Slop [2]

My Grandfather remembered a world without radio. My parents grew up in a world where Uncle Mac and In Town Tonight reigned supreme. When I was ten years old, the natural order of things was to come home from school and watch Play School and Jackonory and Penelope Pitstop and John Craven and Blue Peter and the Magic Roundabout and the Six O’Clock News and Nationwide--but where “computers” were only found in Star Trek and Doctor Who. My parents were deeply suspicious of Television; and my Grandmother refused to have one in the house. Daddy admitted that when he was a little boy, he was told he wasted too much time at the cinema. I myself have an Iphone, an Ipad, a MacMini and a NeoLaptop (and wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to get through the day without them): but I am still inclined to worry that Young People Nowadays spend a bit too long on their Screens.

 

Daddy’s objection to television was that it dominated a room, where radio had stayed in the background. You listened to Tommy Handley firing jokes at you or Dick Barton escaping from Baron Scarheat’s nefarious trap: but you did so while doing your embroidery or playing draughts or assembling a scale model of a Spitfire. For all I know, this may have been true: in the olden days, radios were big cumbersome things that took a long while to tune and warm up. I have a half-memory of a time when The Radio in my parents’ house was a large, heavy, black object with shiny metal controls that was Switched On or Switched Off at particular times. The only voice I ever remember coming out of it was the one that said “Are you sitting comfortably?…. Then I’ll begin.” It was that long ago.  

Daddy also objected to the way TV controlled our life-style. He had a notion, I think, that “switching on the television set” ought to be one of a number of perfectly valid  answers to the question “What shall we do this evening?” to be chosen only after “play Monopoly” and “go for a walk in the park” had been considered and rejected; and that having made our decision, we should consume whatever wholesome fare Aunty Beeb happened to be showing. In the olden days people “went to the pictures” without necessarily knowing what movie was on. 

This was consistent with the endless complaints from Mrs Mary Whitehouse and her ilk, that Television was too rude, too violent or merely too interesting. If you were the kind of person who studied the Radio Times and decided to watch The Benny Hill Show, you could hardly complain that Benny Hill was purveying post-card humour (q.v) -- and if it bothered you, you were quite free to switch him off. But if most people were not making a positive decision to watch a particular show, but merely consuming that night’s bill of fare, then the BBC had an obligation never to show anything which could conceivably scare or embarrass or corrupt anyone.

This theory of Television created considerable friction between the older generation and those of us who regarded Blake’s 7, the Wombles, Rentaghost, Top of the Pops and Little House on the Prairie as unbreakable social commitments. 

I think when I was at school I would have been far more disadvantaged by not having seen Blue Peter or Doctor Who than by not having had a bath or new shoes or any breakfast. Which is worth keeping in mind when you talk about social media bans.

Granny regarded The Television as a very extravagant luxury, like a grand piano or a chauffeur driven car or a slice of avocado toast. How could some people be claiming Family Allowance and Old Age Pension and Unemployment Benefit when they were so fabulously wealthy that they could afford a Television Set? 

Grandad said that his first day at work, at the age of twelve, was as an office boy in an attorney’s firm, at a time where there were still rooms full of clerks copying out letters with fountain pens. I am not sure if I quite believe this. It would have been, what, 1912, when typewriters were already ubiquitous. Maybe old fashioned solicitors felt that it was good manners for legal letters to be hand-written? But certainly, Grandad lived through an era of enormous social change. He would have heard the first radio broadcasts, visited the first cinemas, seen or heard about the first TV shows, and lived long enough to take an interest in my Amstrad PC. His grandfather would have remembered the first electric lights, the first telephones and witnessed the rise of the railway system. 

Which generation’s lives were most changed by these new inventions? I think that the rise of the Mass Medium—television—represented a bigger change than anything I have experienced in my lifetime. Having a Computer in my pocket is very different from having a Television in my front room: but not as different as “not having any concept of TV” would have been from “taking TV for granted”. I think you would have to go right back to the exodus of ordinary people from the farms to the factories in the eighteenth century to find a comparable social upheaval. 

Will the arrival of Artificial Intelligence be like the invention of Steam Trains and Television? Or will it turn out to be a smaller thing, like when we noticed that Usenet is a bit passé and that all the cool kids are expressing themselves via the Twitter? 

*

CS Lewis said that he was once discussing patriotism with and nice old vicar. 

“But sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?” he asked. 

“Yes”  replied the clergyman “But in England it’s true”.

I do not have square eyes. The human race has not evolved into beings with gigantic bottoms and enormous thumbs, perfectly adapted to watch daytime soap-operas but not to do anything else. TV didn’t signal the end of cinema; cinema didn’t result in the closure of the theatres. Young people today read as many, or as few, good books as they ever did. Video entirely failed to kill the radio star. 

"But haven’t people always said that new technology will rot young people’s brains; destroy their morals; take away their capacity for conversation; remove their capacity for critical thinking; present them with violent and immoral role-models, and in general, create a society of mindless, screen-addicted automata."

“Yes. But this time, it’s true."

Slop [1]

Do you remember Before Watchmen? 

Do you remember Doomsday Clock? 

I have certainly forgotten the HBO Watchmen TV sequel, although I believe at the time I said it was rather well done. 

When Doomsday Clock was coming out, someone sensible on the Internet asked:  “How long will it be until we stop treating any Watchmen sequel as a blasphemy against Alan Moore, and start treating it as one more comic book with an unfortunate copyright history—like Superman and Howard the Duck and everything Stan Lee was ever involved in?”

