Here’s a bit more art of some of Britain’s greatest comic talents, which I hope will brighten your day. Once again, they all come from a certain era. They’re of Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes, and Hattie Jacques. Howerd used to live in the village of Mark in Somerset, where he was very well respected. He used to turn up and support village fetes. A friend of mine used to live there, and he told me that Howerd used to rehearse in the local church hall. One Sunday at church his voice started coming through the walls during the service, so they were all entertained with cries of ‘Oooh, no! Oh, you mustn’t, no! Titter ye not!’ and so on. In the late ’80s/first years of the 90s he was just coming back as well and was all set to do a new series of Up Pompeii when he died after broadcasting just one episode of the new show.
Eric Sykes – a very talented performer and writer. He had his own long running series on BBC 1, with Hattie Jacques playing his long-suffering sister and Derek Guyler as Korky, the local policeman. Guyler was also multi-talented. Way back in the 1950s he was part of a skiffle band, playing the washboard. Sykes is probably best remembered for the film The Plank, in which he and other great stars of British TV try to carry a plank of wood across town, surviving all manner of accidents and funny incidents. But he wasn’t confined to comedy. One of his last performances was as the butler in the horror film The Others.
Hattie Jacques, drawn in the role she’s probably best remembered for, the matron in the Carry On films. But as well as starring with Eric Sykes as his sister, she also appeared in Hancock’s Half Hour when it was on the radio as his housekeeper. She well deserves a place in any roll call of British funny women.
I’ve put up several pieces today commenting on far-right Labour MP Neil Coyle and his anti-Semitic tweet about members of Jewish Voice for Labour being ‘Communists’ with their ‘own parties to ruin’. I commented on how this is very close to Nazi rantings about ‘Jewish Marxism’ and power in the SPD and government generally. But it wasn’t just the German Nazis who held these vile beliefs. There were also in British Fascism from the very start. During the War radical right anti-Semitic groups accused Jewish Anglo-German businessmen, such as Alfred Mond, of secretly aiding Germany. The coalition government was reviled as the ‘Jewalition’, while the post-War Conservative Die-Hards were anti-Semitic, anti-Socialist and believed that there was a secret Jewish plot to bring down the Empire. This sounds highly relevant to me, despite the distance of time and space. The Blairites are also anti-Socialist, and Blair’s wars were another form of western imperialism, disguised as freeing countries from tyrants and giving them democracy. In fact it was about removing checks to Western dominance and, in the case of Iraq, looting the country of its oil and state industries. British anti-Semites like Rotha Orne Linton and Nesta Websta were bonkers conspiracy theorists, who believed that Jews and Freemasons were responsible for every revolution and every calamity that had befallen humanity from the French to the Bolshevik Revolutions. One of these ladies also claimed that Nudism was also part of this vast Jewish plot! These people really weren’t well. I can hear Frankie Howerd, the great comedian, who would almost certainly have been killed or put in a concentration camp because of his homosexuality, saying, ‘Oh don’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted!’
I found this piece in Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918-1985 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987) describing British Fascist denunciations of what they saw as the corruption of the British parliament dominated by Jewish interests:
‘Other members did not mince their words with regard to the British government. William Joyce attacked the ‘Slobbering, bastardised mendacious triumvirate’ of Churchill, Eden and Cooper and argued that conscription would bring into the army thousands of young fascists whose training should not be wasted. Elwin Wright, who up until 1937 had been secretary of a respectable Anglo-German Fellowship, advocated the shooting of Jews, called Neville Chamberlain a liar and a traitor and stated that Parliament was a ‘blackmailing corrupt body of bastards.’ For Commander Cole, the Palace of Westminster was full of dirty, corrupt swine and the House of Commons was a ‘house of bastardised Jews’. Cole’s extreme anti-Semitism had developed as a result of his exposure to the Protocols when he had been involved with allied help to the White Russians in the Civil War in the 1920s.’ (p.82).
One of the various Fascist magazines circulating in the early 1920s was The Hidden Hand, published by The Britons. This had originally been called Judentum Ueber Alles when it appeared in 1920, but changed its name in the September of that year. Judentum Ueber Alles – ‘Jewry Over Everything’, an obvious play on the German national anthem, Deutschland Ueber Alles. Perhaps that’s how we should refer to any announcement by Starmer or the Blairites of another purge of innocent, decent Jews, on the spurious pretext that they are somehow anti-Semitic, because they criticise Israel, or ‘communists’ because they’re socialists?
