GIVE THEM MOON AND CLOUDLESS SKIES [479]

from "The Simpsons" episode "Barthood", a parody of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"

It isn’t unusual to want Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson to grow up OK when you have been watching them on television for most of your own life. You hope that our real world, both reflected and created by the show, will ultimately be as kind to them as you want it to be for ourselves.

With “The Simpsons” having now run for an astonishing thirty-five years, three years away from eclipsing “Last of the Summer Wine” to become the world’s longest-running sitcom, its status quo means that, while I was younger than Lisa when I first saw the show, I am now older than both her parents. We have grown up with these characters, but they can only grow through lessons learned, fleshing out their backstory.

I fell out of watching “The Simpsons” for some time, returning upon subscribing to Disney+ to find a show that, while not having folded over itself by pandering to its audience’s nostalgia, has become playful with its own history: it began its thirty-sixth season with a “series finale” that stopped questions on how the show would eventually end, having previously broadcast a fake clip show of leaked episodes purportedly too outlandish even for later-period “The Simpsons”, and a “Treehouse of Horror” story created a “Westworld”-like theme park of the moments adopted as internet memes.

The 2022 episode “When Nelson Met Lisa” was when I realised that my favourite episodes of “The Simpsons” depict an imagined future for its characters, seeing what their experiences have made them, regardless of it being a parody of “When Harry Met Sally”. Lisa has been shown to have a crush on Nelson Muntz before, but a series of scenes across the years builds this into a mature, happy and hopeful ending, one you hope will be canonised.

By necessity, the future depicted in “The Simpsons” can’t be set in stone, because that could get in the way of a good story, but there have been elements built up on each other, then knocked down and rebuilt: Bart could become a deadbeat divorced dad, living in a Springfield Elementary converted to makeshift apartments; Lisa is successful, but marries Milhouse; and Maggie, the eternal silent wildcard, becomes the biggest noise in pop music, and the most constant depiction of her future. Thankfully, Bart and Lisa’s future has been depicted more hopefully, with Bart becoming a BMX stunt champion, artist and a repair shop owner, while Lisa will attend Harvard and have the world as her oyster. 

Then again, Bart could also become a Supreme Court judge after missing “The Itchy & Scratchy Movie”, and Lisa could become President of the United States, having inherited “quite a budget crunch from President Trump”, although the episode “Bart to the Future”, broadcast in 2000, would not have known which Trump presidency it would be. 

Predicting the future can be futile, despite the number of times situations and jokes in “The Simpsons” replayed themselves in real life, from predicting the discovery of the Higgs boson to Disney buying 20^thCentury Fox, but imagining the future should be encouraged, except for preparing for when “The Simpsons” eventually ends – I don’t think anyone is truly prepared for that. Perhaps it could then be rebooted with an older Bart, Lisa and Maggie – it happened with "The Flintstones" and “The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show”.

WE’RE ANXIOUS TO TRY IT [478]

My screenshot is in focus, but the picture is not.

After all the anticipation, the Blu-ray has finally arrived...

Drumming, tribal or jazzy in rhythm, begins as “Vincent Price Presents” appears in a red Futura Display font on a black screen. Cut to a steaming pot on a stove, the word “Cooking” appearing over it in the same font and colour. Expectations already countered, “Price-Wise” appears in fanciful hand-cut lettering, still red, in a yellow burst on a blue background. With expectations placed on his name having been broken, and after today’s potato-based menu is shown, the man himself appears on screen, wearing an apron over his own clothes: “Hello, I’m Vincent Price. in this series of programmes, I hope to take you around the world using your cooker instead of a jet plane.”

 

So begins the first episode of the six-part “Cooking Price-Wise” series, the same opening recreated each time with variations in pot use and font size. Each of the six episodes is delineated by both the main ingredient and where the recipes come from, the UK lining up with bacon. 

 

Everything feels slightly wobbly, and slightly giddy: Price is perfectly in command of his subject and each episode’s running order, the recipes having been gathered personally during his travels, his enthusiasm and curiosity fully on display, with a “hmm?” capping sentences after making certain points. 

