I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME [129]

“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an opinion in my view.”

“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an opinion in my view.”

“If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an opinion in my view.”

This sentence has rattled through my head for the last week, because I have never heard anyone say something like this before. I also cannot think of a situation where you could get away with saying something like it. How do you respond to it? Am I allowed?

When writing about why I don’t like chat shows [link], I came across an interview gave to the “Mail on Sunday” newspaper in 2016 [link], just as a book on his encounters with Muhammad Ali was published. Even if I wouldn’t have made a point of tuning in to “Parkinson” in the 1970s, if I had been around then, I probably would have if Ali, or Billy Connolly, or Peter Sellers, or Kenneth Williams was a guest – some people are worth hearing, even if they are mainly there to promote something.

Although the article was to promote the Ali book, the headlines came from when Parkinson was asked if there were any moments in his career that he regretted. Saying he has been accused of being old-fashioned, Parkinson used the example of the 1975 interview he had with Helen Mirren, who was introduced on the show was the “sex queen” of the Royal Shakespeare Company and, after a theatre critic was quoted as saying Mirren was good at “sluttish eroticism,” Parkinson asked if Mirren thought her “equipment” got in her way of performing as an actress. After clarifying he was referring to her figure, Mirren replied, “Serious actresses can't have big bosoms, is that what you mean?”

The interview can easily be found online, and while it has since been decried as sexist since, it was perfectly fine for broadcast in 1975 – “it was OK at the time” is a phrase often heard in cases like this, usually because it may not be these days. In the “Mail on Sunday” interview, Parkinson said he may have overreacted, but he was reacting to the provocative figure Mirren presented. When asked if they had made up since, Parkinson said, “I don't want to. Nor does she. I don't regard what happened there as being anything other than good television. There is no need to apologise, not at all. She didn't want to do an interview and after about ten minutes I didn't want to interview her. There's no problem, it's not World War III for God's sake.”

For her part, Dame Helen Mirren, later quoted in an article for “The Telegraph” website [link], said, “That’s the first talk show I’d ever done. I was terrified. I watched it and I actually thought, bloody hell! ... I did really well. I was so young and inexperienced. And he was such a f------ sexist old fart. He was. He denies it to this day that it was sexist, but of course he was.”

This leads me to where I became unstuck. In his interview, Parkinson is reported reacting to the notion of his interview with Mirren being a defining moment of the “sexist” Seventies: You have to judge it by what happened in that time. If you didn't live in that time, you're not allowed an opinion in my view [my underline].... I’ve not done anything that I'm ashamed of. I can see everything in the context of the time I did it. I can think, 'Ooh, I wouldn't do that now.' But that doesn't mean to say I was wrong at the time.”

The interviewer, challenging that one sentence, writes, “if one of his guests had said that, he would have challenged them strongly,” but I wished it was challenged in this interview, although we do get the odd quote later, “Am I a sexist? No, I'm Yorkshire. I don't know what the answer is or what a sexist means, basically. I've been married for 57 years so something must be going right. I wouldn't say I'm a sexist at all.”

To be honest, I just needed to write about that one sentence, “If you didn’t live in that time, you’re not allowed an opinion in my view,” but I also needed to present the context in which that was uttered. I will go with Dame Helen’s reaction to the interview, because she definitely was there at the time, but to say you are not allowed to have an opinion on something is a red flag that needs as much oxygen as possible – if I said that to anyone, I would be demolished in response. Perhaps it is easier, for Sir Michael Parkinson, not to use his chat shows as primary sources.

I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT [128]

Last week, the “Radio Times” published an article by former TV talk show host Sir Michael Parkinson, calling for UK television to have a US-style chat show for five nights a week. According to him, the only time it was tried was when Channel 5 launched with “The Jack Docherty Show” in 1997. However, research digs up Channel 4’s “V Graham Norton” (2002-03), Norton having first presented a chat show by standing in for Docherty; BBC Three’s “Johnny Vaughan Tonight” (2003), and most recently ITV’s “The Nightly Show” (2017), before you count shows from Paul O’Grady, Alan Titchmarsh and Richard & Judy during daytime hours. Parkinson then suggested Piers Morgan as host, someone who already had his own chat show, on CNN, which was cancelled in 2014 following declining ratings.

