IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

I WANNA KNOW THE NAME OF THE GAME [480]

Having owned a Game Boy for five years now I appreciate the reliable source of enjoyment and distraction it has been, and I want to keep that experience as long as I can without making any compromises.

My current console is a blue Nintendo Game Boy Pocket, made in around 1997-98. I love its robust build and frugal use of AAA batteries, but I am aware of its biggest limitation, an LCD display with no backlight that also slowly fades with age – playing the Breakout-like game “Alleyway”, I’ve often realised I can’t see where the bouncing ball is going, even when playing in a brightly lit room.

I cannot expect the console to keep working forever, so I decided to take advantage of the growing market in Game Boy clones, arising from the love of the machine, its game library, and the fact that Nintendo built it with largely off-the-shelf components – the Z80-derived processor found in the original Game Boy, Pocket, Light and Color is also found among 1980s computers like the Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC range.

My first option was to buy another Nintendo console, but not their latest Switch – I already own the games I play, so I don’t need to buy them again from the Nintendo eShop. I bought a Game Boy Advance in 2021, which also plays the original cartridges, but its screen is also not backlit – the later folding Advance SP has both front- and blacklit versions, and accordingly sell at a premium, just like the Japan-only Game Boy Light. Admittedly, I had not done my research, but the Advance was later sold for more than I bought it for, a mark of increasing interest and appetite for these consoles.

My next consideration was a refurbished console. An enormous demand has grown for after-market Game Boy screens – backlit, of course, but only able to approximating screen resolutions – console shells and components. I have no aptitude for this kind of modification and assembly, especially more delicate tasks like connecting a new screen to the motherboard, but the ability to order one, encased in exactly the colour of case and buttons you wish, was very appealing. It is an ideal choice to extend the life of existing Game Boy hardware, if you can look past the age of the motherboards – the last Game Boy Colour was sold in 2003, and the last Advance SP in 2010 – but the rework usually with its own warranty.

I then decided to at all-new hardware. A company named Funny Playing makes the “FPGBC”, a Game Boy Color clone using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to replicate exactly the original machine’s processors, largely guaranteeing compatibility with cartridges and peripherals. Like refurbishing an existing console, you can buy the FPGBC motherboard, pre-assembled with screen attached, and build your own case around it, or have one built for you. Aside from its using a rechargeable battery, this is the closest available console to the original Game Boy, the perfect choice if you simply want to play games using all-new hardware.

The only reason I didn’t go for the FPGBC myself was seeing the price tick up when I looked at assembly options for the case and button colours I wanted, followed by the cost and time of delivery, because it pushed my expected cost towards the Analogue Pocket, a console produced in limited numbers since 2021 that, while assuming a mostly similar shape and button layout to a Game Boy, uses its FPGA chip to replicate the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, PC Engine and Neo Geo Pocket, although the extra cost of cartridge adaptors made this less desirable. Furthermore, its continued use of a plastic case and similar rechargeable battery like the FPGBC, while costing up to twice as much as one, soured me a bit, high-resolution screen or not – their shipping costs from the US to the UK didn’t help either.

My final option was announced in June 2024. The ModRetro Chromatic comes from Palmer Luckey, a former virtual reality headset designer who got into modifying Game Boys as a teenager, and now owns a company named Anduril, making armed drones – this fact might be a deal-breaker, but the Chromatic, advertised as a strictly limited “1st Edition”, is already sold out as of the time of publication, so it has already become moot. 

The console is built like a smartphone: a bespoke display matching the resolution and colour temperature of the Game Boy Color, rather than appropriating a screen made elsewhere, and encased by sapphire glass; durable clicky PBT plastic buttons, and a painted magnesium-aluminium alloy case seemingly doubling as its warranty, in the hope of making it indestructible. It is completely overbuilt for its purpose, and more expensive than a FPGBC that could do the same job just as well, and while you can connect a USB-C cable to capture or relay the video from the screen, do you really need that?

I pre-ordered the Chromatic four months after it was announced: I surmised that if Luckey wanted to make money from it, it wouldn’t have been made the way it had been, or would cost more than the $199 asking price – I expect future editions will be cost-reduced, and more in line with the FPGBC. 

