How Henry Blofeld almost played for England

Earlier this month, legendary cricket commentator Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld – he of the plummy upper-class voice and penchant for counting pigeons and buses – retired from Test Match Special at the age of 77. After the Test match on which he had been commentating ended a short while later, he did a lap of honour of the ground and was given a standing ovation by the spectators. In an age in which a pre-requisite of sports commentary would appear to be having excelled at the highest level of the sport in question, it’s unlikely that we’ll see his like again. It is also highly unlikely that we will ever witness a septuagenarian dressed in a mint-green blazer and scarlet trousers doing a lap of honour in front of an adoring crowd ever again, even at Lord’s.

His father, as is reasonably well-known, provided the name of one of the great villains of twentieth-century fiction; Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was at Eton with Blofeld senior and that is believed to be where he got Ernst Blofeld’s surname from.

But did you know that Henry Blofeld almost played Test cricket for England? 

The records show that he was a promising schoolboy cricketer (he even hit a century at Lord’s, for the Public Schools against the Combined Services) but due to a road traffic accident in his teens – he was hit by a bus while riding his bike – a career as a cricketer was a non-starter. Nevertheless, he did play in 17 first-class matches, most of them for Cambridge University (in typically self-deprecating fashion, he has described himself as “an opening batsman of sorts … the worst Blue awarded since the war”) as well as turning out for his native Norfolk in Minor Counties cricket in the late Fifties and early-to-mid Sixties.

Career-wise, he spent a few years in a merchant bank before going into sports journalism, and by 1963 he was reporting on cricket for The Guardian. It was in this capacity that he went to India to cover England’s 1963-64 tour.

That was one of those sub-continental tours where several of the visiting side were laid low due to either gastric problems or injury in the warm-up games, to the point that by 20^th January 1964, the eve of the of the second Test at Bombay, the England squad had just ten fit players (including, somewhat unhelpfully, both wicket-keepers). Wisden would later describe the situation as a “hospital background”. With no chance of anyone flying out from back home at such short notice to make up the numbers – the mid-Sixties were modern but not that modern – the man from The Guardian was told by the England manager David Clark that the pair of them were the only available options, and as Blowers was the younger man by two decades he would most likely get the call-up.

“I replied I would certainly play if needed,” Blowers later recalled, “but if I scored 50 or upwards in either innings I was damned if I would stand down for the Calcutta Test ... I suspect that David’s reply was unprintable.” He was told to get a good night’s sleep, just in case, but as the enormity of his situation sunk in he barely slept.

The following morning, it turned out that his batting services would not be needed; England, in this case, did not expect. But only just. One of the sick, vice-captain Mickey Stewart (Alec Stewart’s dad) discharged himself from hospital and declared himself to be fit to play even though he clearly wasn’t. Thus did “the oddest England side ever to have played an official Test” (according to the reporter from the Daily Telegraph) take to the field, with just ten fit players and a tail-end that started with the number six batsman (Middlesex’s J.S.E. Price, who usually batted at eleven, would end up going in at number eight). India won the toss and elected to bat first, and by tea on the first day Stewart was back in hospital and would play no further part in the match; Kripal Singh, the hosts’ twelfth man, was called upon to field for the visitors. They were expected to lose, but curiously India failed to push home their obvious advantage and the match ended in a draw.

For the third Test, help from home arrived in the form of Colin Cowdrey, who had not been selected in the first place because he’d still been recovering from having his arm broken while batting against the West Indies at Lord’s the previous summer. He would score centuries in the third and fourth Tests. The five-Test series ended in a draw, with neither side winning any of them.

Blowers, meanwhile, continued to work in print journalism until 1972, when he joined the TMS team.

Endeavour (the fourth series)

What with the excitement over the new series of Sherlock earlier this year, I criminally managed to overlook the latest series of Endeavour. Both shows had their fourth series on the telly back in January, and for what it’s worth some of the episodes of said series were broadcast on the same nights, and while the BBC’s modern-day reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes is the one that’s been getting all the attention (as well as more viewers) it has to be said that ITV’s depiction of a young Endeavour Morse as a junior police officer in Sixties Oxford is one of the best things on television.

[At this point, a spoiler alert is probably in order; if for some reason you’ve not yet seen the fourth series of Endeavour, please be advised that this blog-post contains information that you might not want to look at just yet. You have been warned.]