Television isn’t exactly bereft of different ways to have one person interviewing someone else, but the reason I am not a fan of it when presented to me as a chat show is because there is something that feels insincere about them. Rarely would anyone turn up on a chat show because they fancy a chat, and even less if they like the host – it is more likely there is something to tell, or sell, about themselves, or something that involves them. News and current affairs programmes, in search of truth, are more likely to probing of their interviewees than when they are sat on the sofas of Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross’s shows, because they are set up to be more entertaining, which can also be read as less demanding – the one late-night interview show we have in the UK is “Newsnight,” which originally began in 1980 instead of giving more nights to Parkinson’s show. While his article talks of combining showbiz, politics, popular culture and sport in one show, Parkinson could have easily become a presenter of “Newsnight” instead.

Reading the “Radio Times” article, I don’t get why the effort of putting on a US-style chat show in the UK is being demanded by Parkinson – there is something about it being an important and entertaining fixture, and if it works in the US, it should work here, but the implication is that our own shows don’t work – Parkinson has often criticised other chat show presenters, including Terry Wogan, Graham Norton, Davina McCall and Lily Allen, both for the quality of their shows and the rigour of their interviewing skills, especially with the remark in 2016, “I wouldn't ever say that Terry Wogan's claim to fame was as an interviewer. Not at all.”

I should say that I do watch chat shows from the US on a regular basis, as they upload clips to YouTube, but when I do, they are usually from the first half of the hour, before the guests have come out. The US tradition is to begin with the host’s monologue about the day’s events, supplanting the nightly news bulletin, and follow it with another feature, sketch or a game – Stephen Colbert has built his current reputation on the quality of his monologues about Donald Trump, while James Corden and Jimmy Fallon’s interactions with guests are more memorable when they are framed within rap battles and “Carpool Karaoke.” Add in a musical performance at the end of the show, and US chat shows don’t have a lot to do with chat.

In fact, there is already a show on UK television, in prime time, that has guests from Hollywood and the West End, that have as much factual content and musical performances as the US shows do, and it is “The One Show,” which is just as close to “Blue Peter” – famously, in 2011, presenter Matt Baker asked David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister, “how on Earth do you sleep at night,” because he genuinely, innocently, wanted to know.

THERE’S A GHOST IN MY HOUSE [127]

Trying to take a complex philosophical concept, that I am only just beginning to understand, and trying to apply it to chocolate, to make it easier and more palatable, may well be the most literal possible example of biting off more than I can chew. However, with long-gone brands, and their tastes, still on the tips of many tongues since childhood, there may no be easier place to start.

What am I talking about? A word that has come to mind a lot recently has been “hauntology,” which was coined in 1993 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It is a play on “ontology,” the philosophical study of being, of existence and reality, of how things can be said to exist – the French “ontologie” and “hauntologie” sound identical when spoken. The idea that existence can be haunted comes from Derrida, in his book “Spectres of Marx,” ruminating over how Communism can be said to have failed, with the Soviet Union having been dissolved in 1991, despite Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels opening “The Communist Manifesto” with the idea of Communism being a “spectre... haunting Europe.” If that is the case, the idea of Communism, if it is a ghost, couldn’t be dead – and if it appears in the present, it cannot be said to be of the past either.

I already feel lost, and yet that may be the point, because hauntology essentially replaces the notions of ontology, that there must be something that, well, “is,” and replaces that with something which is neither present or absent, relying on language in order to describe any of it – Derrida was already known for his work on the deconstruction of language in texts, so hauntology was seen as an extension of this work.

How do you apply this theory to chocolate, then? Consider the way chocolate is often talked about: chocolate doesn’t taste as good as it used to be, chocolate bars have become smaller, and we wonder why our favourite bars have never been brought back. The notion of chocolate, as it exists today, is literally haunted, for many people, by the notion that there is a perfect definition of chocolate that either did exist, or may have never existed, forever out of reach, but without a way of moving forward into the future to create something entirely new, you must reach back into the past to recreate something, or create a pastiche – nostalgia leads the way.

