The Big Light!

This was written in London at 1.48 am January 1^st 2017 – in Los Angeles it is still in the afternoon – 5.48pm.

Happy New Year - Feliz año nuevo.

I remember many years ago – many many years ago – when I was about 20 and still living at home; in fact I was 20. We threw a party and when we threw a party we really did; plenty of ice cream, jelly, custard, cake and lashings of ginger beer!

Well no it wasn't exactly like that; it might have been the year when I had my picture – in full colour – on the front of one of the local newspapers in fact it was, I just looked it up.

There it is, above, and the others in it are my brother (left), a pal called Dave, and the one on the side of the pool was a workmate of my brudder. You've probably seen it before.

I am the one with my mouth open – I had just got in to the pool and the water was cold, hence the grimace which the photographer caught at the right moment which is why it was promoted to the front page. Scene stealing even at that age!

The girl that I ended up with, for a short while anyway, was the one on the left, of the 3 but unfortunately I have forgotten her name. We only went out together for a very short time in any case.

The photo was taken in Wales and we didn't know the girls till this photo was taken but found out that they lived in the same city as we did – Birmingham so dated them there.

Now that was a big digression as it's nothing to do with the party I opened with but I would like to say no I haven't saved the newspaper for all these years, Dave (from the photo) gave me a copy when he came with a few friends to see one of my shows when I came over from Los Angeles to London about 10 years, or so, ago.

So back to the party: as we were living at home we had the party when les parents went out for the night.

Booze was bought, plenty of finger food, the lights were low and various guests sat around in the salubrious surroundings of our sitting room. Music played, not loud rock, but mood music and maybe that was even by Glenn Miller and maybe it was Moonlight Serenade as I had seen all Jack Lemmon's movies in which he was invariably in a bachelor pad in New York, bringing girls back to seduce to the sweet strains of Moonlight Serenade or similar music.

It was in the days when smoking was fashionable and the room was full of smoke and a great ambiance was created.

Saxophones played, trombones augmented and there was a great trumpet solo but out of the corner of my eye I noticed the door opening and a hand moving to the light switch – YES!!!!

THE BIG LIGHT!!

The ambiance disappeared as quickly as Sunderland supporters exiting from the football stadium whenever their team was losing.

Mam and Dad stood in the door frame; their evening out had been cancelled and my dad would always have to have the big light on – I don't know why he put it on at that moment but he probably thought that teenagers and their parents were supposed to annoy each other and THE BIG LIGHT would do the trick.

It certainly did.

The party broke up and everybody went home; they started to troop off as soon as the television went on and I think we went to the pub.

Now at this lofty age I empathize a bit more as the older you get the harder it is to see in the dark; salubrious lighting is good to watch TV but not to read.

Many years have gone by since then but at that precise moment, the moment when my dad touched the light switch, he was in charge; he was the main man and the man of the house and all that the 1960s stood for; he wanted to come home and be comfortable and get everybody out. He liked a party, a drink and a sing song but not our kind of party.

Since then he saw the big light in the sky and drifted towards it and so did my mother when they both shuffled off their mortal coils.

I often wonder what they would have made of the Internet and the Intranet and the iPads and tablets and all the other paraphernalia that has made nearly all GPs in this country prescribe Vitamin 'D' tablets to most of their patients due to the lack of sunshine and fresh air.

What'll be next? Rickets?

2016 has been a year of the BIG LIGHT for a lot of famous people. A lot of pop singers, actors and other notorious personalities but have you ever asked yourself why?

Well in the 50s right up to the mid 70s in the UK there were only a few channels on television. And up until 1967 there were no network pop music stations. Pirate radio existed, of course, but you needed to live near the coast to hear them, as most of the stations were on ships surrounding the British Isles.

The other source of music came from squeaky Radio Luxembourg.

Popular at the time was music by artists born around the 1930s; that was 86 years ago. Those artists became more famous than any of the artists before or since. These days there are so many outlets on TV and radio that you can become really famous in Wales, or Yorkshire or even Scotland and Ireland and nobody outside those areas will have heard of you. I mean who is the most popular deejay in any of those places?

Before the 50s and people like James Dean, teenagers were insignificant, in fact it was said that James Dean was the first teenager – even though he was in his 20s.

There was a sudden change when teenagers had more disposable income than in the past. In the UK their parents had no disposable income – get up, go to work, come home, cook and sleep. Then the same the next day – I repeat NO disposable income. The average Joe Bloggs would put everything on the never never; hire purchase, terms – you name it. It is all described in the excellent novel Live Now Pay Later by Jack Trevor Story. I got to know Jack very well in the 70s and later played his father in a TV series called Jack on the Box – he was a chancer and a bankrupt and just the kind of person I like.

Jack Trevor Story.

So for the next so many years we are going to say goodbye to all our heroes if they were born in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s – sad but true. One or two will last longer and one or two will die younger than average.

I mean Chuck Berry is 90, Jerry Lee Lewis around 85 and so is Little Richard!

The first baby boomers were born around 1945 and even though we are living longer and crashing into prostate cancer and/or dementia we will all be gone by the time Halley's Comet comes around again.