As well as making use of the central characters’ first names (even though Morse’s one in particular is hardly ever used, to the point where most of his colleagues don’t even know what it is), both shows take a format consisting of short series of long episodes (ninety-minute ones in both cases). In terms of British crime drama, this was a format pioneered, back in the late Eighties, by Inspector Morse and subsequently followed by the likes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Jonathan Creek and many others. Sherlock started back in 2010 and now has thirteen episodes under its belt, while Endeavour began in 2012 with a one-off pilot and is now seventeen episodes old. Sherlock is full of references to the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and subsequent adaptations, while Endeavour’s focus of reference is the enormously popular original series, Inspector Morse, which was based on the novels by Colin Dexter and ran from 1987 to 2000. Both centre around gentleman-detectives, socially awkward but very clever individuals who can infuriate others as well as catch the criminals. Both are very well-acted – in terms of the support cast as well as the leads. Yet, for all the fuss about Sherlock, I’m finding myself preferring the more understated Endeavour. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this. When I was a teenager I read and greatly enjoyed Conan Doyle before I discovered Colin Dexter, but when I read the latter I found Morse – the beer-drinking opera buff who was allowed to get it wrong and have romantic feelings about the women he encountered while investigating his cases (however unrequited they may have been) to be a much more rounded, human and in his own way likeable individual than the emotionally cold, cocaine-taking Holmes.

A recap of Endeavour is perhaps in order. The third series, which aired last year, skipped over an immediate follow-up to the second series which ended with Morse’s mentor Fred Thursday getting shot and Morse himself getting arrested; it was instead briefly explained that the former survived, the latter spent a month or so in prison before being released without charge and the institutional corruption they’d uncovered got brushed under the carpet. Instead, writer Russell Lewis used the third series to experiment with pastiches of The Great Gatsby (with a disillusioned Morse in the Nick Carraway role), Dirty Harry (all that running around between phone-boxes) and Jaws (although, what with Oxfordshire being landlocked, the man-eating animal at large was a tiger rather than a shark) which were much more enjoyable than they had any right to be. A minor character in the tiger episode happened to be the father of James Hathaway, the sergeant in that other Inspector Morse spin-off, Lewis. The last episode was dominated by a bank robbery which went wrong; Morse and Thursday’s daughter Joan were among those taken hostage in the bank. On borrowed time in all sorts of ways, Thursday literally coughed up the bullet that had been in his lung since the end of the second series (in the plausibility stakes, that’s right up there with a man-eating tiger on the loose in the Thames Valley, but it didn’t seem to matter as much as it should’ve done) before tooling up and storming the building, leading to a tense denouement in which he opted to arrest rather than kill the villain (whose eventual funeral is depicted at the start of the Inspector Morse episode where Morse and Lewis go to Australia). Traumatised by those events, Joan, who’d been making eyes at an oblivious Morse even though she clearly had a thing for bad boys, left Oxford.

In a departure from the previously-established format, the fourth series was set mere weeks after the third rather than the following year, so in the Endeavour universe it’s still 1967. This allowed Endeavour to fully explore the impact of Joan’s disappearance on her family (young women leaving home without telling their parents where they were going was a common enough feature of the time to inspire one of the songs on the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album, released in 1967); being of the stoical, buttoned-up generation that came of age in the Second World War, Fred and Win don’t handle things well as their once-happy family falls apart. Morse, having belatedly realised his own feelings for Joan, is badly affected too but he’s also not the type to go in for heart-to-heart discussions about said feelings, and Joan’s eventual return doesn’t really resolve this by any means. We viewers know, though, that for Morse and Joan there won’t be a happy-ever-after, for like many a great literary detective Morse is fated to be unlucky in love (and besides, she doesn’t even know his first name while he can’t bring himself to address her by hers even when he’s proposing to her).

Another story arc is the ongoing development of Morse’s simmering resentment against the powers-that-be, be it via his ongoing alienation from the conformist careerist Jim Strange (his future boss) or his anger over his missing sergeant’s exam paper (he, and everyone else, was convinced that he’d aced it, but his paper mysteriously got lost in circumstances that one assumes have a lot to do with his having got on the wrong side of those in high places) which resulted in a will-he-leave-Oxford sub-plot in which he was offered (via Strange, interestingly) a guaranteed promotion and pay-rise in return for transferring to a police unit in London. We viewers know that Morse will stay in Oxford (and not marry Joan Thursday or anyone else); although Shaun Evans could never be accused of merely impersonation John Thaw, it is however important for there to be markers for the viewer to see how this intellectual junior officer becomes the gruff, curmudgeonly DCI we all know and remember from the old show. But, what with that show having run its course some seventeen years ago, there may well be viewers of Endeavour who have no knowledge of what the young Morse will become (although I doubt that; as Inspector Morse gets regularly repeated on ITV3 it wouldn’t be hard for viewers who’ve been drawn to Endeavour with no prior knowledge of the original series to watch the late, great John Thaw as the older Morse).

