FOGHORN
The magazine of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)
Issue 37
NEWS
FOGHORN Issue 37
Published in Great Britain by the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)
PCO Patrons Libby Purves Andrew Marr Bill Tidy Foghorn Editor Bill Stott tel: +44 (0) 160 646002 email: billstott@lineone.net Foghorn Sub-Editor Roger Penwill tel: +44 (0) 1584 711854 email: roger@penwill.com Foghorn Layout/Design Tim Harries tel: + 44 (0) 1633 780293 email: foghorn@procartoonists.org PCO Press Office email: media@procartoonists.org Web info PCO (FECO UK) website: http://www.procartoonists.org BLOGHORN http://thebloghorn.org/ What is Foghorn? Foghorn is the bi-monthly magazine of the PCO, an organisation of exclusively professional UK cartoonists, formed from the amalgamation of two other bodies; The Cartoonists’ Guild and FECO UK. British cartoon art has a great, ignoble history and currently boasts a huge pool of talent. It deserves a higher media presence than it currently enjoys. Our aim is to make sure it gets it. We want to promote cartoon art domestically and internationally by encouraging high standards of artwork and service, looking after the interests of cartoonists and promoting their work in all kinds of media.
FOGHORN The magazine of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (FECO UK)
By the time you skip this and go straight to the cartoons, in the U.S., middle– aged, not very bright and white will have given way to young, gifted and black. All eyes will be on Mr Obama. What will he fix first? Can he and Gord save the world as we know it, Jim? These and other economic downturn questions such as why Woolworths and not P.C. World engaged your editorial
Tidy stuff!
team for upwards of three minutes, before we got real, globally irresponsible, and chopped down a few more trees to bang out another FOGHORN! Hurray! Bill Stott, Foghorn Editor Artwork: John Roberts
New patron fits the Bill. As far as the Mighty Tidy is concerned, “Doyen” springs easily to mind. Nine out of ten housewives cannot tell him from a well-known margarine spread. He is the cartoonists’ cartoonist, and co-incidentally the favourite of several million non-cartoonists too. It is only right that an organisation like PCO should seek the support of Bill Tidy. Mind you it took some doing, but he was finally brought down on a turning pitch in bad light at Lords’ Taverners. Bill’s work has been and is an inspiration. His drawing, joke-making, story-telling, huge productivity and sheer experience
makes him the perfect Patron. [is that enough creeping? Ed]
Copyright All the images in this magazine are the intellectual property and copyright of their individual creators and must not be copied or reproduced, in any format, without their consent. Front Cover: Chichi Parish Back Cover: Alex Hughes Foghorn (Online) ISSN 1759-6440
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“Distressed by a broken bough and falling cradle incident? Try our no win - no fee policy. Call Freefone...” WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
BLOGHORN
Browned off
The Political Cartoon Gallery’s latest exhibition opens.
The Political Cartoon Gallery’s Tory Blues exhibition has now closed so, in the interests of balance, attention is turned
to the Labour Party. Browned Off! A cartoon exhibition on the first 18 months of Gordon Brown as Prime
Buck.
Minister, opened at the gallery on January 21 and runs until March 14. The show features Britain’s top political cartoonists, such as Peter Brookes, Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Nicholas Garland, Christian Adams, Martin Rowson, Morten Morland (cartoon seen to the left), Andy Davey and Matt
For more information go to www.politicalcartoon. co.uk
Move it, move it
Bloghorn finds a new home. In a bid to kick start the UK housing market, the Bloghorn has moved to new premises at http://thebloghorn. org/. Remember to update your links and wipe your feet before entering. The chairleg for the Bloghorn’s eminence grise, The Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation, said: “Finding Bloghorn a new home is an essential step on our path to world domi … sorry, I mean the new Bloghorn platform will allow us more flexibility in doing what we want to do; making sure that a little more of the world is aware of our popular art form by presenting the work of very best of UK cartoonists, together with news items and cartoon-related features, all amazingly with only minimal recourse to tits, bums and CelebrityBoffing-on-Ice.”
