RIP, RJP*

In Spike Milligan's Q series, from the 1970's, they had a way of ending a sketch, when they had run out of ideas, by having the cast stare at the camera and shuffle off to the left, all the while chanting, in a hopeless way: 'What are we going to do now?' I thought that I might steal this idea to commemorate my father's death. He loved Spike Milligan and I'm sure that he would have enjoyed the idea of a churchful of people acting in this peculiar fashion. And besides, it's a pertinent question: what are we going to do now, without him?

Just over ten days before he died he was still walking and talking coherently, though there could be no doubt that the cancer had taken its toll on him. Then he went into hospital for a blood transfusion, and, troubled by agonising back pain, agreed to stay in. From that point on, every day marked a further deterioration. This time, it wasn't the hospital's fault. Brentwood Community Hospital is a hospital for people who don't like hospitals (everyone). The staff seem to genuinely care. They keep asking if everything's OK, like in a restaurant. Of course - it isn't. But it is nice to be asked.

The book of deathbed humour does not have a high page count. Nevertheless, even at the very end, after we'd been called out at five in the morning to share his last minutes, there was one moment of unexpected laughter, when we were talking about how my Dad had hoped to hold out for Summer. 'Never mind', Justin said, 'it'll be scorchingly hot where he's going.' I looked at him in some surprise. Dad was a lapsed Catholic, it's true, but this seemed a bit harsh. It turned out that he meant the spot in the garden where he wants his ashes scattered. It's a bit of a suntrap.

My Dad was the kind of person who would talk to anyone, as his sons, who spent most of their childhoods waiting for him to finish interminable conversations in Brentwood High Street, knew to their cost. He sometimes felt that he had wasted his potential because he never made significant amounts of money, but his great gift was for life itself: it lay in his day-to-day dealings with other people, in his warmth and lively humour, the twinkle in his eye. He loved life. He really engaged with the world, and was always telling us what it would be like if he ran it - a scenario which varied alarmingly according to his mood.

Most of all, he loved to laugh. I really wanted the music at the end of the service to be Tommy Cooper's Don't Jump Off The Roof Dad, which I think he would have appreciated. This was vetoed, but I was able to include in the eulogy a couple of lines from a nonsense song I recall him singing around the house in my childhood, and which unaccountably stuck in my mind:

'When I see a sausage on a stick,
I can't help it, I have to get in quick.'

Of course, he would have forgotten the words as soon as they emerged from his mouth, but I hope that he would have been tickled to know that they actually got read out in church, by a vicar. (Thanks, Andrew).

Not very long after his departure, we were already living in a changed world. Volcanic ash filled the skies; planes were grounded. This does not seem like coincidence - life never will be the same again. This is just the beginning.


*Reginald John Plumbridge (1936 - 2010)

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tits and terror, or: Nigel Kneale's Breasts

Beasts was a series Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale wrote for ATV in the late 70's, a series of supernatural stories themed around animals. I just bought it on DVD and it was worth the £20 just to see the ATV ident again. The other night I watched Buddyboy, in which Martin Shaw plans to convert a former dolphinarium into a porn cinema. The current owner is suspiciously eager to sell, however. What's bothering him? Is he being squeezed by the heavies? Is it the decor in his flat (ghastly)? Or is he being haunted by a vengeful ghostly dolphin?

Well, we never actually see a dolphin clanking its chains and walking through walls, but, yeah, it does seem to be the latter, sort of. That's a bit of a problem, since it is very hard to make a dolphin, or even the idea of a dolphin, sinister. Buddyboy (this is the name of the vengeful dolphin) doesn't manage it. But as it's Nigel Kneale, there is an idea behind the whole thing, with the exploitation of dolphins being used as a metaphor for the exploitation of women. A feminist subtext then, although I can't see Germaine Greer being overjoyed. Watching it at the age of eleven (?) I didn't notice. In true post-feminist style, what I noticed back then was tits, as if Beasts was really Breasts.

Of course I am so desensitized to such sights by now that they are a matter of supreme indifference to me; they were not so common then and, and to add to the trauma, I was watching this with my Grandma, who was babysitting. The biggest surprise I got watching it again came from the fact that I'd misattributed the breasts. I remembered them small and pale on the body of the girl (spoiler alert) who drowns in the bath at the end. But she is fully-clothed: the half-remembered breasts turn out to be enormous and tanned and sprouting from the body of a wannabe porn star who pops them round the door of Martin Shaw's office for assessment. It's one of the few instances in which something recalled from childhood actually turns out to be bigger than previously thought.

Also oddly familiar in that they belong to actress Marianne Morris who, in the 1974 film Vampyres (which I saw for the first time only last week) plays one of two lesbian vampires who reside (squat, really) in an English country house. Here they lure unsuspecting and lust-addled male motorists in order to drain them dry. It happens.

But what really must have addled my childish mind was that Stuart McGugan, a former presenter of Play School, is Martin Shaw's sidekick in this. So he's gone from having Little Ted and Humpty whispering in his ear to boasting of having weighed Marianne Morris' tits on the kitchen scales. I am now recovering long-suppressed, and possibly false, memories of Play School episodes in which he presided over orgies involving Big Ted, 'evil' doll Hamble, and Floella Benjamin.