No Laughing Matter...

You will have noticed - it has not indeed passed without comment - that there has been less here of late of tales of local jollity or peculiarity. Remote now seem the days of Patrick the absconder or feasting on badger pate and so forth. Some may argue - neighbouring voices not a few - that too much of a touch of Vicar of Dibley was never a good thing. Others, of a more bloodthirsty mind, have questioned whether H herself has been butchered in the Rectory cellar, it being so long since last she appeared in person here. (There is a point, perhaps, to the former thought, though none whatsoever I aver to the latter! H has merely been keeping her head well down since that unfortunate run in with the Colonel [see much previous].)

There was a change of note it is true and I can place the time and the occasion. It was on the news of the disappearance of sweet Madeleine McCann. That was then a shock and has not become the less with the passing of time or the bizarre twists to the tale. Above all, leaving utterly aside any question of who did what, she is still missing; possibly long while dead, possibly still long suffering some terrible torment. In either fate my God and my prayers remain close with her.

That is a shadow colouring all. It is, one may say, but one further loss, just one more crime, in a lost world. And it is not a symbol of anything - it is too wretchedly real to be anyone's or anything's symbol - but only a terrible thing in itself.

There are though symbolic connections in other forms and ways. We learn today that a thirteen year old boy has been charged with the murder of a man in Birkenhead, the victim subjected to - we are told in the news - a random and vicious beating at a Bonfire Night's party. Attacked with burning wood plucked from the fire, knocked senseless until - whether dead or yet, more horrid, still alive - his body is thrown on the fire to be found in the embers the next morning. And the whole thing - of course these days - recorded on someone's mobile phone.

I was talking to E about this today as we drove her to school. I said how it reminded me so terribly of the world of 'A Clockwork Orange'. She agreed that there could be hardly any harsher, more ghastly, validation of Burgess's and Kubrick's vision of a dystopic society in which UV - 'ultra violence' - was the playful norm. For they did 'play' at violence in the film and in the book - it was all a big game and a laugh to the Droogies - and that playfulness made the story all the more compellingly repellent.

And then a moment later - by symbolic happenstance - Malcolm McDowell was on the wireless talking about the film then and now, saying people who first saw the film some thirty or more years ago would leave the cinema physically wretching from what they had seen, repulsed and horrified, but that nowadays the audience would rock with laughter for they 'got' the dark humour of the piece.

He may be right that modern viewers are more cinematically literate, that they have the cultural sophistication to garner laughs in dark places. Possibly so, but I would fear that should this film ever now play in a Birkenhead cinema the laughter would be from simple, brutal enjoyment of the vicious violence, not some comedic distancing from it.

There was another great old film you may recall: 'The Devil Rides Out'. He does indeed. No laughing matter.