Toto Dances

For some reason, the following film clip has given me a lot of pleasure over the past couple of weeks. It is from a 1962 Italian comedy film, Toto di Notte No 1.  Which translates into English as Toto's First Night.  The clip features the main protagonist, Nini (played by the titular Toto) dancing the twist with a waitress in a Spanish taverna:


Toto, the professional name of Antonio Clemente, was a hugely popular Italian comedian, who appeared in 97 films between 1937 and 1968, his last appearance being posthumous, having filmed his role in the anthology film Caprice Italian Style, before his death in 1967. 

Toto di Notte No 1 comes from the latter part of his career and co-stars Erminio Macario - who often appeared with Toto - as his sidekick, Mimi.  Thanks to the vagaries of online translation services, its plot remains somewhat obscure to me.  As far as I can make out, it concerns two double bass playing buskers in Rome, Nini and Mimi, one of whom comes, unexpectedly into money.  Nini decides that it would be a good idea to spend the money touring various foreign nightclubs and musical venues, in order to try and find somewhere that their talents recognised.  In practice, this means that the film effectively turns into a series of comic sketches, partly poking fun at various national stereotypes, partly acting as opportunities for Toto to perform his various routines. I've seen several excerpts from the movie, which involve a fair amount of slapstick humour, much of it not dissimilar to the sort of stuff that Laurel and Hardy got up to in their films, (Macario, naturally, falls into the Stan Laurel role of naive sidekick to Toto's more bombastic and domineering Oliver Hardy-like Nini).

Quite why this particular sequence has fascinated and entertained me so much, I cannot say.  But there's just something about it I find irresistible.  Perhaps it is just the pure, unalloyed joy exhibited by everyone present in it.  Who knows.  Interestingly, as far as I can make out, this wasn't considered one of Toto's best films at the time of its release and the main characters and some of the scenarios were recycled a couple of years later for Toto Sexy, which proved far more popular.

Cake Without Class

I know that I said I wasn't going to write about politics again this week, but Donald Trump isn't really politics, is he?  He's basically a branch of the entertainment industry.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: the man has no class.  Take his recent bombing of Syria.  What's the thing he focuses on when talking to the press about it: the casualties, the justification for the strike, the possible impact on relations with Russia and China?  No, it's the chocolate cake that he and the Chinese leader - who was on an official visit to the US - were eating at the time the missile strike occurred.  It wasn't just one passing mention of the cake, oh no.  He waxed lyrical about the bloody thing.  I don't care how good a chocolate cake it was, it was utterly irrelevant to the issue - you've just fired tomahawk cruise missiles at another sovereign state and all you can think of is a cake?  You are the president man!  Focus on the essential issues.  You didn't hear Obama go on about what he'd had for dessert when announcing the assassination of Osama bin Laden.  Obama had class.  Trump has none.

In fact, Trump is so lacking in class, I'm somewhat surprised that he doesn't take visiting foreign leaders to strip joints as part of his hospitality.  You can just imagine it, can't you?  A mortified looking Angela Merkel, for instance, looking on as Trump, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer clap and cheer a stripper with huge jiggling breasts as she struts her stuff, sticking ten dollar bills down her underwear (he's probably also cheap, in addition to having no class).  Probably.she'd have a huge slice of chocolate cake slithering down between her breasts.  And you know what?  I can guarantee that the main thing Trump focused on would be that bloody cake.  Any normal heterosexual man would be transfixed by those jiggling breasts, not that cake.  (I'm sorry to break it to any ladies reading, but us blokes are very shallow: put us in a room with some naked women's breasts, juggling or not, and we'll just have to look.  In fact, they don't even need to be exposed - just a hint of cleavage is enough to entrance us.  I could guarantee that even a fat greedy bastard would look at the breasts first, cake second).   So, beware world leaders.  If you visit the US during the next four years, you are likely to find yourself in some sleazy strip joint, with some poor girl grinding her arse in your face (possibly with a huge slice of chocolate cake slipping down between her buttocks).

Stripping the Engine

Remember that model railway engine I was restoring?  Well, today I finally got back to it, while I was waiting for the heating engineer to arrive and look at my non-working gas boiler.  Progress wasn't spectacular, but I've stripped the worst of the paint off of the driving wheels, front bogie and trailing truck.  So, here's the 'before' picture:

All that garish red had to go as it is completely unprototypical.  (It was rare for British steam locomotives to sport any colour other than black (mixed with soot and oil) below the footplate, although their German equivalents usually did have red painted wheels).  Here's the 'after' picture:

As you will note, despite two treatments of stripper, the red hasn't gone entirely.  The wheels, bogie and pony truck are, however, now in a better state to take new (black) paint.  It wasn't just an issue of the brightness of red colour (which would have made painting over it difficult) but the fact that it had a gloss finish, which would have made it difficult for new paint to 'take' on it.