And my answer was “When someone other than Alan Moore writes a really first rate and important comic featuring the Watchmen characters.” 

Truthfully, the idea of a  New Gods comic drawn by anyone apart from Jack Kirby is very nearly as silly as someone who isn’t Alan Moore trying to continue Watchmen. But once you have read The Great Darkness Saga it is very hard to carry on being a purist.

I am not up to speed with Grant Morrison’s material, but I have heard they have done rather decent things with Kirby's pantheon.

This essay is not about superhero comics.

People who want to promote gigs or festivals very often use generative artificial intelligence to produce striking posters or flyers. If they are unwise enough to post those flyers on Facebook, the first “below the line” comment is almost certain to be “AI Slop”. 

And the artwork is usually very sloppy indeed. It is painfully apparent that every single sea shanty band, and every single sea shanty session (including, until I changed it, the one I run) is using roughly the same AI generated poster of some jolly pirates singing on a boat or at a dock. Sometimes, photos of the actual band have been turned into cartoons and superimposed onto a sepia or parchment background.  Very often it’s a kind of montage, like a movie poster, with singers, boats, audiences, pints of beer and, for some reason, sea monsters, hovering over an abstract background with no particular relationship to one another.  

Some of my shanty friends have gone so far as to say that they won’t attend any gig that uses this kind of publicity material, and indeed that gigs with those kinds of posters deserve to fail. 

My own position is a little less absolutist. I make some use of ChatGPT and GoogleAI  to bounce ideas off and, indeed, chat to; but I would not let it edit, much less write, anything going out under my name. The main strength of my writing is that it sounds like me; and AI would have the effect of making it sound exactly like everyone else

And I am pretty sceptical of using  AI as a search engine, or as someone said, an “automated librarian”, because its answers are frequently plain wrong. 

Case in point: I am researching, which is to say, vaguely ruminating about, a short, medium or long piece comparing Calvin and Hobbes with Winnie-the-Pooh. Calvin and Christopher Robin clearly have a lot in common: both are six years old; both have stuffed toys, and indeed, stuffed tigers, with whom they have imaginary adventures. And, incidentally, the creators of both characters became quite resentful of their success.

Now, the first Pooh story was originally published, not as part of the collection we are all familiar with, but as a special feature on the front page of the Christmas Eve edition of a London newspaper.  Was that original text any different from the published version? Both Google AI and ChatGPT said that the newspaper published the story without the framing device. You remember that the book begins with Christopher Robin asking for a bedtime story: the newspaper jumped straight in at  “A long time ago, about last Thursday….”. As a result, Christopher Robin has different pronouns: in the book, they were “you” but in the newspaper they were “he”.  

Which makes complete sense: but happens to be incorrect. You can fairly easily find a facsimile of that first printing, and it begins with the “real” Christopher Robin dragging the toy Pooh downstairs, exactly as he does in the book. 

Which doesn’t do me any harm. I am the kind of person who likes going back to sources. My current Work in Progress is a critique of CS Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. When I asked my New Online Best Friend who on earth this “Alanus” who Lewis treats as an important authority could be, it told me that he was referring to a fairly obscure medieval allegorist named Alain de Lille. My first instinct was to head straight over  to the Internet Archive, download a copy of The Complaint of Nature, and see if I could make any sense out of it. (Spoiler: I couldn't.)

Lewis himself would have strongly approved of this: he said that he wished that, rather than reading boring modern books on Platonism, he could persuade his students to simply go away and read the Symposium. 

That is my first response to anyone who pontificates about the evils of the TickTocks and the FaceBooks. The terrible porn infested online echo chamber can provide me, in a few seconds, with primary texts that only a few years ago would only have been available from academic libraries. 

But not every harassed student will use the technology in that way. Many of them will use ChatGPT instead of reading the original books; or assume that ChatGPT is right even when it isn’t; or even use ChatGPT generated answers instead of writing their own. 

This was also true of Google and Wikipedia.  

Which is perhaps not the most original insight I have ever had:  

“New technologies can be used in bad ways and less bad ways”.

“A new tool may be helpful or harmful, depending on what you are doing with it.”

Slop

 A series of very short articles

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Sidmouth Festival Diary [Saturday]

 I got a review!

Obviously I didn’t get straight off the train from Exeter and hop on a bus from Temple Meads to Wells to join some shanty-adjacent friends who were having a camping weekend / mini festival / birthday party in a field near Priddy. Because that would have been mad.

And equally obviously there was no difficulty in getting an Uber or a Taxi to come to a field in Priddy in Sunday morning to pick me up.

I definitely decided that I was NOT going to walk into my flat on Sunday afternoon and take a nap. So I sat down in my book nook chair to catch up on emails and the Guardian. And instantly fell asleep for three hours. 

[And equally obviously, I am not going to canteen shanties on Monday evening, and definitely not going to hear Pressgang Mutiny in the Folk House on Tuesday. Because that would be silly.]

I suppose the festival beard will have to be shaved off. The lockdown beard was not a good look. The hair on my head has kindly gone from brown to light brown, receded slightly, and regained some curls since the trendy and expensive barber started to sell me expensive moroccan hair oils. But the hair on my chinny chin chin has absurd streaks of white in it.

I have a holiday diary I kept just after I had started school. The last page says “after excitement of these, we are glad to be back at Number 3.” (Number 3 being the house number I grew up in.)

I am certainly looking forward to sleeping in an actual bed, using an actual toilet, showering alone, etc etc.