Nathan Ariss was PCO Artist of the Month for January 2009. Nathan works as a cartoonist and illustrator, has been published in Private Eye, The Spectator, Slightly Foxed and Business Executive (BEX). Other work includes book and album illustrations and covers, school text books, advertising campaigns and greeting cards, as well as numerous private commissions. Nathan explained to Bloghorn how he became a cartoonist: “I feel immensely fortunate to have been born into a creative household where it was entirely acceptable to set one’s sights on becoming an artist, musician, actor or professional itinerant, which is pretty much what I am all about to this day. As a kid I was always drawing, and it still feels like the most natural thing in the world to do, even if the tools I use have changed a bit. I think we are all natural artists as children. Unfortunately, it usually gets knocked out of us when we are
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told we have to grow up or be more realistic. I try and keep something of this child-like directness and honesty alive in all my work. Back then it was all about cats, or rubbish monsters, or people with big noses, clowns with flowers growing out of their heads; grotesques really. I don’t know if I’m cured yet, but I still like to draw people with really big noses.”
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FEATURE CHICHI PARISH
Is there a Dr Sketchy in the house? Chichi Parish found out what happens when burlesque meets art school.
Dr Sketchy’s alternative life-drawing school, founded three years ago in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by twenty something artist, Molly Crabapple, kisses the life back into dreary drawing classes. In fact, it does more than that, Dr Sketchy’s anti art school revolution raises the old blood pressure in four continents and 65 cities around the globe, offering drawing classes with a difference: burlesque, bustiers, gloves, diamantes, glitter, corsets, fishnets, feathers, pasties and prizes. Just show up. Drink or draw. If you draw, you might even win a prize. If you drink, you might just get drunk. Keen to find out more about this decadent hybrid, I packed my bags, pumped up my tyres, sharpened pencils, put on a green frock and drove up to the midlands to experience Birmingham’s second ever Dr Sketchy event presented by photographer, Candee Handful, at The Victoria Pub on John Bright Street. So what did I get for my £7? Three hours of evocative Hollywood Babylon glamour and dames, dames, subcultural dames. Burlesque Diva, Dani California, entertained us with a character rendition of Moira Sheara, red head ballerina star of the double Oscar winning glorious Technicolor movie ‘Red Shoes’ (1948). Ms California’s pirouettes politely disgraced the stage. True to the movie, the dancer’s crimson ballet slippers became demonically enchanted. Untrue to the movie, the ballerina loses more than her just tutu. Victoria L’Etoile proved a firm favorite with the punters. She played a cheesy Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz. I shan’t bother outlining the plot, I don’t want to spoil your Christmas. You may be more interested to read about Ms. L’Etoile’s deliciously porcine silhouette (I prefer drawing larger models with generous thighs). Two etiolated non-sketching punters, regulars to Brum’s burlesque scene, assured me: ‘Us blokes don’t care about her cellulite, Victoria L’Etoile is gorgeous, she’s so real.’ I am reminded of Lili St Cryr’s motto: ‘A woman’s best weapon is a man’s imagination’ and there was me thinking that a woman’s best weapons are her cellulite busting formula creams. These men, real men, to boot, assured me they prefer women sans porcelain teeth, sans coloured contact lenses, sans surgically enhanced breasts, sans, erm anything (for that matter). I didn’t know whether to breath a feminine sigh of relief. Burlesque is about as alluring as Baloo bear dancing in a wig and a grass skirt. Entertaining, yes, 4 THE FOGHORN
funny, absolutely. But did I experience zibababadoee factor? Well, not exactly. But what’s zibababadoee factor, I hear you cry. Lili St Cryr, a scandalous 50’s strip tease artist, famed for ‘The flying G’ had it and so did bondage ‘bad girl’ Betty Page: smut appeal. I absolutely love the Dr Sketchy formula and so too does its audience. It appeals to artists, 50’s rock n’ roll musicians, 40’s-50’s vintage fashion designers, performance artistes, statisticians as well as followers of burlesque. I know, because I walked about the room and asked them. Dr Sketchy events take place in Birmingham, Brighton, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow London and Manchester. Poses vary between 3-15 minutes, but as far as the sketching public is concerned, that’s way too brief. Excuse the pun. I saw a lot of briefs in Brum. Oh, and, before I go, I’d just like to add: sketching under the influence of a large glass of chilled Chardonnay is not to be recommended - I got hopelessly pissed.
