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The story of the character from the gutter improving themself in character, status and lifestyle beit in ‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw or ‘Educating Rita’ by Willy Russell, is one of the basic stories of relationship explored in literature and media.
This scene from Willy Russell’s play and film about Rita, a liverpudlian hairdresser who is being tutored as a mature student by a university don, sees Frank saturated in self-pity and guilty of denying Rita of the literary pleasures and social standing that she desires and he has rejected.
Rita – Yeah. Well, er…I’ll tell you what you can’t bear, Mr Self-Pitying Piss Artist,
what you can’t bear is that I’m educated now. I’ve got what you have and you don’t like it. I mean, good God, I don’t need you. I’ve got a room full of books!
I know what wine to buy, what clothes to wear, what plays to see, what papers to read, and I can do it without you.
Frank – Is that all you wanted? Have you come all this way for so very, very little?
Rita – Oh, yeah, it’s little to you, isn’t it, Frank? Little to you who squanders every opportunity and mocks and takes it for granted.
Frank – Found a culture, have you, Rita? Found a better song to sing? No. You found a different song to sing. And, on your lips, it is shrill and hollow and tuneless. Oh, Rita, Rita, Rita,
This conversation resonates in me in that through my upbringing, life experiences and admitted prejudices, I don’t want Rita to think she sings a better song but for different reasons to Frank.
I’ve always viewed the constraint and imposition of viewing high culture literature and other expressive arts such as opera, ballet and painting as the porthole for cultural acceptance as dismissive and insulting to huge numbers of people. It’s a cultural apartheid where only certain people are considered worthy enough to sit at the high table. Envious? – not a bit of it. In fact, it’s an extremely narrow and limited range of intellectual pursuits by which to discriminate people’s integrity. I have felt what it’s like to be held in this confining set of topics. All attempts to talk about other values and interests are met by a glazed look in some eyes and a silence or a polite acceptance accompanied at intervals by opportune ways to assert court behaviour and social order by perhaps being corrected grammatically or factually by a date, name or other irrelevantly insignificant detail.
Here’s an fictitious example but based on fact! :
Have you ever asked a question of somebody who cannot bear to show that he/she doesn’t know the answer and hence, in their minds, lose face, credibility or status. Perhaps I should say here, ‘an answer’ because invariably you get an answer of sorts but not to the question that you asked.
Hey Nigel, sorry to disturb you but how do you get a Lookup table to work across different worksheets in Excel for our reports?
-Ermm – I’m not sure, John, without looking at it for longer but did you know, by the way, that an elephant’s got big ears or that Ian McEwan is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. Anyway, you don’t need to go into that detail for your reports.
OK thanks Nigel, your response was very interesting but alas completely unhelpful because I didn’t ask you for trivia or opinion. Listen Nigel, I wouldn’t think any less of you if you were just honest and say on this particular occasion, you don’t know the answer to my question. I’m not testing you, in fact, I wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought there was a good chance that you might be able to help me. It’s not a game or contest, you know, we’re not comparing the size of our nobs!
I’ve been entertained in the hallowed dining rooms of the Oxford colleges, taught at one of the country’s most prestigious grammar schools, rubbed shoulders with allumini of the academic world. Fellow of the Royal Society here, Doctorate there, I must say my gown’s B.Ed colours felt very sorry for itself amongst the grandeose ermin of the Oxbridge dons. I have sat on the banks of both Isis and Cam, punted and hung out with the best of the aspiring class. I remember one particular time when teaching at Oxford, someone asked me, “Do you row?” Not “Can you row?”, mind. Not – “Are you able to propel yourself through water with the help of oars?” No – that is a different kind of question altogether. This question is like another, “Do you read?” – I think I replied “Only Ceefax pages 341-9 and the Sporting Life” to that one. No – “Do you row?” – Know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink, wink – King Lear, Glyndebourne, Twickers, Blowers, my dear old thing. It’s code, almost masonic but very prevalent because that’s its purpose.
My contention is that Jerusalem is past its sell by date. We no longer need nor should want the world to think of us as ‘Downtown AbbeyLand’ We’re being held back by our antiquated class system and the extemely unmeritocratic and statistically biased selection of our ruling elite. The argument is not that it’s unfair, which it is, but that it’s ruining us. It’s not only the Royal family IQ that’s down the pan as a result of interbreeding. We need freedom for the best genes from all monkeys to come to the fore.