I wonder what would happen if I carried on writing and publishing diaries in weeks when I am not festivalling?

Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.
Got up, drank coffee, wrote, listened to Radio 4.

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Friday]

Final day. 

I am dictating this into my Iphone on a train. Apple notes has a built in speech-text feature, so what could possibly go wrong? The next station is Taunton. I heard Prescot Mutant give a talk about sea shanties. They think they derive from cotton-screwing songs. There is a popular Jamaican tune which goes almost exactly to Sam’s Gone Away. Why are there no English cathedral-building songs? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are not comfortable with the “she says she won’t but I think she will” line in Chicken on a Raft. I wish I had been taking notes. See it, say it, sort it.  Against my better judgement, I sang McDermot’s War Song (By Jingo) to the Middle Bar group at the Anchor , but they seemed to think it was funny. Th he shanty people thought that “silver spades” and “golden chains” might be references to sea burials, the “silver spades” actually being an anchor. I don’t approve of automatic standing ovations, but I definitely stood up and clapped at the end of Peters Field, a cycle of songs by Sean Coolney, (Young Uns), Sam Carter (riding high still from last night), and Eliza Carthy (whose dad was in the front row).  The folk opera format meant we got a very detailed account of the event with voices and names given to individual victims (and some of the soldiers) . Several songs are destined to become standards. The word “Peterloo” wasn’t mentioned until the last line of the final song. Spiers and Boden did what was very much a Spiers and Boden set, which is pretty much exactly what you want on the last night. There is still a wild boar in the woods, the bush still pricks their heart full sore, and the identity of the baby in The Birth of Robin Hodd is still a surprise if you haven’t heard it before.

[The shanty crew were actually called Pressgang Mutiny.]

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Thursday]

Who was it who said that travel infantilises you? Like a toddler, you suddenly find that you have to specifically plan and take account of your bodily functions.

The same is true of festivals. 

That is obviously just a general comment. Definitely nothing awkward or embarrassing happened last night. 

Yesterday I had to play the fine old game of Festival Tetris. Studying the programme, there logically must be a way of fitting in all the things you want to do. [But everything turns out to be the wrong shape.]

Rowan Gatherer, the front man for the Goblin Band, was doing a solo set in the Kellaway Cellar, which was more or less obligatory [for me to attend]. He is great. It is hard to put your finger on what he does — he sings songs and lets them speak for themselves, but with a definite preference for the silly and absurd.  He sang The Muckspreader, the Mallard, I Am a Mortal Unhappy Old Chap and If I Were a Pretty Young Girl, which is practically a rugby song: "I would marry a milkman, and we’d milk each other all night long, I would marry a boxer and we’d beat each other all night long, etc etc". People who go to Bristol sessions are warned my repertoire may be expanding.

I have discovered that some older folkies don’t like the Goblins. Too silly and too shouty? I still think they are the best thing out there. 

"So, if I go straight to the Methodist hall, I can hear Jennifer Reid and Macdara Yeats doing their talk / performance on Dublin / Manchester street songs, finishing at 3.15 and still get to hear Daoiri Farrell doing Irish songs in the Ham at 15:30." Except…disaster….Daoiri on first at Ham, so his set nearly finished by the time I get there: oh woe! 90 minutes between now and ballad session unaccounted for!

I sensibly did a thing which needed to be done to my tent to ease Saturday’s departure. 

Best set of the day, and possibly of the festival, was Sam Carter’s tribute to Nic Jones. Sam is a fine performer, and while I do not play guitar, it seemed to me that he was accurately reflecting Nic’s playing style without (of course) attempting to be The Bootleg Nic. He did all the songs you would expect him to do: pot stoves and gold that he hasn’t found and lovers drowning and ruins on shores and people who are under the impression that Canada is a seaport town. Will Pound, (harmonica and squeeze box) and Jennifer Butterworth (banjo and vocals) opened for him. They can only be described as virtuosos, and were clearly having a great time. “I love music,” exclaimed Will after one exuberant tune.

[They were the people who would have come on after Daoiri Farrell, so everything fitted together quite well in the end.] 

And while it was perhaps not a complete surprise, NIC JONES HIMSELF WAS IN THE AUDIENCE. He cut short the multi-minute standing ovation with “play some more songs”. 

I HAVE SHAKEN HANDS WITH NIC JONES

[Background: Nic Jones was the pre-eminent trad folk singer of the 1970s, and Penguin Eggs is frequently voted the second best folk album of all time, after Liege and Lief. He suffered a catastrophic car crash in 1982 which ended his career, although he had a brief comeback in 2010.]

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Wednesday]

 I carelessly left my keyboard in the café. They kept it for me, of course, and the coffee-making lady said she had been asking if anyone knew the name of The Journalist so she could return it. 

“The Journalist”. 

I’d be happy with Blogger or Influencer or Local Character, but I’ll take The Journalist.

[I put a bluetooth keyboard in my Everything Bag, and typed directly into my phone: Apple Notes, since you ask. The proof reading feature is actually quite helpful. Clearly, if I am going to leave things in cafes, not taking the laptop or the tablet was the correct decision.]

I SANG "THE GORILLA" AT THE CAMPFIRE. Probably my smuttiest song. The Bristol Shanty crew have yet to be subjected to it. It is not at all about a horny gorilla who sodomises a judge. It is in fact a very subtle satire against capital punishment. 