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FEATURE CLIVE COLLINS
Clive Collins
Don’t mention the war The 2nd World Misunderstanding is still going on in bookshops across the land, it seems, and a heavy piece of shrapnel came my way in the form of Nicholas Rankin’s new book ‘Churchill’s Wizards’ which fills in the background to much of the deception and camouflage that Britain undertook from WW1 through to the end of WW2. It is mindgripping in its descriptions, and includes a substance called Pykrete – named after its inventor, Geoffrey Pyke – which was used to ‘doctor’ large icebergs shaped into aircraft carriers that were unmeltable, and intended to fool the enemy. It was actually even mentioned in the Christmas edition of TV’s ‘QI’. But in among all the welter of chicanery and deception - and it must be borne in mind that the Brits were scorned among the foreign warring nations for acting in an ‘ungentlemanly’ fashion in their persistent use of deceit and camouflage (though the very word comes from the French ‘camoufleur’ ) – word has come to me of similar cunning plans, laid by the Germans, no doubt in some devilish foreign bunker, with the specific aim of knocking us sideways through their sheer nerve. Very little is heard, for instance, of the radio programme that was transmitted for a number of years up to 1945, called ‘Itchma’ (‘It’s That Churchill Man Again’) in which the same Bavarian catch-phrases were used interminably by regular characters – Happy Heinrich’s jolly phrase ‘I won’t take mein greatcoat off, I’m not stopping!’ or Eager Eva’s ‘Can We Do It Now, Adolf?’ or even Hairsbreadth Herman’s ‘I’ll be bombing you now!’ After these gems, it is said that the listeners were regularly sent chuckling to their beds in their millions, though sceptics say the rush to sleep was to avoid any further similar shows. Another high-density listening choice was the early evening radio show ‘In Berlin Tonight’ where Josef G interviewed celebrities who were passing through. There was always a posse of friendly royals and cabinet ministers on hand, ever keen to have a say and to profess firm, undying friendship with the Fuhrer. The German broadcasting authorities even took great pride in the fact that they had a real live Lordship working among them – one Haw-Haw. Strangely, less is heard of the German cartoonists who were to be parachuted onto our seaside promenades in the summer months, specifically to draw ‘dispiriting caricatures’ intended to sap the morale of British holidaymakers. While lorry-loads of cockney sparrer-type spies busied themselves on British streets, distressing members of the public by giving the incorrect Churchillian V-sign over and over again. It is said that many of the spies ‘learned to like hospital food’ after that. Many of the spies were so incompetent and illtrained that they were caught simply because they asked for Schnapps in the local tavern, or complained that the beer WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
was too warm, and demanding change for Deutsche Mark notes in denominations of 100,000. In parallel attempts to undermine morale in the country, pirated versions of famous cartoons were slipped into copies of newspapers by casual fifth-columnists working in newspaper distribution plants, such as these, drawn by a German cartoonist named ‘Lau’, by seeming to be by a genuine Low. It is, however, easy for anyone even halfway familiar with Low’s work to spot the forgeries.