I'm not sure whether the next stage will be to repaint the chassis (and the tender chassis, which I stripped a while ago), or to proceed with stripping the blue paintwork off of the loco and tender bodies.  The latter could be a lengthy job - the surface area to be stripped means that it will have to be done in stages.

Oh, if you are wondering about the boiler, whilst the engineer got it working again, it failed its safety tests and has now been condemned.  So I'm now looking at replacing the boiler.  Which, whilst not cheap, isn't really unexpected: it wasn't new when I bought the house and I've just finished paying off the mortgage, so really it's a miracle that it lasted this long.  Of course, while I'm grateful for it lasting so long, the truth is that I could undoubtedly have saved money on my gas bills if I had replaced it with more efficient new boiler years ago.    

Monday Election Rant

Being gay isn't a sin, according to Tim Farron, who, apparently, is leader of the Liberal Democrats.  But he's not too sure whether gay sex is a sin.  Not that his reservations about 'gay butt sex' are entirely due to religious convictions - it's just that it makes his eyes water.  Allegedly.  All of which constitutes about the most interesting election news over the weekend.  To call the campaign for this election a slow starter is an understatement.  It's as if the political parties are reluctant to actually start it - which isn't surprising as nobody is really sure why we're having a general election.  Instead of proper electioneering, all I seem to encounter are 'true believers' from the main parties trying to justify their leaders and their bad decisions.  When it comes to Theresa May, I'm afraid there really are no excuses - she's an opportunistic careerist interested only in self advancement and aggrandisment.  Politically, her record speaks for itself: she was a lousy Home Secretary and even worse Prime Minister. 

When it comes to Jeremy Corbyn, though, I've apparently been brainwashed by the biased media into believing that he is a hopeless leader with unpopular and unworkable policies.  Really?  What the individuals who write this kind of stuff (the example I encountered over the weekend having been posted on Facebook) don't seem to grasp how insulting to our collective intelligences it is.  It typifies the attitude which alienates so many of us when it comes to the Corbynistas: their patronising assumption of the self evidence of the fact that they are right about everything and that if you can't see that you are either stupid or, worse, a 'Blairite'. The fact is that it isn't Labour's policies under Corbyn that I have a problem with (such as these policies are - I've seen little evidence of any coherent policy actually emerging under his leadership), but rather that it is him I have a problem with.  It has become painfully obvious during his tenure that he is incapable of leading a modern political party.  He is utterly incapable of articulating any policies in such a way that they can be sold to the electorate.  He just doesn't seem to understand that in order to gain power you have to persuade voters, rather than party members, that your policies will be most beneficial to them. 

None of which should be surprising, as he only seems comfortable when preaching to the converted, at forums where nobody is likely to disagree or challenge him.  Consequently, he isn't used to having to actually justify his policies to a sceptical audience and persuade them to his point of view.  Indeed, if one thing has characterised his leadership of Labour, it has been a refusal to listen to voices from outside his band of supporters which might be critical.  Which, interestingly, is something he has in common with Theresa May who, similarly, seems unwilling to listen to critical voices.  There can be no alternative to her chosen path.  Anyway, enough election ranting.  I promise this will be my only excursion into politics this week.  (Unless something really exciting happens, that is).

Back After the Break...

That's right, due to circumstances beyond my control (mainly trying to get someone to look at my gas boiler which has stopped working) I haven't been in the right headspace to come up with a proper post today.  Instead, I've fallen back on that old standby: a selection of some old TV commercials.  These are from the sixties and, right from the off, feature some points of interest.  First up is the Fry's Turkish Delight ad featuring the 'Big Fry', who is portrayed by none other than a pre-James Bond George Lazenby.  Indeed, before his one and only appearance as 007 in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the 'Big Fry' was the role for which he was best known to the public.

These ads come the period when London was on the cusp of becoming 'swinging' and a lot of them place an emphasis upon glamour and youth culture, with Sandie Shaw advertising Lux soap and young women being told that the secret to pulling blokes is to make out sure that their 'Head and Shoulders' are free of dandruff.  Obviously, she won't want to waste that effort with her hair by getting hot and sweaty in the disco: so Mum under arm deodorant is another essential.  The commercial for London Life magazine pushes the point that Britain's capital was the 'happening' place to be.  The Sunday Mirror ad is a reminder that the tabloid press's obsession with UFOs is nothing new and certainly wasn't invented by the Daily Mail.  I do remember from my early years that throughout the late sixties and early seventies the Sunday papers were always running lurid stories about UFOs, hauntings, black magic rituals and the like.