I heard Joshua Arnold and Therine again, partly because I was interested and partly because they were opening for Seb Stone. (Seb Stone is a young man who sings folk songs and plays the bagpipes. He specialises in clever tongue-twisting songs, like the one about the philosophical argument in Ireland which ends in a fight, and the Kipling one about the gamekeeper and the river.) Arnold plays the hurdy-gurdy. His partner sings and plays what might be a shruti box. She wears a headpiece covering her face, with a kind of antler arrangement. Their songs are dark, not always lyrically audible, dominated by a single drumbeat, but consistently compelling. They incorporate charms and curses into the material, as well as Playford tunes. They reference Shirley Collins more than once and finish with I Love My Lord Jesus Above Everything. (And Oak and Ash and Thorn). A reimagining of the merry England of the folk revival, which was itself a reimagining, perhaps?

Joshua played his hurdy-gurdy in the campfire session. He thanked me afterwards for my “eccentric” songs. 

I should make a list of my reviews: "authentic",  "unusual",  "eccentric" ‘it’s great that you’re enjoying yourself."

["You sing with energy, enthusiasm and humour" "in your own inimitable way"]

Gigspanner is a kind of more serious Bellowhead, a supergroup consisting of Peter Knight, Nancy Kerr, John Spires, Phillip Henry, old Uncle Tom Cobley, and all. There is a lot of "arrangement": the Young Farmer Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn went on for several weeks. 

Forgive me, folk gods, for I hit the Wall. I am fairly certain that Honey and the Bear are excellent, and I am fairly certain that they sang Who Knows Where The Time Goes, and I am absolutely certain that I fell asleep in my seat.

A large amount of coffee was consumed in the interval, so I was able to give the Young Uns my full attention. David Eagle, I think, is much funnier when he is sparking against an audience and against the other band members, as today, than when he is doing pure stand-up. The gig was sponsored by the local Nissan dealerships, and he wouldn’t let it go: at one point he suggested they shift to opera and singer Nissan Donor. We had three songs from the Johnny Longstaff cycle, including the fine one about Cable Street, a medley of sea shanties, and a bunch of their contemporary stories, including the unbearable one about the gay Muslim who took his own life. 

No ballad session, but I went to the meeting/concert of the "traditional song society", which involved people singing ballads. Middle Bar seemed to tolerate my Little Boy Billee admirably. Wind dislodged some guy ropes, but the tent stood up very well.

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Tuesday]

 — Panel about Widicombe Fair. There are lots of versions.

— Anchor/Middle Bar Singaround. Lots of singing. 

— Concert: Joshua Arnold (strange), Sally in the Woods (Liverpudlian) 

— Ballad session: Lots of ladies buried in the churchyard. Lots of gentlemen buried in the choir. Many roses and briars ensue

— Concert: Goblin Band (sing what is now known officially as Widicombe Fair II) Winterborn (sing What Side Are You on and All You Fascists Bound to Lose in complicated harmony and American accents).

— Campfire Session: Man plays Hurdy Gurdy. No-one knows Tipperary. 

I can’t believe I have three more days of this / I can’t believe there are only three days left. 

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Monday]

No, I am sorry. A blossom is at best a potential cherry. An egg yolk is the possibility of a chicken. You might as well say that a book that hasn’t been published is already a book. Which I think some versions of the song do actually say. 

Yes, I did get to the ballad session, and I actually made a note of what was sung: as well as the riddle song we had Brown Adam, Long Lankin, something which might have been called the Widow Woman’s Daughter From Westmoreland, Jim Jones, Pretty Betsy the Milkmaid From Blackberry Ford, (which I made a note to try and learn), Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor (which doesn’t narrow it down), Bruton Town, and Dives and Lazarus. 

I irrevocably associate Dives and Lazarus with the Mary Wallopers version, but this had less swearing. (“Thou art none of mine brother Lazarus” as opposed to “I’m going to call the police-i-um”). Both versions arguably leave out the main point of the Bible story. 

I think the Ballad Session provides a necessary balance to the Big Stars on the main stages. 

It is very hot. I might even say too hot. I have a very sensible messenger bag with pockets that I call my Everything Bag, so in theory, I always have a programme, a comb, some tissues, and a kazoo with me. After four days, all the pockets are mixed up, and I can never find the one thing which is needful. Did I mention that it was very, very hot? 

There was a moment when Joshua Burnside came onto the stage where I randomly thought of the famous photo of John Lennon with the Quarrymen. It was probably the rolled-up shirt sleeves and the fact that I’d seen Bootleg John a few days ago. Why does no one warn you when this kind of thing is about to happen? He starts singing vernacular poetry to folkie tunes, and my brain suddenly switches from "hot" (did I mention that it was hot) to "fully engaged". Diving into my Everything Bag for my notebook to jot down lyrics: 

“The last armchair you ever sat in before your overdose / Is the one I sit in every day to eat my egg on toast” 

“I can’t imagine why anyone would do that / tell me brother why did you do that?” 

Really, it’s these moments I go to festivals for. 

Miranda Sykes and Jim Causley did their "songs we like that aren't necessarily folk-songs" set, which is lovely. The EFDSS “new comers” slot in the cellar included a very young and very charming group of young people called Woodkern, who I am 80 per cent sure I heard in another configuration at the Falmouth shanty festival and a young singer-songwriter called Ezmy Grace, who sang a self-written song about a supposed witch whose body was exhibited as an attraction for two centuries after her death. "Joan’s bones, no longer abused."

[Olly the Shanty Boy confirms that three of the people in Woodkern are also in Kessenyan.] 

