A Northern Soul

These are the five elements of hip hop. Very few art forms require mind, body and soul.

 If you work in a school you appreciate that hip hop, along with its rap offshoots, is a popular form of cultural expression. The issue with education is that is driven by white middle-class men, more interested in the traditional, the canonical, than the contemporary and fresh. In the last few years GCSE English Literature has been adapted to include a pre-19^th century text, which means students no longer study a text written after 1945. Don't get me wrong, there is a place for heritage literature: there’s no denying that Austen, Dickens and Shakespeare require study; in fact, it’s a thrill when students see the connection between their lives and these ‘ancient worlds.' However, education shouldn’t just project institutional taste onto young people, it should respond to theirs too.

Steve Arnott is a person trying to do such a thing. He’s discovered by filmmaker Sean McAllister at an arts meeting. Now, Steve doesn’t look like a tastemaker. Everyone around him is younger, displaying a social ease he finds uneasy. Indeed, he's right to observe that ‘these people look like they’ve got nothing to worry about.’ Steve, on the other hand, does. He works in a warehouse on relatively low pay; his marriage has broken down, forcing him to move back in with his sick mother- and he has up to his neck in debt. Steve doesn’t have the lightness of being as many artists do; there is no trust fund to catch him if he falls. Despite not wanting to be, he’s a "starving artist" in every sense. And unlike the poverty voyeur of Common People, who 'could call their dad (to) stop it all,’ Steve's bank of mum and dad is payday loans.

Poster art of Steve Arnott

McAllister is drawn to him. Up in Hull to direct the first night of its Capital of Culture celebrations, he sees Steve as a kindred spirit. McAllister left school at 16 and got a job in a factory for nine years, before leaving to become a filmmaker. He understands how people can be trapped in financial and aspirational poverty. The arts were McAllister’s way out. Since leaving Hull, he’s produced documentaries on Iraq, Yemen and Syria; the latter Syrian Love Story was one of the best films I saw last year. Steve is different in that he doesn’t want to leave Hull. Instead he wants to expand it. I’m not being facetious when I say this. I appreciate Hull is often used a punch-line by southerners for all that is shit and dirty; however, it’s a city with pride. Its fisheries were once the envy of Britain, bringing huge sums of money in. William Wilberforce, the English politician who argued against the slave trade, came from there. Further, Phillip Larkin, the great post-war poet, worked in its university library. Steve’s big concern is that the City of Culture might pass the satellite estates by. He explains how some families don’t have the money to come into town, which stops them from benefitting from the artistic provision on offer. (When I worked in West Leeds there were children who had never been into its city centre- their world globe had just one location: home.)

Steve’s dream is to take a bus into deprived schools and communities, where he can then deliver hip hop tutorials to youngsters. The medium is something they are used to, which may make them more willing to communicate. His hope is that it empowers children to express themselves creatively, rather than aggressively. At the start everything seems to be going well: the company he works for donates a bus that he has kitted out with recording equipment. Soon Beats Bus is pulling into schools, teaching children how to breakdance and flow. The children are drawn into this fast vibrant world, one every bit as colourful as Alice's Wonderland. There are two kids in particular that stand out. Harvey, a boy with a stutter, who finds articulating his feelings difficult; and Blessing, a bodyshaker, who is made of charisma and light. Steve continues to go from school to school, but he also enlists the pair into his crew that perform in city festivals over the year.

Steve, the crew and the beats bus.

I appreciate my description so far might make this seem like School of Rock. It isn’t. Steve is not a hype man in the vein of Jack Black. He’s quiet and sensitive with the children - and McAllister. The time he puts into this social enterprise costs him at work, as he struggles to juggle what is effectively two full-time jobs. The daughter that he dotes on lives an hour and a half away – difficult, given he hasn’t got a car. This all occurs whilst the debts continue to mount. If he was up to his neck in it before, he’s now up to his eyeballs. Watching a man trying to keep his dignity when it’s being stripped from him is a difficult watch. Frequently, Steve’s eyes threaten tears. The trauma of witnessing abuse as a child clearly had a profound effect on him; now it’s capitalism slapping him down. Ironically, in many senses, he’s a Conservative poster boy – The Big Society in action; he should be put on a pedestal, held up as a totem for social change; instead, he’s starved out, kicked down, warned not to dream.

I’ll end by ruminating on Blessing’s words. In his first performance, he said he had ‘butterflies in his stomach’; by his second ‘dragons.' From the frantic flutter of apprehension to the focused expulsion of confidence, this is progress. White men in graves can inspire our children to learn, so too fortysomethings in tracksuits. Whomever the person, whatever the medium, it’s just important creativity catches fire.  Since the documentary £26,000 has been raised for Steve’s Beats Bus. Money that will go to supporting children like Harvey and Blessing realise that there is more to art than grammar and punctuation. 