 

Everything may be in place to ensure that pre-prepared food is ready at the right point to continue the demonstration – Price refers to “the marvels of modern television” several times – but I don’t feel a final script was used, or indeed needed, for example when an Ayrshire roll was instructed as being cooked “at 370 degrees, or mark 4 in gas”.

 

The show itself feels it was recorded in a hurry, and in one continuous take: a zooming in on Price as he introduces one episode’s main ingredient leads to the shot going out of focus, and the shadows of people behind the camera are occasionally seen. These flaws were either not important – having been broadcast in April 1971, many might still be watching in black and white, on older 405-line sets, making them less visible – or that time was constantly against the production, the entire series having been recorded over the course of a week in July 1970, with two episodes completed on the Friday.

 

It turns out the pastry dish I couldn’t remember from last time was “Fish Fillets Nord Zee”, which instead uses mashed potato and a cake icing bag to create a border and compartments on a dish, to tell the story of Dutch history through its dykes and sea walls, with the fish and vegetables representing the sea and land. I still won’t be trying it, but I enjoyed hearing Price talking about it. At the time, chefs were more willing to give up the recipes and secrets featured in this series, something that would be more closely guarded as “intellectual property” today. There was a garlic salad that sounded rather interesting...

 

Some curious decisions are made in the presentation: an episode centred around bacon refers to a cross-section model of a pig balanced on a kitchen cabinet above Price’s head, and the history of potatoes are illustrated with cartoons by an uncredited artist. The most bizarre moment of all was the creation of a fruit cocktail crocodile, using a cucumber as a starting point  - the lights dim to make the “monster”, and the close-up of the face was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.

 

The kitchen is incredibly 1970s in look, with patterned cookware, woodgrain cabinets and red kitchen tops. At the same time, it is a modern kitchen: among the uses of a blender, garlic press and the fridge as cooking gadgets, a dishwasher resides in the back of the shot, never mentioned. A ledge in front of the kitchen tops is reserved for the end of each episode for Price to point out, with a wooden spoon, the ingredients used in each episode, in case you were too slow writing them down - later in the 1970s and into the 80s, teletext and home video made taking notes far easier, let alone the tie-in book. 

 

The series is intimate, with no audience, Price talking directly to the viewer, both he and the kitchen backed into a corner by the cameras. It is almost a YouTube video circa 1970: it is made by an independent production company, I.D. TV, and the show is copyright of the Vincent Price estate. It was filmed using Thames Television facilities, but was at its mercy as to when it would be broadcast, just as anyone uploading a video online is subject to the rules and regulations of the host site. Even YouTubers now have more capable and portable cameras, with image stabilisation, and perhaps even the luxury of reshoots, but the same time, a YouTube video would more likely cut out any hesitation, and break each episode into one video per recipe.

 

Shot today, “Cooking Price-Wise” would undoubtedly have a much larger budget, while also sending Vincent Price back to the places from where he found those recipes, making it as much a travelogue as an instructional cooking show – think Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. However, that would sacrifice the intimacy of one person enthusiastically sharing the knowledge they have gathered, which was my main takeaway from a TV show I have waited years to see.

THE MIDNIGHT HOUR IS CLOSE AT HAND [477]

I have anticipated this for a while, but I will need to continue anticipating for a few more days.

I was intending to discuss Vincent Price’s “Cooking Price-Wise”, a series made for Thames Television, and released on Blu-ray by the British Film Institute for its first public view since its original broadcast in 1971. I have only seen a few seconds of this show, played in another TV show from over twenty years ago, but I have been given a copy of the tie-in book, expanded and reissued by the Price family in 2017, subtitled “A Culinary Legacy”. I was looking forward to discovering what kind of experience is created when watching a cooking show hosted by an icon of horror cinema.

However, I ordered the disc via Amazon.co.uk, where messages of the package being out for delivery were replaced by an apology for its having been sent to Leeds, two hundred miles away from me. Therefore, I am taking the opportunity, created by misplaced logistics, to explore why I anticipate watching Vincent Price cook a turkey.

