Friday 14 November 2014

TALKING OF OLD ETONIANS.

30 comments:

Bungalow a Bill said...

Buggers can't be losers, as Private Eye had it. What a disgrace our judges have been down the years - remember that daft old fucker Denning refusing to conceive, as though it were settled law, that the police could have beaten confessions out of anybody. Peter Cook at his best here.

Caratacus said...

While not in the same class, of course, this offering from 'Not The Nine o'clock News' offers its own perspective on the judiciary;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VgwxKW0J6I

yardarm said...

I live in Thorpe`s old constituency of North Devon and at the time it was very rare for a political scandal to go public and public mention of homosexuality likewise so it was all a great laugh for us in the playground, hurling accusations of being a Jeremy, a Thorpe or a Norman at each other.

Thorpe had the jaw dropping impertinence to stand again in `79 and send his cuckolded wife/beard out to canvas. She turned up in the local pub to be told by one old boy ' no smoke without fire ' and promptly beat retreat. I still think he lost more because of the bumming rather than the murder plot.

Anonymous said...

Speaking as a Secondary Modern School product and a straight up and down meat and two veg bloke perhaps I can ask my learned friends here, who seem to know about these things, about the Eton uniform.

Does it come with a quick access back-flap in the trouser department?

Baron

call me ishmael said...

He was a bit variable, Cook, mr bungalow bill, I shrink from smut and I had no time for that Derek and Clive rubbish but his film, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, prefigured, forecast Mandelson's New Labour Orgy of Greed perfectly, almost too intelligent to be satire and we must thank him for, at least, those diligent campaigners at the back of the Eye, if not for the repulsive FatToryBoy, Hislop, of the PBC.

Denning was indeed extraordinary, even by the maverick standards of British judiciary. He is hailed by many as a liberal reformer - in such matters as married women's and co-habitees' property rights - yet in the matters of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, he was pure fascist. He did believe that the cops involved were bent but felt that to reveal such - by granting an appeal - would undermine the compliance and good behaviour of the ordinary citizen. And that would never do. And to be fair to him, he made that quite plain, Truth must never threaten Obedience.

call me ishmael said...

Bron Waugh stood against him, mr yardarm, coining the DogShooters tag for what were then the Liberals but have now turned into the enabling arm of Redneckery, first Thatch, the NonceLover, and now the Four Riders, Dave, Gideon, Hague and IDS.

Yes, I remember it, bit of a Jeremy, there was even a gaymen's magazine called Jeremy. I then felt a bit sorrry for him, his bunny rabbit love letters to Scott, his Farage-style country gent wardrobe, fobwatches and Trilbys but you can't go around behaving as he did. At least, you shouldn't.

call me ishmael said...

Always a laught, thar, mr caratacus. Judge Frank Blennerhasset once confided in me that he, ahem. remembered when people used to wear the manufacturers labels on the inside of their clothes, ahem, a hee-hee.

call me ishmael said...

I have read some modern gay fiction, mr baron, as well as much of me verge's classic literature transgresif and from these I have deduced that on occasion homosexual men can accomplish their variation of coitus in a face-to-face posture; those pretty-faced shimmering intellects at our public schools may, therefore, have little use for a seat of the pants fuck-flap, as it were.

Bungalow Bill said...

Cook was a victim of his brilliance and got bored by 24. The Private Eye founders, public school and mostly now dead, stood against the Toynbee liberal humanist priggishness though they were truly radical and bang in the tradition of English dissent. They are missed: Cook, Waugh, Wells, Rushton; Ingrams and Booker might now as well be dead. Instead, God save us, we have George Monbiot and Owen Jones. Don't laugh.

Bungalow Bill said...

Should have named Paul Foot.

Anonymous said...

Hee hee, good old Cook. He was great in "The Princess Bride" as well.
-richard

Anonymous said...

I still think the best put-down was Cook to Frost.

David Frost:- “Peter, I’m having a little dinner party on behalf of Prince Andrew and his bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson. I know they’d love to meet you – big fans. It’d be super if you could make it – Wednesday 12th.”
Peter Cook:-“Oh, hang on, I’ll just check my diary,” Cook replies. “On dear, I find I’m watching television that night."