However, the 1st Edition might be the best Game Boy not made by Nintendo themselves. I bought it in “bubblegum” (pink, with purple A and B buttons), and feels incredibly solid and well put together, although heavier than I was expecting – with cartridge and AA batteries installed, the Chromatic weights 270 grams, versus 160 for a similarly prepared Game Boy Pocket. The crisp, legible and colourful screen is a revelation – the backlight is so powerful that I have it at one level above “off”, so I expect it, and the console, to last a very long time, although my main concern is avoiding any chipping of the paintwork.

In short, buy the FPGBC to enter the world of Game Boy gaming to avoid using old hardware, and if you want a Game Boy Advance, buy a refurbished console if you can, or an Analogue Pocket. If you don’t want to compromise, learn to compromise.

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 Wells’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. 

WE FADE TO GREY [472]

“Operation No Grey” was a campaign launched in June 2023 by the car manufacturer Fiat, with the advertising agency Leo Burnett Italy, announcing they will no longer sell cars painted grey. This was symbolised by dipping their latest car, the Fiat 600e, into a vat of orange paint. Their press release said, “The decision was made to enhance the importance of colours in life, embodying the Italian way of living and reaffirming the Brand’s New Dolce Vita value.” This was followed in February 2024 by a full La Dolce Vita guide, provided to help Fiat’s British customers lead a more relaxed and Italian lifestyle.

This gimmick, posture and provocation was most likely fuelled by car sales data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders confirming that grey has been the most popular car colour sold in the UK since 2018, counting for 26.8% of all new cars sold in 2023. With second choice black taking 20.2%, and third choice white at 16.5%, blue is the first non-monochrome choice with 15.1%. The overwhelming popularity of grey and monochrome colours was found among both personal fleet buyers in all parts of the UK, perhaps the result of wanting to protect the resale value of the car.

Fiat’s decision also attempts to highlight themselves above other car brands. Despite being a significant part of the gargantuan conglomerate Stellantis, they are still one brand among many: Fiat’s car range is comprised of small cars like the 500, 600 and Panda, with the Ford Focus-sized Tipo no longer sold in the UK. Despite compete with similarly-sized cars from Renault, Volkswagen, Seat and Skoda, they also vie with other Stellantis brands like Vauxhall, Opel, Peugeot and Citroën, the latter having its own extensive history of small cars. Want a bigger Fiat? Stellantis will sell you an Alfa Romeo instead or, better still, a Maserati.

Checking Fiat’s website in other countries confirm they do not sell grey cars elsewhere either, although they don’t need to sell La Dolce Vita to the Italians. However, what I have noticed is they have restricted the choice of available colours in another way: the price. The new 600 is available in red, but if you want any other colour, including Sunset Orange, it will cost you £650. Likewise, the electric 500e (Ice White), the original 500 hybrid (Sicilian Orange) and the Panda (Gelato White) are essentially sold in only one colour, unless you pay extra – the upcoming Grande Panda has no information available on which colour, or colours, you can get for free.

Increased choice is available, but not necessarily demanded, so therefore, if you want La Dolce Vita, you will have to pay for it. Even with a base Fiat 500 coming in at just under £17,000, an extra £650 is a significant cost to add for something that, while making your car easier to find, won’t change how it drives.

LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE [471]

“Coca-Cola Spiced” was a variant of the ubiquitous soft drink sold by The Coca-Cola Company in North America from February to September 2024. Originally introduced as the first permanent addition to the range since Coca-Cola Cherry Vanilla in 2020, it was withdrawn after only seven months due to undisclosed reasons, while Cherry Vanilla and “Diet Coke with Splenda”, sweetened with sucralose and aspartame, were withdrawn as well.

I came across an imported can of the with-sugar version Coca-Cola Spiced – a “Zero Sugar” version was also sold - a few months into its now-limited run. I had not heard any description or review of the drink, only that there was a Coke labelled as “Spiced”.

Drinking the can left me underwhelmed – “Spiced” essentially meant “with raspberry”, in the same way that the longstanding cherry variant of Coke is “spiced” with cherry flavour.

