Book review: David Stubbs (2023) DIFFERENT TIMES: A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY

Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.

The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)

He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)

Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.

Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).

Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.

While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).

Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.

I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.

These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).

There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).

There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.

The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.

The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and This Country (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).

The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?

There’s an astute reference to how much The Office (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).

The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.

Book review: Robert Chapman (2023) EMPIRE OF NORMALITY: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Exposing the Empire of the “Normal” Mind

Robert Chapman’s book, published by Pluto Press, is a trenchant, clear and maddening read which exposes and challenges the taken for granted assumptions about “normality”. This is expressed by the pathology paradigm through which autism and other neurological differences have been perceived for nearly two centuries.

Movingly, there’s a sense that things weren’t always thus… Before the “clock time” of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Chapman notes that most societies before the 1800s were sometimes able to accommodate difference rather than judging it against a metrical yardstick, which became the norm due to the great, but also obsessive and decidedly creepy, scientist Francis Galton. Before then – while Chapman does not ignore real discriminations that existed – the focus was on seeing health as ‘a matter of harmony or equilibrium [either] within the individual, or between individual and either the environment or their community.’ Ancient Chinese medicine, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and the Ayurvedic tradition in India, while evidently having the limitations of their times, were ‘nothing like the systemic disability segregation’ that came later in the 1800s.

Chapman is measured and critical – if not especially detailed – about the actual record of Communist regimes, chiefly those of Lenin and Stalin, but nevertheless forwards a committed Marxist analysis of how our sense of “normality” and enforced conformism is dictated by capitalism. I am convinced, as clearly, Marxism was not a template or rulebook that the Soviet dictators actually utilised, but rather distorted it and used it for promotional value.

This book builds on Mark Fisher’s crucial insights about people internalising and blaming themselves too much for problems which are actually externally imposed by capitalist realism. Chapman rightly calls it a ‘fascistic fantasy’ to wish away neurodivergent disablement and illness and that we need to accept that they will always exist. Chapman is strong on defining the industrial and human impacts of Fordism, which was a major workplace enforcement of conformism and neurotypicality, as well as creating burnout and boredom. The manipulation of workers and their moulding into ‘man machines’ saw corporations utilising the PR techniques of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Mentions of B.F. Skinner echo the piecemeal behaviourist educational moulding that Laura Tisdall reveals in her excellent book about the 1940s-70s British education system.

There’s a fascinating section where Chapman develops a nuanced critique of the increasing use of prescription drugs from the 1950s and related debates concerning over-medication (pp. 95-96, 105-106), culminating in references to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the ‘Commercialization of Human Feeling’ and C. Wright Mills on the ‘personality market’ (111-112). This reflects on how workplace exploitation in itself created problems that led to alienation and increased reliance on drugs.

Chapman critiques the 1960s Laingian anti-psychiatry movement, which was so easily coopted by right-wing libertarian Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (article 1960, book 1961), giving him ammunition to claim that mental illness itself was a ‘myth’. A section on eugenics builds on Adam Pearson and Angela Saini’s BBC documentary Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal and Adam Rutherford’s recent work in exposing this appallingly extant movement that Galton founded. If anyone’s in any doubt about the sway of the ‘autism as damaging’ pathology paradigm, learn how Deborah Barnbaum argued, as recently as 2008, in The Ethics of Autism, ‘that, once prenatal diagnostic technology is capable, there will be a moral obligation to abort autistic foetuses on the grounds that being autistic is inherently incompatible with living a good human life’.

While Chapman follows the typical Marxist pattern of offering rigorous diagnosis of the malady, but not proposing detailed remedies, he does see the major path forward in the work of Peter Sedgwick’s PsychoPolitics (1982), a socialist attempt to recognise mental health illnesses, but seek alternative community organisation beyond the state apparatus. This approach is shared by Franco Basaglia in Italy, Hel Spandler and Mark Cresswell and the West German Socialist Patients Collective. In parallel is a sound account of the Neurodiversity movement which emerged in the 1990s, led by Jim Sinclair, Judy Singer and Harvey Blume; their politics of Neurodiversity has been furthered by Nick Walker and others who’ve contributed to the paradigm shift in the 2010s towards neurodivergence being respected.

Chapman notes significant earlier progress in the late 1970s with the Black Panthers recognising ‘disabled liberation as bound up with collective liberation’. This is a prelude to his necessary and ambitious focus on intersectionality at the end, with many alliances with other groups needed for his proposed neurodivergent Marxism to work. He does not entirely ignore our planetary environment, which has been ransacked and made to fit the needs of capitalist development, whether American, Chinese or European. However, that this really only emerges in the conclusion suggests a fuller book is needed to explore how neurotypical thinking hinders any serious long term ecological action.