Then there's avuncular Jack Warner advocating the benefits of formica.  Did you know that there was a time when formica was considered such a desirable product that they had advertising campaigns for it?  Then there's the equally avuncular Captain Birdseye, who is still hawking his fish fingers to this day.  I'm guessing that this was the original Captain Birdseye - he's regenerated more times than Dr Who since then (they'll probably insist he has to be a woman next).  Before we go, let's not forget the brands seen here which no longer exist - most notably National petrol.  One of several brands which had their own strings of filling stations in the days before you filled your car up at the supermarket.  Ah, the nostalgia of it all!

 

Election Fatigue

I suppose I should acknowledge that an election has been called.  Why, when there are still three years of this parliament to go and a government with a working majority, this should be considered necessary is a perplexing question.  Ostensibly, it is so that May can say that she has a democratic mandate for her policies, most specifically Brexit, rather than feeling bound by the manifesto promises made by a different Tory leader in the 2015 election, (which made no mention of Brexit).  Which might seem highly laudable, but it still doesn't justify calling an election early - manifesto promises aren't legally binding, so she could safely ignore them and all she needs to govern legitimately and pursue her own agenda, is a parliamentary majority.  Which she already has.  The real reasons are rather more cynical, I fear.  For one thing, calling a general election now rather pre-empts any charges against Tory candidates which come out of the Electoral Commission's investigations into alleged expenses fraud at the 2015 election.  If May stuck to the schedule and waited until 2020 to go to the polls, then she would have risked three years of criminal charges and trials involving Tory politicians and all the potential political damage that could have wreaked.  This way, presupposing she wins, all of that will have been safely out of the way by the time the next election rolls around circa 2022.

The other obvious reason for going to the polls now is the Tories. current commanding poll lead over Labour.  Of course, one of the reasons for the introduction of fixed term parliaments in 2010 (by a government of which May was a member) was supposedly to prevent opportunistic prime ministers from putting party before country and calling snap elections to try and maintain themselves in power. This piece of legislation also meant that the opposition could have denied May the opportunity to hold this election, as it requires a two thirds majority in the Commons for parliament to be dissolved.  They would have been justified in doing so: the Tories made these rules and should be forced to stick to them.  May shouldn't be allowed to go to the polls until after Brexit, when its consequences will begin to be felt.  From a purely tactical perspective, the opposition parties should have opposed her cal for an election simply because, right now, they are in no fit state to fight one.  Yet Corbyn, a man with no political nous whatsoever, happily voted with the government, gleefully leading Labour toward potential oblivion at the polls.  He really is unfit to lead anything, let alone what used to be one the UK' major political parties.  I know that he and his cronies see winning elections as some kind of irrelevance, but the fact is that without political power, you can achive nothing.  You certainly can't help the people you claim to represent.  By embracing an election now, Corbyn is risking Labour losing even more seats and putting them further away from power and being to help the less well off than before.  Indeed, he is pretty much guaranteeing Tory hegemony for the foreseeable future.

As you can gather, I'm less than enthusiastic about this election.  Not only do I fear that it is going to be an electoral disaster for Labour but, to be frank, I'm suffering election fatigue.  It was barely two years ago that we fought the previous election, then last year there was the bruising EU referendum. I just don't have the appetite or energy to go through all of that again so soon.  I know that a lot of other people, on both sides of the political divide, feel the same way.  I suspect that the Tories are relying on this, hoping for a high degree of political apathy which tends to favour the status quo.  The aggressive language already being used by the right wing press in their coverage is also depressing.  Already we have talk of 'crushing Labour' and pro-EU supporters being described as 'saboteurs' - this doesn't augur well for the election being fought on the basis of rational, well informed, debate.  I'm really not looking forward to the next few weeks. 

The Sandwich Man (1966)

Intended as an all-star comedy extravaganza, The Sandwich Man was very poorly received upon its original release.  After a couple of TV screenings in the seventies it vanished from sight until a 2008 DVD release and, more recently, its addition to the regular rotation on Talking Pictures TV.  Seen again now, it isn't difficult to see why the film was considered such a disappointment in 1966, but is also difficult not to feel affection for the portrait of a long disappeared London that it paints.  Charting a day in the life of the eponymous 'Sandwich Man', Horace Quigley, played by Michael Bentine, the film takes us on a meandering journey through London, from docklands (back in the days when working class people lived there in terraced houses) to West End, taking in various landmarks and venues.  Along the way Quigley encounters various characters (all played by well known at the time British comics and character actors) and observes various comic vignettes.