Did I say the acting was first-rate? Shaun Evans as the young Morse and Roger Allam as Fred Thursday are both superb in their respective roles and deserve all the praise they can get. The support cast does a thoroughly good job too, notably Abigail Thaw as the journalist (who deserves better than to be referred to as John Thaw’s daughter every time her being in Endeavour is mentioned), James Bradshaw as the pathologist (getting the best lines and clearly enjoying himself more than he ever did in The Grimleys) and Dakota Blue Richards as WPC Trewlove. Some minor characters have developed a lot as the show has progressed, not just Joan Thursday (Sara Vickers is brilliant in her scenes with Shaun Evans) but also the straight-laced, old-colonial Chief Superintendent Bright who has become a more rounded character than the usual bewildered police chief trying to keep his detectives in order (which is what he was, more or less, in the first two series). He’s played by Anton Lesser, a solid character actor who’s been in a lot of good stuff in recent years – he was also the boss in that sadly short-lived BBC series The Hour, Sir Thomas More in Wolf Hall and Fagin in Dickensian, and he’s really good in Endeavour (in which he shot the man-eating tiger, and how many actors can say they’ve played a character who’s done that?).

The fourth series saw an emphasis on aspects of the Sixties which moved more towards the popular perceptions of the decade than has hitherto been the case in Endeavour. The ‘white heat of technology’ (previously glimpsed at in the first-series episode set in the armaments factory) was represented by a very big computer designed by some Oxford boffins to beat a visiting professor from the Soviet Union at chess (although Morse also used it to find someone’s address) and a nuclear power-station (the focus of the climax in the last episode). At a local hospital, some Carry On-style goings-on between a doctor and a student nurse soon gave way to something much more sinister. The Cold War put in an appearance, what with the Russian professor and references to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of nuclear fall-out in the episode with the power-station. Morse, we learned, can speak Russian which I don’t think ever came up in the original series. 

Then, of course, there was the culture clash of the second episode as pop music interrupted the classical music which Morse prefers. A caricature of Mary Whitehouse locked horns with the Wildwood, a rock band which was a fictional composite of various real-life outfits (there were nods to, among others, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and early Pink Floyd). Both were of interest to the Oxford City Police’s finest – the former had been receiving death threats while the latter popped up on the police radar when some dope was found in a dressing-room they’d used, but they were later connected to a dead builder who’d become more involved with them and their groupies than anyone was prepared to admit to. The uptight Morse – seen as an oddity by the band members, what with his being a young man in a suit – was shocked by a gem of a revelation from Thursday about smoking dope during the North African campaign. The Mary Whitehouse character’s daughter – a smoker and a vodka-drinker behind her mother’s back – declared her love for Morse (he, being pre-occupied with Joan, didn’t reciprocate) and then fell out with her bigoted, domineering mother. The band’s manager’s alibi fell apart when it was revealed that the Kinks were banned from playing in the USA, so he couldn’t have been on the phone to someone in New York discussing their forthcoming tour (nice try, thinking the police wouldn’t know that; good thing WPC Trewlove’s got her finger on the cultural pulse). Bright and Thursday, their status as men from a bygone age emphasised more than ever in this episode, got to discuss the changing times and the nature of hatred. The pop music, brilliantly, was all done specially for the show by the people normally responsible for the classical music in Endeavour. The highlight of that episode, though, had to be the bit when Morse was forced to face his inner demons when he got drugged and started hallucinating (no Sherlock-style mind-palace for him, alas, although in Morse’s case it would probably be more of a mind-pub). 