This impressive book, with its far-reaching and impressively constructed argument, persuades you that some form of reformed Marxist thinking, combined with other lenses, is vital to begin making the world a better place. Chapman grounds the book with a notably personal introduction which reflects on his own life experiences. There are promising signs in how neurodivergence is being more accepted, but we can’t be complacent: as Chapman argues, we need fewer ‘diversity consultants teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers’ and more ‘neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace.’ (p.161)

Film review: Tish (2023)

Paul Sng’s documentary about Tish Murtha (1956-2013) is a moving and informative film, shown on BBC4, which gives us an insight into a unique socially rooted and incisive documentarian photographer.

It can be watched here by UK people. I’d say it should be viewed before reading any further, really, as it’s an immersive and moving watch.

Murtha captured the world of West Newcastle upon Tyne: the aimlessness, free play and complexity of the human lives lived in intensely difficult circumstances. A simple, moralising buffoon from the London press like Rod Liddle has it that these places are marked by “anomie”. While Sng’s film makes no attempt to romanticise circumstances which, it is admitted, did lead some individuals in the community to turn to crime as a way out, we see desperation and love and tenderness and the mutual aid provided by people like Tish herself. It is also a counterblast against the simplifying cultural stereotypes of what working class people are like: Tish was into operatic arias and jazz music, not what was No. 1 in the charts, though neither should be denigrated in our long front of common culture.

As with the documentary Mind on the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (2017) about Hull’s great jazz musician, we starkly get the sense of an intensely creative person being let down by an indifferent “welfare” state, which has become anything but. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron et al just cattle prodding people into work however unsuitable. The YOP, the grotesque appropriation of the “New Deal”, the familiar bleak cruelty of the 2010-15 Coalition era use of the system as seen in I, Daniel Blake: none of this fitted to the individual.

Why don’t we as a society give people enough money to get by and encourage them to do what they are personally best suited to do in life? It’s even more grotesque in the case of Tish, as she gave us a unique portrayal from the inside of a community, and, as is mentioned here, her photographs tell us: these people existed, and were let down on so many levels.

It reminds me of the Boy in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot when he asks Vladimir: “What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?” To which Vladimir replies: “Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he  hesitates) . . . that you saw me.”

Tish Murtha’s photography and text indicates how there wasn’t just malign neglect, but also active harm. The workfare-anticipating YOP, a sop to resentful people a bit higher up in the social pecking order from cynical right-wing ideologues above them, exposed people to insecure, degrading labour simply to get their pittance of dole money. This process, with the metrical motive to get them off the official jobless statistics, also subjected them in some cases, as we learn here, to cruel bullying from the bosses who were basically benefiting from a cheap reserve army of labour.

Notably, the South Shields-born, but Elswick, Newcastle-bred and rooted Tish says that she does not see herself as a ‘community photographer’. This is true, she is simply a great photographer, whose work’s power came from being part of the tribe she was documenting: this specificity and innate empathy ultimately gives her work deep universality and sets it apart from the anthropological, or even touristic, gaze of a Martin Parr. Parr, a fine photographer, is also a here today gone tomorrow Orwellian middle-class figure going into places for a short time and then leaving, having advanced his own reputation.

The documentary sensitively reveals how Tish’s hardness, self-reliance and uncompromising nature in part developed from growing up in a home with a violent father. As a wise comment on Twitter has it, if there was the opposite of a “nepo babies” upbringing, this was it. While sharing a deep bond with many in her family, she  had to be a driving force in getting her work done, though it was very work in which her subjects were willing participants, to whom she gave copies of the photographs. But when in need, there wasn’t any paternal or maternal welfare state to provide any nurturing or even a decent enough safety net.

Tish is the sort of left-wing bolshy voice we are sorely in need of today. No, everything’s not great. If things are wrong, we shouldn’t blandly submit, but stand up for what we believe in. Her juvenile jazz band photos are likely to elicit simple nostalgia from many people today, but this film gives us Tish’s urgent words, more powerful for being from within the North East community, castigating the underlying militarism and control being exerted on several levels through this cultural practice. She was so intelligent and passionate that she realised that speaking out and raising hackles is at times entirely necessary to being able to live with yourself and do good. Also, Tish gives a chastening rebuke in a letter to the behaviour of certain people within the Side Gallery milieu, for taking a patronising view of working class culture and for undermining her work.

To relate this film to my specialist subject, Plays for Today which came to mind most include One Bummer New Day (1978), Andy McSmith’s intricate missive on newsroom power and priorities, set in Newcastle and reflecting on poverty in, yes, Elswick. In addition, David Edgar’s Destiny and Jim Allen’s The Spongers, both from earlier in the same year, reveal a similarly forensic lens trained on what the people were thinking. The link is especially clear as Tish did some similarly critical and searing, but also respectful, photography of people’s celebrations of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977. This was before Thatcherism proper, but under Callaghan there was still a debilitating – or consoling – underlying patriotism which deeply infused working class communities. Lest it be forgotten, Dennis Potter was pro-monarchy and wrote a highly positive account of the TV coverage of the Jubilee, which gives another perspective beyond the vile racism of certain, understandably unpublished, Philip Larkin poems.