Sir Michael Parkinson gave a wonderful posthumous tribute to union leader Jimmy Reid. In it, he refers to the televised debate that he had with Kenneth Williams, a very entertaining popular guest on his show, despite describing Parkinson as ‘that northern nit’. Williams very much saw himelf as the articulate, well-read sage and loved to flaunt his knowledge to impress his audience. Play the clip below.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-11021287
I’m suspicious of my working class shoulder chip. I see injustice in the world but what have I done to allieviate it? Could my objections against private health and education be down to that really I’m envious of not flying special class and being protected from the also-rans by the curtain. The fact that I really hate golf could be not so much because I regard it as the apartheid of all sports but because I’m shit at it! If I had been born into privilege, wouldn’t I be like all the other ‘haves’ and ‘winners’ and look after my interests and seek to profit from them.
Well that belief that it would hard to resist nepotism, entitlement, the chance of a place at the high table is not true for one very special man. Anthony Neil Wedgwood “Tony” Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate, renounced his hereditary peerage to become a British Labour Party politician and a Member of Parliament (MP) for 50 years.
It’s hard to imagine how a man educated at Westminister School and born an aristocrat could devote his entire life to fighting for democracy and the rights of the common man.Tony Benn is simply a man for all seasons.Here are his values, listen and decide for yourself.
“My mother was a very religious woman who used to read the bible every night. And she said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. She said the bible is the story of the conflict between the kings who had power and the prophets who preached righteousness. And she taught me to support the prophets against the kings and the older I get, the more true I believe that to be. And I find wherever I go, that same prophetic teaching is to be found in all religions so I don’t feel in any way divided from jews or muslims or buddhists. I find that if you explore the roots of your faith, you have a common interest and belief and that is the basis for the future of the human race.”
I’ve noticed this scaremongering all my life, usually done by the tory press. If you let Labour in, all our best minds will leave the country and the masses will lose the ‘trickle-down’ benefit of their leadership. There are reds under the beds, those ‘pinko’ teachers in Camden are promoting homosexuality by reading ‘I’ve got two dads’ and there are a million Bulgarians and Romanians heading our way to steal our jobs and houses. My wife and I decided very early on in parenthood that we would not threaten the ‘bogeyman’ on our two sons. If something is wrong, you don’t do it because it is wrong and not because of the consequences.
With the next clip in mind, I’d like to persuade anybody connected with education to make Tony Benn the patron saint of teachers! If the Roman Catholic Church can do it, why can’t we?
“When people talk about politics, they always talk about powerful people and weak people, successful people and unsuccessful people, rich people and poor people. The real question is: Is it right or is it wrong? Now you can argue about what’s right and wrong, but that’s the question you should ask.” – ” My experience of progress is very simple. If you start with a sensible idea like votes for women, in the beginning they ignore you, then they attack you, then they imprison you, then you win and you can’t find anyone at the top who doesn’t claim to have thought of it in the first place.”
I’m fustrated by the well-held view that all you have to do is send your child to a certain school or have the best teacher and genius will prevail. It is a fact that only 20% is down to the school! In my experience, it is the child that succeeds or not and for a teacher to take credit or fault for that, rather masks the real truth. Our skill as teachers is to enable, to inspire, to encourage because we are pseudo parents. Anybody who is, shall we say, conservative-minded, who is career-oriented and looking primarily to promote themselves should, in my opinion, be in another job.
As Bill Cunningham, street fashion photographer for The New York Times, says, “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.” Whereas with the rest, it’s give me a bonus, an increment or a reward and I’ll believe in anything you want, peddle anything you want and trample over anybody you want. Give me the key to the executive washroom or the title of assistant manager (No Gareth! – You’re an assistant to the manager) and I immediately seem to suffer from amnesia and acute hyprocrisy to my own previous working habits.
Still fighting injustice at 88, no matter where it presents itself. You can’t muzzle the truth, so don’t bother trying!
Every UKIP, Defence League sympathesiser, reader of the Daily Mail should be made to watch this clip and realise how rational, educated and essentially good people value and tolerate the differences between us all.
Finally, after reading and listening to the clips above, is this as funny as it was intended to be? Here we have the prophet and the king. One baron looking to profit from this encounter, puns intended, and one looking to encourage and enlighten. I’m a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen but I doubt the wisdom of treating subjects with satire that do not deserve lampooning. This after all, does not serve the public good like highlighting the homophobia of redneck cage-fighting fans or heroically ridiculing the fanatical singing of the ‘star-bangled banner.’
What this does bring home is a lesson in extremely generous tolerance and acceptance for people whose views are diametrically opposite to your own.
What a morning that was! Getting up at the crack of dawn and walking down a savannah path to help an african herdsman milk his cow and goats. I regret not being at the slaughter of the two goats for the end of visit barbecue. Sounds morbid but makes perfect sense if you think that rarely does a meat-eater see the complete story of how the meal come to the table.
