Churchill unedited

The unexpurgated version of Winston Churchill’s “The End of the Beginning” speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, Mansion House, on November 10, 1942:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
It is not the middle of the end, nor the end of the end.
It is not the beginning of the middle, nor the end of the middle, nor the middle of the middle.
It is not the middle of the beginning, and certainly not the beginning of the beginning, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Cad or bounder?

H, a girl I’ve been going out with for three months, tells me I’m a cad. It’s a running joke. Or it is for her and her friends. I contest it, particularly the implication that I treat women badly, but they insist that it doesn’t mean that. A cad, they say, is merely a rake with a suspiciously self-confident manner with women.

Act like you know, Rico

This week in lyrics analysis corner it is my pleasure to welcome one of the few successful pop songs sung by someone named Cecil: Here Comes the Hotstepper, the solitary hit of the artist best known by his stage name Ini Kamoze.

There are two schools of thought on the meaning of Cecil Campbell’s ode to a murderous thug. The most common interpretation is that the narrator is a gang member patrolling the streets with his crew, partaking in gang warfare and generally letting blood as if juicing strawberries.

A more in-depth study, however, suggests that Cecil has spent an unsatisfactory evening at the opera with his crew, whom he has found loitering “in A-D area” of the auditorium. He boasts that anyone testing him will “hear the fat lady sing”, suggesting that he is able to emulate the leading lady’s performance note for note.  Having admonished his friends Rico and Bo for failing to  follow the plot (“Act like you know, Rico / I know what Bo don’t know”), he announces his intention to buy a strawberry-flavoured (“Juice like a strawberry”) ice cream in the interval from an usherette with his spare change (“Ch-ch-chang-chang”). However, learning that the ice cream is £4 for a very small tub, he murders the vendor, noting that the price is “extraordinary” and asking whether she thinks he has “money to burn”. Flushed with regret, he entreats appalled opera-goers to “dial the emergency number”, possibly to call the policeman he accidentally bumped into on the way into the performance (“Excuse me Mr Officer”).

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Pick up the crew in-a de area, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer

No, no, we don’t die
Yes, we multiply
Anyone test will hear the fat lady sing
Act like you know, Rico
I know what Bo don’t know
Touch them up and go, uh-oh
Ch-ch-chang-chang

(chorus)

Extraordinary
Juice like a strawberry
Money to burn baby, all of the time
Cut to fade is me
Fade to cut is she
Come juggle with me, I say every time

Here comes the hotstepper, murderer
I’m the lyrical gangster, murderer
Dial emergency number, murderer
Still love you like that, murderer

Top 5 unexploited film sequels to Brief Encounter

It seems odd to me that no one has adequately exploited the popularity of Brief Encounter by making a sequel. Or, indeed, several sequels, preferably along the lines of the Die Hard franchise, viz:

Brief Encounter 2: Briefer Encounter
Dr Alec Harvey returns from Johannesburg for a conference on respiratory diseases among miners, but only meets Laura Jesson for a few seconds while changing trains on his way to the Winter Gardens in Blackpool.

Brief Encounter with a Vengeance
Fred Jesson discovers the truth about his wife’s clandestine cinema visits with Dr Alec Harvey and contrives to restore his pride by poisoning a scone destined for Harvey, who is due to visit the railway station tea shop on his return journey from Blackpool. The assassination attempt is foiled, however, when Dolly Messiter, the chatterbox who interrupted Harvey and Mrs Jesson’s farewell at the end of the first film, intercepts the lethal scone and dies noisily, pulling the tablecloth to the floor and upsetting a dish of Banbury cakes. 

Brief Encounter 4.0: Live Free or Encounter Briefly
(directed by Joel Schumacher)
Dr Alec Harvey, who has been suspended from the medical profession after the shock of Dolly Messiter’s death caused him to seek solace at the bottom of a whisky bottle, learns from autopsy reports that her demise was no accident. He returns to the station to confront Fred Jesson, but is met instead by Jesson’s hired goons, who force him to take refuge behind the counter in the station cafe during a 15-minute shoot-out sequence. Harvey overcomes Jesson’s thugs, defeats Jesson in hand-to-hand combat armed only with a stethoscope and episiotomy scissors, and rescues Laura Jesson from certain death by untying her from the railway tracks just before the delayed arrival of the 4.15pm to Crewe.

