A tale of my dad, Roger Hargreaves, Arthur Lowe and Mr Happy saying “piss off!”
From my father: “We were recording the first series of Mr Men films in 1974 with Arthur Lowe, at Advision recording studios. Arthur Lowe was recording Mr Uppity. He smoked a large cigar in the book. I said to Roger Hargreaves, “I don’t think the BBC will accept Mr Uppity smoking”. He didn’t say anything, he just drew this, Mr Happy saying “Piss Off!” in my storyboard pad. Arthur picked it up when he came out of the recording booth and wrote, “A sentiment I echo!” and signed it. We didn’t say anything to the BBC and they let it pass. The only country to object was Finland. 38 years ago, it’s history!”
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Clapton’s solo from While My Guitar Gently Weeps, isolated from multi-track.
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Transforming recipe websites
I live alone and work from home. I eat a cooked meal twice a day. I’m not someone with a natural culinary imagination, so I often rely on recipes sites. I usually spend an hour trawling through BBC food sites, or the online destinations of celebrity chefs. It gets boring, which is a shame, as I like to cook and I love food.
How has the web not solved this problem yet? The sites that allow you to input what you’ve got in your cupboard, and then offer you suggestions based on that, are ok - but you’re still sifting through recipe after recipe, most of American origin (which means trying to figure out what the hell cilantro is).
Here’s what I want.
The site offers you options:
1. How many people are you cooking for? (Few sites offer recipes for one).
2. What’s your budget? (One main problem with recipes is that the more interesting ones rely on you buying exotic ingredients that you never use again - why can’t more sites take this into account, and offer you further suggestions the following day for meals with the same ingredients?)
3. How much time have you got? (I don’t always want “quick and simple” - at the weekends I’d like to experiment).
And then give me suggestions, broken down into sections based on main ingredients (chicken, fish, etc). Give me the option to click an “I cooked this” button so it can personalise the experience, give me a whizzy profile I feel good about updating and sharing, do some Last.fm-y stuff in the background to offer me similar recipes, and - crucially - do all this in a way that means I don’t have to spend more than 5 minutes at a time using it.
Eventually it can just throw a recipe at me in my Twitter feed every lunchtime and dinnertime, that I know I can make, will like, and have the ingredients for.
Not too difficult surely? :)
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Amis/Jacobson
I read two novels during my recent Sicilian sojourn, Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (diverting enough as a Sharpe-ish comic novel, woefully facile as ‘literature’) and Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (the work of a master craftsman, though perhaps the craft overwhelmed the feeling).
Read back to back, I was struck by the similarities. Not just in the tone of voice - though it does seem that these middle-aged male prose stylists tend towards the same accent, all of them still in debt to the Great American Trio of Updike, Bellow and Roth - but also in more surprisingly specific ways.
Both books riff on Hamlet’s Ophelia (both specifically referencing the “There is a willow grows aslant the brook” monologue), ceiling fans (yes really - both concerned about how they might unscrew themselves), the giants of English literature, and - of course - breasts.
And, ultimately, at their heart both books appear to be about striving to live in a house in Hampstead. They are both astonishingly parochial novels, even though the writers work hard at conjuring grand themes. Jacobson’s more successful in this department, but I couldn’t help thinking that The Finkler Question is so specifically located - BBC-affiliated, middle class St John’s Wood dwellers (read: “Booker judges”) - that I’d be amazed if it translated internationally.
I devoured both in days, but came away feeling there must be more to the heavyweight English novel than this.
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