Which Reminds me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zju6KbP_1xY 

and the guitar solo at 40 seconds is great.

An Urge to Utter - 2016

I was listening to the radio the other day and the programme was about Harriet Martineau who, from a non-conformist background in Norwich, became one of the best known writers from the nineteenth century.

It doesn't say much about me when I say I hadn't heard of her. But that would be the same to the person in Liverpool who, having heard I was an actor, made it quite clear, and told me so, that she had never heard of me.

Harriet Martineau followed, what is called, neccessitarianism* and had an urge to utter.

Yes – an urge to utter.

I probably have that urge, which is why I write on here now and again. Lots of us have urges to utter and I heard a famous poet on the radio who said that she has been planning a novel for years. You've heard plenty of people say that so what stops them? They have the urge to utter but don't want to be judged too harshly so, even though they write columns and poetry they don't want to be judged for anything of length just in case it's no good.

Harriet Martineau was very controversial and was an early feminist although it seems rather a late date to be an early feminist when the earth has been here for many millions of years. The older you think it is the less religion means to you.

But it's both easy and hard to realise just what a necessitarian actually is; maybe it is someone who looks out to the universe and accepts all the messages they get from it and acts accordingly doing what is necessary - or gets locked up for being a danger to themselves and other people.

Maybe that's why Trump was elected and not Clinton and Brexit was voted for when it seemed that sensible people were voting to remain in the European Community.

In both cases people went in to the polling booth with a pin and stuck it into the space where their hand was guided as if from Mars (what is necessary) – that's the only excuse I can think.

Someone said on the BBC World Service the other night, that in a few months time people will say they saw what was happening and they knew Trump would win. Well . . . .

I know that when I have looked at elections – and I lived in America for five presidential elections – I have noticed that as soon as one of the candidates finds a catch phrase they win. It doesn't happen all the time as with John Kerry when he said help is on the way – it just wasn't good enough to beat Bush who was the sitting president.

Al Gore wouldn't seek the help of President Bill Clinton as he was a bit puritanical and didn't want to be associated with a president who had been impeached even though he was found not guilty, but that catch phrase was there; this time it was fuzzy math when Bush retaliated to Gore's maths.

So as soon as I heard that the catch phrase “inherited from the Labour Government” I knew the Conservatives were going to win each time they have used it. You see each time a catch phrase is used the party or person it is used against doesn't question it; and they should.

In the referendum – a plebiscite which was never ever used here before 1974 – as soon as the leave campaign started saying take back control I knew it was all over. Nobody answered it.

At the moment the government here is trying to take back all the rights we had before the referendum – we already had those rights so why vote to leave? Oh yes!! The same disease America has – immigration. In a country where everybody is an immigrant they were swayed by Trump's rhetoric, the leave campaigners here were swayed by a really evil person called Nigel Farage who warned that millions and millions of immigrants would want to come and live in Britain. Farage is one of those opportunist people that history throws up now and again; the gang of four (here) who left the Labour Party in 1983 to form an alliance with the Liberal Party. (Liberal here, by the way, is not the same as in America but is middle of the road). They were opportunists but as soon as they actually took the opportunity in 2010 and joined with the conservatives it was their death knell as they lost nearly all their seats in the commons last year in the General Election.

As to Trump, he used the same popularist speeches that some people may have had at the back of their minds; people whom you might scratch and they'd be racist. The 'Donald' wasn't in a straight jacket and dictated to by PR men and women or the men in grey suits he was himself. Hillary Clinton wasn't. I noticed two leaders of the Labour Party giving great speeches recently – Ed Milliand and Gordon Brown – but when they were leaders they were puppets.

I am totally against Trump I don't think he has any of the qualifications for the job but he is good on television and that's why he won.

But the good people in America will vote for anything: I remember three years after I moved there, there was an election for the Sheriff of Los Angeles County. The man in office was a certain Sheriff Sherman Block and he was challenged by Lee Baca. The first time the election took place there was no majority so they had to have a 'run off.'

A few days before the second election was to happen the 74 year old Sheriff Block, fell in his bathroom and died.

The run off election took place in November 1998 even though Sheriff Block had died on October 1998. Instead of cancelling the election the authorities allowed it to go ahead and seven hundred and three thousand, one hundred and seventy eight people voted for a dead man. Seven hundred and three thousand, one hundred and seventy eight people.

This year – 2016 – over seventeen million people in Great Britian – seventeen million turkeys, or Santa Clauses voted to cancel Christmas. In other words voted to leave The Common Market or, as it is now called, The European Community. Since then it has been mentioned on the news and in news and current affairs programmes every day – every single day.

And that's the way we end the year – not knowing what we want and we leave 2016 knowing that we lost some great people and the greatest of them all.

Mohamed Ali.

* Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.

It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents. Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes.

Anthony Collins was the foremost defender of Necessitarianism. His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) was a key statement of the determinist standpoint.

The Century Dictionary defined it in 1889–91 as belief that the will is not free, but instead subject to external antecedent causes or natural laws of cause and effect.