Ended the day in Bulverton, the standing-up tent, where Steve Knightley did a full band gig. So that’s twice I’ve heard Cousin Jack! Phil came on to sing Crow on the Cradle, and played the fiddle interlude in Galway Farmer. Steve was slightly less demonstrative in that song than he sometimes is, and I thought all the better for it. 

I don’t know the reason behind the Show of Hands split, but it was clearly amicable. It has to be said that the big-band format with guests and cameos has given Steve’s act a huge shot in the musical arm. I sang a song about a farmer buying a male hen in the campfire tent, which doesn’t have any innuendo in it at all. I sang a sad song in the Middle Bar to prove that I can.

Sidmouth Festival Diary [Sunday]

Today I have been mostly listening to legends.

Lunchtime — Martin Simpson! Played his twiddly bluesy slide guitar and sang a song about a tree and a song about a Chilean singer who was killed by the junta. (“His hands were kind hands”: he sang it in tribute to Dick Gaughan.)

Early afternoon — Steve Knightley doing what Steve Knightley does best, which is basically stealing the show, if not the festival. This was Steve Knightley “and friends”, friends including the aforementioned Martin Simpson (accompanying him on a Dylan cover), traditional singer Paul Dowes, the guy with the Cajun from Track Dogs, and the young man who plays the new age kettle drums. This is probably not the technical term. The story is that Steve heard him busking in Sidmouth last year and more or less said ‘join the band’. 

Steve sang an obscure Martin Carthy number called His Name is Andrew, and everyone finished with the obligatory song about tin miners. 

Oh, and someone called Phil Beer joined him on the stage. Definitely not a Show of Hands reunion, though: they did the Blind Fiddler which is very much a Phil song. 

Am I the only one who thinks that one particular stanza of one of his newer songs is distinctly troubling? 

A traditional African band from Zimbabwe opened up for him. They were very good. They sang some catchy songs we didn’t know, danced a lot, and finished up with the possibly familiar Wim-a-Way. And encored with a kind of body percussion number, which originated with miners who weren’t allowed to chat and communicated by stomping their feet. 

Evening: Maddy Prior and Peter Knight!!! A late addition because the headliner was indisposed: they described it as a work in progress, which actually generated a real warmth and intimacy on the stage. Peter Knight is, of course, the fiddler all the other folk fiddlers want to be — his style is more classical than ‘diddly-dee’. Distinctly not a Steeleye Span tribute act. Maddy’s actually mad-sounding reading of Bedlam Boys was a tour de force, but the highlight was the incest-and-fratricide ballad The Sheath and the Knife.

Subjected Middle Bar to Pie in the Sky, it being Sunday. They shouted out That’s a Lie in the appropriate places. Tried the late night song session at the Bedford, which is very full and has excellent singing (the Goblin Band were sitting right in front of me) but struggles to compete with the rest of the pub and the tunes session in the other room. 

I played safe and sang It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, which went down about as well as you'd expect.

Sidmouth Festival Diary (Saturday)

First full day of festival….. 

Coffee and bacon roll in cafe. Bumped into my Recently Ennobled Folk Friend. (Lady in cafe greets him as ‘Sir’!)

I am not going to get into the infinite regress thing I used to do at Junior School Camp, of recording in my diary when I wrote my diary. 

Today is technically the first full day off the festival! So, of course, I have been a bit ‘full on’.

11.30 — Concert: Holly Clarke sings fairly traditional folk repertoire with quite bouncy modern arrangements. Ben Moss, who I have seen accompanying Grace Petrie, sings clever modern songs in a trad-adjacent style. E.G His song about urban foxes, in which King Renardine has been reduced to a beggar.

1pm — Second half of Middle Bar sing around. I sing The F-Word Song which goes down surprisingly well. Make a note of several shanties I ought to learn, including Yaa Yaa Skipper Jan Rebek.

3pm — Concert: Patakas are Joe and Will Sartin, which produces a certain amount of built-in goodwill. (They are now talking about their dad, and even joking about making the audience cry.) But they are clearly a tremendous trad duo in their own right, alternating tunes and traditional numbers. And an easy, laid-back, stage presence. 

The Copper Family could almost be said to have invented folk music: the current incarnation are the grandchildren of Bob Copper. I heard them once when they were trading as the Young Coppers, which I was alarmed to find was eighteen years ago. They are confident that their songs (including things like Spencer the Rover and Thousands or More) have been in their family for seven generations, on the grounds they have a written document written by Bob’s grandfather, which says “I learned these songs from my grandfather.” They are avowedly an amateur outfit, but still wonderful. I was going to say that their singing is “harmony style” or even “church style” but obviously the word is Copper Family Style. 

5pm — Across town to, er, the Conservative Club for the second half of a legendary ballad session. Only traditional ballads from memory are permitted…. Didn’t make notes of what was sung, although there was definitely a fine Alan Tyne of Harrow. 

7pm — I have nothing against  Lindisfarne, but have probably heard Fog on the Tyne as many times as I need to, so opted for the Traditional Night Out in the arts centre. A kind of rolling folk club in which an invited gaggle of singers and musicians do a couple of songs each. I concede that my concentration may have wandered a couple of times. In a way quite odd to hear Phil Ochs’ There But For Fortune in that context. 

11pm — Up hill for a campfire session. A group of Morris Dancers incorporate a slang term for the male organ into Sidney Carter’s fine song about the Peasants’ Revolt, so I retaliated with the Two Ronnies Morris song ("the bum, the bum, the bum, the bum")  which was declared “brilliant”. Later essayed Workers of the World Awaken. 

