The Oldie magazine March issue 410

Page 42

Small World

Steven Spielberg’s Cleethorpes adventure Hollywood mogul is my best friend – according to Mum jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… Today has been a day of unexpected but not unwelcome solitude. I announced to my parents that I was off to the cinema for a morning viewing of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. As ever, my mother somehow thought the whole misguided venture was my fault: ‘Natalie Wood’s not good enough for my son – he has to make the whole film again, apparently!’ ‘Mum, I had nothing to do with it. I am not a film studio. I am not an executive producer. It’s Steven’s … fault.’ ‘Steven who?’ Dreading that she might actually somehow phone him, I was reluctant to reveal his identity. But, still, I gibbered, ‘Spielberg. It was Steven Spielberg.’ She huffed at the name and said, ‘I suppose if Steven wants to go along with you to watch paint dry, you’d better go.’ I taunted her back: ‘Do you really think that, on a Saturday morning in Cleethorpes, I’m off to the cinema with someone called Steven Spielberg? Do text Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. They mentioned they might want to meet us in the KFC opposite the boating lake afterwards.’ ‘Well, they’re all fools, then, and you all deserve whatever you get,’ Mother said. What I did get was the smallest screen in the cinema and, thankfully, only six other attendees. I’m not antisocial but, as a little person, even with tiered seating I find sitting behind someone in a full cinema is often challenging. It only takes one string bean of an adolescent in front of me and there are no Sharks or Jets visible to Little Jem. The movie was more than passable, if not entirely necessary. I was saddened to hear the attendance in my flea-pit mirrored the national box-office receipts for my great friend Stevie. He should 42 The Oldie March 2022

remodel himself as King of COVID and release a series of remakes that attract just the right number of people to allow significant safe-spacing. Sorry, Steven. Still, I did experience the buzz of early-in-the-day cinema that Graham Greene celebrated as ‘mornings in the dark’. I followed up with an ‘afternoon in the strip lighting’ at one of Cleethorpes’s larger independent supermarkets. ‘Six aisles – and a shelf each for vegan, gluten-free and Polish,’ as I heard an impressed caravanner boast once. Unfortunately, the only person working on the whole shop floor was my sometime nemesis – Gerty the Gatekeeper. Never has one woman done more to promote the usefulness of the automated self-checkout. A minute with Gerty can feel like 20 minutes on a chat show, given the range of questions you’re expected to answer. The automated tills were all out of order. She explained, ‘Gary from Meat is in Mykonos, and the only computer I can handle is my dishwasher.’ So I had to take my basket of goods to Aisle Two – Gerty’s favourite because it’s ‘roomier’. As she turned my frozen onions over twice, she asked, ‘You still working?’ I nodded politely, thinking my mute response would deflect any further questions. But she fired off follow-up questions at machine-gun speed: ‘Where? How long that’s for? Enjoying it?’

These were just warm-ups. Soon she was assessing each and every shopping choice. Looking at my liver-and-onionsfor-one ready meal, she said, ‘Be warned – that mashed potato is like soup if you go over 700 watts.’ She shook her head fervently at the daring selection of three king-size Pot Noodles. ‘Bloody hell, you’ll be regular. Do you find that?’ Suspiciously dangling a bag of Chupa Chups, she asked, ‘You’re childless, aren’t you? So what’s the occasion?’ I felt like a felon in Columbo. I began to crack. ‘I just occasionally like a lollipop. The comfort of oral fixation, I suppose … and perhaps a sliver of a remembered childhood.’ She laughed with a loud, single ‘haw-haw’ and said, ‘You’re a sensitive one, aren’t you? You a writer?’ As I left her to mop up and shut up, on this crowd-free, early-closing, end-ofsomething-that-never-really-started day, I reflected on Gerty’s questions. Her deductions were spot-on – they were annoying only because she was in the wrong job. She would have been brilliant as the Barry Norman/Jeremy Paxman of Cleethorpes. She would skewer my mate Steven Spielberg: ‘West Side Story? Really? Seen it. Done it. Why don’t you come up with your own ideas, Steve?’


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Articles inside

Ask Virginia Ironside

5min
pages 106-108

On the Road: Celia Birtwell

4min
pages 94-96

Crossword

3min
pages 97-98

Overlooked Britain: England

7min
pages 90-92

Taking a Walk: London’s

3min
page 93

Edwina Sandys’s Manhattan

7min
pages 88-89

Getting Dressed

6min
pages 84-87

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson

4min
page 74

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

2min
pages 75-76

Television Frances Wilson

4min
page 72

Music Richard Osborne

3min
page 73

Film: Parallel Mothers

3min
page 70

Media Matters Stephen Glover

4min
pages 67-68

Boris – the fall of Falstaff

4min
page 66

Love Marriage, by Monica Ali

4min
page 65

Constable: A Portrait, by James

5min
pages 61-62

Against the Tide, by Roger Scruton, ed Mark Dooley

2min
pages 63-64

The Doctor’s Surgery

3min
page 47

One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage, by Michael Crick

2min
pages 55-56

Readers’ Letters

8min
pages 48-49

A Class of Their Own, by

5min
pages 57-58

Postcards from the Edge

4min
page 44

Goodbye to Hollywood

6min
pages 38-40

Pearls of wisdom from The Oldie’s 30-year archive

4min
page 41

Small World Jem Clarke

3min
pages 42-43

Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson

4min
page 34

Country Mouse Giles Wood

4min
page 35

History David Horspool

4min
page 33

My Irish home is now a ghost

3min
page 32

Do act with your heroes

4min
page 31

A Supreme Court Justice

4min
pages 26-27

Francis Bacon, Queen of

4min
page 30

Thirty years of Oldie laughs

7min
pages 28-29

My true ghost story

7min
pages 18-20

My friend Auberon Waugh

6min
pages 22-24

What happened when I went

4min
page 25

Sport’s golden oldies

4min
page 21

RIP the alpha male Mary Killen

4min
pages 16-17

Bliss on Toast Prue Leith

3min
page 6

The great Liberal comeback

3min
page 11

The Old Un’s Notes

3min
page 5

The strange death of youth

4min
page 13

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

4min
page 9

Our founding father, Richard

7min
pages 14-15

Barry Cryer remembered

4min
pages 7-8

Grumpy Oldie Man

4min
page 10
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