Baron

Woman on a Raft said...

How about a contemplation, Mr Ishmael, on the subject of Uncle Tommism?

I understood what the character was about in the religious context, but it is sad that his name accurately attaches to the tendency of people to collude with oppression, even when it is their own oppression, in the secular context.

It is baffling - to me - that people do not seem able to see the pattern of offending which goes from the exploitation of the children in state care, through to those who are vulnerable and get picked up by grooming gangs, to the excusal of a convicted rapist who sent his friend out to trawl for him.

It's not just the police and judiciary - it is ordinary people who seem to be only too willing regard the victim as the one at fault, even when the police and CPS have for once managed to do their proper job.

I would value your thoughts on the subject as I am deeply confused by Uncle Tommism.

call me ishmael said...

It is all on the continuum of what you so memorably termed the Grooming of the Nation, mrs woar, and not only in the sexual commodifying of children and infants by GlobaCorp, GlobaPorn and via the ubiquitous ouija-pad, without which no child may be permitted to live but is also seen in the sleazy phenomenon of Nigel Poundland - a scumbag predator infinitely worse than those he decries who has successfully recruited to his greedy banner a host of those already victimised by MediaMinster yet desperate that theirs be the first mouth into which he defecates, he and his pigshit ignorant proto-Nazi goons. That really is self-victimisation, Yes, Nigel, the NHS must go, and the rich should pay less tax, and in the case of Poundland grooming, the Other takes the place of your collusive rape-victim-to-blame. Same in Scotland, of course, although I am hopeful that Gnasher Sturgeon's poisonous bigotry may yet cause her horse to bolt, throwing her on her nasty head, the separatists probably don't realise it but Gnasher was the biggest single cause of the Togetherists' victory.

Youwill be familiar with RD Laing's Identified Patient theory, in which as long as a family can point to, single-out one of its own as being the cause of what we would now call its disfunctionality it need never address its own collective malfunctioning. We are happy to so conspire, some of us, in this muddle-headed nonsense, happy to define rape victims as "she-was-asking-for-its;" happy to jail a child for life rather than recognise that we had made him ill.

We must return to this, this national self-abuse.

call me ishmael said...

I do hope that Frost is continuing his little dinner parties down there in Hell and that he is swiftly joined in Satan's dining room by Lord and FragrantLady Archer, our other famous dinner partyistes. Surfaced Without Trace, that's what his cleverer friends said about Frost.

Oh, but mr ishmael, he nailed that fellow, wotsisname, that president chap, Nixon....
No, he didn't. He didn't nail anyone. Like far too many Cantabrians he did grubby showbiz. And dinner parties.

SG said...

Gnasher Sturgeon. Ha! Ha! Ha! Just as well she's stupid otherwise she'd be truly dangerous...

http://dom-bescoby.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/couple-of-viz-cartoons-from-way-back.html

SG said...



On another matter altogether... I see there is a great deal of fuss regarding the attire of a certain scientist. Indeed his departure from the obligatory white coat seems to have caused offence in certain quarters. Whilst attention was focused on the shirt, which I believe to be of the short sleeved variety, the heavily tatooed forearms also surely invite scrutiny and, indeed, challenge. However, he is an astrophysicist. Perhaps this was merely an homage to Ray Bradbury's 'Illustrated Man'? That being the case I feel that he should be exonerated.

call me ishmael said...

I don't care about him. Or Doctor Monica. Mr Bradbury, him gone. Now the New People think that science fiction is that old tart Patrick Stewart, queening around a cardboard set, Making it So; that science is Brian Cox, silhoutted on a mountain top, simpering.

DtP said...

May be of interest:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/arts-feature/9366992/sylvie-guillem-interview-a-lot-of-people-hated-me-bon-you-cant-please-everybody/

Anonymous said...

Mrs WOAR's comment reminds me of the grim amusement I derived from the John Terry/Anton Ferdinand squabble. The words "fucking black cunt" may have amounted to a racially aggravated public order offence; "fucking cunt" alone would have led to nothing much at all. Racism an abomination in the eyes of the law; misogny not so much. (That it's a stupid, statist Blairite horror of a law is moot, as is the hilarious idea that footballers are role-models. Who in their right mind models themselves on anybody else, anyway?)

verge.//

SG said...