A man who can actually play and sing sang No Women No Cry.

I will not keep this up for seven days, though. 

Sidmouth Festival Diary (Friday)

Overheard outside Sidmouth YMCA: “Daddy, do you suppose they named it after the song?”

Quite a long way into conversation with a man in the café that sells enormous breakfasts before we realise that he thought my “Priddy Festival” T-shirt was a “Prodigy” festival T-shirt.

I didn’t think it quite polite to take a photograph, but the person playing the piano accordion in the trade stand that sells piano accordions was John Jones. As in “Turn out the lights” and “Here Comes the Flood" and "Jesus Walks In Idaho." .

Middle-Bar Singers are kind of a festival unto themselves. They have sessions every lunchtime and evening at a pub which is not called the Middle Bar. (It is the Anchor. The Anchor also has ceilidhs in the back courtyard, so the singing in the upper room is in conflict with the tunes in the car park. This weirdly adds to the fun.) Like all groups that have been running for a long time, it has a certain Masonic quality with traditions and jokes that the newcomer has to pick up. (Everyone stands up in certain choruses as if they were singing a hymn.) The longest-standing members, or possibly the committee, sit on a special bench and always start and finish the session. Otherwise, a physical stick is passed round [to indicate who's turn it is.] There is some serious singing (we had Rose of Allan Dale and Sea Cole today), but it skews to comical and music hall songs which obviously suits me.

This afternoon, a big guy with a hat and something which was not a Prodigy T-shirt sang Don’t Go In Them Lions Cage and the German Musicianer. No one actually threw anything at him, so I suppose that is a win….He already has a notebook full of songs he ought to learn.

Shower gel leaked over carefully chosen wet/dry bag and micro towel in my Everything Bag. 

Evening concert was the John Jones trio, which I liked very much. It felt like a scaled-down version of the Oysterband, because it was. Jones has the same stage presence in the cut-down format that he did when he was fronting a big band. [The same rather 1980s body language, as well.] 

After the concert, we went up the hill to the Bulverton —the loud dancing tent with the club vibe—to join the campfire session. The current weather situation meant that actual campfires are banned, of course. There was a man singing Streets of London, so I knew I was in the right place. I sang Passing Through, Little Boy Billy, and Casey Jones. 

At the rate of five a day, I will have sung through the Rilstone Songbook by the end of the week. 

A man in the bar said, “Aren’t you the fellow who sings Old Uncle Tom Cobley?”, which was nice because I am.

Tomorrow is the first full day of the festival!

Sidmouth Festival Diary (Thursday)

 It turns out that there is Another Shop, which sell Everything Except Tent Pegs.

I do, however, refuse to spend £10 on a water bottle, particularly considering what I propose to use it for.

Also need a Travel pillow. I yield to no one in my admiration of Ewan McColl, but last night my ruck sack was literally my pillow and in the morning I had a stiff neck.

Whoah! There is a Festival App. [You can filter "all concerts" or "all events featuring men named Martin" and click "favourite" by the ones you want to go to.] That makes much more sense than scribbling in the programme book and circling things and crossing things out. 

(“Oh you remember the good old days when we scribbled in the programme book")

Boo! Young’Uns and Granny’s Attic clash!

Sitting by the beach, counting humans and seagulls. The humans are winning. 

I know I am at a festival because people whose names I can’t remember have already started saying "hello Andrew". We haven’t reached the stage of people who I have never consciously met before saying "hello Andrew". 

Louise told me that there is an old proverb that goes “more people know Tomfool and Tomfool knows”

The first official gig is the Bootleg Beatles. This is a presumably so people can argue in the pub about what folk music is. 

If anyone says that they ain’t never heard no horse sing no song I shall be forced to call the folk police.

The Bootleg Beatles are, obviously, great fun: the sold out Ham Tent all singing along to She Loves You and Here Comes the Sun. Someone like Andrew Hickey can probably tell us how accurate their performance is, but to my Beatle -loving ear it was about as a close to the recording as you could get (which is to say, rather closer than an actual Beatles concert would have been ).

I first started listening to Dylan because he was friends with the Beatles and first started listen to Woody Guthrie because he was Dylan’s last idol and first started listening to Martin Carthy because darnn it there must be some English folk music as well, so definitely the Beatles are okay to start a folk festival with. 

I did find the act odd, though, The first half they are in high collar suits and mop top wigs, giving me the sense that I was watching someone cos-playing the Beatles cartoon. In the second half, George was in his denims and John was in his white suit and Jesus beard: but he was still making acerbic “rattle your jewellery” type gags. Obviously, none of the later material was ever played live in front of an audience. “This is one we once played on roof” explain "John".  "Paul" does his “just the boys …. Now just the girls” thing in Hey Jude. The singer [possibly Miles Frizzell] has McCartney's mannerisms and stage-presence down pat. I was particularly impressed at the way he channelled Younger Paul in the first half and Slightly Older Paul in the second. 

I suppose we were watching a recreation of a reunion that never happened. There is almost nothing better than the ‘aaahh….aaaahh….aaah” in Twist and Shout. 

Caught the end of the Middle Bar Singer having a sing-around at the Anchor. I sang a song about a dead horse. Several people sang silly songs I ought to learn for myself; particularly the one about the cucumber and the one about the ice cream van. 

Sidmouth Festival Diary (Wed)

I am in the Rincon cafe . 