And there was another nasty, anti-Semitic publication, The Jews’ Who’s Who. Presumably this was a list of Jewish figures in parliament, industry, culture and the arts, and the gentiles who supported them. This reminds me of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and related groups, who apparently put together a map of the people they accused of anti-Semitism – who were naturally supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, including Jews – and where they lived. This resulted in one entirely blameless Jewish woman having her car firebombed.
We have gone very far through the looking glass here, folks, where anti-Semitism is dressed up as its opposite and racists use its accusation to smear genuine decent, anti-racists, especially if they’re Jewish.
If this carries on, will the next time Starmer speaks he’ll be met by a uniformed mob chanting ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Starmer!’ Because if he isn’t, he should.
More hilarity now, though it’s unintentional and comes courtesy of Alex Jones’ British pal, Paul Joseph Watson. Jones is the bonkers American conspiracy theorist responsible for Infowars. This was the internet show that told its audience that the globalists were going to take over the world, stripping us of our freedoms and even our humanity. Obama was going to declare a state of emergency and force Americans in FEMA camps, commencing the mass cleansing of the population. The Democrats were all secretly Satanists and paedophiles. They and big business were in league with aliens/ and or demons to take over the world and create the one-world Satanic superstate of fundamentalist Christian end times theology. Barack Obama was declared to be the Antichrist because he smelt and had flies buzzing round him. Hillary was a lesbian cyborg, who practised witchcraft. NASA was running child slave labour camps on Mars. Feminists and gay rights activists are transhumanists, who want to turn everybody into gender neutral cyborgs. They’re coming to take away Americans’ guns. And the government is putting things in the water that ARE TURNING THE FRICKIN’ FROGS GAY.
It’s a fair question whether Jones actually believes any of this rubbish, or is just exploiting it for the sake of viewers. He was one of the major purveyors of the batshit insane conspiracy theories that are a genuine threat to decent political life. Thanks to Jones’, the bereaved parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre have been subject to abuse because Jones declared that the massacre didn’t happen and they were just ‘crisis actors’. A Boston pizza parlour has also been subject to abuse and even an intrusion from an armed man after Jones declared that it was at the centre of a Democrat paedophile ring and that the abuse children were kept in a dungeon in the basement. It isn’t, and there is no basement and no children. The gunman had been taken in by Jones’ bilge, and had come to free the kids he genuinely believed were imprisoned there. After being shown he was wrong, he gave himself up peacefully. It’s a mercy that no-one was killed.
Thanks to antic like the above, Jones has been thrown off a series of internet platforms so that his public profile, and his income, have taken a massive hit. And Paul Joseph Watson, after hanging out with him, has returned to Blighty. He was one of the three, who managed to destroy UKIP under Gerard Batten. When he and another two internet personalities from the far right, Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meechan and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin joined UKIP, prompting those of more moderate views to walk out. The party was already losing members to Farage’s latest vehicle for his colossal political ego, the Brexit Party, and the entry of Watson, Benjamin and Meechan just about finished it off.
Coarse jokes have been made about the precise nature of the relationship between Jones and Watson. One theory is that Watson split from Jones because of the latter’s views about Britain’s NHS. One commenter to a video about Jones and Watson jokingly suggested that Watson was over here because he was tired of being the object of the sexual attentions of Jones and one of the others at Infowars. But whatever the reason, Watson is over here, he’s looking for attention, and he’s angry. And to everyone else, it’s hilarious.
Zelo Street has posted up a rip-roaring piece about Watson going berserk at Piers Morgan on Twitter. Watson wants to debate him, but Morgan’s got better things to do like torment the government in interviews, and has simply blocked him. This has sent the man dubbed ‘Twatson’ by his detractors into what Molesworth used to describe as ‘a fearful bate’. And so he’s poured forth a stream of abuse directed at Morgan on Twitter, beginning with this delightful message.
“Cowardly little bitch. Afraid of the fact that I’m more popular and definitely more attractive than you. Mercenary twat. Debate me, you yellow belly crusty boomer sellout fraud cuck wanker dickhead”.
And there’s more, much more. He rants that Morgan is afraid to debate him because he’s more intelligent, youthful and handsome. And his spirit animal is some kind of bird of prey. He’s not a misogynist, because when he was at school his mother and grandmother would beat up any kid who picked on him. Nor is he an INCEL. He has no trouble picking up girls, especially Muslims. That still doesn’t alter the fact that he is anti-feminist, and has very islamophobic views.