A Northern Soul is available on iPlayer. Donations to Beats Bus can be made here: 

https://beats-bus.co.uk/

The Play That Goes Wrong

‘The show must go on.’

(A nineteenth century show business phrase)

When Laurence Olivier first stepped onstage as a professional actor, he botched his entrance by tripping over the door frame and falling into the footlights. Things can go wrong for even the greatest actor. They can miss their mark, forget their cue, lose their prop. Every person, however revered, can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. It can happen because actors – despite their claims – are fallible. They are not divine beings, omniscient Gods, able to circumvent embarrassment and failure. They are shit in a bowl, fart in your pants, human beings. The fact they make mistakes doesn’t make them lesser actors; the fact they can find a way out of them is what makes them great.

Yeah, but you stacked it mate.

I talk about this because last night we went to see The Play That Goes Wrong. The play is a sleeper hit. First performed in The Old Red Lion in Islington, the show benefited from word-of-mouth reviews. From there, it enjoyed huge success in Edinburgh before transferring to London. Over the last four years it’s been packing them out on the West End, earning an Olivier Prize for Best New Comedy. The premise of the play is indebted to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, a 1982 production that centred on the backstage rivalries of a failing theatre piece. The Play That Goes Wrong is purely centred on what happens onstage and the chaos that ensues when you pair incompetent stage crew with risible actors.

This is the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s production of Murder at Haversham Hall. Director Chris Bean introduces the performance apologising for the box office mix up that has led us here. He hopes we’re not too upset that our Hamilton tickets haven’t materialised, causing us to watch his play instead. Bean is in good spirits; he believes we’re in for a treat. Previous productions have not gone well. Technical challenges hampered James and the Giant Peach (a giant one couldn’t be sourced; the normal one lost. The end result: a work titled James). But this one would be different. They had the costume, the stage, the cast and most importantly, the rights. (Legal wranglings in the past left them without a plural, consequently their musical Cat did not generate the sales they hoped.)

The acting is as stiff as a corpse.

The play begins with Charles Haversham laid out on a sofa. His friend Thomas Colleymore and butler Perkins try to revive him- but he’s dead. Or at least he should be. Acting is a craft. It takes years of training and experience to convey a life not lived. Facial expression, tone of voice, timing, pacing, body language and movement. These are the constituents of acting. However, being a corpse demands none of these things. It is easy. Children do it in primary school. Dead lions on the mat is all the research you need for playing dead. All you have to do is lie there and think of interval – when you can then get up and stretch your legs. The trouble with Charles is he reacts to his company’s mistakes. When they sit on him, he recoils. When they drop something, he hides it. When the stretcher breaks, he wriggles off-stage - this to him is 'covering.'

It’s not just playing dead these characters can’t do: they can't perform for their life. When the body is removed and the inspector is called, havoc soon ensues. Props are misplaced, so instead of the inspector using his pen and notepad to make notes, he must use keys and a vase. As for the performers, they can barely speak let alone act. The actor who plays Perkins enunciates in a style akin to Matt Berry’s Steven Toast, delivering the word ‘morose’ in a way a head injury might. In one hilarious moment, an actor comes in too early, meaning they pre-empt their partner’s line – it’s the Two Ronnies ‘Mastermind’ sketch put to murder mystery dialogue. 

If it isn’t enough the actors have to deal with each other’s efforts, they also have to contend with the stage. Before the production began we saw Trevor, the Sound and Lighting Operator, leave his sound booth to attend to a few things on stage. One of which is a loose floorboard; the other a mantelpiece that won’t stay up. Of course, problems with these feature later. More than that though, the scene walls are shakier than a Crossroads set, and the front door, which connects performer to stage, just won’t open. Everything about this production is doomed to fail: from the corpse that won’t stay down, to the stage that won’t stay up, the play is an unmitigated disaster. So what do the actors do? Break the fourth wall and laugh at their mistakes? End the play early and preserve some dignity? Of course not. They soldier on. They cover each other’s mistakes with more mistakes, creating a house of mistakes, which will of course topple, allowing the process to begin all over again.

At the end of the piece, there’s echoes of Buster Keaton, Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge and Only Fools and Horses. With all these disparate influences, it’s no wonder that the play has been successful. It really is one for all the family. A teenager will enjoy the pratfalls, a millennial will appreciate the satire, a parent will recognise classic sitcom and grandpa will enjoy all the carry on.

The show must go on. 

This show surely will for years yet.

The Play That Goes Wrong is on in the Duchess Theatre

There She Goes

BBC4 doesn’t have much in the way of original British comedy and drama, but when it does it’s often exceptional. Burton and Taylor and Detectorists spring to mind as to the channel's quality programming. Its latest offering There She Goes is currently my favourite programme on television. Writer Shaun Pye, responsible for Monkey Dust and The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, has created a family sitcom that is both hilarious and vital.