But it all seems a long time ago, and now we are friends with the whole of Europe, and the only sounds coming from the runways of the world today, are those of pigs, lined up and ready to fly. THE FOGHORN
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CARTOONS PETE DREDGE
A touch of
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FEATURE CHRIS MADDEN
Love is a drug Chris Madden gets the heart a-fluttering
News headline for the final article in a recent news bulletin: ‘Scientists Claim That Love is Just a Biochemical Reaction!’ An interesting headline indeed. Partly because of the subject of course, but also because it’s a headline that’s been recurring since before I was old enough to know what the word ‘love’ meant, which is some considerable time ago now. It must happen every year: Valentine’s Day is approaching and the news editors decide that it’s time to pay special attention to press releases from university departments that study the human emotion that is celebrated on the day. It’s an easy story. Here’s a quick crash course on the subject. When a person falls in love a chemical called phenylethylalamine is released which makes the person feel particularly good when in the presence of a particular other person. The effect of the chemical lasts for anything from a few months to a few years, but in the end it inevitably fades away. End of story. Not much mileage in that for Mills and Boom. The good news is that when the phenylethylalamine ceases to do its work a different chemical may sometimes kick in – an endorphine – that has a much less dramatic though more long-lasting effect, provoking a general feeling of okayness rather than the preceding mania. Endorphines are sensible chemicals. If the endorphines don’t kick in, the chances are that another phenylethylalamine-induced experience will be looked for elsewhere. At first sight it all sounds a bit like drug addiction - but that’s looking at it the whole thing the wrong way round. Our brains work by naturally secreting chemicals as messengers that jolt us into doing what we ought to do next. That’s why we are vulnerable to artificially administered chemicals - because we use them in our brains WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
anyway. Some people baulk at the idea that love is nothing more than the result of a quick injection of chemicals in the brain. Surely such an elevated state of the human psyche must be more than that? But why single out love for special treatment – very few people get perturbed by the notion that other emotions are the result of biochemical reactions. Who gets disturbed by the notion that adrenaline (aided and abetted by its macho buddy, testostenone) is responsible for aggressive behaviour for instance? No one’s bothered by the concept of ‘having an adrenaline hit’ when riding the big dipper, but who would want to describe a romantic encounter as a phenylethylalamine hit, and not only because you can’t pronounce the word (You haven’t even tried to, have you?). It’s considered to be okay to have a purely biochemical high from adrenaline because the state that it invokes – one of action, alertness and aggression – is deemed to be at a basic and primal level of our
experience - the purely physical level. In fact we want the state to be chemically induced, because to some extent we want to deny to some extent our own personal responsibility for the feelings that are promoted (especially the aggressive elements). The fact that there’s a chemicallybased element to the phenomenon of love seems to imply that the whole business is out of our control, but of course it isn’t: it doesn’t mean that the experience is totally random: that you may be walking down the street one day when you suddenly get an unexpected shot of phenylethylalamine that makes you fall head over heals for the first person that you see – so you have to be careful where you walk. The chemical comes into play when it’s appropriate. Just as adrenaline comes into play when you’re on the big dipper or in speeding traffic rather than when you’re feeding a baby. Think of it more as an enhancer than a dictator. Of course, the world of romance doesn’t run smoothly: everything can turn upside-down and end up pear-
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FEATURE CHRIS MADDEN
shaped rather than heart-shaped. This is due to the statistical law that things can go wrong in more ways than they can go right. I have trouble enjoying romantic movies for this reason, because I can’t get out of my head the fact that although in the film the smitten participants in the dance of romance will do anything to be together, I suspect that in a few years’ time they’d do anything to be apart. The love drug will definitely have worn off: they’ll realize that the only way they could have possibly done what they did was because they were under the influence of a mind altering chemical, or that they were the victims of a ludicrously unrealistic and sentimental movie plot. As well as the word ‘biochemical’ there’s another word in that headline that’s a bit dubious. Can you see it? It’s the word ‘just’. What’s so wrong about things being ‘just’ biochemical? It’s all a bit reductionist. It’s getting the messengers mixed up with the message. Imagine a headline stating that “Scientists discover that Beethoven’s symphonies are ‘just’ a sequence of compressions in the air impacting upon the ear”. Perhaps followed by a statement along the lines that ‘At a scientific level, it’s been proved that Beethoven’s symphonies are the result of exactly the same physical processes that produce ‘The Chicken Song’. Beethoven’s symphonies are indistinguishable to The Chicken Song! It’s a scientific fact (A fact that’s no doubt endorsed by the proponents of cultural relativism, so it must be right). There’s yet another thing that’s wrong with that headline. It’s the word ‘Scientists”. It should be ‘Journalists”. It isn’t scientists who claim that love is ‘just’ a biochemical reaction. It’s journalists who claim that it is. The scientists are merely stating that there is a biochemical element to the whole phenomenon – not that it’s ‘just’ a biochemical reaction. But as usual the scientists are dissed by the arts-graduate journos as being soulless egg-heads. No doubt the journalists justify their gross over-simplification and blatant distortion of the truth by saying that they are making the story accessible and interesting to the public, on the grounds that it’s better that they know something that’s wrong than that they know nothing at all. 8 THE FOGHORN