Underpinning it all are two subplots.  One about Quigley's favourite pigeon's progress in a race from Bourdeaux to London dictates much of his route as he goes from phone to phone, awaiting news about the pigeon from his neighbour, who is watching Quigley's coop for him.  The other involves Quigley's attempts to bring together a model Sue (Suzy Kendall) and her boyfriend Steve (David Buck), who have fallen out over Steve's suspicion that model Sue is having an affair with her photographer (Bernard Cribbins).  Although these two elements should give the film some kind of structure and coherence, it stubbornly remains a directionless series of episodes, which often feel as if they've been strung together at random.  This lack of narrative drive fatally undermines the film, robbing it of pace and purpose, making it difficult to for the viewer either to fully engage with the characters or really care what is happening.

None of this would matter so much if any of the various episodes were either particularly funny or original.  Sadly, they are all too predictable:  as soon as we see that lawn mower in the park, for instance, we just know that it is going to run amok and as soon as we see the overloaded Mini-Moke driven by scoutmaster Terry-Thomas, we know that it is inevitable that there's going to be some conflagration involving the vehicle and Ian Hendy's motorcycle cop.  Frequently, they promise to build up to some kind of wild and zany conclusion, but instead just peter out.  All of which is hugely frustrating for the audience, bearing in mind star and co-writer Bentine's reputation for anarchic and surreal humour, as seen in TV series like It's a Square World and Potty Time, not to mention his tenure on the Goon Show in its early days.  Here, though, his humour just never takes off - even the climax, which is clearly meant to be a huge slapstick comedy set piece, falls flat.  Part of the problem lies in the fact that the main characters, particularly Quigley, are never participants in these vignettes, which are instead played out by characters we've only just met and therefore have no emotional investment in.

Which isn't to say that The Sandwich Man is a dead loss.  On the contrary it is, on a technical level, a very well made film, superbly photographed in colour by co-producer and cinematographer Peter Newbrook, who makes the most of the London locations.  Some of Robert Hartford-Davis' direction is pretty stylish: in particular a sequence where two housewives (Diana Dors and Anna Quayle) argue the merits of rival TV doctors (Dr Kildare and Ben Casey) whilst walking through Billingsgate fish market, their descriptions of the various operations depicted in the respective series inter cut with fish being gutted on the slabs.  Interestingly, the film also embraces the multi-culturalism of post-war London, with the opening sequence introducing Quigley's neighbours as they leave for work - a pair of Sikh jazz musicians, an Egyptian carpet salesman and a Chinese ice cream vendor (who sells Italian ice cream from his van).  The point is somewhat undermined, however, by the fact that they are all played by white actors blacked up, (except the Chinese ice cream man who is, of course, played by Burt Kwouk), with Bentine himself appearing later as an Indian club owner.  But this was par for the course at the time in British film and TV and, although the usual racial and cultural stereotyping is present, it is all relatively benign and free of the more obvious racial prejudices which were often on display in pop culture of the era.

As mentioned before, the film captures a moment in time: a summer's day in sixties London.  Everything about it - the cars, the fashions, the advertising hoardings - reminds us of how much has changed since the film was made, whilst the various landmarks remind us of how much has remained constant.  The Sandwich Man was part of the eclectic output of bargain basement independent producers Titan, who are today probably best remembered for the horror movie Corruption and who, infamously, finally went out of business part way through production of another horror flick, Incense for the Damned, (the footage from which was eventually bought by a distributor and edited into a barely coherent feature).  Before that, they made another star comedy, Press For Time, for Norman Wisdom, who also guests in The Sandwich Man.

 Although The Sandwich Man largely fails as a comedy, it still holds many other sources of entertainment for the modern viewer and is well worth watching.  Not least, it provides Michael Bentine, who, I suspect, is largely unknown to contemporary audiences, with a rare leading role.  Whilst not typical of his usual characterisations or humour, his widowed Horace Quigley remains an engaging and likeable character as he wanders his way through sixties London, trying to fill the gap left in his life by his wife's death lving vicariously through eccentrics he encounters, his activities as the honourary secretary of the sandwich board men's union and his pigeons..  

Nothing Happening Here

So, the trouble with bank holidays is that as I tend to do very little on them, I don't have anything to write about here.  And when we've had as long a bank holiday weekend as the Easter weekend, by the Monday I;m really stumped as to what to post.  I mean, I spent the better part of today lounging about on my sofa watching films.  Not the sort of films I discuss here - far too mainstream (even I like to have a day off from obscure exploitation movies).  That said, yesterday I did finally get around to watching a pretty decent adaptation of a Joe R Lansdale novel - Cold in July - which I recorded a while ago.  That was pretty off beat and, in typical Lansdale fashion, took some unexpected turns.  Apart from the film watching, the only other notable thing I did today was buy some olive oil to pour down my ear.  It's meant to be good for softening impacted ear wax, making it easier to remove.  (I'm still holding out hope that the tinnitus in my left ear is down to ear wax problems, so I'm willing to try anything to shift it).