The shop which sells absolutely everything, opposite, has closed. How will I pick up the things i din’t pack or don’t have the space for? 

I went for packing light this year Twelve tee shirts, four pairs of jeans, two turtle doves old uncle tom cobley and all. 

I am officially old so I came up on Wednesday rather than Thursday. Folk week really starts on Friday evening. 

By which I mean I am mostly retired so I don’t have to book days off two years in advance. I am not saying that the main reason I retired was that they wouldn’t have let me take the 2026 folk week off, but….

Putting up my tent was the usual Struggle. It still bends alarmingly in the wind, but it has never collapsed yet. I realise this is like saying that you found the thing you lost in the last place you looked. I assume one day it will explode and I will have to buy a temporary one from the Shop Which Sells Everything, which has, I have said, closed. 

I had somehow formed the impression that it was easier to go to Sidmouth on the Coach than on the Train, since the Coach goes to the Bus Station and the Bus to Sidmouth goes from the Coach Station. This year National Express seems. To be running Fewer Coaches. So I went to Exeter on the train, which is quicker. And there is Bus to the Bus station. So I went on a bus and a train and a bus and a bus and a bus. 

Nothing happened on Sidmouth on Wednesday night, so I had fish and chips and looked at the seagulls. 

I had an early night but the people in the next tent talked all night but i have earplugs. I have a whole quiver of earplugs in fact. I am not going to be like one o those people who quit smoking and goes on and on about it, but everyone should wear earplugs at concerts. 

I arrived in the coffee shop (there are lots of coffee shops) and the coffee shop lady said ‘Hello! Now folk week has really started!’ I am sure she says that to all the regulars, but it is still kind. They do bacon sandwiches and spicy buns. (Neither me or my spell check can spell "cinnamon") 

I will see if I can buy Everything in any other shop. 

If I can’t find any Unofficial Siniging I will go for a walk along the esplanade. 

Answers To Readers' Questions [5]

 Aristide Twain

One of many problems with the concept of a Doctor Who reboot is that it can't sustain. The temptation to have the New Doctor fall through a space-warp and meet an aging David Tennant in Dimension B is just too strong. Witness what happened to the Star Trek films! One of the post-Leekley, pre-McGann pitches for the 1990s reboot had already begun to plan a season finale where Sylvester McCoy would appear to explain how he had used the Key to Time to reboot the universe before the script for the pilot had even been greenlit. And all of this was before ‘No Way Home’ and the Spider-Verse films broke the bank. (I'm positively surprised that Mara Jade has yet to meet Rey and Poe.) I tell you, any attempt to simplify Dr Who's continuity by starting over would only complicate it further in the long run by simply leaving viewers with two connected timelines to keep track of. It's a foregone conclusion.

People tell new stories about old characters all the time. We all get that Ivanhoe, Robin of Sherwood, and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves are three different stories about the same character. 

I think that “reboot” usefully describes a meta-story: when there is an in-universe narrative reason that James Bond used to be gruff and Scottish and has suddenly become English and posh. 

(Old Doctor Who was curiously worried about providing in-universe explanations for trivial changes: Leela gets zapped in the eye by a laser when Louise Jameson wants to stop wearing contact lenses; the Doctor constructs K9 Mark 2 when the BBC wants a less unwieldy prop, and the robot gets laryngitis when John Leeson is unavailable to do the voice. You could say that the whole idea of regeneration is an in-universe explanation for changes to the production. There could have been a world where the seventeenth elderly, crotchety actor had been recast as the Doctor, and the twenty third actress had taken over the role of “Susan”.)

I think that there have been two fruitful uses of meta-narrative in other media. In both cases, the in-universe explanation was provided after the fact by writers who were not responsible for creating the revamped character. 

The first, obviously, was Flash of Two Worlds. The 1956 version of the Flash was simply a reimagining and updating of the 1940 version: but the 1961 comic established that there were two separate characters, living on, respectively, Earth One and Earth Two. I don’t think that many kids in the 1950s were lying awake at night thinking “But that means that those comics my Dad used to read weren’t really, really true.” But for the next couple of decades, writers had a lot of fun with the two universes: particularly as the existence of Earth Two gave them some leeway to age and kill-off major players without harming the central canon.

It was, however, incredibly confusing and off-putting for the casual reader. “The Huntress, she looks fun….Daughter of… I didn’t know that….WHAT YOU MEAN HE’S DEAD!!!!!”

The second one, equally obviously, was the hardly less convoluted history of Captain America. Stan Lee was under no obligation to say that the Cap of the 1960s was the same fella as the Cap of the 1940s: the natural thing would have been to just start again from scratch; but he chose to imagine the defunct character had been frozen in ice after the end of World War II. I don’t think anyone watching the Captain America: First Avenger movie would have been aware that this was originally a clever splicing of two different characters together: “a World War II hero out of his time” is a very interesting and valid premise. Stan Lee’s revamp failed to take into account, of wilfully ignore, a dozen appearances of Captain America Commie Smasher published between 1946 and 1950; and we could have carried on ignoring them, but in 1972, Steve Englehart established that the 50s character was a: an imposter b: mad and c: still alive. This was clever, because it allowed the different comics to be treated as “true”; but narratively fruitful because it allowed the liberal America of the 1970s to allegorically confront the conservative 1950s America. And because the imposter, William Burnside, grew in the ensuing decades into a sympathetic, tragic villain. 