Pye has written the sitcom from personal experience. The sitcom revolves around Rosie, a child with a severe learning disability, and her parents’ failure to cope. Pye and his wife had a child, like Rosie, with a chromosomal disorder. The sitcom is the transposition of the their life into thirty minute episodes. Some of the events are of course embellished, but the kernel of them is true. The idea for the sitcom came from years ago when Pye wrote Facebook posts about his domestic situation. His humour was gallows in nature, laughing in the face of condemnation; his daughter the jailer, he the prisoner. The posts were well received because people admired the honesty behind them. In the play of life, disability is often depicted as an interminable tragedy that doesn’t allow for levity. Pye though realises disability can be funny. And to laugh at disability is not to laugh at the disabled, but to laugh at the situations it throws up.

Shaun Pye. (You might remember him from Extras.)

There She Goes begins with dad Simon (David Tennant) and brother Ben (Edan Hayhurst) taking Rosie (Miley Locke)  to the park for a kick-about. The trouble is Rosie  isn’t interested in going. She performs a sit-in on the pavement in way of protest. Simon is reduced to calling his wife Emily (Jessica Hynes) for assistance. Emily opens the door and sees the civil disobedience in action. It’s down to her to break the strike and send the striker back to work. She and Simon pick Rosie off the floor and bundle her - like a murdered body - into the car. The journey to the park? About ten seconds. Immediately this scene establishes the humour and challenge in having a disabled child. Tasks that should be simple are bloody difficult when someone doesn’t want to play ball; the only option is to laugh in the face of defeat.

Rosie’s ability to outwit her parents at every stage- despite being learning disabled- is a real joy to behold. In episode two we see Rosie get excited over a picture of a bubble bath. Simon and Emily knows what this means. Their daughter wants to be bathed, and bathing means bubbles, and bubbles means trouble. Simon excuses himself with a carrier bag of food; an ‘I have to cook’ get out of bath time free card. It falls on Emily to perform the kind of mission that Ethan Hunt would refuse to accept. Getting Rosie in the bath is easy; getting Rosie out of the bath is impossible. When bath time is over, she tenses her body, becoming a dead weight. Even with two of them, Simon and Emily can’t get her out. Rosie is the ruler of her kingdom; she will come when she’s ready. Emily’s attempts to bait Emily out of the bath is comedy gold.

There’s another side to There She Goes though that elevates it beyond entertainment. The story flashes back and forwards over ten years. The scenes I’ve touched on are set in 2015-16, hitting the sitcom beats of build-ups and pay-offs. In these moments we see a united family that love Rosie in all her exasperating glory. Running alongside this though is Emily and Simon’s past, which to excuse the pun, isn’t so rosy. Here, we see how Emily struggled to cope with the realisation that her daughter wasn’t like her son. We see a mother’s struggle to connect with her daughter. Jessica Hynes is fantastic in these scenes, reflecting the confusion that stems from things not turning out the way you planned. In one heart-breaking moment, she explains her feelings to Simon, ‘What if you lost a child, but there was something there, just reminding you of it all the time?’ She sees Rosie as a haunting, a ghoul reminding her of the child she never had. On the other hand, Simon finds connecting with his daughter simpler; what he finds difficult is understanding his wife’s depression. Where he should be helping to pull his wife out of the abyss, he instead drinks himself to oblivion. The fact that we still empathise with Simon is a testament to David Tennant’s nuanced performance.

So There She Goes has it all. It has comedy that will make you laugh, and drama that'll make you cry. It has the happiness of seeing a family laugh in dysfunction. It has the edge of parents making fun out of their disabled child (in a good natured way though). It really is wonderful.

There She Goes is on BBC4, Tuesday at 10pm. Previous episodes can be watched on the iPlayer.

First Man

The only thing I know about space is ‘my very easy method just shows us nine planets.’ Given I’m often accused of having my head in the clouds, I have zero interest in what happens above me. I blame my science teachers. They weren’t bad teachers, but they weren’t inspiring ones either. I have no recollection of them showing any enthusiasm for the topic at all. When it came to the school of presentation, they were less Michael McIntyre, more Jack Dee: we were impositions on their time, obligations to be endured. In my science GCSE I got a good mark, but this was through memorising a revision guide, not because I had any actual understanding of the subject. My big fear as a teacher is my students will leave school and never read a book again. (I think the ultimate index for measuring my quality as a teacher is whether school leavers scour through a hotel bookcase or not? If they do, then I did a decent job. If they don’t, then my practice should be called into question.)