I don’t know if Vincent Price was typecast by his appearance in horror films, in both the United States and the UK, or by how effective his voice was in a horror context. To be absolutely honest, he was also so much of an Anglophile that I didn’t realise he was American, proving my apparent inability to place his accent – in an appearance on Thames’ “Today” discussion show in 1972, Price tells Eamonn Andrews that he is a great fan of British food, like steak and kidney pie, and beans on toast, “because I don’t have to eat it all the time!”

But Price had almost a parallel career as a gourmet cook, releasing three books of recipes in the 1960s with his then-wife Mary Grant Price. Like The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith’s mother inventing correction fluid, Price’s grandfather, Dr Vincent Clarence Price, invented baking powder – the expanded “Cooking Price-Wise” featured a few pages from this Vincent Price’s own cookbook, reminding you to “Use Dr Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder” at the top of each page. In the same interview with Andrews, Price said the aim of his series the previous year was “to tell the British housewife that there are very common things, like potatoes, that can be done superbly, and with just as little effort as they put into it ordinarily”.

In 1971, cooking shows were more on the fringes of TV schedules than is expected today – no landmark series with Delia Smith, no combined travelogues with Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. Confined to a kitchen set, the likes of Fanny Cradock will present instructional series that will be found on weekend mornings, alongside similar programmes on woodwork or learning a language, or just as TV channels reopened in the late afternoon, or before they closed down for the night. Cradock did have primetime series as early as 1968, but on the more deliberately specialist BBC Two – repeats on BBC One were again at the fringes of its schedule. “Cooking Price-Wise”, despite its presenter and its aim, was therefore relegated to about 11.15pm or 11.30pm on a Tuesday on Thames for six weeks in April and May 1971, again before closedown – I could not find any evidence that the rest of the ITV network ever showed it outside of the Greater London and Home Counties area.

I have never cooked a recipe from “Cooking Price-Wise”, but then I own a copy of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook”, and I have never wanted to cook anything from that either. Perhaps it was that one clip of the TV show I have seen, which was of Price filling several pastry pockets with olives and other ingredients – I have been unable to find the clip since seeing it, or the TV show that included it. 

Time might be the problem, as British tastes have developed in the decades since the show was made – olive oil doesn’t have to be bought in a chemist anymore, and wine and hummus are actually consumed here now. What doesn’t help is the pictures provided of some recipes, practically screaming that they were from another time, when things were done differently – it may be that hearing and seeing someone explain them to you will make them more palatable. I will have to try one of them now – my copy of the book keeps opening at the minestrone for some reason, but Sardinian Gnocchi may be worth a go.

I hope watching “Cooking Price-Wise” will be as rewarding as I have built it up to be, when my copy of it arrives.

I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD [476]

Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising. Far be it from me to defend the decisions of a multi-national car manufacturer, but belittling creativity is something I will not have.

On Tuesday 19^th November, Jaguar Cars unveiled a thirty-second advertisement featuring a group of colourfully-dressed individuals arrive on an equally colourful, but rocky landscape. They look around, then look at you. One paints lines with a paintbrush, and another brandishes a sledgehammer. Two-word slogans fill the screen: “create exuberant”, “live livid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and, most importantly, “copy nothing”.

With no cars featured, this was instead a statement of intent by Jaguar ahead of the announcement of a new electric-only car range on Monday 2nd December. Regardlessly, it was met with knee-jerk derision by commentators and social media accounts, using the ad as a vehicle for their existing prejudices by accusing Jaguar of junking their heritage to embrace diversity and “wokeness”, as if they were trying to make more of a point beyond the slogans in the ad, rendering anything not presented straightforwardly as being suspect. 

This invective felt like the inverse of the jokes I made in an article I wrote back in 2017, about the then-new Range Rover Velar helping people to identify and come out as Range Rover drivers: “I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover. The more we know, the more the world can be a better place - so long as we don’t cut each other up.”