Brief Encounter Begins
A reboot of the franchise, in which Dr Alec Harvey emerges as a character stricken with guilt over his inability, as a child, to cure his twin brother’s conjunctivitis. To atone for his failure, he frequents station cafes in a tireless quest to remove coal dust from passengers’ eyes. He begins to find solace after rescuing Laura Jesson from certain blindness in one eye, but his happiness is thwarted by the return of his brother, whose bitterness over his condition has caused him to reinvent himself as the villainous Partially-Sighted Man. Harvey emerges victorious from their fight to the death (after Partially-Sighted Man gets coal dust in his other eye and stumbles into the coke furnace aboard the Penzance Express) but alienates Mrs Jesson, who realises that Harvey’s mission to save sight is more important than their relationship.

Brief Encounter Actually
Richard Curtis reimagines Brief Encounter as a five-act rom-com in which Dr Alec Harvey (Hugh Grant) and Laura Jesson (Keira Knightley) overcome their awkward social situation and get married after Fred Jesson (Bill Nighy) confesses his deep-seated passion for Dolly Messiter (Emma Thompson), who is equally smitten. Beryl Walters (Renee Zellweger), the cafe assistant, dies, but the solemnity of her funeral is broken when Albert Godby (Rowan Atkinson), the ticket inspector, uses the occasion to consumate his relationship with Myrtle Bagot (Martine McCutcheon), the longstanding object of his flirtatious banter. All six lovers are married in a joint ceremony in the station cafe at Christmas, during which it snows.

Artbollocks

There is an exhibition on at the Old Truman Brewery at the moment called GazeAndBody. What’s it about, I wondered, as I picked up the leaflet. Well:

“The work commissioned by Rotoreliefs in Vibe Bar is focused on discourse and is materialised in videos and performances (Gaze & Body) which are interconnected by the concept and the translation of visual images into words.”

Now, I’ve done a degree in social sciences. I know what discourses and concepts are, but this is baffling. Is it meant to mean something, or is it a hoax to gull card-carrying PoMos into looking pensive while watching porn?

Bum note (2)

It strikes me that since the advent of digital cameras there must be a much higher proportion of people who know what their own anus looks like. Or the proportion may be the same, but there has been a sharp decline in the sales of complicated systems of mirrors.

Dustman lost in translation

I’m an enormous fan of online translation machines, so much so that I once used one to give an interview, by e-mail, to a Brazilian academic who spoke only Portuguese. When finished, I tried to work out how accurate the machine had been by translating my words into Portuguese and using the same machine to translate them back. It was absolutely incomprehensible.

Here, for example, is one machine’s attempt to translate the chorus to My Old Man’s a Dustman into German:

Mein alter Mann ist ein Müllabfuhrmann, trägt er die Schutzkappe eines Müllabfuhrmannes, trägt er Gottvorhang ich Hose, und er lebt in einer Wohnung des Rates.

And here is the machine’s attempt to translate it back again:

My old man is a garbage disposal man, carries he the protective cap of a garbage disposal man, carries he for God curtain I trousers, and he lives in a dwelling of the advice.

I did try to help by translating the idiom “cor blimey” into its original meaning, “God blind me”, but it didn’t help much. If Lonnie Donegan had recorded the song with those lyrics he might have been stuck in a dwelling of the advice for life.

Top 5 superior song lyrics to woop, woop

“Woop, woop,” is, according to the rapper KRS-One, the sound of the police.

Is it, though? I’ve heard the police, and it was definitely more: “Mee-maw, mee-maw.”

Now I think about it, that was probably the police car rather than the police themselves. I suggest to KRS-One, if that’s his real name, that he revise his song to one of the following:

1. Would you mind breathing into this bag, sir? That’s the sound of the police.

2. ‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, that’s the sound of the police.

3. We are appealing for witnesses to come forward, that’s the sound of the police.

4. A 32-year-old man is helping us with our inquiries, that’s the sound of the police.

5. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court, that’s the sound of the police.

Whose Golden Globes are they anyway?

Does anyone remember the bit at the end of each episode of Whose Line is it Anyway?, the comedy improv show, when Clive Anderson would ask his guests to read the closing credits in the style of his choosing?

Good. Now watch Kate Winslet’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes last night and imagine that Anderson instructed her, just before she went on, to read the cast and crew list of Revolutionary Road in a certain style.

I cannot say for sure what style she is attempting, but I’m leaning towards “Pregnant woman attempting to give a speech at her best friend’s wake”.

Joke

Q: What does an emotional B A Baracas say whenever he sees a rhubarb-based dessert?

A: I pity the fool.