One of the staples of comedy is a character massively losing their temper, like Donald Duck in some of the Disney cartoons. There’s a similar comedic value in watching Watson explode at Piers Morgan’s refusal to get drawn into debating him. Although perhaps we shouldn’t laugh. As Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘Oh, don’t mock. Doooon’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’ But faced with such a massive tantrum, it’s very had to follow Howerd’s command of ‘titter ye not’.
Zelo Street concludes their article about this with ‘Piers Morgan is, for all his faults, successful and well-off. And Paul Watson … isn’t.’ And it’s sending Watson up the wall to the immense amusement of everyone else.
As I said, I’m glad Boris Johnson has recovered enough from the Coronavirus to be sent home. I really don’t want anyone to die from this disease, including BoJob. But his recovery also means that I can at last put up the cartoon below. I was drawing just when it was announced that Johnson had been taken into hospital, and to lampoon the man when he was fighting for his life would have been unacceptable. But Johnson’s illness doesn’t change what he is, or what he and his party stand for. And so they’re still suitable subjects for ridicule and satire.
Johnson prides himself on his classic learning. He presented a series a few years ago on ancient Rome, and had a column in the Spectator when he was its editor, in which he discussed what lessons the classics had for us today. I remember one piece he did in his series about Rome, in which he contrasted the early empire, which was governed by just 12 men, with the army of MEPs and bureaucrats that administer the EU. The obvious lesson there was that smaller government equals good government. Of course the argument falls apart when you consider the vast distance in time, morals and social and technological sophistication, as well as the simple fact that the EU and its constituent nations are meant to be democracies. Ancient Rome wasn’t. It was an oligarchy, in which only a narrow section of the population had the vote, and the only real political power was that of the emperor and the army. The senate continued to meet under the empire, but their debates were so meaningless that I think they more or less stopped having them. One emperor was forced to send them a message requesting them to debate something. With his background in the classics and admiration for ancient Rome, it therefore made sense to lampoon Boris as a Roman politician.
But readers of this blog of a certain age will also remember the late, great Frankie Howerd and the comedy, Up Pompeii. This was set in the famous Roman city, and starred Howerd as the slave, Lurcio. It would start with Lurcio leaving the house, sitting down on a convenient seat, and saying ‘Salute, citizens. And now, the prologue -‘ at which point he would be interrupted by some commotion. And thus would begin that week’s episode. It was a ’70s BBC TV show, but in the winter of 1990-1, it was revived by ITV. Howerd was once again Lurcio. But the show had moved with the times and changed one character. In the original series, I think the son of the family that owned him was supposed to be gay, and the butt of various jokes about effeminacy by Lurcio. This was before the gay rights movement had had quite the impact it has now, when jokes about gays were still acceptable. By the 1990s they weren’t, and so the gay son was replaced by a eunuch, so they could still carry on making the same jokes about lack of masculinity. Sadly, it only lasted one episode, as Howerd died after the first episode was shown.
His material, like the ‘Carry On’ films, is dated now, but Howerd was a great comedian and genuinely funny man. He lived in the village of Mark in Somerset, and after his death his home was turned into a museum. He was very popular and respected there, because whenever they had a village fete, he’d turn up to do a turn and give them his support. He also, I heard, used to rehearse in the church hall. A friend of mine told me he’d actually been in a church service while Howerd was rehearsing, and his lines could be heard coming through the hall. Let’s hope they weren’t the monologue where he pretended to be a vicar, and joked about how last Sunday he held a three-hour service for the incontinent. ‘There wasn’t a dry aisle in the house’, is the punchline to that one.
So I’ve drawn Johnson as a Roman patrician politician, being jeered and pelted with mud, cabbages and buckets of water by the mob. Behind him is Howerd’s Lurcio, looking at once shocked and puzzled, and underneath is one of Howerd’s catchphrases ‘Titter ye not’.
As Johnson and his party are authoritarian and extremely right-wing, I’ve tried to show their Fascistic tendencies in the decoration at the top. The pattern around the panel is based on a Roman design, although I’ve taken a few liberties. If you look at it, it’s composed of repeating swastikas. It also has the fasces, the bundle of rods with an axe attached. This was the ancient Roman symbol of the lictor, a Roman official. The rods symbolised his right to beat, and the axe to behead, Roman citizens. It was also adopted by Mussolini’s Fascists and their counterparts in other nations, like Oswald Mosley’s disgusting BUF.
Here’s the cartoon. I hope you enjoy it, and it helps cheer you up in these dreadful times.