The series concluded with an investigation into the disappearance of an academic in a rural village which seemed at first glance to be going the way of The Wicker Man (not a good setting for an earnest and determined copper) although in the event the villagers’ neo-paganism was a red herring; it was actually good old-fashioned jealousy that did for the academic, and in any case the nearby nuclear power-station was where the action really was. It was as a result of the finale in the power-station that Morse finally got his promotion – Hornblower-style, on the basis of action above and beyond the normal call of duty rather than by way of the exam – and he and Thursday both got medals, leading to a fine cine-footage-style shot of Fred and Win smiling outside Buckingham Palace. Does a well-deserved retirement now beckon for the character who’s been played so well by Roger Allam? With Morse now a Detective Sergeant, maybe it’s time for DI McNutt, named as Morse’s old boss in the original TV series, to enter the stage – although maybe not, as it’s already been announced that Roger Allam will be in the fifth series which is in the pipeline. There were a few questions that viewers might raise (the Thursdays’ son not being mentioned at all amid the furore of Joan’s disappearance, the Wildwood’s sleazy manager not being arrested for perverting the course of justice, Bright’s wife not visiting him in hospital, the lack of follow-up regarding the discovery of a dead Scottish hit-man in the boot of a car, how the GPO was able to replace or repair Morse’s phone so quickly after he threw it against the wall), but all in all I found the fourth series of Endeavour to be thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable viewing (once I finally got round to viewing it) and I am now looking forward to the next series. In the meantime, I might as well work my way through some old Inspector Morse episodes via the ITV Hub.

This year being thirty years since Inspector Morse first aired, there were nods a-plenty to the original show and it was fun trying to spot those in addition to trying to work out who the murderer was. I once again managed to miss Colin Dexter’s background appearances, but then I’ve always had as much success at spotting those as I have had solving cryptic crossword clues (in any case, author-spotting has been much harder this time around as the old boy’s now 86 and doesn’t appear in person any more). What with getting kidnapped by one of Oxford’s many serial killers and sneaking Morse into the power-station, Abigail Thaw’s character had more to do this time (I’d like to think that that was because Russell Lewis realised he was under-using such a good actress), and her father’s second wife Sheila Hancock made a much-publicised appearance as the Tarot-reading old lady in the last episode. There was a reference to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (the first film that John Thaw starred in), while I presume that the unnamed London unit which offered Morse a job was a nod to The Sweeney. I took a reference to what someone was ‘last seen wearing’ as evidence that they were attempting to do something silly like crow-barring all of the Morse novel titles into the dialogue in some way, although this turned out not to be the case (Thursday did mention Cain but not any daughters he many have had, and no-one spoke about a jewel that had been theirs or death having recently become their neighbour). That said, when Bright was hospitalised it was with a bleeding stomach ulcer, the same as what Morse had in The Wench Is Dead (both the novel and the TV adaptation). Actors who’d previous been in either Inspector Morse, Lewis or both were in evidence (the obvious one – Roger Allam – aside, there was among others James Laurenson, who’d been in the first-ever episode of Inspector Morse and who now played the wheelchair-bound professor in the computer episode). As with Sherlock, even the most trivial things are deliberately placed, such as lines and sub-plots which refer to minor characters from Inspector Morse (including Susan, the woman who Morse fell in love with as a student), music (always an important aspect of anything Morse-related), the made-up yet very plausible Oxford college names and all sorts of little puzzles; my favourite (now that it has been pointed out to me) is the name of the Abigail Thaw character, Dorothea Frazil – the word ‘frazil’ means ice crystals, so ‘D. Frazil’ means de-ice or, of course, thaw.

The latest series of Sherlock was good, after a mediocre start. But Endeavour is better.

The modern history books: Spies, conspiracies and Britain in the early Sixties

We live in an age where there’s a lot of popular history about, and some of it manages to combine a high standard of writing with excellent historical research. Here are three of the best that I’ve enjoyed reading recently:

Popping up on TV as well as in print, Dominic Sandbrook is one of those historians who’s pretty good on revisionism – reinterpreting historical facts by looking at the evidence from a different perspective and coming up with something that challenges the accepted historical view of historical events; the old A.J.P. Taylor maxim of nothing being inevitable until it happens is very much Sandbrook’s guiding principle, it seems. In the first of his four books on recent British history, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, he strikes a fine balance between the political, the economic and the cultural, looking below the surface of events. The travails of Harold Macmillan’s various Chancellors (Reggie Maudling strikes me as being one of the most amusing people ever to have held that particular post) are juxtaposed with sections on movies, books (Ian Fleming of course, but also Kingsley Amis and long-forgotten types like Colin Wilson), television (this was the time when ITV started and the BBC entered one of its most creative periods), moral panic in the newspapers over immigration and the sexual behaviour of teenagers (plus ca change…), the early Sixties satire boom and pop music; plenty of stuff in that last bit on Lonnie Donegan, Billy Fury and Acker Bilk (whose presence is explained by the notion that in early 1962 there were those who thought that trad jazz would be the defining sound of the Sixties) before we get to the Beatles (where Sandbrook’s revisionism is clearly shown, with there being nothing inevitable about Beatlemania, the last remark on which goes to Ted Heath of all people – as Trade Secretary at the time, he remarked that the demand for Beatles-style jackets in late 1963 single-handedly saved Britain’s corduroy industry). It’s a long book (738 pages, not including the footnotes) but it’s well worth persevering with. The set-piece chapter is the one on the Profumo scandal – which has quite the build-up by being referenced or alluded to in previous chapters before, following an account of the Vassall scandal, it breaks out in a surprisingly low-key fashion (the central point, a junior minister’s affair with a call-girl, lasted just a few weeks) before becoming something that “might have been scripted to encompass a wide range of sensitive issues of the early sixties: espionage and subversion, sexual wantonness, unchecked materialism, the supposed exoticism and criminality of immigrant communities and the nepotism and ineptitude of the Conservative government ... it touched on public and private anxieties that had already been festering for years.” Interesting times, indeed, and fascinatingly chronicled here.

