voice and personality and to take charge, as if that's the sort of thing 13-year-olds are perfectly used to.
Zoe decided, entirely of her own volition and as an expression of her maturity and sense, to put her interesting football career on hold so she could prepare for the big day and the girl, as everyone agreed, done brilliant. Remember, before generalising about Youth Today, that this happened at an age when I found grunting a bit of a challenge.
Goodbye of sorts
ON Wednesday, I went to a party which, if the greetings card companies wanted to seize on a growing market, they would have to sell as a 'Leaving your regular pub in order to move to a very nice residential home' card.
Although Ted, 93, isn't really leaving the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds; he'll just be less of a fixture. All the same, his family and friends decided that the occasion should not pass unnoticed, it being a general Chemic principle that no occasion which might involve a drink and some food, especially cake, should pass unnoticed, and in my experience it never has.
This time Ted's friends and family piled it on a bit by combining his not-really-leaving-do with his unofficial inauguration as Lord Mayor of Woodhouse.
This was probably in contravention of several local government acts but he did get a chain of office and some plausible-looking ermine robes and he can't wait to show them off to impress the ladies at the residential home, although what he thinks will come of that, I wouldn't like to say.
In search of the real London
LAST week Lynne and I visited the real London, which wasn't where we expected it to be.
We also visited the Tate gallery, with David Hockney's huge and heartening East Yorkshire tree pictures, and Camden Lock, with its hundreds of eccentric, crafty stalls of the type which used to inhabit the Dark Arches and Corn Exchange in Leeds, until somebody decided they were a very poor reflection of the New Leeds and that empty and derelict was the way forward.
And, of course, we called into the West End stores which, in the Christmas season, become so lively and jingly and welcoming that they make me want to move to North Korea, me not being a natural shopper.
Which is probably why we found ourselves, to get away from all that, wandering round a respect-able middle-of-the-road, very quiet street in North London, where we had to go into a pub because it was the only thing open for as far as we could see.
The pub, thoroughly ordinary with a mildly tarty barmaid and a landlord with excessive wrist jewellery, had a sprinkling of mainly middle-aged customers and was what you would have called quiet, were it not for the fact that Londoners can't generally be quiet because they seem to prefer shouting like costermongers in a shouting competition.
Except the man next to me, who looked like a dodgy geezer from Central Casting and was talking in a mumble out of the side of his mouth while patting large brown envelopes which may have contained piles of ponies.
Still, I felt uneasy; puzzled by the suspicion that something was missing. Then I realised what it was – this was the only time in our two-day London stay when I had been entirely surrounded by English people.
Almost everybody in the central or lively areas of London is foreign, and if they look English, it's generally because they are Australian.
You have to go the suburban back-woods to discover the real London, in the sense of the traditional London I got to know while living in SE23 in the 1970s. Frankly, I don't know whether it's worth it.
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
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