Yesterday Tweezer took it upon herself to enter the stage at the Tory party dancing, coming in shaking her booty to Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’. I think this was supposed to maker her appear upbeat and confident, showing how little she was worried about Brexit, challenges from BoJo and other rivals and Jeremy Corbyn’s revitalized Labour party. And presumably her, or her advisers, thought the choice of the Abba song would stress how regal she was.
The opposite has been the case. With a few notable exceptions, the prevalent mood across the country seems to have been a mixture of mirth and acute, vicarious embarrassment. The left-wing, disabled issues vlogger, Gordon Dimmack, put up a video yesterday about it, describing her as ‘dad-dancing’. Which is quite accurate. She did come across very much as that middle-aged relative, very often someone’s father, who proceeds to embarrass their offspring by dancing at family parties. Mike has put up a very good piece about Tweezer’s cringe-inducing display over at his blog, where he quotes the good folks on Twitter on this weird spectacle.
They’re all worth reading, but my favourites are the Tweet from Wandering Aeonghus, who said “Abba have condemned the use of their music by extreme right wing political groups. Do keep up!” and James Melville, who suggested new, more appropriates for the Abba song to fit with the Tory conference. They were
“You are the Brexit queen
Two left feet, dance like Mr Bean
Brexit queen
Feel the heat from the EU team, oh yeah
Plead with France, you don’t stand a chance
Having the worst time of your life
Ooh, see no deal, watch us scream
Digging the Brexit queen”.
Wirral In It Together, on the other hand, made a serious point about Tweezer and her racism and victimization of the poor and disabled:
“Theresa May dancing?! Are there graves of poor, homeless, abused, disabled, black, Asian, Hispanic people under the #CPC18 stage?”
Some people in the media, amazingly, appear to have been impressed. The I has glowing headlines today about her performance. And Laura Kuenssberg tweeted “That was one of best speech entrances ever from the person the public might least expect it from”.
This got angry replies pointing out how poor her assessment of it was and how out of touch Kuenssberg herself was from Michael Stewart and Fiona Nouri. While Matt Thomas tweeted that “Presumably Fred West could’ve come out doing Gangnam Style and Laura would’ve put a positive twist on it.”
LBC’s James O’Brien spoke for so many in this video showing his reaction to it all on YouTube.
‘Oh no! This is awful!’ he cries, before he facepalms.
You can hear the spirit of the late comedy legend, Frankie Howerd, saying ‘Titter ye not! Ooooooh noooo! It’s rude to mock the afflicted’.
But there’s a serious aspect to May’s weird cavortings. She’s dancing ’cause she’s trying to stay in power, and she’s proud that her party has reduced the working people of this country to abject poverty. Proud that they’re deporting people of colour, who have every right to be here. Proud that they’re privatizing the NHS and introducing charges for services that should be free. Proud that sanctions and the work capability tests means that the unemployed and disabled are dying of starvation. Proud that there are nearly a quarter of a million people using food banks. And the poverty for ordinary people will get worse, thanks to their partisan and utterly inept handling of Brexit.
The last word should really go to Mrs Gee, who said
“Young people – take a long hard look. Then register to vote and #voteLabour like your fucking lives depend on it. Because actually they do.”
Mike concludes his article with this
Every word of that is true. The lives of the young – their quality, everything that makes a life worth living – are in danger every moment the Conservatives are in power because the Conservatives want to take everything that makes life worth living away from working people.
And yes, that will probably extend to the right to reproduce, at some point in the future. Which is odd, because if there’s one thing Mrs May’s performance showed, it’s that it is the Tories who really shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
I know this is ad feminam, but I couldn’t resist it. Not when the Tory press has flung out so many ad hominem attacks at Labour politicos and trade unionists over the years.
In his article on Jeremy Hunt and Theresa May running away from the British public yesterday, Mike has a photo of the Tory leader in full grimace.
Looking at her, I was reminded of a picture of a Roman statue of an actor, now in the Petit Palais Museum in Paris.
It all brings to mind what Frankie Howerd would’ve said as Lurcio in Up Pompeii, ‘Titter ye not! Oooooh, she’s off again! Don’t mock! You mustn’t mock! It’s rude to mock the afflicted.’
Howerd was one of the greatest funny men this country has produced, who gave millions joy with his own brand of comedy. May and the Tories are also clowns, but it’s a black farce and the only laughter is what Russian writers call ‘the laughter through tears’.
The ancient Greek word for ‘actor’ is ‘hypocrite’. And that’s what the Tories are: massive hypocrites, pretending to care about ordinary people, ending poverty, protecting the NHS, while doing the exact opposite.
Help end their hypocrisy and cruelty by voting Labour on June 9th.
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