“Spice” is a word used in different ways, and what I expected upon seeing that word on a can of Coke was expecting the taste to be “hotter”, or more piquant, which I don’t equate with raspberry flavouring. I think it was a mistake not to identify the use of raspberry in the name of the drink, the only major clue being a slight tinge of pink in the red colour of the can, and in using a word as potent as “spiced” only in relation to raspberry.

Coca-Cola has, since 2022, been leaning into another definition of “spice” with its “Creations” line of special edition drinks – making its drinks more interesting or, more specifically in this case, giving them more attention. I liked the strawberry and watermelon-flavoured version of Coke produced with, and named after, the American music producer and DJ Marshmello – ironically, the following “Dreamworld” flavour tasted more like marshmallow. A later “creation” imagined the year 3000 through a caramel and popcorn taste, and the current Oreo cookie flavour feels less a “creation” than a simple mash-up, one reminding me more of chocolate Angel Delight than Oreo.

My takeaway from this situation is that Coca-Cola “Original Taste”, and the brand in general, is so ubiquitous it has become part of the background, but the current solution is in adding to the formula in various ways to make people continue to try the drink, when advertising the existing drinks to remind people about them, or implement a loyalty scheme, have already been tried.

As Coca-Cola Spiced was introduced in North America, the UK received their own flavour that, while sounding more boring, remains on sale: Lemon.

YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON [470]

[Update: A big thank you to the digital artist Dave Jeffery [https://www.kecskebak.hu/], whose work in creating and recreating channel idents has been used on screen by the BBC and Big Centre TV, for contacting me via Mastodon to confirm that Meridian’s logo was designed by Ian Carley, the company’s head of design. The original article is below.]

The half-sun, half-moon face used as a logo by Meridian Broadcasting has remained lodged in my mind long after it disappeared from TV screens, but I have never considered why it was used to represent independent television in the south and south-east of England – my hunch is that it doesn’t matter at all.

Back when ITV was the name of a network of regional TV channels, mostly named for the area on which they were broadcast – Thames, Tyne Tees, Anglia, Scottish, London Weekend Television and so on – Meridian replaced TVS (Television South), providing programmes in its area of the UK from 1993. It is still broadcasting, but in the procession of takeovers and mergers of ITV companies that began when Meridian bought Anglia in 1994, Meridian’s distinctive logo and name were usurped by a national “ITV” identity from 2002, the name living on as “ITV News Meridian”, the name of their regional bulletins.

This does not explain the choosing of its symbol, from a designer whose name I could not find, here picked out in high-contrast red, yellow and purple, initially in idents on a halved yellow and blue background. The sun-moon face is centuries old, borne of opposing forces, of duality, and of accepting this as a nature of being, from good and bad, to life and death, and femininity and masculinity. It was seen as decoration on old naval navigational tools, like compasses and sextants, fitting in with the brief of serving an area of the UK steeped in maritime and naval tradition like Portsmouth, Southampton, Cowes and Chatham, but means precisely nothing if you are also broadcasting inland to the likes of Salisbury, Reading and Oxford.

The name “Meridian” is more confusing than expected: it comes from the Latin “meridionalis”, meaning “of the south”, but it makes me think of London, and the Greenwich Meridian - this use came from the Latin “meridies”, for “midday”. When the consortium that owned Meridian bid, in 1991, to represent the ITV network in the south and south-east of England, they also bid for the London area, most likely using the same name and logo. Perhaps the intention was, just “Granada” came to symbolise Manchester and the north-west of England as much as that region of Spain, Meridian will do the same for the south, once it appears often enough. This expectation did not happen so much for Carlton, like Granada a pre-existing company with a pre-existing name, which eventually won the London licence.

The website TVArk has a quote from a J Dallas, creative director at Meridian, talking in 1999 about the replacement of their original bombastic and orchestral idents with something a lot calmer and more purple: “The idea was they thought the Company had become established and the computer graphics for the original ident looked old fashioned. The problem with the logo is it looks stuck on to something whatever you do with it.” Meanwhile, the wonderful book “Branding for Television With Knobs On” by Martin Lambie-Nairn, designer of the Channel 4 logo, noted that Meridian executives took offense at being told their production and marketing wasn’t connected by a unifying strategy and brief, its “marketing tree” being disparate twigs growing from the ground, unable to take advantage of the fact the TV channel itself, branding and all, is as much a product as the programmes by themselves.