I was also unimpressed with the derision of Jaguar’s new image as having appeared from nowhere, as if years of preparation hadn’t been made in formulating Jaguar’s new approach – they are moving upmarket from making “executive” cars that competed with BMW and Audi, becoming a high-end brand alongside the likes of Bentley and Porsche – along with stopping production lines to retool their factories for the new range of cars, also the culmination of years of development.

Predictably, the aesthetic of the ad prompted people to ask if Jaguar had started making clothes, as if licensing deals between car and clothing manufacturers had ever existed, and others that included a direct competitor to Jaguar, Tesla’s Elon Musk, said “Don’t you sell cars?”, a reference to none being shown in the ad, to which Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover said, “Yes. We’d love to show you”.

I had thought that people would have looked at the ad more closely, or looked more than once – it was only thirty seconds long. In two scenes, areas are painted over or illuminated with lines, a reference to the “strikethrough” imagery that forms both the new use of the Jaguar “prowler” logo – the main Jaguar logo is now just a sans-serif wordmark – and a design motif that will feature on the new range.

Despite the startling difference with Jaguar’s former establishment image – the Jaguar JX6 saloon was the British Prime Ministerial state car from 1979 to 2019, when Boris Johnson replaced it with a Range Rover – the ad was hardly the blindside to convention it has been made out to be. Those that remember a startling series of UK ads from 1995 that said only beautiful people drink Martini, depicting someone getting plastic surgery to comply,  will be aware of the disruptive tactics used by advertising agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), including the extraordinary Tango soft drink ads of the 1990s, and the launch of First Direct Bank in 1988 that “hijacked” ITV and Channel 4 simultaneously with a broadcast purportedly from the future. Jaguar needed people to start talking about Jaguar again before they could start talking about their cars, and couldn’t have achieved that aim more perfectly.

The slogan “copy nothing” comes from Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who once said that “a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing”. He had a point. Walking down one street in my home town, not necessarily the most affluent but just above average, there were three Jaguars from the current model range, all of which have been withdrawn this year: an XE saloon, an XF saloon, and an F-Type coupé. Only the Jaguar badge and grille distinguished them outwardly from the other cars in the street, all of which have the same raked, aerodynamic lines and pull-out door handles. Even worse, I passed an X-Type estate car, made during the period of Jaguar’s ownership by Ford, and based on the mass-market Ford Mondeo – you get the feeling the car should not have been allowed to happen.

When the notorious car conglomerate British Leyland was formed in 1968, merging the firm that owned Jaguar with the parent company of Rover, both names were used on cars that drove heads of state, not “executives”. This was rationalised to make Rover the more “affordable” brand, and perhaps the cars Jaguar had wound up making could, if it still existed, have been branded as Rovers – Jaguar’s current parent company, Jaguar Land Rover, have owned the Rover brand since 2008, but have seen no reason to use it so far.

Speaking of Land Rover, and any comparisons of the Jaguar ad to a clothes or perfume manufacturer are also a little ironic when you consider how the Range Rover, which has turned over time from a utility vehicle to a luxury SUV, once named its must luxurious trim level “Vogue”, after the magazine. This shift, alongside the shift in car buyers’ tastes towards sports utility vehicles, has directly benefitted Range Rover, perhaps at the expense of Jaguar, whose own SUVs were built on the same platforms as the Range Rover Evoque and Velar. In the current car climate, Range Rover effectively ate Jaguar’s lunch, hence the need to reposition themselves.

The new Jaguar cars – an XJ6-like saloon, a grand tourer coupé, and a further SUV – will reportedly start from £100,000, which is the same as a large Range Rover, but a bit more than a Porsche. I don’t know why they didn’t just go with “POA” – “price on application” – because if you have to ask how much a luxury item costs, you can’t afford it anyway. That is the realm where Jaguar is destined or, for those that admire creativity without being able to drive, where it remains.

GONE FISHIN’ [475]

Only occasionally will I have something to eat from McDonald’s, but when I do, and if it has passed 11am, I will have a Filet-O-Fish. Once I realised that choice was “Proustian”, I had to think about it a bit more.