Yeah - I'm with you on the matter of science fiction and, for that matter, science Mr I. I can't watch anything with Cox in it - I can't help but feel that they (Cox et al) are the programme rather than the subject matter itself. Also just about everybody seems to be a Professor these days. They seem to hand out 'Chairs' like, well, chairs at a village hall meeting.

Carlo said...

It's surprising just how little is acceptable these days.... to anyone.

call me ishmael said...

Not necessarily a bad thing, mr carlo; much is better than it has ever been, why not expose and damn the fatuous and unwholesome?

mr dick the prick's recommendation of the Guillame article is a case in point; she merits our attention not just for her art but for her person, retiring when much lesser talents would milk their empty celebrity for another three decades - Mick'n'Keef, Dr Bob Dylan of the White House, all those ghastly writers of lit-er-a-ture, that smarmy git, Jacobson, just for instance, why don't they do something useful before they die, Amis, Rushdie, that suicide merchant, wotsisfuckingname, writes endless Discworld books, fucking whining cunt.

It is unsurprising how much complaint there is, the surprise is that there is so little.

call me ishmael said...

I google-imaged him, Cox, mr sg, for something else, to see if I was right and there are many views of him in silhoutte on mountain tops, being amazed. But if you wish to be wholly deterred by a presenter then Neil Oliver takes some beating, he must've been choppered onto every mountain peak in the country, where he tosses his rockstar locks before grunting, in his teeth-gritted Jockish, some historical solecism or other, and then being amazed. I think I am correct in saying that Cox and Oliver are products of the PBC, homo-erotically obsessed, when not promoting paedophiles, like Savile and thieves like Thompson.

call me ishmael said...

It's Blair's Holocaust Day, mr verge, which more enrages me, that and his knighting of Branson.

Doug Shoulders said...

History and science on the BBC is all bollocks. I caught a part of some shit documentary where a professor of something declared that evolution was caused by tidal movement. They flew him and his fluffers out to some paradise setting whereupon he proceeded to demonstrate his theory. At that point it was no longer a theory but God’s honest truth.
“There you go” “That’s it” “The beginning of life on earth”.
The Neil Oliver geezer. I never watch. All so depressing..British history of the small folk.
I believe David Bellamy was sacked for not towing the line on the BBC evolution is God edict.

jgm2 said...

Mr Doug,

Naaah. David Bellamy got his P45 for daring to question the 'settled science' of the global warming 'climate scientists' aka your local polytechnic's geography department.

Doug Shoulders said...

Ah.. yes Mr jgm2 It was the other crock of horseshit that he questioned.

He never seemed to fit in there…at the PBC.

mongoose said...

I do not think, Mr Ishmael, that we can blame the fringe parties. It is not their fault that a fringe-seeking section of the electorate exists. The reason that these parties find fertile soil is that the mainstream parties have allowed it to them. If the main parties did not lie and cheat, talk droid soundbite bollocks, and generally behave as they do, it would be a much harder game for Sturgeon or Farage. OK, their voters will be disappointed in due course but to their angry eyes it cannot be worse than what they have already.

I think that the rise of the professional politician as a class itself rather than individuals - Cameron as much as Milliweasel - offers no purchase for a natural constituency to cling onto. Why would a working class person vote for a generational North London droid like Dead Ed? Why would a shire-based yeoman or Grantham grocer vote for Cameron? Their problems are not the same - Cameron's voters can flee to UKIP, Ed's don't flee as much - they'll just not vote - but the effect is the same. Except of course that with the death of the DogShooters, the hammer will fall more heavily on Labour. Labour should have been able to haul in all of those disgruntled coalition votes and they will get almost none of them.

Cameron's masterstroke is yet to come - and will be presented as weakness. A simple accommodation with UKIP to let them get half-a-dozen or so seats and a continued pledge on an EU referendum - which he will not lose - and it is over. It is the price he has to pay for keeeping Scotland. Will Farage have the wit to take his victory and his vote or will he stupidly look for his SDP-like split moment and cock the whole job up? Either way the the Tories win big in 2020.

call me ishmael said...

There is an alternative, albeit in the same vein, mr mongoose, one we shall address presently.