This film includes testimony damning of our societal and capitalist organisation in how simply having an Elswick address meant that people had job applications turned down. This is an equivalent situation that the Irish social realist TV drama A Week in the Life of Martin Cluxton (RTE, 1971) observed that affected people from certain housing estates in Dublin; highly relevant given the Murtha family’s Irish ancestry. This film assumes extra emotional power in how it shows Ella, Tish’s daughter, investigating her mother’s life and meeting the people who knew in different places and times.

Important here, above all, is that we do get to hear from a particular Geordie tribe, unfiltered and not “explained” by middle class sociologists or indeed right-wing hacks like Rod Liddle (a bad political actor – and man – who cynically appropriates social democracy). I once heard, in a former workplace, the sort of vapid dismissal and pigeonholing of Northern writing and culture, as clearly identified by Andrew McMillan, when Barry Hines’s From a Kestrel to a Knave (1968) was mockingly put down. There’s a middle-class sneer and duplicity in how certain Arts funding bodies, dispensing subsidies, give to certain types of approved curators and not to others who might just have voices they deem too abrasive, like Tish’s.

Tish, in words, work and actions more than demonstrated that she was a humanist. I don’t think people who see Art works as just fuel for subjective pleasure and as being mere products are remotely humanist. Are there creative industries? Yes, if they foreground the human labour involved. No, if we are simply caring about products, ‘content’, the bottom line and venerating the dogma of “productivity”.

Is this another case of the licence fee being justified by one programme? Well, yes, but this was partially crowdfunded, such is the BBC’s Tory-abetted financial woes, in a time when the Corporation’s news and current affairs output has been largely subject to a (subtler) Orban-esque media capture. Anyone thinking of themselves as progressive, “Labour”, socialist or human might want to watch this and see whether they are happy with our society and politics in the last 45 years.

Will we listen to Tish’s cautionary words from 1980?

There are barbaric and reactionary forces in our society, who will not be slow to make political capital from an embittered youth. Unemployed, bored, embittered and angry young men and women are fuel for the fire.

The future of society rests on whether we do. While I’m sure that, with her upbringing, Angela Rayner might get it, recent praise for Thatcher’s ‘meaningful change’ from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer suggests that it’s unlikely that we’re going to get anything significantly different from the next government than what we’ve had from Thatcher to Sunak.

Book review: Laura Tisdall (2020) A PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION? How childhood changed in mid-twentieth-century English and Welsh schools

Laura Tisdall’s book, published by Manchester University Press, is an aptly comprehensive and deeply thought provoking study of postwar British education. Her work is vastly well read and adopts a probing and careful approach to this unwieldy, mammoth field of study.

The book’s conclusion perhaps undersells its final Chapter’s compelling cumulative argument about the exclusion of people whose identities and behaviours were different from the “normal”. But, this is ultimately a very well researched and argued reflection that the so-called “progressive” era of education in the 1960s and 1970s was a longer term 1945-79 cycle. The overall tendency was to valorise the group over the individual, with utilitarian one size fits all approaches, or expedient “what works well enough” teaching. Tisdall reveals that pupils fitting in and conforming with the crowd was fundamentally encouraged in a preparation for the workplace and to produce people for welfare state Britain. It’s surprising in a way that the historiography here doesn’t include Paul Willis on “the lads” and Philip W. Jackson on the “hidden curriculum” as these ideas very much support Tisdall’s argument.

This non-Utopian progressivism, as defined by Tisdall, is persuasively indicated to be a complex mix of social democratic and conservative ideologies. This may have done some good in some places and been responsive to some local needs, but it clearly discriminated against minorities. This followed a 1920s-30s Utopian progressivism which was more radical, but which didn’t get implemented anywhere near as much. Even this non-Utopian progressivism, largely derived from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was piecemeal and only partially believed in and implemented itself by teaches, so was always fused with more traditional chalk and talk methods. But then the promotion of group work and the bias towards producing sociable children did clearly mark a change from the 1940s on, compared to what was there before.

Tisdall grasps complexity: the uneven, varying progressions across time rather than discerning simplistic patterns like some Fleet Street hack would. There’s no definitive indication that progressivism failed, as it was only partially tried. Few, if any, deschooling theories were ever implemented in the 1970s. There’s a sense of a conformist middle ground, where mixed classroom teaching methods were used, with enthusiastic or reluctant incorporation of group work, discovery learning and “child-centred learning”, depending on the school. Tisdall pertinently questions of the related moral panic over teenage delinquency, manifested in “blackboard jungle” fictions and also the later 1960s ‘Black Papers’ claims – or myths – linking radical teaching methods with permissiveness. With no evidence, Cyril Burt et al linked what was basically their dislike of student radical longhairs at University, to earlier 1950s “softer” teaching methods in primary school.