The Filet-O-Fish has been my choice since childhood, and I can taste why: it is milder overall than a hamburger or cheeseburger, with a steamed bun over a toasted one, tartare sauce instead of the more mixed assault of mustard, ketchup and gherkin, breaded pollock over seasoned beef, and a slice of processed cheese – the original American version only uses half a slice.  I continue to make sure that some of the sauce falls out, creating a dip for the fries.

I also remember the Filet-O-Fish’s previous blue polystyrene container, served in bags crossed with lines of “M”s, more than any toy the meal came with, and trying to poke your fingers through it as much as you tried to flatten the flimsy foil (unused) ashtrays that used to be on every table, which usually had the moulded seats bolted onto the table leg that took root in the red tiled floor, surrounded by cream walls, doctor’s office pictures, spider plants and Muzak...

This is the term “Proustian” at work, derived from the dunking of a Madeline cake in tea conjuring the memory of the story that makes Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (or “Remembrance of Things Past”). Everything I have described does not exist anymore, but they are of such a specific time – the late 1980s into the early 1990s – that it cannot be separated from what triggers those memories.

Tastes necessarily do change. McDonald’s can no longer realistically be allowed to appeal to children, their having ended the ball pits and birthday parties. I sensed something was up when the dominant colour of their restaurants changed from red to green, resembling a coffee shop more than a classic McDonald’s, just as other coffee shop chains joined the High Street like Starbucks and Costa. At the very least, the UK avoided the replacement of the Filet-O-Fish in the US by the Fish Filet Deluxe in 1996, with a larger patty and the addition of lettuce, before petitions brought the original back within a year, retaining the larger fish patty.

I am also now too aware that the Filet-O-Fish is the “healthier” option only in comparison to their other burgers, McDonald’s making clear it uses fish from sustainable sources, and that a medium portion of fries has more calories in it than the sandwich itself (337 versus 315, according to mcdonalds.co.uk)... but you still need at least a small portion of fries for the tartare sauce... 

If nostalgia is going to be triggered by food, make sure that nostalgia comes from a place that means you can only eat it occasionally.

TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK [474]

I had only one reason to think that Donald Trump could be re-elected President of the United States, and that was the event of his attempted assassination in Pennsylvania in July 2024, when the imagery of someone getting back up, punching the air as they were led away, eclipsed everything he had said or done, or could say and do. We live in the age of the moving image.

I have no intention of writing about Donald Trump again after this article, because I have done it more than enough times for one lifetime. I could find myself writing about the consequences of his actions, because you don’t have to be in the United States to have it act upon you in some way. Trump will do what he does, like he did last time, we will all resist again, like we did last time, and when he leaves office, because he cannot run for President again – and realistically will be too old to run for a third time, even if he somehow changed the rules – the next President will overwrite his proclamations with new ones, just like last time.

Meanwhile, most Americans that did vote for Trump may consider that choice to be as transactional as any other interaction he has made, because they cannot have voted based on character to have re-elected as known a quantity as him. Fears over the future of classical liberalism and democracy will fade, because people can still think, choose and act for themselves, regardless of what the rules are – how else does Trump think he can behave as he does? The search for a Democratic answer to this victory will be found, but by a younger generation of people.

It has already been noticed that sales of dystopian fiction, like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, have surged in the days following the election. However, I had already thought about the fictional megacorporations that would have benefitted from a Trump presidency, like Wayland Utani (“Alien”), the Tyrell Corporation (“Blade Runner”) and Omni Consumer Products (“Robocop”). Elon Musk, having slotted himself into a prospective governmental position has also, through his use and misuse of his own social media platform, also fulfils the role previously filled by newspaper press barons like Rupert Murdoch and William Randolph Hearst. 

What am I going to do? I will leave below what I have already said before, leave it at that, and be thankful that the only reason the United Kingdom is on its sixth Prime Minister in a decade is because, when they are no good, either as a political leader or as a person, they are either voted out, or kicked out.

This could apply in so many cases, but in the next four years or less, read thoroughly, have a sense of history, and don’t repeat your mistakes.