I did get threatened by Google over the weekend - they accused me of posting pornography on my Google Plus account.  I regularly 'plus one' old stories to my Google Plus timeline, or whatever the fuck they call it, not because it generates traffic (nobody actually reads anything on Google Plus), but because it forces Google to reindex the page for the search index and the backlink it creates might help ranking.  Google decided that one of these stories was somehow pornographic.  All pretty pathetic and< I can only assume, part of Google's ongoing war against satire: first of all they try to classify satire as 'fake news' and penalise satire sites in the rankings, now they are calling it porn.  Like I said, pathetic. Just fuck off Google, you tax evading, content stealing, privacy invading bully. Anyway, with the bank holiday weekend out of the way, my time off from work starts properly tomorrow.  Which, hopefully, will mean that I do something interesting to post about. 

Holiday Magic

To commemorate the fact that today was a holiday, I was going to try and post something suitably light and frivolous.  But it's hard to get in the holiday mood when the front page of the Daily Mirror is screaming that the world is on the brink of nuclear war and my intermittent tinnitus has returned after a couple of days off.  OK, I know that makes it look as if I'm equating an extremely irritating humming in my left ear with the horrors of nuclear war, but it is fucking irritating.  (Not only did it make it extremely difficult for me to get to sleep last night, but I'm having to have a dehumidifier running next to the sofa while I watch TV, as the sound from said device masks the tinnitus).  Mind you, the Mirror can't be too worried that a nuclear holocaust is imminent, as their front page is also promising eight days of Easter crossword puzzles and a free two quid bet at your local Coral bookmakers.  We might see the May Day bank holiday yet, depending on the difficulty of those crosswords.

But to get back to the point, what better to get us in the holiday spirit than a magic act?  (lots of things, probably, but the magic act is what I've got to hand.  Having taken a look at magician Channing Pollock's appearance in European Nights the other day, this time we'll be seeing French magician Mac Ronay's appearance in the same film:


There you go, if that doesn't get you in the holiday mood, then nothing will.  (Except alcohol and drugs, probably).

Hooray for the Holidays!

Thank goodness that Jesus was crucified on a Friday and rose again on a Monday, thereby giving us the long Easter weekend.  This four day week couldn't end soon enough for me - work has been both especially tedious and irritating, and my tinnitus returned with a vengeance during the first part of the week.   But I'm now off work, not just for the Easter weekend, but for the next sixteen days, (I had nine days of unused leave with my leave year rapidly drawing to a close and, by coincidence, the various bank holidays coming up mean that I can use those nine days to get off work for sixteen days), and the tinnitus has changed from an irritating hum to a high pitched singing which doesn't bother me.  Plus, in more good news, my endowment policy has paid out, which means that the last of my mortgage will be paid off.  Even better, the payout amount is higher than expected, meaning I'll be left with a very welcome windfall once the mortgage is paid.  Which, whilst not making me fabulously wealthy, does mean that I can once again reconsider my current employment situation, as I no longer have the monthly burden of mortgage repayments to worry about.

But what am I going to do with all this time of stretching ahead of me?  Well, for one thing, I'm hoping to finally do most of the stuff I was planning to do the last time I took time off, but was prevented from doing so by a heavy cold.  I've also accumulated a huge backlog of films to watch, both recorded from TV and on DVD - I need at least a week off to get through these alone.  Once watched these will, of course, provide more material to be posted here.  That said, I'm still mulling over the idea of setting up a new site to accommodate the film and other pop culture related material I turn out. That's something else I'll be giving some thought to over the next couple of weeks.  Then there's that model railway layout I'm forever trying to put together, various bits of DIY around the house I now own , not to mention the garden, which is once again a jungle (much to the delight of my neighbours' cat).  I'm also hoping to fit in a trip to the coast, (delayed from February by that bloody cold)  and maybe a trip to London, to visit Soho and see how much it has changed in the many years since my last visit.  Inevitably, I'll not achieve a fair amount of this as life, as ever, will intervene.  But I'm going to give it a good go.

European Nights (1959)

Having mentioned European Nights, a 1959 proto Mondo in yesterday's post, I thought that we might as well look at the US trailer for it today.  Basically a chronicle of various popular nightclub acts from across Europe, there is a Mondo-like emphasis upon the weird and slightly sleazy.  The acts range from French comics, through circus trapeze artists, belly dancers, magicians and Paris strippers to British rockers.  All the sorts of things you couldn't see on TV in the fifties, in other words.  Like those rock and roll movies which were popular at around the same time, European Nights allowed audiences to see acts that they would never have the opportunity to see live.  Clearly a popular format, it was quickly followed by the similar World by Night movies, which took the concept global, showcasing acts from across the world.

