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It was announced today that the actor Albert Finney has died at the age of 82. With understandable predictability most of the reports focused on the whole 'Angry Young Man' angle and how he was a part of the new wave of post-war kitchen sink dramas. Reading through the various stories today it occurred to me that I have only seen him in three films. One of them is a film I really enjoyed, Tim Burton's Big Fish from 2003, although I hadn't remembered that he was in it. 

Of the two films I refer to, the first is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I don't necessarily think it is because I am from Nottingham that I got into the works of Alan Sillitoe but it was nice to discover from an English teacher at school that the world I was from had been committed to literature, and was certainly a lot more relatable than the Famous Five for example. Finney's portrayal of Arthur Seaton was almost exactly how you would imagine from reading the book, although he does prove that the Nottingham accent is a difficult one to pull off, something that Stephen Tompkinson demonstrated when he failed at it in the 2018 biopic Torvill & Dean. 

Naturally this was the main focus of the reports in the local news, treating Finney as an honorary Nottingham person in much the same way they do with Brian Clough. The Nottingham Post and Leftlion do like to write about its notable people (nearly all of them anyway) and the Post in particular has no understanding of the word 'tenuous' so at least they had a reason to publish some photographs of the cast in the Market Square.

Anyway, although I have seen very few Albert Finney films, there is one in particular that I have seen a great many times. As regular readers of my blog or Twitter feed will know, I collect versions of A Christmas Carol, both books with different artwork and movie and audio adaptations. One of the highlights of our December viewing of the different versions of the film is Albert Finnay's Scrooge, a musical that I described on Twitter today as 'joyously bonkers'. 

This particular movie adaptation of the A Christmas Carol story takes the story we know and love and liberally sprinkles it with batshit craziness. Finney's portrayal, which I have no doubt influenced Harry Enfield's Old Gits characters, has everything and more. Starting with the isolated and mean Scrooge and suddenly becoming overly enthusiastic while seemingly pissed up on the milk of human kindness and joining in with a game of The Minister's Cat despite the fact that nobody could see him. The scene in which Scrooge joins in with the first version of 'Thank You Very Much' while his coffin is wheeled away is unfortunately and inappropriately what popped into my head when I found out that he had died today. For someone known as a dramatic actor, Albert Finney just let his hair down and threw himself into the role with a reckless abandon and for that I tip my hat to him on the sad occasion of his passing.

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If a history book was ever written about situation comedy, then Till Death Us Do Part will be brushed aside into the footnotes of 'it was acceptable back then' along such questionable shows as Mind Your Language, Curry & Chips, and the bar to which all olden days comedy racism is held, Love Thy Neighbour. None of these shows will ever achieve a mainstream repeat due to their content and rightly so, but in the case of Till Death the truth is that all those who condemn it have missed the point. While Alf Garnett was undeniably a racist character, Till Death Us Do Part was not written as a racist sitcom.

The programme was written as a satire of a certain attitude and was of the time. Garnett was of the generation that saw the mid-late 1950s wave of immigration from the West Indies and bore those opinions out of fear of the unknown. It is hard to believe nowadays that people actually thought that a black neighbour would have decreased the value of their house and that 'they' were all criminals. The viewer was not meant to laugh with Alf, they were meant to laugh at him, the true hero of the show was Alf's wife Elsie, played with understated brilliance by Dandy Nichols. What fell apart was that the character gained a following among the thick-necked knuckle draggers who held Alf up as a poster boy for their very real beliefs. Warren Mitchell once told a story of being stopped at a football match once by such a crowd who told him that they "love it when you have a go at them wogs" to which Mitchell replied "Actually I'm having a go at fucking idiots like you". 

I have seen a few episodes of Till Death and it does stand up alongside the so-called 'kitchen sink drama' of the 1950s, albeit a comic version. The portrayal of working class life in a run down council house during that era of the husband going to work, returning for his dinner before washing his face and going to the pub was as realistic as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Of course it makes sense for the BBC not to show it nowadays given the content but maybe there's room for a repeat run in light of recent events. The terrible events that took place in Paris yesterday have brought out the misguided racist opinion spewers who want to blame all Muslims for what happened and seem intent on filling social media with all manner of ill-informed cuntery. How poignant that Warren Mitchell should die on the day that the descendants of his most famous character are having a field day.

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Mandi was working today and I had intended to crack on with some work, including bringing the blog up to date and recording The Sunday Alternative. I woke up with a banging headache so went back to bed until noon before taking Jack out and making breakfast. Having previously made a long list of jobs to do today, I didn’t complete them due to my late start although there was a satisfactory amount of crossing out by the time I had decided to knock off for the day. It was mainly a day of catching up, nothing I can call proper work apart from the podcast, although all work related. In between this I also managed to do some laundry, washing up and cleaning the kitchen sides (especially as my fried eggs and bacon for breakfast had caused the most spectacular mess of the hob) and edited my blogs before uploading them a few at a time.

Despite today being a working day for me I still managed a little Twitter silliness based on today being International Robin Hood Day. There has been a lot of hype about this on social media, although typically for Nottingham it has been greeted with a certain level of apathy. The trouble with Nottingham is the fact that not enough people who live here care about the place and its history. I have met this issue head on with such campaigns as The Old General (nobody round the Hyson Green area has lived here long enough for it to be important to them) and Mushy Pea-Gate, something that affected everybody in the city. Robin Hood is a fictional affectation based on myth and legend but Nottingham has never pushed the character far enough, I agree that he should be used as a tourist pulling figurehead for Nottingham (as should Ayup the Duck but that’s another story) but it needs doing properly. First of all it needs to be admitted that Robin Hood wasn’t real and that there’s nothing wrong with using a fictional character. The best tourist attraction I can think of using to a better advantage is the film locations aspect, something that we hardly acknowledge. Why aren’t we operating an open topped bus tour around the settings for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Dark Knight Rises, Control, Once Upon A Time in the Midlands and a great deal more? There hasn’t been a single Robin Hood film ever made anywhere near here so the whole thing is a little insignificant.

I think my main source of amusement was the ambitious use of the word ‘international’. The Robin Hood legend has international appeal and it does bring overseas visitors to Nottingham to see the statue outside our ‘castle’ and to see the visitor centre in Sherwood Forest. However, if Robin Hood had been an American character then they would shout it from the rooftops and have an enormous theme park dedicated to him. So I took the ‘international’ and then I took the piss. By pretending to retweet messages from world leaders I was pulling what I thought was the perfect satire, especially when I put words in Barack Obama’s mouth about having a mushy pea stall on the White House lawn to honour Nottingham on this day. By the time I tweeted on behalf of Russell Crowe, including an apology for the dodgy accent used for his portrayal, I had grown bored of the fact that nobody was playing along and returned to my work.

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