History of a somewhat different nature is covered by David Aaronovitch in his Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped Modern History. If we really do live in a conspiracy-obsessed age – and reactions to recent events both here and in the United States have presented little evidence to the contrary – then perhaps a look at conspiracy theories of the past, the truth behind them and why so many are willing to believe them (the need for a certain type of narrative is a key part of this) is no bad thing. Thus, we have a chapter on the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document which, despite being exposed as a forgery in 1921, did much to fuel anti-Semitism in the twentieth century and is still doing the rounds in the Middle East) and a somewhat lighter chapter on the pseudo-history concerning the Priory of Sion myth (amusingly entitled ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit’). Showing that conspiracy repeats itself, there are links made between the conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, and also (exploring a particularly British vein here) between the deaths of Hilda Murrell and David Kelly. Personally, I’d’ve liked to have seen what Aaronovitch might have to say about the various conspiracy theories surrounding Harold Wilson, but what makes this book so relevant for readers today is the American stuff. When Aaronovitch turns his attention Stateside, there are chapters on conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbour, various Clinton-related cover-ups, the 9/11 ‘truthers’ and the Obama ‘birthers’; those last two show how belief in conspiracy theories has risen with the advent of the Internet (“Cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally invented individuals have grown up … the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd”). As this book was published in 2010, there’s nothing about Donald Trump’s involvement in the ‘birther’ nonsense, although if Aaronovitch is going to do a second edition he’d probably need to include a whole chapter (maybe more), building on the post-Internet rise in the popularity of conspiracy theories, about the uses of conspiracy theories as political weapons in this year’s Presidential election. This book is intelligently written and hugely enjoyable, and a good one to have read before the next time someone brings up the subject of the ‘truth’ about, say, 9/11 or the pseudo-history behind The Da Vinci Code.

Conspiracy of a real rather than a theoretical sort abounds in A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, the tale of how Kim Philby betrayed, well, just about everyone. Ben Macintyre – an author of espionage-related stuff who I have read before (his Agent Zigzag is excellent) – is on good form here dealing with the story of perhaps the most notorious traitor in British history, aided by being able to access recently-declassified government files and previously unseen private papers. This isn’t a straight biography of Philby, though (there have been plenty of those); this one tells the story of British and American intelligence in the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War, focussing in particular on the friendship between Philby and two of his closest associates, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton of the OSS, and later the CIA. Elliott was a very good friend of Philby – or so he thought; they were of a similar background (public school, Cambridge, made their names in intelligence during the Second World War) and he shared everything he knew with him at a time when people who worked for the secret service were very tight-lipped outside of it, but frequently got drunk and let slip all sorts of interesting information when socialising with colleagues (something of which Philby took full advantage). After the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, which ruined Philby’s intelligence career by virtue of his closeness to the former rather than any concrete evidence, Elliott was instrumental in maintaining Philby’s innocence – blackening the reputation of a particularly troublesome MP who used Parliamentary privilege to ask some questions that some would rather have remained unasked – while trying to bring him back into the fold (he eventually succeeded in having him appointed as an agent under journalistic cover in Beirut, from where Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963). Elliott was also involved in the Crabb fiasco of 1956, the story of which is told here (one wonders how he was able to keep his job after that one, which went against the explicit orders of the Prime Minister). He was deeply affected by Philby’s betrayal, as was Angleton, although the effect on the latter was perhaps more ruinous for the intelligence community; having trusted Philby implicitly, Angleton switched to not trusting anyone and, having convinced himself that there was a mole in the CIA, wasted much time and resources as well as resorting to illegal methods in the chasing of this phantom, to the extent – irony of ironies – that some came to believe that Angleton himself was a KGB mole, charged with causing as much damage to the running of the CIA as possible. It all, it seems, went back to Philby. As retold by Macintyre, this is a truly irresistible read for anyone who, like me, has a penchant for spy fiction.