This year I listened to ‘Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino’ by Arctic Monkeys. The record is a concept album: taking place on the moon, its story consists of a fictitious band playing for guests at a space hotel. Being a huge fan of lyricist Alex Turner, I did some homework and discovered that Tranquility Base is the site on the moon where humans landed and walked on for the first time. My interest was a little piqued and I re-watched the moon landing again as a result.

This week I went to see First Man which tells the story of said moon landing, focusing on the leader of that mission, Neil Armstrong. I have seen space movies before – Gravity, Apollo 13 and Moon - and they’ve always left me a little cold. This one though I was excited about because it’s by Damien Chazelle and Justin Hurwitz, the pair behind Whiplash and La La Land. I talk about them as a pair because along with Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer, their movies wouldn’t work without the other. Chazelle’s movies have always had music at front and centre, with his first two having jazz musicians as lead characters. Chazelle has the eye; Hurwitz the ear. The latter's scores have been both muscular and propulsive (Whiplash) and melancholic and romantic (La La Land).

Their previous work is rooted down on the ground in the tarmac of small town America, featuring aspirant characters who look up to the stars and get disappointed when they don't look back. How then were they going to make a film about an all-American hero who aimed for the stars and hit the moon? If their stock in trade was creative underdogs, how were they going to create a film about a renowned victor without it descending into bland patriotism?

The first thing I should say is despite being more ambitious in scope than Whiplash, the themes and concerns aren’t so different. First Man, like Chazelle’s other features, is about obsession. Whiplash was about going to wild extremes to perfect drumming; La La Land was about the emotional sacrifice that comes from an individual pursuit; and First Man is no different. It’s a movie about commitment and the cost of it to the individual and their loved ones.

La La Land (left) and Whiplash (right)

It begins in 1961 where Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), a test pilot for NASA, runs into some trouble. The rocket plane inadvertently bounces off the atmosphere, meaning the mission must be aborted - our hero must face the consequences. This remember is a time of space race where the Soviets and Americans were locked in brinkmanship, each trying to outdo the other without causing all-out-war. Essentially, space programmes were multi-billion dick swinging enterprises. Any failure would leave a nation feeling limp and emasculated; any success would give them a raging hard-on that would last for Viagra days. So Armstrong is not the flavour of the month at the beginning, in fact, his failure leads to him being grounded.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere in Armstrong’s home is heavy. His daughter has a brain tumour that shows no signs of abating. Despite the research he does, there appears to be no way of decelerating the effects. These intimate moments at home, shot up close on jerky cam, are deeply profound. We see a father powerless to prevent his daughter’s demise. At the subsequent wake we experience heartbreak as Armstrong shuffles off into an empty room to be alone with his tears. Gosling is often accused of being blank and dead-eyed in his roles; here though he emotes, the glacier melts, the result is deeply moving.

Thinking deeply or looking vacant?

This is not the Ryan Gosling show though. Claire Foy plays Neil’s wife, Janet, and through her we appreciate the fallout of masculine repression. Armstrong doesn’t talk about his feelings with anyone – his feelings are as inaccessible as the moon. He’s still a loving husband and father, but he’s distant and struggles to connect. This disconnect makes him more and more obsessed about landing on the moon. Back on the programme, relocated to Houston, he stands in his garden, binoculars in hand, and stares wistfully into space, imagining being there than here. It begs the question: can one only accept the dangers of space if they don’t feel the comfort of earth?

I didn’t mention Hurwitz at the beginning of the piece and have neglected to mention him since. The soundscape of the film was inspired by a 1947 piece, Lunar Rhapsody, by Harry Revel with theremin player Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. The composition was an Armstrong favourite that he played on Apollo 11. It’s the sound of a slow dance between earthling and alien, piano and theremin; a lifting off of an old jazz number into the cosmos, a human walking into space. This song features along with Hurwitz’s only masterly compositions. Up until the end, the music is mood, punctuating the small and big dramas on earth; the final number ‘Landing’ though has all the gravitas of a history-defining event. Just as Chazelle proves he can leave his independent Whiplash roots behind, Hurwitz demonstrates how-should he wish- he can throw the whole Hans Zimmer at the screen.

On the way home I asked The Girl so many questions: ‘What happened to Michael Collins?’ ‘Did Neil Armstrong go into space again?’ ‘How big is the moon?’ ‘How big is the Earth in comparison?’ She answered all of my questions with good grace, and as a primary school teacher promised to bring me home a book so I could learn more. (This will still be above my level). So what years of secondary education couldn’t achieve, a film did. Science is more interesting if you hear about the human first, isn’t it? That’s the angle teachers should go for. I’ll happily learn about evolution if someone told me about Darwin first? Maybe how he grew that beard? I’ll be fascinated by Newton if someone told me what brand of apple fell on him? Show me the person first; the science after – it’s what First Man did, and now my head’s in the moon as well as the clouds.

First Man is in cinemas now