But as you know, I groaned slightly when someone decided it would be a Good Thing if it turned out that Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were not different actors playing different directors' different fictional takes on the same fictional character, but literally existing Spiders-Man from different timelines. It wasn’t interesting. Nothing followed from it: it was simply an opportunity to say “gee, the different versions of the character are different in some ways and not so different in others.” 

I felt the same way about the decision to say that the Ultimate Comics were part of an in-universe parallel world, as opposed to a creative take on what the classic Marvel Universe might have looked like if it had been created in the 2000s rather than the 1960s. Yes, Alan Moore very wittily said “this-is-an-imaginary-story-aren’t-they-all”, but my brain goes more easily to  “an alternate world where Uncle Ben survived but Aunt May died” or even “an alternate world where Captain Kirk is a fascist and everyone wears eyepatches” that it does to “a parallel world where everyone is much more realistically drawn.” 

Some people are just really uncomfortable with the idea of “fiction”. We understand that someone is making up the stories but we are not prepared to treat the stories as something which someone has made up. I can kind of see why: once you permit yourself to say “Let’s play a fun game in which we pretend that the Christmas presents are left by an old man in a red suit — you pretend to write to him and I’ll pretend to reply” then you are too old to hang up your stocking. 

How does this relate to the toxicity we have had to deal with recently? If it is an object of faith that fictional works really happened or must be treated as if they really happened then it is very hard to accept a new fictional work based on an existing one. “But Helen of Troy didn’t speak English with a US accent — she just didn’t — and if you think she did you have no right to called you film the Orestia."

I wonder if this relates to an underlying Christian fundamentalism in the culture: a sense that if Moses, as a matter of historical fact, didn't lead two million people though the Red Sea, then the story is entirely worthless. 

And shall I tell you what is really weird? Stan Lee had already introduced a metafictional element into his Marvel Universe: but that meta-fiction involved the Marvel Bullpen, the writers and artists who created the stories. His comics were presented, not as quasi-historical events, but as things that someone had made.

Doctor Who never did that: although it might be argued that when you saw monsters made of bubble wrap and neutron bombs counting down with flap-down digital clocks you couldn't avoid thinking “this is a story being acted out with improvise plots”. But it is very true that almost as soon as Doctor Who became popular, fans wanted to see the man behind the curtain. There were features on Blue Peter and the Radio Times about “how the special effects were done” and, boringly “amusing incidents on the set”. 

And yet: canon. 

It seems to me that if you were re-starting Doctor Who, you would begin with a mysterious figure trekking through space and time, who has always been trekking through space and time, and who has been everywhere once and lots of places twice. And since he is bound to talk about his previous adventures, there is no reason not to say that the previous two TV series’ represent the characters “past”. (If he says “I once met the devil” your would expect some viewers to say “ooo ooo he means the one with the ood / no no he means the one in the village with the white witch”.) It would be a bad move to make that a very important part of the new programme. Doubtless, at some point, he’ll say “Aha, my old foe, the Master, he travels in time and space but unlike me his does harm rather than good.” You would not necessarily say “Aha, the Master, he used to have a female identity called Missy and then revealed that I was the Timeless Child.” 

But I just. Don’t. See. Why any of this needs to be a Plot Point. Someone on the internet proposed that the new Doctor should have amnesia — that he should only find out about previous adventures from, say, a TARDIS diary. I am not saying that an amnesiac Doctor couldn’t be the basis for some good stories. Anything could be the basis for some good stories. But I don’t get why there needs to be an in-universe explanation about why the backstory is on the backburner.

When Doctor Who was a going concern, your Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks were against multi-Doctor stores, because there was no good way of writing a script with four or five egos all competing for attention. As long as the revival actors are still alive, I suppose there is no way we can avoid a Christopher Eccleston / David Tennant / Whoever The New Person Is crossover. And if you do it, you should do it, with the egos clashing as loudly as you can. 

It is interesting that Star Wars was happy to do one of the most thorough-going reboots without providing the merest whisper of an in-universe explanation: dumping something like three hundred novels and a fairly well developed time line. And I am deeply grateful that there has never been the slightest temptation to say that there are two galaxies both equally long ago and far away; and in one Luke married a lady called Mara and had a son, and in one he stayed celibate and went to live in a monastery. When Dave Filoni wanted to incorporate Admiral Thrawn, the bad guy from the decanonized novels, into Star Wars: Rebels, he didn't make someone run at the speed of light to open a gateway between the universes: he just introduced him as a character. I like that approach. Some would say that Filoni was offering fan service to the kinds of people who felt that their life was ruined when the Expanded Universe was de-canonised. My impressions is that he wanted a big villain and though he would borrow one who already existed.

Dear Person I overheard in Forbidden Planet just after Force Awakens came out:

You said that the reboot means that all the time you spent reading the Expanded Universe was wasted: but if someone said “Hubble bubble hocus pocus make the Expanded Universe take place on an Alternate Time Line” would you get your time back?

Love ARR

But but but: suppose it turned out that New New Who was taking part in a parallel universe, and it turned out that the Very Big and Very Bad villain was actually the Doctor from a different universe, one in which the Doctor had finally, as has so often been predicted, gone bad; wouldn’t the moment where we tear Zagreus' mask off and reveal Ncuti Gatwa underneath be worth the complexity?

It might be. Anything might. Several different fans have at several times proposed a story where Moriarty rather than Holmes survived Reichenbach.

But it would, in a way, be an unearned twist: a twist that was interesting only at a meta-level. If you can make up a story without cannibalising history, maybe you should