The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

In Anthony Burgess’ short story The Endless Voyager, a businessman throws away his passport and wallet mid-transit and, unable to enter any country, spends the rest of his life shuttling from airport to airport. He eventually goes mad. Today, of course, such a traveller might stave off purgatorial insanity by dabbling on his iPhone or netbook.

In this post, friend of The Dabbler, unrepetentant English Catholic and erudite Chesterburkean commenter Recusant  selects the six cultural clicks that might sustain him in an interminable succession of departure lounges.

1. Powell & Pressburger

There is a general view that the English are the most undemonstrative and unromantic of races. Undemonstrative? Certainly, on an individual basis. Unromantic? Hardly. There is a deep and broad vein of romanticism, heavily banked up with reticence, that is almost a defining feature of the English. It is expressed strongly in the Ealing comedies, but also in those war films such as The Cruel Sea, Ice Cold in Alex and In Which We Serve. None, however, illuminate it as clearly as the products of an upper middle class Englishman, Powell, and his Hungarian Jewish emigre creative partner, Pressburger. I could link to any of Black Narcissus, I Know Where I’m Going, A Matter of Life and Death, or A Canterbury Tale and be very happy – well, maybe not A Canterbury Tale – but for me the definitive P&P film is The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. It does no harm that the stars are the marvellous Roger Livesey – the P&P actor, a radiant Deborah Kerr and a quietly perfect Anton Walbook. I’ve seen it at least fifteen times now and could recite almost every line perfectly, but it is still fresh, funny, moving and just so bally English. It could, and especially given the date, 1943, have been made nowhere else, and yet it is the opposite of parochial, that perennial failing of the British film industry.

2. Brian Johnston & Jonathan Agnew

In the perpetual departure lounge I will need something that I can guarantee will put a huge smile on my face and do it quickly. This ‘full grown schoolboy’ piece of innuendo laden commentary from Jonners and Aggers does just that and also links to the only sport I can really summon an interest in.

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3. Dr Feelgood pre-1977

This clip from their concert at Southend Kursaal in 1975, whilst not their best song, certainly shows their raw energy and the thing that attracted me to them when I first saw them, on the same tour, at the Southampton Gaumont. After the primping and preening of Glam Rock, the self-satisfied inanities of the hippies and the utter embarrassment of the mass market pop scene, the Feelgoods burst on me in all their sweaty glory. Unpretentious and supremely skilled at what they did, but without the god awful solos of the period. Lee Brilleaux was, for me, the personification of what a lead singer should be: charismatic and not divorced from his audience. Wilko Johnson was mad as a barrel full of monkeys, but he was our mad. The other two, John Sparks and Big Figure just pumped out the bass and drums like they were men doing a job, not boys trying to impress a gaggle of teenage girls. The band from England’s answer to Hoboken – Canvey Island – put life, fun, sweat, sex and a good laugh into the pompous mid-Seventies music scene and godfathered all that was to follow.

4. Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion

Ever since being first taken by mother at the age of eight, there has hardly been a Lent when I have not seen the St Matthew Passion. Even for an unrepentant Catholic like me, I can see that the Lutheran Bach succeeded in creating some of the most sublime religious music there is and the finest setting of Our Lord’s passion. And it is religious or it is nothing. Without the text, and without the religious context it becomes less entertainment, more sentimental heresy. I’ve chosen a Kathleen Ferrier version because of her voice, but also because her tragically early death mirrors the loss spoken of in the Passion.

5. The Queen Mother’s Funeral

Not for the funeral itself, or for who she was, but for what it represented: that the hysteria on display at Princess Diana’s funeral might just have been an aberration and was not necessarily a complete picture of the new England. The sentimentality, or, more accurately, unearned emotion, that was allowed to run riot after Diana’s death and the sanctimonious bullying of the Queen – “Show Us You Care, Ma’am!” – that was indulged in by the vulgar mob and the vulgar press, drove me to despair and nausea. The Queen Mother’s funeral, on the other hand, appeared to restore a sense of restraint, calm and dignity that the Elton John blubfest seemed to have made impossible. So I watch the funeral with a sense of relief that maybe the virtues of this land are still stronger than the superficial, celebrity plagued culture that is on general display would have us believe.

6. The Wilton Diptych

It’s not my favourite painting, I would want something by Velásquez or Titian for that, but it is the one I feel most attached to and familiar with. It is, as much as any painting can be, an old friend. The National Gallery is accessible in the way that most galleries are not. It is possible to dip in to it as you pass by, or when you use it as a convenient short cut from Trafalgar Sq to points north. I invariably make a point of visiting the Diptych. It is almost a pilgrimage. It is also an incredibly rare example of pre-reformation pictorial art and gives a small impression of the riches that were lost to us by the Year Zero of the new protestant settlement and the Puritan iconoclasm that was to follow. England was not the cultural wasteland of corrupt Catholic practice, as is often depicted. Rather it was a minor powerhouse of music – see William Byrd, Peter Philips and others who would put Palestrina to shame – architecture and sculpture. It, the diptych, is also exquisite.