The Meridian logo appeared everywhere: before every programme, at the end of programmes made or commissioned by them, in flashes before each advertisement break began, and in a bizarre tie-in with Southern Ford Dealers, where you could buy the Ford Fiesta Meridian special edition car – I really saw a TV broadcaster’s logo plastered on cars that private citizens chose to buy with their own money.

Meridian’s legacy was in children’s programmes like “Wizadora”, “ZZZap!” and “It’s a Mystery”, alongside dramas “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries” and “Hornblower”, and the documentary series “Monkey Business”. However, its logo was used so prominently between 1993 and 2002 that its legacy is what remains for me - it is visually striking, but it only represents itself, not what Meridian was, or continues to be.

BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT [469]

“Oblique Strategies” is a set of cards, introduced in 1975 by artists Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, designed to promote lateral thinking when breaking creative blocks. I knew about them from Eno’s collaboration with David Bowie, sparking and informing decisions made on Bowie’s albums “Heroes” (1977) and “Lodger” (1979).

My sister Layla Spence, writer and artist of the online comic “Ill Fame”, owns a pack of these cards, saying she has used them when a second opinion might be needed, and thought I could use them in my writing. 

You don’t reach the four hundred and sixty-ninth article in a series without having deployed some lateral thinking along the way, but I didn’t know if I should use the cards to spur an idea, or to apply them to something I had already prepared. Upon cutting the cards, the first one read “What wouldn’t you do?”, so my answer was to be led by the cards this time around, forcing me to be creative about my creativity.

“What mistakes did you make last time?” I think my last article about Toys “R” Us opening concessions in branches of WHSmith was a little overblown. Visiting a local branch that stated it was “now open” amounted to a further statue of Geoffrey the Giraffe, and shelves of toys to one side. No space for traditional WHSmith product lines stationery was really lost – if anything, it looked tidier than usual. I always visit that branch when I am in town, and I was facing the prospect of losing some of the reason I go there – as it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

“Do nothing for as long as possible.” Your baseline may vary - living authentically as yourself is politically charged in the sight of the wrong people. Meanwhile, I don’t write to intervene - I don’t need the hassle. I observe, I write, I continue looking. “Nothing” is subjective.

“Abandon normal instruments.” I will switch to making videos someday.

“Who should be doing this job? How would they do it?” There is no vacancy here, but if you can honour your obligation to explore your intrigue every week, while trying to articulate that in an approachable way while never having a set formula for how that will be done each time, then you may be in with a chance... to do it for yourself on your own site.

“Trust in the you of now.” Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.

“Don’t break the silence.” I drew this card just after watching a YouTube video about a Nintendo GameBoy clone that I want to buy, which I watched to give myself a rest for a moment – I am purposefully thinking of buying myself a worthwhile distraction that forces concentration. I listen to the music or have a TV on in the background all the time. I only do “silence” when I am asleep, and even then, my TV must remain on as I fall asleep. I can be “still”, but not “silent”.

“Do we need holes?” What did you have in mind?

“Abandon normal instruments.” I just drew the card that inspired David Bowie’s song “Boys Keep Swinging”. The plan was already to emulate a garage band by having Bowie’s band playing each other’s instruments – the simple drums are by guitarist Carlos Alomar – and the card seems to imply they were on the right track. Also, “abandon normal instruments” for a song about gender identity? [Yes, I was thinking so hard I didn’t realise I drew the same card twice.]

“Distorting time.” This may have been my plan all along – whatever that is, I’ll never tell, because I don’t actually know.

ALL UNDER ONE ROOF [468]

I remember the feeling of “I beg your pardon?” upon seeing, in March 2024, a poster in the window of WHSmith in Oxford of Geoffrey the Giraffe, proclaiming “Toys “R” Us In Store Now”. 

I knew the toy store brand was re-establishing itself following its bankruptcy in 2018, and its concessions in Macy’s department stores in the United States, alongside slowly opening smaller retail stores, was a formula that could work in the UK – their higher-end FAO Schwarz brand, they of the giant piano keyboard, is already found in Selfridges here.