I've found that it is possible to buy a download of the US version of the film, so I might be able to talk about it in more detail at a later date.  But until then, I'll leave you with an excerpt highlighting magician Channing Pollock:

West End Jungle (1961)

Directed by Arnold Miller and produced by Miller and Stanley Long, West End Jungle purports to be a 'journey into the dark heart of London, filmed in the actual places of vice'. It might have been shot on the streets and in the clubs of Soho, but the prostitutes and punters aren't the real thing, with their encounters recreated, Mondo style.  A precursor to London in the Raw and Primitive London, West End Jungle's main claim to fame nowadays is the fact that it was effectively banned in the UK after the BBFC declined to award it a certificate. Indeed, it was only officially released in the UK until a DVD release in 2008 (when it received a '15' certificate).  Did it deserve to be banned?  Whilst its subject matter might still have seemed somewhat risque for the early sixties, its presentation is in the tradition of the 'cautionary tale' type of documentary, warning of the perils awaiting girls who fell into London's vice trade and complete with a moralising narration from David Gellar.  There's no actual sex depicted, let alone any nudity.  The reasons for its effective banning, as we will see, lay elsewhere.

Despite being tersely dismissed by Wikipedia as  'a 1961 British film about prostitutes', West End Jungle presents itself as a serious investigation into the consequences of the 1959 Street Offences Act, which effectively removed prostitution from Britain's streets. The film shows us, in gleeful detail, how this simply resulted in paid sex moving from the streets into seedy clubs, clip joints and Soho's growing number of strip joints.  But it doesn't stop there, it also examines how the sex trade had never been confined to prostitutes soliciting for trade on the streets, pointing out that, contrary to its portrayal in the popular press, prostitution wasn't just something indulged in by immoral, down on their luck women and grubby, depraved men in dirty raincoats.  A lengthy segment shows how the 'hospitality' offered by company directors to their high flying clients constitutes nothing more than very expensive prostitution, as we see a company director from the provinces set up with a high class 'escort' by his London equivalent after their companies sign a lucrative business deal.  A supposedly upmarket club is 'exposed' providing similar services to businessmen, whilst another city gent decides to visit a 'health club' rather than his usual club.

Which isn't to say that the film doesn't also explore the more downmarket side of the post-1959 London sex trade.  As well as being treated to visits to various strip clubs, we also experience a clip joint and even the 'photographer's model' trade.  As it notes, the 'lonely' men who 'hire' such  models don't actually take cameras to their assignations with girls 'who need a bath'.  Also included is the obligatory story of the innocent girl from the provinces arriving in London to seek her fortune, only to fall prey to the pimps who apparently lurked around the arrivals platforms at Waterloo station.  (This particular ingenue ends up working in the clip joint).  Of course, for all its moralising, West End Jungle is simply playing the game still played by the likes of the Daily Mail to this day: in order to demonstrate just how evil or depraved whatever is being condemned actually is, they have to show it to us in all its filthy detail.   Whether its the West End sex trade in the early sixties or scandalously brief swimsuits being worn by starlets today, we have to be shown it in order to fully appreciate its awfulness.

The problem for West End Jungle was that, although it didn't actually show anything really depraved, it showed enough to give the impression that Britain's capital city was a seething hive of iniquity.  An impression that the great and the good of London's elites really didn't want disseminated across the world, let alone Britain.  Unfortunately for them, they could only pressure the censors to deny it a certificate for cinema exhibition in Britain and the film was released to foreign markets, regardless.  Ultimately, West End Jungle falls into that category of films which might be classified as proto-Mondos. Along with the likes of European Nights (which chronicled various exotic nightclub acts from across the continent) it presents some of the content which would become the staples of true Mondo movies, but without the outrageously staged excesses of cannibalism and animal cruelty (amongst other things) and the gleeful narrations which, rather than condemning what we're seeing, celebrates it.  Compared to Miller and Long's later, far more Mondo-like, London in the Raw and Primitive London,  West End Jungle comes over as more sober, with stark black and white photography and rather harder edged recreations of events.  The clip joint segment, for instance, is far seedier and rough than a similar segment in London in the Raw, even showing an unhappy punter being roughed up by the doorman.