There was more a constructive critique offered by those in the mainstream of teaching, which defended some new methods, but also did pave the way for the mixed blessing of the Thatcher era National Curriculum (1988). Tisdall shows the 1970s as the era when teaching unions got much more militant, understandable given the declining status of a very difficult job. She documents the deeper picture: it’s not simply all a reactionary Black Papers juggernaut conquering all before it, though I feel that key figure Cyril Burt’s role over time needs a bit more ideological analysis and unpicking…

The book’s greatest strength is how Tisdall marshals a vast range of evidence of teachers’ experiences and opinions through oral history interviews and a copious range of education related press publications from the times she is analysing.

Now, there could be more on popular culture’s representations. Such as in pop music, TV (e.g. Scene, Grange Hill), literature and film, or how the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s abstract records were used in classes. The vast area of literature is partially included concerning the Blackboard Jungle myth, and there’s an apt, if brief, citing of Lucy Pearson’s findings about realism. This does get me thinking about the large cohort of Play for Today dramatists who had experienced teaching… Overall, though, this seems an unfair ask, given Tisdall’s focus is squarely on educational history and ethnography, rather than cultural representations.

There could have been more direct evidence of varied people’s memories of teaching styles and approaches in their schooldays, i.e. some interviews and surveys, but also an attention to first-hand diaries, material instances of schoolwork itself and more analysis of documents like individuals’ termly (parents’ evening) reports. The use of HMI reports and other school records is absolutely brilliant, so this would have enabled an even more rounded perspective. this would have assisted the book’s argument, as we do get some crucial findings on people who didn’t fit in, cited via published academic work or reports.

Anyway, this is a fine book, a labour of intensive thought, infused with historical nuance. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if anyone came away from reading this feeling that getting rid of the HMI and replacing them with OFSTED has been a good thing. It also leaves you certain that large class sizes, teachers being overworked and thus relying so often on utilitarian, non-differentiated methods have let the majority of people down who rely on the state system.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.

Neil Kulkarni (1972-2024)

Neil Kulkarni [on Wookie]: The crowd’s response to it shows you it’s skill, they’re loving it and they’re dancing and singing along to it […]

Al Needham: Were you entertained when you saw him [Robbie Williams], Neil?

Neil Kulkarni: I wasn’t… I mean, I’ve always been entertained by my own simmering loathing…!

Chart Music: the Top of the Pops Podcast, #37 (2019)

While I was his friend on Facebook, I didn’t ever meet or speak to Neil Kulkarni in-person, so I’m far from qualified to offer the deepest of tributes. But as part of a loose grouping of writers – at the Melody Maker, with Simon Reynolds, Simon Price, David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes, and online, joined by the varied likes of Rhian E. Jones, Marcello Carlin, Mark Fisher, Tom Ewing and Robin Carmody – he was an unrepentantly raucous and erudite writer who made a deep impression on how I appreciate music and life.

Neil Kulkarni was an elegant, Coventry-centred colossus of music writing, who, for a time, was prominent in a culture which could have benefited from heeding his passionate and complex words about a vast range of music into the 2000s.

He came into prominence in autumn 1993 through writing an articulate and irrefutable letter to the Melody Maker about its elision of Black musicians’ work. Thereafter, he was invited to work on the paper in a move showing the relative openness of the music press at that time, which, in its Allan Jones edited era, could still claim with some credibility to be a focal point for the counterculture in Britain. For the next half decade or so, Kulkarni was a fearless and trenchant music critic, interviewer and, curiously, gossip columnist, initially as a permanent staff member at the Maker.

Kulkarni was also latterly a regular guest on the Chart Music podcast. The crucial episode #37 ‘ITV Digital and Chill’ provided an analysis of an August 2000 Top of the Pops episode which was full of love and insight. For instance, there are incredibly layered dissections of Craig David and Mansun, a humanely damning account of Reef and a sterling paean to UK Garage star Wookie. Kulkarni, who waxed humorously about practically anything, also extolled rare “thrilling” moments in the TOTP archive where you see “weird noises exciting people!”, where strange sonic moments in MJ Cole or Sparks visibly affect people in the audience.

However, this is rightly most remembered for Kulkarni and fellow ex-Melody Maker writer Sarah Bee’s account of how the magazine’s ethos was destroyed, its genial, combative pluralism filleted by a range of Marks who mostly came in from the NME and reduced the paper’s audience and reach with a bizarre tunnel-visioned pitch for limited and laddish guitar rock bands, and an “Alternative Nation” which was clearly anything but. Bee and Kulkarni detail, in an extended therapy session mixed with dramatic tirade, the dismal, misbegotten editorial reign of Mark Sutherland, which led to the paper being discontinued and merged with NME at the end of 2000. His angry instantaneous reactions to the very mention of certain bands or journalists come from a place of love for what is good, exciting and generous in life and music.