But making a deal to open Toys “R” Us concessions exclusively in WHSmith, in 76 stores by the end of 2024, was perplexing. Known as a combined newsagent, bookseller and stationers – a conglomeration that my sister, when buying magazines and art supplies, described as being both too specific and too generic to be useful – over two hundred branches have already incorporated Post Offices into them, franchises replacing former “Crown” Post Offices closed by the Government-owned group. It wasn’t an obvious choice for a toy shop to open, even if WHSmith did sell some board games along with children’s art and stationery supplies.

Entering the Oxford WHSmith required me to walk past the regular store, making sure you saw what they had to offer first, to reach the mezzanine hosted by, or guarded by, a fibreglass model of Geoffrey on a park bench. I didn’t look through it – I think I just needed to know it existed.

WHSmith has chopped and changed its product range over the years: the 1980s saw it as a major seller of microcomputers and games from Sinclair, Acorn, Amstrad and so on, and it regularly sold music and films too. During the 1980s and 90s, it owned Do-It-All, a chain of DIY stores, and ran the cable TV channels Lifestyle and Screensport. 

But today, its current image is either as a convenience store in airports, train stations and hospitals, once found selling toothpaste for £10, or as a network of tired and cluttered High Street stores. Giving up floor space to Post Offices and Toys “R” Us, then dual- and triple-branding the signs above the front door, suggests WHSmith is diminishing its own presence to adapt to changing tastes. It may operate Smiths News, the largest wholesale supplier of newspapers and magazines, but print sales of both have been in decline for years, and while its reputation as a bookseller caused its inventory system to be adopted worldwide as the ISBN number, stores rarely offer more than a narrow selection of books in comparison to Waterstones or other independent bookshops.

I still make a point of visiting WHSmith: my family’s birthdays and Christmas are punctuated by their greeting cards; it is the only place I have bought “The New Yorker” magazine outside of New York itself; and it is very good if you want one of something particular: one pen, one pencil, one notebook. Supermarkets may offer multipacks of these for less per unit, but only if you are willing to compromise on exactly what you wanted. It has already sold toys and games under their own brands like The Gadget Shop and Past Times, and giving over that part of the store, like in Selfridges and in Tesco (with rival toy shop The Entertainer) makes some business sense.

What is WHSmith meant to be? Whatever it needs to be to keep going.

PRESS YOUR FACE UP AGAINST THE SCREEN [467]

Well, my television broke again, losing power to the screen for the second time in four years, in the same way it happened last time. With the memory of the previous two-week wait for it to be fixed rising to the surface, I threw up my hands and bought a replacement. Provided this one lasts for a few more years, I have realised this may be the last regular television I will buy.

My first personal TV was a fourteen-inch cathode ray tube TV bought for £139 in 1996, weighed seven kilograms (15.4 lbs), had two one-watt speakers, no subtitles or teletext ability, and used approximately 150 watts an hour, CRT screens holding high voltages even after turn-off. The back of it was riven with ventilation holes, because they were surely needed.

My new TV, a Sharp 32FH8KA, weighs half as much, has a thirty-two-inch LED screen like my previous Toshiba model, but this time with high dynamic range so effective that the backlight can be turned down to save power. Along with two twelve-watt speakers that have some bass, the unit is only a few inches thick – the circuit board and connectors stick out from the back of the TV, and is the only part that remains ventilated, because the screen hardly produces any heat, and because so little energy is lost through heat, it only uses twenty-six watts an hour. It is also fully Android compatible, making it pretty much a computer, into which other computers can be connected. With inflation, £139 in 1996 is now £271 – this new TV cost only £199.

Aside from the minimum expectations of a TV’s ability having greatly expanded over time, connectivity has also greatly changed. I only ever connected a VHS video recorder to the old portable TV in the 1990s, via the single SCART connector, but I now have an Apple TV box – “Android” is something that other people do – a Blu-ray player, a separate DVD player that accepts region 1 DVDs from North America, and an Atari Flashback console, all connected at once, covering all possibilities. 