Nowhere near as slick as the two later 'shockumentaries', West End Jungle is, nonetheless, still an enjoyable slice of sleaze from the sixties.  if nothing else, it provides us with a vivid picture of pre-swinging London.  Moreover, at only fifty five minutes long, it doesn't have time to outstay its welcome.  As with London in the Raw and Primitive London, the DVD also includes a selection of short films as extras, including Get 'em Off, a history of London strip clubs narrated by Hugh Scully of Antiques Roadshow fame.  That alone, surely, is worth buying the DVD for.

The War Against Easter

I suppose I should say something about all the made up furore surrounding Cadbury supposedly dropping the word 'Easter' fro its, er, Easter sales campaign, emphasising instead the fact that it was chocolate, rather than Easter, eggs which were to be hunted.  Which, bearing in mind that Cadbury are known as a chocolate manufacturer, shouldn't really be surprising.  But all the usual suspects shouted all the usual things about a 'War on Christianity'.  Including, of course, The Prime Minister, Theresa May, who never misses an opportunity to try and divert attention from her miserable performance as PM by trying to latch on to some 'populist' non-controversy.  Reminding us that she is a vicar's daughter, she waxed lyrical about the true Christian message of Easter and its significance as a Christian festival.  Except that it is all bollocks.  Easter, like Christmas, is actually a traditional pagan festival co-opted by the early Christians and refashioned into a nice, safe, Christian celebration.

Both the name Easter and the symbol of the egg are derived from the earlier pagan festival.  The name allegedly derives from that of a pagan Goddess and the egg is a symbol of rebirth and fertility, which is what the festival was originally about: the coming of Spring and the rebirth of the land.  From a Christian perspective, it isn't much of a leap to instead make the festival about the resurrection of Jesus.  The sheer nerve of Christians in protesting about the co-opting of festivals they hijacked from the pagans in the service of commerce or other secular concerns never ceases to amaze me.  They really are hypocrites.  Well, I say that, but I suspect tat it is more down to ignorance - many Christians I've spoken to about this issue seem blissfully ignorant as to the true origin of their main festivals.  Interestingly, some Christian sects, most notably the Jehovah's Witnesses, do recognise that Easter and Christmas are actually pagan festivals, which is why they don't celebrate them.  Of course, being a non-believer, I'm in the privileged position of thinking that they are all crazy and all miss the real point of Easter: with two bank holidays it gives us an officially sanctioned long weekend every Spring.

Horse Before Cart

Sometimes, you can't help but feel that people are putting the cart before the horse.  Take these protests that 'Momentum' (the would be party within a party set up to support Jeremy Corbyn in his Labour Party leadership campaign) have been holding outside the offices of New Statesman magazine.  Their problem is that the venerable left of centre political publication is apparently being too critical of their idol.  To be frank, it has been undermining his leadership, they claim.  In fact, they fear that its negative attitude is going to cost Labour seats in next month's council elections.  The trouble is that you can't help but feel that they've got it all arse about face.  Maybe, just maybe, the Statesman is critical of Corbyn because he is such a poor leader.  The worst Labour leader, in fact, since Ramsay McDonald, and possibly even more damaging to the party than the old turncoat.

Indeed, it is Corbyn rather than the Statesman that is going to cost Labour dearly at the polls next month.   Quite apart from the fact that so few people read the Statesman that it is inconceivable that it could influence sufficient voters to affect the outcome of any council seats being contested, Corbyn has left the Labour Party with no clear electoral strategy, no coherent policies and a vacuum where leadership should be.  He is simply the latest in a long line of middle class lefties who simply do not understand what traditional Labour voters actually want.  He keeps telling them what he thinks they want, but that isn't the same thing at all.  What he and his ilk (the Socialist 'Workers' Party in particular) won't accept is that, on many issues, the British working classes are actually very conservative.  Middle class radicalism cuts no ice with them.  What they want is the guarantee of jobs, fair wages the chance of progression, both professionally and socially.  Corbyn isn't offering them any vision of how this can be achieved.

The most successful Labour leaders, such as Attlee and Wilson, recognised this innate conservatism and understood that you had to sell your most radical reforms (the NHS, the expansion of Higher education, the Open University etc) in terms of how it is going to benefit their core supporters in terms of creating jobs, prosperity and self improvement.  Most spectacularly, Tony Blair (He whose name must not be mentioned) not obnly succeeded in tapping into the real aspirations of the working classes, but also carried a large part of the middle classes with him.  Love it or hate it, but New Labour had a far better grasp of the party's core constituency than the likes of Corbyn will ever have.