Random acts of humour
“He may be a boring old fart, Kevin, but they’re the only ones with any money” WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
FEATURE GUIDE TO FOLK
As always, your Foghorn Guide seeks to look beyond common misconception and present instead a clear, informed assessment of a specific human activity, however strange. Folk Dancing is strange. It takes many forms. It must not be confused with Ballroom Dancing which is also strange, but lacks the social significance of Folk Dancing. A good example of this essential difference is Morris Dancing. This was invented by an English chap called Maurice Morris ages ago – some experts think even before 1956 . It is thought that Morris lived in Ludlow although the folk song [q.v.] “Dancing Morris” begins “Oooooooooooooooooooooh… Morris ‘e luv’d in Lidlow where ‘e courted Great Big Bess..”, which may be true or a printing error and according to recent local surveys, nobody cares anyway. Morris’s aim in developing the familiar two lines of chaps dressed like berks and carrying little sticks was to commemorate the frequent cross border raids by sarcastic Welsh chaps. As is recognized by most scholars, early Welsh telly was rubbish so there was little to do in the evening apart from, “ Iwgh fannwy goch goch grynwd stickio!” which translates approximately as, “Let’s go bash the English with little sticks!” Straw boaters represent a nod to Morris’s limited banjo playing skills. Bells and flowers were added in the late 1960s to make the whole thing more
“Borrowed strip, apparently... ”
hip. Morris Dancing’s connections with pre–Christian beliefs, fertility and general rude stuff were invented by Open University lecturers in 1979 in an attempt to make themselves more interesting to an audience grown weary of heavy sweaters. Other countries have folk dancing too and it is often wheeled out to entertain people on package holidays who sit clapping on the on beat whilst completely bladdered on Grcyrcwcs [trans; Liquid Death with No Vowels] – a Polish aperitif and disinfectant made from marinated underwear. Foreign folk dancing can be even more unbearable than Morris
Dancing, including as it often does, folk SINGING: ditties involving the plight of a young cross-eyed goatherd entangled in his own zither whilst serenading the wrong girl under a harvest moon, all thirty six verses of which are delivered in the original Dragvonian, accompanied by two big blokes on slack drum and Swannee Whistle. NB; BALLROOM dancing has nothing to do with FOLK dancing, the former being a valuable social legacy, whilst the latter is a BBC wheeze to get viewers to vote for d – list celebs.
Random acts of humour
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“Alright! We’ll get a steam iron” THE FOGHORN
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LETTERS TO THE ED
The Gallery
Letters to the Editor Snail Mail: The Editor, Foghorn Magazine, 7 Birch Grove, Lostock Green, Northwich. CW9 7SS E-mail: billstott@lineone.net
Load of Cramp Dear Editor, You’re probably male and will probably not understand anything I am about to say because you’re male. Yours etc Oonagh Cramp Dear Editor, Foghorn’s OK as far as it goes, but what about a bit of glamour? Me and the lads down the Lion think you want to get real and do a centre spread, you know, nothing porny, but more like Nuts or Scrotum. Put a bit of that together with your zany gags and you’d be on a winner. All the B[r]east
Darren Cramp
[no addresses, but same postmark. Ed] Comfirmation needed Dear Editor, Thanks for sending us a copy of your magazine. We all looked at it for quite some time ,but could not determine what it actually is. One of our older members – Toby – he’s nearly 27 – suggested that Foghorn is a humorous publication and that the little pictures are cartoons. Can you confirm this, please ? Yours etc., The Guardian Weekend Review Team
Denis Dowland was PCO Artist of the Month for December 2008. Reflecting on the future of cartooning in the digital age, Denis had this to say: “Technological advances give with one hand and take with the other just like chancellors. I certainly do not miss the good old days of dragging heavy portfolios round studios, at or soon after lunch-time, to baffle brain-addled, red-braced juvenile yuppie editors, I’d better stop now, it’s all coming back to me. I simply couldn’t wait for the internet. Now that video has virtually taken over the medium, however, the internet is swamped by infantile trash, taking us back to square one, if not further. This only requires an upgrading of our working methods, like the telephone once did. The threat I see as more insidious is the unstoppable drive toward the cretinisation of society as perhaps its only means of holding together, its naturally enthusiastic adoption by the mediocre and its resigned and guilty acceptance by those who do know better. Grumpy old git, moi? I love it.”