This was where I thought Cadbury was heading when their new “Darkmilk” bars were announced. When I first heard of the possibility of eating a dark milk chocolate bar – a darker kind of Dairy Milk, or a smoother-tasting Bournville – I thought, oh, they are trying the Gambit bars again. The Gambit only lasted for a few years in the 1980s, but its literal gambit was blending Dairy Milk and Bournville together, giving you all of both, rather than the best of both. From the taste tests I conducted with family and friends, Cadbury appear to have created something that some people may not have tasted before. In Australia, where Darkmilk first launched, it is also available with chips of dried raspberry – that would be the real game-changer for me.

WE’VE JUST BEGUN TO DREAM [126]

The Walt Disney World Resort is almost its own entertainment nation state, made up of theme parks instead of cities. At thirty-nine square miles, it is the size of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, or slightly bigger than Jersey.

Its second theme park, Epcot, opened in 1982 as a celebration of human endeavour, a kind of answer to how the Magic Kingdom came to be. Building from Walt Disney’s original idea for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, where traffic would travel in tunnels under a lush garden city, the “EPCOT Center,” to use its original name, would combine two further theme park concepts, one of technology and another of international cultures, into what was often labelled a permanent World’s Fair. Disney’s involvement in the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair is a precursor to Epcot, where its attractions “It’s a Small World” and the “Carousel of Progress” would be relocated to Disneyland after the fair ended, while Disney’s first full animatronic display, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” would be reworked as Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents.

I would have loved to have seen the original EPCOT Center, having become aware of it – when it opened, the future was coming thick and fast, with the advent of home computers and compact discs, while British TV audiences still had its own primetime showcase for new technology in “Tomorrow’s World,” coming live from the site of the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, proving that, in building BBC Television Centre on the land, you should still look to the future as much as you can.

Like the World’s Fair, Epcot would use corporate sponsorship to maintain and develop the rides – World in Motion, now Test Track, has always been sponsored by General Motors, now using the Chevrolet brand, while the Universe of Energy was sponsored by oil company Exxon, now ExxonMobil. However, this model has its problems: Horizons, the ride that specifically looked towards the future, lost General Electric as its sponsor in 1994, and carried on until 2004 without ever having been updated in twenty years.

The worst example of this was how Journey Into Imagination, sponsored by Kodak, went from being Epcot’s most popular ride to its most reviled, with Kodak’s reluctance, and later inability, to spend too much on updates, resulting in a cheaper ride that had its length cut from thirteen to five minutes. When the ride’s original mascot, Figment, was brought back to irritate the shorter version’s host, Eric Idle, it smacked of a lack of imagination, especially as the ride has not been updated since 2002.

These days, Epcot rarely has sponsors, the united nations of the World Showcase have been somewhat undermined by the Trumpery of “America First,” the health-oriented Wonders of Life pavilion is now the centre of the International Food & Wine Festival, while Innoventions, a technology showcase formerly named Communicorp, is mostly empty. The current edutainment-led rides at Epcot, already using some familiar Disney properties like Finding Nemo and Frozen, will be joined with rides fully based on them, with a “Guardians of the Galaxy” rollercoaster replacing the Universe of Energy from 2021 – there had already been a plan to supplant the idea of a “FutureWorld” with a more thrill-based “Discoveryland,” and it sounds like it is now on its way.

Is the future over? Even if I am no longer able to visit the future, as seen from 1982, I would have loved to have visited an Epcot that ran with the future theme all the way, visiting a pavilion titled “The Wonderful World of Graphene,” displaying roll-up computers with antiseptic surfaces, or something. Meanwhile, I could be fired like a proton through a virtual Large Hadron Collider, much like you can take a rocket to Mars on the current Mission: Space ride.

Mind you, as we hark back to the 1980s... and as “Guardians of the Galaxy” harks back to the 1980s... and as BBC Television Centre is redeveloped as apartments, using its history as a TV studio as a selling point, I am left with the ghost of a theme park I can never visit. At Epcot, the future has been cancelled.

WHEN I SEE AN ELEPHANT FLY [125]

On 3^rd July 2018, Southwark Council approved the demolition of the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre and surrounding buildings, to be replaced by a mix of low-cost apartments, student flats, retail and leisure space. The owners of the site intend to close the centre by 31^stMarch 2019, with its tenants being offered lower rent and help moving to other sites in the meantime. How nice.