There is the necessity in certain extreme cases for calling a cunt a cunt. Especially when a magazine which had provided a focal point for disparate genres, people, weirdos, pop fans and all to converge in a benign space with each other was unceremoniously turned into its opposite. Namely, a sneering, exclusive space for white male rock bands, which was, as Kulkarni said, was “separatist” and actively denigrated anything which deviated from this pattern and betrayed certain racist tendencies. Ultimately, Sutherland was patronising to his readership, treating them as idiots – Kulkarni quotes the gauche bracketed clause added in by Sutherland to his own copy which actually assumed readers would not get the cultural reference “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy”. The tirades reach a righteous crescendo when Bee and Kulkarni reach the Sutherland MM‘s ’50 Reasons the Alternative Nation is Fighting Back’, a bullshit litany if ever there was one and one of the dumbest, neediest morsels of prose ever published.

There was a loss of spaces like Melody Maker and indeed Top of the Pops where different tribes and demographics would coexist happily enough. All of which tied into the increasingly nasty public sphere (or bear pit) of the Noughties, which is increasingly recognised by a range of writers. Kulkarni turned to writing for specialist publications pertaining to heavy metal and hip hop, which was a sign of cultural atomisation and silos and how few were being allowed to deploy a pantheistic, inclusive philosophy of music – barring perhaps John Peel until 2004 and Annie Nightingale long after.

Kulkarni’s writings online for The Quietus and various blogs could often be richly entertaining and deeply moving, as in the case of his tribute to the late Terry Hall from one of his favourite bands, Coventry’s The Specials. What struck me most in the last five years or so, as a subscriber to The Wire magazine, was his prolific and wide-ranging reviews and interviews, which gadded freely from genre to genre. Rightly, his friend and colleague David Stubbs has mooted a collection of Kulkarni’s finest, most vital writings. I’d say his interview with Cleveland, Ohio’s mighty Mourning [A] BLKstr to coincide with the release of their extraordinary The Cycle in September 2020 should be a shoe-in.

Following on from the sad departures of Annie Nightingale (1940-2024) and Roy Battersby (1936-2024), Neil Kulkarni’s premature passing leaves British culture immeasurably poorer. Who else could range from discussing fashion to crisps, hip hop to BBC radio 3, Carry On movies to historian Edward Gibbon’s prose style? For David Lichfield, the loss of a good social media friend has meant Facebook now feels ‘pointless’.

But we can donate to this fund to help support his bereaved children, set up by David Stubbs and which 1,550 people have contributed to. We can also return to Neil’s words, which deserve collecting within at least one book, and learn, act and be.

I’m never going to get a tattoo, but if I did, it would be a Melody Maker tattoo. I fucking loved that magazine. I don’t feel cleansed, Sarah, I still feel upset.

Chart Music #37 (2019), op. cit.

Sometimes I think that music is the only prism we have left through which we can process pain, and that’s why in 2020 it has taken on an extra radiant significance, an even more intimate connection with our reasons to be. […] Before we rush back to the usual cycle of auteurist, individualist music made by lauded and pampered artists, we’d do well to listen deep to the communal act of love that is The Cycle.

Neil Kulkarni, The Wire #439 (September 2020)

Roy Battersby (1936-2024)

Roy Battersby, speaking to me via Zoom, 11 September 2023

Roy Battersby was a great TV director able to generate performances in dramas which created an effect of deep, focused intensity. My tribute to Roy here consists mostly of reflections concerning his body of work, with a special aim of generating more awareness and interest in his overlooked single dramas for TV from 1975-93.

Battersby’s main love may have been cinema – and he talked and wrote voluminously about Pabst, Eisenstein, Wajda and many more – but, as a TV director, he was equally adept at use of video in the studio. Escape from Kampala (1991) and Olly’s Prison (1993) used studio confines for gripping and disturbing ends. Yellowbacks (1990), one of two he directed for BBC1’s final video-led contemporary single play strand in prime time The Play On One (1988-91), also presents a real building vividly via Outside Broadcast video. A strong sense of place and ability to foreground the salient features of an environment through lighting, camera movement and careful framings marked Battersby’s work.

This is evident across Escape from Kampala‘s drama of a prison break in Amin’s Uganda, with a cast comprised of all Black actors, Malcolm McKay’s depiction in Yellowbacks of state political interrogation of dissidents in a looming, empty house and Gentry (1988), a very late ITV play by Nigel Kneale, an excoriating drama about class warfare and an attack not just on Thatcherite gentrification but anticipating the inequalities of the asset boom politicians have consistently stoked since. In Olly’s Prison, a three-part drama by Edward Bond shown in increasingly late night time slots on BBC2, one room provides the setting for a frighteningly enigmatic drama in a first instalment which plays out between a jittery, mobile Bernard Hill and his daughter, Charlotte Coleman, totally withdrawn, still and profoundly silent.