Football and nostalgia

This Saturday, it will be fifty years since England won the World Cup. Funny really; that final took place just over twelve years before I was born but I can tell you more about it than a lot of games that I’ve actually seen. Odd, too, that so much attention is being devoted to looking fifty years back into the past at a time when our present-day national side has been doing so monumentally badly. But maybe that’s the point; if dwelling on the present – or rather, the recent past given that that infamous defeat at the hands of Iceland was over a month ago – is just depressing, why not opt for wallowing in history, or rather history as remembered in the warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia?

Why do we English (and I include myself in this, for the only England football shirt I own is a replica of the red, heavy cotton one as worn for that game) look back so fondly to 1966? Simple – it is the only time our national side won, well, anything of note, and football fans are a notoriously nostalgic lot. It’s ubiquitous at club level; every club has its own specific time-period that its supporters fondly look back upon – there’s a whole sub-culture that includes but is by no means limited to retro shirts, long-retired pros revered by grown men who saw them play years ago and various publications (of which more shortly). Internationally I suppose that it is the same with other countries. I have, for example, met Hungarians, some of them my own age, who’ve been more than happy to remind me about what happened when Puskas and co. turned up at Wembley in ’53.

With unusually good timing, I have recently been reading a book called 4-2 by the film critic David Thomson; published in 1996, it is to all intents and purposes a blow-by-blow account of that famous final, interspersed with various diversion which touch on snippets of autobiography and the exploration of themes such as the nature of football fandom, the tradition of the English as ‘good losers’ and the contrast between living in a (football-induced) dream and getting on with life – shades, perhaps, of Fever Pitch here which is somewhat appropriate as it came out at the height of the mid-Nineties football literature boom. It’s an engrossing read, a pretty good football book (albeit one with the odd diversion onto certain American sports which perhaps should have been edited out) which I am surprised I’ve only just encountered, with the best part (in my opinion) being the seven-page chapter on Geoff Hurst’s second goal – you know the one I mean, don’t you?

4-2 was originally published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of that World Cup win, meaning that it first hit the bookshops just before the 1996 European Championship started. There was plenty of nostalgia about 1966 back then, and there is now a growing sense of football-related nostalgia about Euro 96, twenty years on. What with England having only ever won one major international football tournament, failed campaigns – not the bad ones like Euro 2016 and the World Cup two years ago, but the ones where England were genuinely in with a shout of getting to the final – are also being celebrated (which, I suppose, is why Pete Davies’s excellent book All Played Out, published shortly after the 1990 World Cup, got made into the documentary film One Night in Turin six years ago).

Earlier this year, a book called When Football Came Home by Michael Gibbons was published; it tells the story (with the benefit of twenty years-worth of hindsight) of Euro 96 from an English viewpoint. It’s a fascinating read even for those of us who think we remember it all (we don’t; memory can sometimes play strange tricks, especially where football is concerned) although the title, a play on the chant from the Baddiel & Skinner song, is hardly original (the legendary Des Lynam used it for a BBC doco on the tournament several months after it took place).

Gibbons resolutely refuses to buy into the rose-tinted view that England were brilliant – they weren’t; a few sublime moments (the bits everyone remembers) obscured what was basically an OK side that had been unlucky not to qualify for the 1994 World Cup but which, come 1996, had the benefit of home advantage. The high point of England’s Euro 96 campaign, the 4-1 win over the Dutch – a match that was analysed in some detail in Jonathan Wilson’s superb book The Anatomy of England six years ago – is summarised thus: “In football the result is sacrosanct, and can drench any performance with a tin of industrial gloss. The received wisdom that has developed since the 4-1 – that England battered the Netherlands in open play – is spurious … the Netherlands had enjoyed more shots, more corners and more possession than their opponents … England didn’t outplay the Dutch, but they did outscore them.” Overall, Gibbons has done a great job in a book which doesn’t flinch from portraying the tournament as the mediocre, poorly-attended (Wembley aside) affair that it really was; even the ugly side of Euro 96, such as the accompanying violence and the ever-odious behaviour of Piers Morgan, gets an airing here.