I have only visited the Elephant & Castle once before, around twenty years ago, when my brother played ice hockey. We must have parked under the shopping centre, then walked across to the venue, passing through the centre to get supplies. The reputation the Elephant & Castle has gained as being a kind of, well, white elephant probably didn’t make an effect on us at the time, as we lived close to the Tricorn Shopcentre in Portsmouth, a Brutalist concrete construction routinely labelled the worst building in Britain, until it was demolished in 2005, its bazaar of dark corners replaced by a flat car park, ready for a development that will actually get built.

Having already planned a trip to London, and having been reminded of the place, I took the Northern Line to Elephant & Castle, and immediately got lost – the directions up into the centre took me through a platform for the Bakerloo Line, also based under the centre. I can see why Transport for London wants a better Underground station as part of the new development, but they could sort the directions of some arrows first.

Approaching the entrance to the Elephant & Castle, I got the video camera on my phone ready, for I was expecting a dead shopping mall – the building has been characterised as having been run into the ground since it opened in 1965, as one of the first shopping malls in the UK. The documents published by Southwark Council on the day of its decision noted this was a concern found during the public consultation, although the neglect was perceived as deliberate, due to the centre having been a target for redevelopment opportunities for years. Therefore, I was expecting some sort of carnage. I walked in, and after a few seconds, I put my phone away...

The place was fine.

In fact, the Elephant & Castle was clean, if a little dark, and while there were empty shop spaces, there was an entire High Street inside, including a Tesco, WH Smith, Boots, Lloyds Bank, Greggs, Clarks Shoes, Peacocks, Poundland, Shoe Zone, and many other independent fashion and food stores contributing to the heady aroma that hits you when you walk inside – I was expecting the stench of damp and mould, and there was none.

There are two other tell-tale signs I have picked up from other dead shopping malls: while the escalators to the top floor were not switched on when I walked in (at 9.45am on a Friday morning), I put this down to the bingo hall and bowling alley not yet having opened – either that, or people were using the stairs. Meanwhile, the vending machines worked, selling Diet Coke for less than I expected. Along with the multicoloured fibreglass elephants dotted about the place, I approve. (The elephant statue outside the entrance, rescued from the pub that gave its name to the area, used to be located inside.)

You can see that more expensive shops may have been there before – there certainly was a H. Samuel jeweller at one point – but the uncertainty over the centre's future perhaps restricts bigger brands that want more certainty. Another bank, Santander, announced plans to close its branch, mainly due to most of its customers also using alternative places, but it produced a leaflet explaining how it is going to support the community ahead of this change.

That is what the closure of Elephant & Castle feels like – it is a community centre that is formed out of its shops, away from the intention of being merely a retail experience. The new development – it is led by Delancey, which built the 2012 Olympic athletes’ village - has to give first refusal to a bingo hall operator, regardless of how modern the area will look, but the bowling alley is less important. A £634,000 fund has been created to help independent retailers move out, but Tesco, which has been there almost since day one in 1965, will have to sort itself out.

The documents supplied by Southwark Council on 3rd July, available on their website, are exhaustive, detailing over their 250 pages how every single possible consideration, when a building project is proposed, needs an answer, from dust and vibration during the building work, to consideration of heritage sites, archaeology, effects on various sectors of the population, and in answering the concerns of all those that answered their consultation. From reading it, I guess the case for demolishing Elephant & Castle has been made, for progress has to be made, and with the centre sticking out among more modern buildings, time has finally run out...

Like hell it has: the decision to demolish is still subject to legal agreements being drawn up, and Historic England has to consider both an application to have the centre listed, which didn’t work for the Coronet theatre, and an application from Delancey to prevent it from being listed. This story is not over, not least after reading this quote from Fiona Colley, a Southwark council cabinet member for regeneration, which described Elephant & Castle as the “final piece in the jigsaw for regeneration.” She continued:

“As the options for refurbishment were developed further we were less and less happy with how the scheme would fit in with the rest of the area’s high-quality designs. The council has now rejected the earlier options to retain some parts of the original building and insist on full demolition.”

Leaving the Elephant & Castle, I got the feeling that, with a centre that already has the available space to do something good, or could be renovated, it sounds like anyone who wanted it demolished had talked themselves into doing it. The centre was part of the project to rebuild London after the Second World War and, apparently, that will never end – it’s either a case of make do or mend, or if it ain’t broke, break it.