Battersby gained a crucial apprenticeship in 1960s documentaries such as The Stockbroker’s World (1964), for the Men and Money series, a carefully observant study of the London Stock Exchange in a time of mottled stability and mild flux. We see archaic top hats, gleaming, and a man shaking a cacophonous rattle, but not as if at a football game.

And inevitably, it’s controversial. A man doesn’t become a stockbroker or a stockjobber in order to serve British industry, or help investors. He buys himself into this little world because his father was there. Or because he’d like to make a good living in a way that’s socially acceptable. But he’s entitled to claim that he and his colleagues are a necessary part of an ingenious mechanism for raising money… For making our kind of society possible…

A lot of metaphorical blood has flowed here, and perhaps a little actual blood as well…

Narrator’s (Tony Garnett) final words in The Stockbroker’s World

Battersby went on to direct Tony Parker’s Some Women (1969), a feature documentary The Body (1970) with a Ron Geesin and Roger Waters score, and Julia Jones’s Home and Away (1972), while displaying his remarkable facility with filmed single dramas.

Roll On Four O’Clock (1970) is a bleak, utterly compelling masterpiece, the first of his two major collaborations with writer Colin Welland and producer Kenith Trodd. Welland’s drama unflinchingly reveals the pervasive bullying and homophobic evil that permeates a Secondary Modern in Salford, with a range of stolid, complacent teachers, like that adroitly played by George A. Cooper, and Clive Swift’s kindly art teacher who is the one to act with humanity. This work carries Welland’s patented immersive veracity, his writings emerging from a mixture of his own experience and embedded research in communities. It is a humanist clarion call that was 18 years in advance of the cruel homophobic Section 28 legislation and thus light years ahead of dramas in the early 1970s which tended to avoid this subject.

Then came Battersby’s three Play for Today jobs. The first, Better Than The Movies (1972) is one of the remaining 32 Plays for Today I’ve yet to see or, in this case, read: a John Elliot drama featuring Christine Hargreaves, which Roy professed he didn’t have strong memories of and that he regretted he’d turned down directing Welland’s marvellous Kisses At Fifty (1973) and got this instead. Roger Smith’s The Operation (1973) is an incredibly odd melange of pointed politics and lurid exploitation filmmaking, a kind of bad taste Marxist Melodrama, which is utterly unique and divided viewers then and would now, as a Play for Today viewing group in April 2021 attested! This is not subtle, or in the liberal humanistic dramatic tradition. There is a thinness to much of the characterisation. It skewers its villainous property speculator protagonist, an oddly well-cast George Lazenby. While I find certain elements of this don’t work – a haphazard diegetic soundtrack* and it is glaringly androcentric, watching fifty years on – few can doubt that this leftist melodrama’s targets are totally deserving and relevant in 2024.

Also with Welland and Trodd, Leeds United! (1974) opened Play for Today’s fifth series in especially trenchant, politicised fashion, dramatising an actual 1970s strike in Leeds. While it found predictable brickbats from Whitehouse types, and defensive responses from union leaders and textiles firm bosses alike, it was this very uncompromising attack on both these settled establishments that shows the drama’s power. It really is a people’s drama, conveying the vox populi of the women textile workers who are grassroots union members who develop a fervent, ferocious socialist consciousness through their industrial action and who learn the bitter lessons of betrayal by senior figures in their own movement. Clearly, even the compromises of the 1970s seem Utopian compared with today, when the unions are disempowered. This is part of this drama’s historical value, in that it shows a time of relative strength in the Labour Movement, and also warns against compromising too much with conservative forces, as it lets passionate demands for structural change fade away. Battersby’s peerless cinematic technique for TV is kinetic and often deeply moving.

The elaborate, virtuoso opening tracking/crane shot is a British TV equivalent of Pabst or Welles. The set piece exchanges in the Town Hall send the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, while the Woodhouse Moor sequence evokes a gradual, melancholy realisation. While it’s very much a de-individualised crowd drama, and thus is demonstrably socialist, Battersby enables especially fine performances from Lynne Perrie, Elizabeth Spriggs and Lori Wells.

Next, Battersby directed Post Mortem (1975), a superb one-set studio drama by the undervalued Brian Clark, which anticipated Battersby’s later mastery of video studio aesthetic. This is a one-hander centring on the intense Judy Parfitt, playing an archetypal English workaholic, a formidable backstairs fixer in the financial world, notably in the year that Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader. This play, one of several masterpieces, utilises Battersby’s experiences with The Stockbroker’s World, and also his visual sense, to deploy some elaborate camera movement unusual for the studio setup – anticipating Alastair Reid’s work on series 1 of Gangsters (1976). Battersby is the ideal director to tell a story whereby professional flux and incomprehensible jargon and deals is interwoven seamlessly with the personal tragedy of the forsaken private life. The hubris is writ far wider than this one room.

By the mid-1970s, Battersby had taken a job working full-time for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. His self-published memoir gives a fascinating account of a controversial incident in Derbyshire, which I have yet to fully read, and there’s a nuanced account of the Party’s aims, tactics and intractable limitations.