The Canterbury Tales (1972)

Another one of those films where the English language version seems to have vanished from sight completely.  As the series of trailers indicates, there certainly was such a version, but nowadays I can only ever locate Italian language versions of Pasolini's interpretation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.  Back in 1972, when it was released, the film met with something of a hostile reception in the UK: critics really didn't like its earthy, sweaty take on Chaucer, with lashings of sex and nudity and fart jokes to boot.  The fact that this was actually a pretty accurate interpretation of the text, and Pasolini's grimy, mud covered version of medieval England was undoubtedly quite realistic, cut little ice with the purists.  You can't help but feel that there was a degree of resentment at the fact that foreigners were having the audacity to adapt a British literary classic for the screen.

It's something I've often noticed in the UK - the way in which we jealously guard our literary heritage, clearly believing that only the British can properly interpret them.  Foreign adaptations are seen as some kind of cultural trespass.  Of course, this doesn't work both ways: critics have never had a problem with UK filmmakers, TV producers and playwrights adapting foreign language literature for stage or screen.  But there are many fascinating foreign language adaptations of British texts, from high culture classics like Chaucer and Shakespeare to pop culture favourites like Sherlock Holmes and The Saint.  Sadly, these are little seen in the UK.  There are two Saint movies made in France whilst the Roger Moore TV series was running in the UK.  The stills I've seen of the latter of these films seems to indicate an interpretation of Simon Templar along the lines of John Steed, complete with bowler hat.  There are also some magnificent Russian language versions of various Sherlock Holmes stories - I have a Soviet era Hound of the Baskervilles on DVD (with English sub-titles) which is quite fascinating and enormously entertaining.

British crime pulps were once extremely popular subjects for continental film adaptations.  Whilst Peter Cheyney's London private eye Slim Callaghan might only have appeared in one UK movie (Meet Mr Callaghan in 1954), he starred in a whole series of adaptations of Cheyney's novels in France during the 1950s and 1960s.  Another Cheyney character, Lemmy Caution, also starred in a series of French language B-movies during the same period.  Always played by Eddie Constantine, he even wandered into the orbit of Jean Luc Goddard, becoming the lead character in the director's 1965 science fiction film, Alphaville).  Similarly, Edgar Wallace eventually found his true cinematic voice in Germany in the fifties and sixties, adapted into a series of black and white 'Krimi' films. (Germany has also produced a number of Sherlock Holmes films, most of which, especially the silent ones, strayed a long way from Conan Doyle, by the sixties the great detective even found himself immersed a very Wallace like 'Krimi', Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace).

But we've strayed a long way from The Canterbury Tales.  If anyone can point me in the direction of an English language version of the Pasolini adaptation, I'd be very grateful.  Although I have very vague memories of it turning up on BBC2 in the seventies, to the best of my knowledge it hasn't seen  the light of day on UK terrestrial television in decades.

Canned Crap

War with Spain over Gibraltar.  People shitting in coke cans.  Gangs of racists beating up asylum seekers.  It feels like Britain has turned into a Mondo movie.  Sadly, however, it's all real.  It's scary quite how quickly things have started to unravel since the EU referendum.  Now that Article 50 has been invoked, it all seems to be unraveling out of control.  The poor sod getting beaten up by a gang of up to twenty thugs simply, it seems, because he wasn't white, is just the latest and most extreme example of the way in which the racists have become emboldened since the referendum outcome.  I'm not saying that Brexit is the direct cause of racist behaviour, obviously.  But, with the anti-immigrant invective which accompanied the 'Leave' campaign, it has encouraged the extreme right and racist thugs generally, to think that their mind set is now in the majority.  Still, you have to wonder, once we're out of the EU and all those 'foreigners' have been sent home (as the extremists seem to think they will), who will the reactionary right have to blame for everything they don't like then?  Presumably, we'll be back to demonising single mothers and the unemployed.  Not to mention the mentally ill and disabled.

As for that business where those Coke cans being delivered to Coca Cola plant in Northern Ireland were found to contain human excrement - you notice how quickly the press tried to blame that on illegal immigrants?  The narrative of the riht wing press focuses on the fact that the lorry carrying the offending (and offensive) cans came from Germany, leading them to speculate that asylum seekers and illegal immigrants must have been hiding in it and they were responsible to crapping in the cans.  None of which really makes sense - if you were in the back of a truck and desperate for a dump, would you try to crap in such a tiny receptacle?  Personally, I think it was  the Germans - it's all part of the war the rest of the EU is conducting against us (in the fevered imaginations of the right wing press) for having the audacity to leave.  They've started by sending us tinned shit, we've retaliated by threatening to go to war with Spain.  It all makes sense now.  Mind you, I at least learned something from this story, namely that soft drink tins are delivered with the top end open.  The top, with the ring pull, is added after the can has been filled.  Which explains how thay could manage to shit into the tins - I had visions of them attempting to accurately crap through the ring pull aperture.