Michael Blakemore (1) (1928–2023)

I'd never heard of this novel nor its author until its description and recommendation by Simon Callow in his Life in Pieces. Intrigued, I searched my local County Libraries' catalogues: Cheshire came up with it, and I collected it from Alsager Library a couple of weeks ago. It's a lovely novel, good enough to make me wish its author had stuck to fiction rather than vaulting to fame as director of a play I've neither read nor seen (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) but am prejudiced against, thanks to Joe Orton's dismissive comments in his diary.

Even amateur actors such as myself can recognise most of the situations delineated in this well observed and superbly expressed novel. All we lack, I guess, is experience of the ebbs and flows of a truly extended season such as that at 'Braddington Spa' on the Yorkshire coast which occupies most of Sam Beresford's story. But we, even we, know the highs and lows, the camaraderie and endless judgments, the insecurities and egos but also the generosity of spirit revealed in this tale. And, speaking as one who once described 'amdram' as "a hot-bed of bed-hopping", we're not unacquainted with the fairly free spirit of shagging which our hero has the self-confidence to embody. This is described with the same sureness of tone and wisdom which pervades all the novel, but also with a euphemistic yet accurate elegance (no naming of parts) which dates it quite certainly.

For this is 1959. Or rather, a fictionalised 1959 published in 1968. Aside from the wonderfully acute and analytic depictions of theatre, the period elements fascinate me. Only the rich have motor cars (unless they are possessors of what our author charmingly refers to as 'minicars'); our characters journey by bus or train. This paragraph delighted me; the hero is seen off by his official girlfriend at the station with a packed lunch:

"I hope you like your lunch. It cost a fortune."
The day before she had bought him a chicken leg, an avocado pear (to remind him of Australia), a few black olives, an apple and a slice of cheese cake, and she had packed them in a tin to eat on the train.

As a teenager I remember being puzzled by the aside in Katharine Whitehorn's Cooking in a Bedsitter, first published in 1961, that 'chicken is something which still has a faint aura of extravagance', as in my childhood it was close to mundane. Note also the 'avocado pear', which now sounds as old-fashioned as 'motor-car'. And packed in a tin? Well, yes: the first Tupperware party in the UK was a year away....

Trivia aside, the analytical precision and honesty of Blakemore's judgments can't be separated from his verbal precision and stylishness. Read it, buy it, re-read it; love it.… (more)