While working for the WRP, and largely due to the uncompromising radicalism of Leeds United!, Battersby was effectively blacklisted by the BBC, under pressure from MI5, with Post Mortem an overlooked final parting shot. However, Verity Lambert and June Roberts, producers of Thames Television’s ITV daytime soap opera drama Couples (1975-76), employed Battersby to helm several instalments written by his old collaborator Tony Parker. ITV work dried up after that, and in his full time WRP role, he worked on film projects, the most significant and sadly relevant of which is the documentary The Palestinian (1977), which contains testimony of Palestinian children in Lebanon dying through lack of water supply. It’s partial in its politics, yes, without any attempt to chase the elusive and often duplicitous goal of “balance”. It reveals the disturbing, subjective truths of a particular moment and illuminates the facts of its historical context.

Suffice it to say, that the independent thinking Battersby fell foul of the autocratic Gerry Healy leadership, for being too vocal in a way that the controlling Healy could not countenance. After a semi successful stint organizing for the WRP in Glasgow, for which he gained scant recognition, Battersby left after the falling out with the leadership and had fully left his full-time role and the WRP itself by 1980.

His memoir details his more humbled attitude to life since then, speaking of his love of his then new partner Judy Loe and how he recognised and valued family life anew after effectively being married to his work and the WRP for so long. There are some almost unbearably moving reflections on their life in Italy and the attempts in the late 1980s with Kenith Trodd to get a political and historical drama set in Italy with full cooperation of the locals, which a touchy, cautious BBC kiboshed.

However, that’s jumping ahead. Aided by Margaret Matheson in his return to TV work, in her time at ITV regional company Central, Battersby directed tantalising series by Peter Tinniswood and Barrie Keeffe which I have yet to see, including the latter’s No Excuses (1983) starring the peerless Charlotte Cornwell. He subsequently worked with another great Play for Today alumnus David Rose, producing Films on Four including Winter Flight (1984), irreverent and damning about masculine pub culture, if with a somewhat questionable ending, and Mr. Love (1986), which I’ve not seen, yet sounds a lovely, perhaps uncharacteristically upbeat work in the Battersby oeuvre. Others I’ve sadly yet to be able to investigate are Farrukh Dhondy and W. Stephen Gilbert’s notable series King of the Ghetto (1986) and for, BBC2’s leftfield, experimentalist strand ScreenPlay, The Act (1989).

Battersby worked on a range of the generally stronger and vastly popular range of police dramas of the 1990s like Between the Lines, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and Cracker. His autobiography gives a frank and caustic account of his thoughts about certain other police dramas of the era they came to wearyingly dominate. His book in that and another section is also as strong an inside account of how television drama lost its soul in a Faustian, nay Birtian, pact whereby utilitarian economics and ratings obsession merged to snuff out the questing innovation and the sort of passionate, committed focus that Battersby and two whole generations of writers, directors, producers and actors, had provided from the 1960s to 1990s.

My interviews with Roy, held on Zoom in September 2023, were, therefore, probably his last, as he was, as I only faintly knew, very ill, though he seemed in good spirits and managed to talk at some length both times.** In his chats with me, his fundamental geniality and helpfulness and interest in other people shone through. He was deeply intelligent and impassioned, and wore these attributes lightly. His memoir clearly indicates a lifelong socialism, and awareness of the need for more than incremental reforms, despite his bad experiences with the WRP organisation. In this book, he shows his political development by engaging with environmentalism and the need to stop destroying our planet in so many interlinked ways.

Roy seemed flattered and happy to be able to discuss his life’s work with me, especially the deep acres of it which have undeservedly passed into public obscurity. I intend, very much in line with his stepdaughter Kate Beckinsale’s public calls, to ensure his unparalleled contribution as a great BBC-trained director, equally at home in ITV’s popular dramatic mould, is remembered and inspires others to look deeply at the world and make good, intense art infused with commitment.

*They should’ve stuck to and expanded its Stanley Myers underscore, which does have some of that Roy Budd seedy grandiosity… But, perhaps, BBC budgets, as ever, would only stretch so far.
**I hope to publish the transcripts and audio recordings to the British Entertainment History Project.

Play for Today’s Title Sequences

Forgotten Television Drama

By Tom May

During its run from 1970 until 1984, the one-off drama series Play for Today employed seven different title sequences. In my article for the Special Issue on ‘Play for Today at 50’ for the Journal of British Cinema and Television , I provide a historical analysis of these. Focusing on how the different sequences invested the strand with a particular identity and prepared audiences for the plays that followed, it identifies the  main modes of address employed by the title sequences and the ways in which they both startled and seduced viewers.