Back when Trump was first elected in 2016, I said that “the weight of [the Presidential] office demands respect. However, the holder of that office cannot afford to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when Trump has never appeared to need it before.” (“Who Says a Miss Was Made to Kiss?”, 21/11/2016)

In 2018, I mistakenly consoled myself knowing that 2025 could have been the latest possible year Trump could remain President: “What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached.” (“You’ll Never Live It Down Unless You Whip It”, 28/05/2018)

When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, I said that scrutiny of Trump will continue to intensify: “Trusting only his decisions, there is no history to learn, no precedent to observe, no dignity worth honouring... Perhaps your experience of life is tainted when the only people that come close to you will eventually sell you out for profit, but when you define your life by the deals you make, you can’t reasonably expect fealty from anyone.” (“Spank The Pank Who Try To Drive You Nuts”, 08/11/2020)

Finally, after the 2021 attack on the Capitol building, I thought I never had to consider Trump again: “Donald Trump became the de facto 'Gatekeepers' bogeyman: a man whose choppy utterances and half-formed, half-stolen slogans enraptured millions, and radicalised thousands more. Words were often beyond him, left to those in his administration to make sound reasonable, but the longer the noise, the threats against the media, and the pronouncements on Twitter went on, the more it became the stifling daily rhythm to everyday life... He really was the worst of us.” (“All About the Love Again”, 24/01/2021)

BUT STILL THEY COME! [473]

Browsing blu-rays in HMV’s flagship store in London’s Oxford Street, I found myself unable to concentrate on what special edition re-release I wanted this time around, leaving half an hour later empty-handed and with a headache. 

While inside, the store’s speakers were playing an intense section of the immensely popular 1978 prog rock album “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds”, from the emergence of the spidery Martian creatures and their heat rays, with driving bass lines and Phil Lynott’s vocoded call of “Ulla!”, through Justin Hayward’s rendition of the love song “Forever Autumn”, the album’s sole cover, mixed seamlessly into the story, to the sinking of the iron-clad warship HMS Thunder Child by the Martians. 

I presume the 95-minute album was played in full, but it was heavy going for a Saturday afternoon in a busy store. However, I made sure to listen to it in full, something I had never done before, despite my family always owning at least two copies of it, my parents seeing a live performance of it, and even my travelling to Woking, where the story is set, to see Michael Condron’s Martian Tripod sculpture, identifying it more with the album cover than the description in H.G. Wells’ original novel. My family has always had at least two copies of the original double vinyl release, with gatefold sleeve and booklet of art by John Pasche to accompany the music - it is pretty much my introduction to what an “album” is.

The opening track, “The Eve of The War”, and “Forever Autumn” were released as singles, and a “Highlights from...” album cuts the length in half, but listening to Jeff Wayne’s development of leitmotifs is something I should have done earlier, distilling the essence of Walls’s story into an immersive experience, guided by Richard Burton’s narration as “The Journalist” (recorded in California before he began shooting the film “Exorcist II: The Heretic”).

Progressive rock is named through its aspiration to art through more elaborate composition and arrangement of music and lyrics, taking in other genres. I initially thought that, in this case, Rick Wakeman had walked so that Jeff Wayne could run, through Wakeman’s albums like “The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table” in 1975, and the previous year’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, a forty-minute orchestral adaptation narrated by David Hemmings. However, Wayne had already composed the score for a West End musical adaptation of “A Tale of Two Cities” before entering commercial song and ad jingle writing.

Now I have listened to it, something that made me screw up my face was the track “Brave New World”, where David Essex, as the Artilleryman, proposes that humanity can live underground, under the noses of the Martians: “We'll send scouting parties to collect books and stuff, and men like you'll teach the kids not poems and rubbish – science, so we can get everything working.” Fortunately, us art-lovers have Burton’s narration of the Artilleryman unveiling his tunnel, “scarcely ten yards long, that had taken him a week to dig. I could have dug that much in a day, and I suddenly had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers...” How fortunate for humanity that the Martians caught a cold.

Writing this has led me to discover that “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of Spartacus” exists, an album released in 1992 that stars Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, seemingly eclipsed by the enduring success of Wayne’s previous work. I may have to listen to it too.