Birthday revels in a knife crime culture
Although I am reserving my real birthday treat for Sunday, when I go to see Ken Dodd at the Rose in Kingston — like the Arctic explorer, I may be away for some time — the day itself was marked by the opening of West Side Story at Sadler’s Wells, though this anodyne, “international”-style production rather punctured my over-excited expectations.
And in a year when seventeen teenagers have already been stabbed to death in London, the brutality of the gang warfare and the ever brilliant social pleading of “Gee, Officer Krupke,” seemed more poignant than ever. Except that it didn’t, really: the whole show now needs an overhaul, an update, new choreography and, for heaven’s sake, a cast of kids. Tony looked about thirty-five.
I see that Sir Richard Attenborough, with no evidence whatsoever, is blaming violence in the movies for the knife culture. I’m afraid he’s wrong, as knives are just a by-product of what’s going wrong in society, as West Side makes abundantly clear.
And some folk say that there’s actually a decrease in these terrible incidents, we just hear more about them as society itself is obsessed by the problems for which no-one’s prepared to invent solutions; although some figures claim that a knife crime took place every four minutes in 2007 and, if true, that is frightening. But we shouldn’t blame anything on the movies.
Milton Shulman used to say that violence on stage and screen prompted violence on the streets, but there’s no evidence to support this contention, and it’s surely much more likely that the truth is the other way round: culture reflects a harsh reality.
Still, my sunny birthday was on the whole unclouded by such reflections. What did I do? I collected my first bout of free prescriptions from the hospital pharmacy. I joyously took charge of my first freedom pass for inner city transport all over the country. My son met me in the West End and bought me a beautiful pair of Oscar Sweeney shoes and handed over a P G Wodehouse first edition. And my taller and better half met me for a delicious fish supper before clocking in at Sadler’s Wells.
I couldn’t have had a nicer time — except with the production, of course, and I’m spending tonight with family, old friends and neighbours before packing my boots, spirit level and emergency survival kit for the Kingston expedition.
For the second year running I’m not going to the Edinburgh Festival and I couldn’t be happier. As usual, the official programme is the only one worth visiting, yet we’re going to have a deluge of bunkum over the next few weeks about this and that on the fringe and a welter of over-hyped medicocrity treated as if it were just what the nation really wanted to hear about.
Instead, I can enjoy the city while everyone else is away on holiday, or in Edinburgh, get properly stuck into the Proms, catch up on my movies and look forward to my awaydays to the Essex coast and the Yorkshire dales.
Of course, if I had a reason, or a budget, for going to Edinburgh, I would be playing another tune: Edinburgh only works if you truly believe it matters and you make it the centre of your universe for ten days or a fortnight. And when you’re actually there, that’s what happens. It’s always a big shock to come home and realise no-one else has felt remotely the same way about it at all.
And not one stand-up or comedy turn will be a patch on Ken Dodd, anyway. So all my Edinburghs will come at once on Sunday night when the great goofy one grabs his tickle stick and threatens us with his latest exercise in audience incarceration: “It’s not the television, missus….you can’t turn me off!”