While I am happy with the speakers on my new TV, a sound bar is usually the first add-on others would buy nowadays, especially if streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC iPlayer are accessible through the TV itself – apart from the Sky Glass TV, made for subscribers to that service, TVs with built-in soundbars have not appeared, as if better sound is expected to be something that needs to be added to a TV. I could easily have bought a large computer monitor with enough connectors for what I require, but these doesn’t really exist either.

The ability to just buy an all-purpose screen may arrive if no unified decision is made on the future of broadcasting. It is not clear if “5G Broadcast”, using the mobile phone network to deliver TV signals, is the ultimate choice if more of the current TV signals are repurposed for mobile use, while satellite TV, my main source for “regular” broadcasts on my new TV, may only remain if Sky commits to continuing with it beyond the end of the 2020s – if not, why should SES build more Astra satellites? If then, my TV will become that all-purpose screen, but I should never fear, for the box and manual states it supports the H.265 video codec, should any UK broadcaster decide to start using it – that’s good, I suppose.

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE [466]

I came very late to Al Jarreau’s song “Mornin’”, a quite irrepressibly positive piece of smooth jazz with electric piano and strings, and a hybrid animated and live action video to match. It is very easy on the ear.

On my first listen, my first thought was, “this is a bit Pages from Ceefax, isn’t it?”, which is not as obscure a thought as it sounds. Certainly, David Foster’s original instrumental version of “Mornin’” fits that description completely.

Ceefax, the BBC’s teletext service that began in 1974, was initially only seen by owners of sets capable of decoding that part of the TV signal. Meanwhile, with BBC One and Two only broadcasting a few daytime shows outside of the Open University, schools programmes and live events, a test card and music was played to fill the gaps. From 1980, a rotating series of news, weather and information named “Ceefax in Vision”, later “Pages from Ceefax”, began replacing the test card, while continuing to play music. This arrangement was still seen during the day on BBC television as late as 1990, later relegated to early morning and at the end of the day until the end of analogue TV transmissions closed Ceefax in 2012. 

Being of an age where I would have seen “Pages from Ceefax” during the day, I recognised that the music being played was not often heard elsewhere. Without exception, instrumental tracks were played, i.e. no singing, and they were often light or easy listening in nature, or bland an inoffensive at worst. Until 1988, there were still restrictions on the amount of recorded music being broadcasted in the UK, known as “needletime”, so this music would come from sources either exempt from these rules, like foreign recordings, or by licensing cheaper library and production music.

 

The “foreign recordings” element was often literal: VHS recordings of “Pages from Ceefax” posted to YouTube don’t often have the music picked up by their content ID system, although I found one 1995 example that used the 1981 album “Flashing” by the Japanese jazz pianist Himiko Kikuchi, or another from 1983 using the 1971 album “Sentimentálna trúbka” by the Slovak American trumpeter Laco Déczi.  However, British musicians and composers would also travel to Germany to record, with renowned library music names like Neil Richardson, Alan Moorhouse, Johnny Pearson and Keith Mansfield appearing under pseudonyms like “The Oscar Brandenburg Orchestra”.

 

Even at the end of Ceefax in 2012, the BBC were still using library music, this time more recent recordings licensed from Funtastik Music, which to me sounded more stereotypically like the “elevator music” under which the earlier tracks could be classified. Notably, the final song played was “B.A.R.T.”  a commercially-released song by Ruby, a rock band that featured Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and better known from being played between gaps in BBC schools programmes. This was more a nod to the end of laid-back presentation that could no longer take place in a time when TV channels need to continuously hold the viewer’s attention – no longer can BBC Two casually open up at 9.30am, warn viewers that coverage of the TUC Conference begins in two minutes, then play “Nifty Digits” by Richard Harvey, as they did on 9^th September 1982, according to the YouTube channel that put up the recording.

 

But the earlier popularity of light music under big bands and jazz performers like Bert Kempfaert and Oscar Peterson, and the later existence of groups like The Test Card Circle point to the continued popularity of music of this type on its own terms, even down to CD reissues of production music albums made by labels like Bruton Music and KPM originally not meant for general sale. In this case, my brain has labelled it by where I heard that kind of music most, therefore as “Pages from Ceefax”.