This shorter post is intended to complement this article by presenting the findings of a survey I undertook from June 2021 to January 2022. This aimed to gather the views on the various title sequences of a range of interested parties. While there is no pretence at rigorous sampling, the views of the 61 people…

View original post 1,591 more words

“It’s like, you know, everything is cancelled”: MC Tomster’s TREMENDOUS THIRTY, 2021

Here are my favourite albums of 2021. The very favourite is marked by an * though! On that matter I’m actually in exact agreement with the Guardian, which is a rarity!

I’ve played some of these more than others. But they are all ace in various ways.

There is also a Spotify playlist here with a track each from these releases for your listening pleasure.

Little Simz – SOMETIMES I MIGHT BE INTROVERT
Bruno Pernadas – PRIVATE REASONS
Axolotes Mexicanos – :3
Jazmine Sullivan – HEAUX TALES
Mzylkypop – KIEDY WILKI ZAWYJA?
Remi Wolf – JUNO
Doja Cat – PLANET HER
Genesis Owusu – SMILING WITH NO TEETH
Fievel Is Glauque – GOD’S TRASHMEN SENT TO RIGHT THE MESS
Haiku Salut – THE HILL, THE LIGHT, THE GHOST
Space Afrika – HONEST LABOUR
Mason Lindahl – KISSING ROSY IN THE RAIN
Cities Aviv – THE CRASHING SOUND OF HOW IT GOES
Lost Girls, Jenny Hval & Håvard Volden – MENNESKEKOLLEKTIVET
Andy Stott – NEVER THE RIGHT TIME
Rochelle Jordan – PLAY WITH THE CHANGES
Öona Dahl – MORPH
Douglas Kearney & Val Jeanty – FODDER (LIVE AT DISJECTA IN PORTLAND)
Anthony Joseph – THE RICH ARE ONLY DEFEATED WHEN RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES
Dave – WE’RE ALL ALONE IN THIS TOGETHER
Billie Eilish – HAPPIER THAN EVER
Virginia Wing – private LIFE
Joan As Police Woman, Tony Allen & Dave Okumu – THE SOLUTION IS RESTLESS
HARD FEELINGS – HARD FEELINGS
Damon Albarn – THE NEARER THE FOUNTAIN, MORE PURE THE STREAM FLOWS
Arlo Parks – COLLAPSED IN SUNBEAMS
Nun Gun – MONDO DECAY
Tom Jones – SURROUNDED BY TIME
NOUS, Laraaji, Arji OceAnanda & Christopher Bono – CIRCLE OF CELEBRATION
*Self Esteem – PRIORITISE PLEASURE

Highly honourable mentions to Lindsey Buckingham, Naked Flames, Jana Rush, Claire Rousay, Field Music… Many of these people’s and others’ albums are represented on this other Spotify playlist: MC TOMSTER’S 2021 GALLIMAUFRY. This is a mix inspired by the eclecticism of John Peel and Annie Nightingale and veers far more oddly and expansively than the BANGERS or TREMENDOUS THIRTY playlists.

Some of the videos for the TREMENDOUS THIRTY selections are, in themselves, amazing. Watch them! :

Bruno Pernadas – THEME VISION

Doja Cat – NEED TO KNOW

Andy Stott – HARD TO TELL


Rochelle Jordan – ALREADY (Beckettian!)

Further VHS aesthetics here:

Nun Gun, feat. Mark Stewart – STEALTH EMPIRE

NOUS, Laraaji, Arji OceAnanda & Christopher Bono – GIVING PRAISE

Self Esteem – MOODY

MC TOMSTER’S 21 BANGERS OF 2021

I have decided on my 21 bangers of 2021: listen to them in full on my Spotify playlist here.

1. Joel Corry, Jax Jones, feat. Charli XCX & Saweetie – OUT OUT
2. Caroline Polachek – BUNNY IS A RIDER
3. Kero Kero Bonito – THE PRINCESS AND THE CLOCK
4. AERO GROS M – IN BETWEEN A MANSION’S GATES
5. Shmu – (TECH, NO HUMAN) MEMORIES, THOUGHTS & IMAGINATIONS EXIST WHERE?
6. Go_A – SHUM
7. Fred again… & The Blessed Madonna – MAREA (WE’VE LOST DANCING)
8. Noizu – SUMMER 91
9. Jungle – ALL OF THE TIME
10. PinkPantheress – PAIN
11. Central Cee – OBSESSED WITH YOU
12. Sam Fender – SEVENTEEN GOING UNDER (edit)
13. WILLOW & Travis Barker – t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l
14. SZA – GOOD DAYS
15. beabadobee – LAST DAY ON EARTH
16. Doja Cat, feat. SZA – KISS ME MORE
17. Altin Gün – Yüce Dağ Başında
18. cEvin Key feat. Edward Ka-Spel – WATCHING YOU
19. Hannah Peel – EMERGENCE IN NATURE
20. Jane Weaver – SOLARISED
21. Lizzie Esau – CAFFEINE

Many thanks to Marcello Carlin, Justin Lewis and David Lichfield for alerting me to many of these songs; I wouldn’t necessarily have even been aware of them otherwise.