As if there wasn’t enough footballing nostalgia in the air already, I have contributed something to it myself – although my latest published article is not about 1966 or even 1996, and it doesn’t concern England. There is a link with the 1966 World Cup, but only in passing – Eusebio, the highest scorer in that tournament, features in this story. It is the story of how the unfancied Toronto Metros-Croatia managed, against the odds, to win the North American Soccer League forty years ago this summer. My interest in football on the other side of the Atlantic was aroused when I found out that Toronto has its own MLS team, and I was intrigued to find that Toronto’s footballing history goes back way before Toronto FC joined said league in 2007. My retelling of the story of Toronto’s forgotten footballing triumph – and it’s a fascinating underdog story involving an ageing star, a player walk-out and a training-ground bust-up among other things – can be read in the latest edition of the retro football magazine Backpass. No prizes for guessing what the main focus is in the rest of the magazine...

The literary James Bond: Solo and Moonraker

Much though I like James Bond – the books as well as the films – I don’t tend to go for the ‘continuation’ novels much. These are the ones that have been written by authors who aren’t Ian Fleming and there have been a lot of them; a parade of thrillers of varying quality where the hero happens to be a British secret agent by the name of James Bond, agent 007, licenced to kill, etc. Some, like the films, are set in the present day (present day when the book in question was written, at any rate) while others are set within the character timeline as laid out by Fleming (Fifties, early Sixties); the latter are usually better. The people who make the Bond films have never gone for adapting one of the continuation novels for the big screen.

That said, my ears pricked up recently when I heard that Anthony Horowitz had written a Bond novel; I rather liked what he did with Sherlock Holmes so I will get round to reading Trigger Mortis at some point. This was at the back of my mind when I came across a copy of Solo by William Boyd in the library and so I thought I’d give that a go. I’ve had Boyd recommended to me several times and while I doubt the recommenders had his Bond novel in mind, that’s what I went for.

(By the way, this contains spoilers – regarding Moonraker (the novel) as well as Solo. You have been warned.)

Boyd kicks off with a foreword that states that he’s sticking with the chronology of Bond’s ‘life’ as laid out in You Only Live Twice, the last novel to be published when Fleming was still alive and the one which included an obituary of Bond (missing presumed dead following a mission to Japan). This dates Bond to having been born in 1924 (although there is apparently some debate among ‘Bondologists’ regarding the literary character’s precise age as Fleming did change the timelines a bit over the course of his twelve novels and two collections of short stories), and it’s with this in mind that Solo kicks off with some rare war reminiscences on the part of 007 before introducing Bond in 1969 on his 45^th birthday.

After an evening of dining, drinking and mild flirtation, Bond test-drives a new car (a Jensen FF; nice) and is given a new mission – there’s a civil war going on in the West African state of Zanzarim (a thinly-disguised version of the Biafran War in Nigeria; Boyd himself grew up in West Africa which must have helped with the setting). Quite simply, M wants Bond to go there posing as a journalist and take out the main rebel leader. It doesn’t entirely go according to plan (although the rebels are nonetheless defeated) and Bond is shot and left for dead by his supposed MI6 contact in the country (she’s also one of the two love interests here) and a sinister Rhodesian mercenary. After a brief convalescence, he decides to ‘go solo’ in order to get revenge.

Travelling to the United States on a false passport, he manages to track down the people he’s after with surprising ease, although things get complicated when it turns out that the American authorities (among them Felix Leiter’s nephew) are also after the surviving rebel leaders as they’ve set up an aid agency which is actually a front for a massive drug-smuggling operation. As per a lot of Fleming’s villains, the Rhodesian mercenary character is physically disfigured, in this case as a result of his previous fighting experience.

Bond out for revenge: This has been done before in the films – Licence to Kill, Quantum of Solace – but not really in the novels although a running theme, especially in some of the earlier ones, is Bond’s desire to bring down SMERSH after what happened in Casino Royale. Here, the character is older and wiser, but also more impulsive while still being prone to acts of extreme violence when he’s in the mood. He is, after all, a killer.

There are a few aspects of Solo that are rather formulaic of Bond; what he wears, what he eats, what he smokes and what he drinks (I suppose that these details have to be in place so that we can be sure that this is James Bond; authors dealing with Fleming’s creation do have to use some Fleming-esque details). The women with whom he is romantically involved seem to be there for no better reason than because they have to be there in a James Bond adventure (as soon as his contact in Zanzarim is revealed to be a woman, you know it’s only a matter of time before he has sex with her). It gets better outside the Bond comfort zone.

