It’s grim up North London

[millionreasons]

The Islington Gazette is celebrating 150 years of increasing fear of crime with two stupendous headlines. This week it’s: “MURDER ON THE DANCEFLOOR” and the equally excellent: “ARSENAL FAN FOUND DEAD IN FRONT OF TV”.

The train line that used to the old Northern line, running runs south to the city and now north to Hertfordshire, used to be called, rather poetically, the Great Northern Electrics. Then when the trains were privatised, the company that became WAGN took over the line. But all the signs still said Great Northern Electrics or British Rail which was very confusing for people wanting to go to Welwyn Garden City. The signs were finally changed to say WAGN last year just in time for First Capital Connect to get the contract (the same FCC who have got the Thameslink franchise and will probably take over the SpecialbrewSilverLink) – amazing how one of the Tories’ mantras was Competition, yet soon pretty much all of London’s non-tube transportation will be owned and run by First.

Attached to a mulberry bush on Highbury Terrace is a handwritten sign asking dog owners not to let their canines poo there, or if they do, to please clean it up. On the bottom of the piece of paper is a criticism of this, protesting that the notice is ruining the bush and the general vista. Below that is another note (different handwriting) complaining about the complainant aggravating the situation. It’s quite difficult to write on a note attached to a mulberry bush - these people are elevating public passive-aggressive letter-writing to conceptual art.

Talking of which, there are a set of twins I see most weeks when I leave the tube station. I call them the Ken Dodd twins because they have the same Van de Graaf generator hair. They wear white shirts, maroon ties and grey slacks. I thought that the woman who looked exactly like them was their mum and I imagined that they were just local eccentrics who’d never left the leaky old house they were born in and spoke in their own private language. Thus, channel-hopping a few weeks ago, I was quite surprised when I saw them on TV and discovered that they’re not the Dodd Twins but the Cox Twins. The programme was the history of light entertainment, from the original music hall (in which the Cox Twins were big), through radio ventriloquists and Saturday Night At The Palladium, to the no doubt worn-out tape of Emu biting Michael Parkinson, to the presumed future of light entertainment: late nite telly freaks, Derren Brown & David Blaine. It ended by saying how the old names – Bruce Forsyth, Noel Edmonds etc are back and the old talent shows have been reincarnated as X Factor and Come Dancing as Strictly Ballroom Come Dancing. Which doesn’t really prove that these things are intrinsically popular, more that things go in waves. Like leggings and pixie boots and the Conservative Party. What occurred to me was that when alternative comedy took over from the likes of Cannon and Ball, Little and Large in the ‘80s, it was a triumph of the Southern, often Oxbridge-educated, posh people over the Northern un-PC clubland comedians. Not that I’d want the old fashioned double acts to still be on prime-time, but the lightweight whimsy of A Bit Of Fry and Laurie and French and Saunders, and the pointless puerility of  Filthy Rich, and Catflap was hardly any better. The Northern Hi-de-Hi/Open all Hours/Victoria Wood style situation comedy that Ricky Gervais pastiches in his otherwise excellent Extras hasn’t been reincarnated – except, perhaps, in Phoenix Nights (which employed Jim Bowen, Spit the Dog & Bob Carol-Gees and Syd Little), whose gentle humour I still prefer to Gervais’s sometime viciousness.  

Comments

[green-jumper.livejournal.com]

The Islington Gazette always reassures me that my life isn't too bad.

It shares a few stories with the Hornsey and Crouch End Journal, but the latter will have an obligatory celeb story, a David Tennant story plus the never ending saga of the concrete factory alongside CPZ parking.

[millionreasons.livejournal.com]

The IG reassures me that N1-N19 is just full of muggers, rapists, murderers and low-life scum. Well, their headline boards do; I've never read the rag myself.