This is Kira Farm Development Centre in Southern Uganda where our party of North Devon pupils and teachers spent ten days in July 2012. We were there to experience the Amigos charity efforts to train some of Uganda’s most vulnerable young people in farming, textiles, catering and other skills. Particularly heart-warming was the opportunity to visit ex-students back in their homes after they had finished their one-year courses.
In this film you can see the students of Kira farm making bio-water filters to take into the local community. Helping to deliver these filters, one to the local dignatry,(politics is everywhere) two to schools and one to a children’s sports club was one of the proudest feelings I’ve ever experienced. And I hadn’t done anything! It makes me angry when I hear affluent people complain about their rights when such deserving people are so grateful for something so basic.
“Mr. Wainwright has proved to be far and away the most candid diarist among the singer-songwriters who… brought confessional poetry into popular song…New York Times
What a voice and what a performer he is. He’s unique. When I see a video like ‘Man shits in bucket’ on Youtube receive 25,000,000 views while Loudon Wainwright attracts an average of 20 odd thousand, I despair.
With no rehearsal, Beverley Knight finishes the session off and does this! Must be tough for other vocalists to watch this and know that you just ain’t got it!
Peter Cook was educated at St Peter’s College, Radley, a public school near Abingdon in Oxfordshire.
The following are extracts from a biography of Peter Cook by Harry Thompson.
Radley had strong links with overseas service which was why Peter had been sent there. In the words of one contemporary, Robin Gunn,’It was a very insular society, geared to producing characters of self-sufficient enough to govern the natives in distant, lonely, steamy parts of the globe.’
It goes without saying that Peter’s first year or so at Radley was utterly miserably unhappy. He intensely disliked the authority that the school exercised over him and those who applied it.
Peter’s first wife Wendy remembers that,’He did share with me how sometimes he would bang his head on the wall in despair in the night because he couldn’t breathe and I think he felt so abandoned. He really had such a lonely time.’
Peter Cook soon learnt to use humour as a form of self-defence.
‘I hated the first two years,’ he explained,’because of being bullied. And I was as cowardly as the next man, I didn’t enjoy getting beaten up and I disliked being away from home – that part was horrid. I could make fun of other people and therefore make the person who was about to bully me laugh instead.’ How many times, over the years, has the British comedy industry had cause to be grateful for generations of public school bullies.
Peter’s particular bete noire at Radley was the Senior Prefect, Ted Dexter, later to become England’s cricket captain. Even in later life, Peter was still ‘really angry’ at the treatment he had received at the hands of Dexter.
As well as having to endure the disciplinary attentions of Dexter and his sort, Peter found his pretty features attracted a different kind of unwelcome attention. Asked later by Michael Parkinson what his chief memory of Radley was, he replied: ‘Trying to avoid buggery. I’ve always wanted to look up one old acquaintance of mine – and I won’t mention his name, he’ll know perfectly well who he is, the dirty sod. I was a young quite pretty boy, number three in the charts and he was a prefect, and he came into my cubicle. I was reading a magazine and he sat on the bed and put his hand up the back of my pyjamas and started stroking my back. And he said, “Do you mind that, Cook?” And I said “Yes …” In fact I didn’t mind at all but I felt I ought to say yes, because my master had had me in at the beginning of term and had said, “As a young boy, Cook, you will discover that there are a lot of other boys at this school. And sometimes…. the other boys…..do things to the younger boys.”
Asked later by Playboy magazine how he had lost his virginity at the school, he retorted, ‘At what end?’
It fills me with immense pride to have been a state school teacher all my life. Peter Cook’s experiences are of course not thankfully universal but a good friend of mine who is a counsellor once told me that a statistically significant disproportionate number of his clients are from private boarding schools. We have had two fantastically talented boys from our school win scholarships to Eton in recent years and I’m absolutely certain that today’s improved culture serves to protect them from the customs and abuse that boys used to suffer. When invited to join in the acclaim that these public fellowships bring to the school, I become a silent conscientious objector. You see, in state schools, we teach anybody and everybody. We often find our most valued role is helping young people cope, at such an impressionable age, with all the things that Peter Cook was coming to terms with. We don’t fuck them up or indeed try to fuck them!
John Cleese, in a posthumous assessment, distilled the essence of Cook’s talent:
“Most of us have to grind away for something like six or seven hours – that’s what Chapman and I used to reckon – to produce three minutes of material, whereas for the first fifteen or twenty years of Peter’s professional life it took him exactly three minutes to produce three minutes of material …..”
A Monkey in Manhattan 