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CURMUDGEON
Road to nowhere Anyone who has laughed themselves silly at Duncan Adams’ book “The Meaning of Liff” probably enjoys place names, the shape and sound of which makes you think of something else entirely. “Goole” - puddles of stuff found in abbatoirs ; “Glossop” - what remains on the table and floor after an enthusiastically consumed bread pudding. “Runcorn” - the hard scaly bits on the inside of horses knees. However, Runcorn has claims to fame beyond being onomatopoetic and having a rubbish little bridge connecting one side of the Mersey to the other. It is very, very difficult to get into. In the late 60s, when Runcorn was merely somewhere which sounded vaguely equine and had a silly bridge, local planners decided to surround it with a four lane superhighway, anticipating the advent of shopping, DIY, sofa and tattooing centres. Which is fine if you want to circumnavigate Runcorn at 70mph all day – except when the puny bridge is all clogged up with in- bound scousers singing “Slowly, ‘Cross the Mersey” and the “expressways” are stationary, but
finding the off ramp to whichever bit of central Runcorn you want is very hard. Every signpost - those with place names on them, that is - not the ones telling you to keep two chevrons apart, don’t drink, don’t speed and Runcorn Welcomes YOU - indicates at least nine inner areas. Some in black on white, others brown on white [historic landmarks such as the Heritage Tattooing Centre] and all partially obscured by local hand crafted theories like, “All Scousers are W*****S” Miss
your turn off and Yippee ! its round the expressway again. Runcorn’s the only place which makes my satnav lady, normally calm and unruffled say things like, “In point 3 miles, turn left. Possibly”. So why go to Runcorn ? Well, not that its any of your business ,but I was keeping a hospital appointment for swabbing to see if I am an MRSA carrier prior to an extremely delicate operation on my foot. Well, one of them. I’m not. But my blood pressure was sky – high.
Random acts of humour
“So we are agreed, gentlemen: either we need more diversity on this board, or we need to get a better cartoonist.” WWW.PROCARTOONISTS.ORG
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FEATURE BUILDINGS IN THE FOG
Windows and glass Depending where you live, it’s quite pleasant to be able to look out of a window. Indeed, if we are in rooms without windows some of us would feel claustrophobic. Indeed some would pummel the door screaming “LEMME OUT! LEMME OUT” then collapse in whimpering a mass on the floor, at which point you smugly demonstrate to them that the door is unlocked anyway. The evolution of windows and the development of glass manufacture has had a big impact on our built environment. Actually it’s pretty amazing that glass was discovered in the first place, apparently round 3500 BC, give or take a Thursday. Let’s face it, sand isn’t the easiest thing to set fire to. Stick a match to it and most probably it will be instantly extinguished, either by the sand itself or by an incoming wave. But it is just as well some one found out that burnt sand turns into glass, as sand when it’s being sand is very difficult to see through. Put sand in a window opening and it will fall out. In its glass state it works much better. In warm places like Rome or Athens in ancient times you didn’t really need anything in the window holes in your buildings; it was nice to get a breeze through. (Despite that obvious benefit it was the Romans who first used clear glass in windows) In more northern climes, though, it was very different. Fed up of icy draughts and sweeping up sand that didn’t stay in place, sometime around the 11th century some enterprising chap, who’d obviously just returned from a holiday in Rome, stuck a lump of glass in a window. He would have thought “Hey this looks cool” and immediately sent forth his good lady to buy a pair of curtains. I have often thought that curtains are what separate us from other animals. After all you don’t find curtains in nature, but that’s another story. The Germans first developed a tech12 THE FOGHORN
nique to produce flat glass. To start with it could only be made in small pieces, much smaller than the window opening they were in. This meant places were still draughty until someone thought of joining the pieces together with lead. Churches quickly cottoned on to this, producing some pretty spectacular results. Eventually in civic and domestic buildings a timber frame arrangement was developed. The horizontal timber pieces were called transoms (from the Latin trans meaning across) and the verticals mullions (from the Latin mull meaning I’m still thinking what to call them). The basic domestic timber window has changed very little since. It was the early years of the last century when rapid development of large sheets of flat glass started to gather pace. Larger and larger sheets of glass sheet have been used since, from architects’ homes designed to look good in magazines to cladding for tower blocks. Modern architecture surely wouldn’t have looked quite so
modern with Georgian window frames. With silicon jointing and air-conditioning nowadays windows can do away with frames completely. With the arrival of mirrored glass, nonarchitecture arrived. You could build a simple flat surfaced tower block cover it in mirrored glass and it almost disappeared, like a James Bond Aston. The down-side is the if the buildings around are rubbish, their reflection will make your building look rubbish too. If a neighbouring building was also mirrored, things got very confusing. When our nannying masters started to get concerned that buildings should be energy efficient, the poor insulation of glass become an issue resulting in a great deal of legislation controlling the extent its use, at least in this country and particularly in housing. Double glazing became normal and a whole army of salesmen have lived off its usage ever since. Roger Penwill
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THE LAST WORD
The Critic Recipe for disaster
Foghorn’s resident critic Pete Dredge watches telly so you don’t have to. Simmering jealousy, class prejudice, voyeurism, greed, unbridled pretentiousness and double-entendres by the bucket load. It’s all there in Channel 4’s “Come Dine With Me”. Think “Abigail’s Party” meets “Carry On Canape”, and you get a flavour of what this mildly entertaining, late afternoon soufflé of a show can dish up. I’ve never seen the appeal of throwing dinner parties, unless you are the type who gets off on social one-upmanship. The chances of catastrophe and disaster are stacked so high as to make the exercise reckless in the extreme . Go out to a restaurant or order a takeaway. Do anything to avoid the finger of blame being pointed should the fare be less than acceptable! But these telly people are canny folk. They know the chances of perfection (ie boring telly ) are so remote as to be negligible. Should this not be the case some astute editing, finely chopped, will soon bring the proceedings nicely
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to the boil. So what’s it all about then? For simplicity’s sake there are no couples involved in this show, just four ‘singles’ of differing sex, all strangers of indeterminate age and pedigree. The ladies are usually thrice divorced and project the citric aroma of ‘availability’ should the right man come along. Fortunately, for the benefit of ‘good telly’ the male guests on this particular show never quite cut the mustard in this
“I hope you aren’t going to be sniffy about eating horse..?”
particular department and would probably show a marked preference for an afternoon’s model-making rather than anything more unseemly in the light-toheavy petting department. Each contestant hosts an evening in their own home and the other guests award marks out of ten. The marks are totted up at the end of the week and the winner walks off with a grand. No tacky telephone voting here, mate! The whole post-production proceedings are spiced up in the editing suite with a liberal sprinkling of a double-entendre laden commentary by someone from the ‘comic / ironic’ school of voiceover artistry. Once the dishwasher has been loaded and bruised egos massaged back to their inflated best the well-imbibed guests are taxied back to whence they came . No doubt planning their “Come Dine With Me’ video viewing night with finger food for one plus remixed Demis Roussos compilation CD.
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FOGHORN (ONLINE) ISSN 1759-6440