I found the civil war descriptions to be the best part of this novel, while the war reminiscences – Boyd has a young Lieutenant Bond of the RNVR serving in Normandy with 30 Assault Unit, which had been set up by Fleming himself – are a very clever tribute to Bond’s creator. Bond going for a spot of personal vendetta is also a good way of taking the character out of the usual comfort zone (see above). I tend to steer clear of Bond continuation novels for a reason (the formulaic feeling aside, some of them got a bit silly, and I wasn’t much impressed with the Sebastian Faulks one a few years ago) but this was pretty good; I’ll certainly be looking to read more William Boyd novels as a result.

I decided to follow this Bond literary experience up by going back to the original: Ian Fleming. I thought I’d read all of those years ago but it would seem not; while clearing out some old books recently I came across an Ian Fleming omnibus containing three Bond novels. Judging by the position of the bookmark (a card from a scuba-diving club!), it looked as though I hadn’t got as far as the third one, Moonraker. Post-Solo, that is what I read. I remembered that the film was one of those so-bad-it’s-hilarious ones (if you haven’t seen it, four words – Roger Moore in space – will tell you all you need to know), but as the novel was first published in 1955 I doubted whether it went that far. I already knew, thanks to reading a book about the afore-mentioned wartime commando unit that Fleming set up, that the villain of the piece is a former Nazi who changed his identity in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The story begins in London where we find out that Bond is 37 years old, as he reflects that he’s eight years away from hitting 45, at which point he will cease to be a Double O agent and get a desk job instead (evidence here of Fleming changing Bond’s chronology over time, as previously mentioned). He’s flirting with the secretaries, although the principal flirtee is not Miss Moneypenny but one Loelia Ponsonby, secretary to the Double O Section (evidently the makers of the films thought that one secretary was sufficient). Anyway, time for a briefing from M: Sir Hugo Drax is a millionaire businessman who is bankrolling a British missile project known as Moonraker, an act for which he’s been knighted. Not much is known about his background but he’s a member of M’s club, Blades, and M thinks he might be a wrong ’un because he cheats at cards. There follows a card-table confrontation, the sort of thing that Fleming did so very well, as Bond – who, in addition to being the Secret Service’s best card player, also happens to know all there is to know about card-sharping – gives Drax a very expensive taste of his own medicine (£15,000 from a single game of bridge, and that’s at 1950s prices). Drax, foreshadowing several other villains who get bested by Bond in a club or casino, advises him to “spend the money quickly”.

Bond then gets assigned to Drax’s Moonraker project HQ down in Kent, where there’s already an undercover agent called Gala Brand, a Special Branch officer who’s posing as Drax’s secretary. So far, names aside, this seemed more like the basic plot to Die Another Day (which was bad without being funny) rather than Moonraker; proof that there’s always something in the films that can be traced back to the original source material. Between them Bond and Brand find out that Drax (who, by the way, has a facial disfigurement) is up to something, almost getting killed by part of a cliff falling on them in the process; they sort-of figure out what Drax is really up to, and there follows a car chase across Kent (Bond’s vehicle here is a pre-war supercharged Bentley; like many of its successors, it gets wrecked) after which Drax reveals his evil plan to the pair of them (the rocket that’s going to be test-fired actually contains a Soviet-supplied atomic warhead that’s going to destroy London) before leaving them to an elaborate death (specifically, they’re imprisoned close enough to the rocket that they’ll be killed when it launches) from which they are able to escape and foil the plans in such a way that this also results in Drax’s own demise.

Already knowing that Drax was an unrepentant Nazi before reading the book probably didn’t help in terms of the suspense but there are many clues that point the reader to this (all of the rocket technicians and henchmen are German, and Drax even drives a Merc). For an audience reading this in the 1950s, the combination of Nazis and nuclear annihilation would have been a potent mix. However, the main reason why I’ve chosen to divulge so much of the plot is to point out the main thing that I learned from reading Moonraker, which is the extent to which the component parts of your average Bond film can be found here: Early encounter with the villain at a card table, bonkers plan, car chase, ruthless henchman, full explanation of said plan for the benefit of 007 and his attractive female companion prior to elaborate but somehow escapable death – they’re all here.

Moonraker, though, also has a few elements that are not typical of a Bond adventure. It is set entirely in England, and we get to see some of the action from the woman’s point of view as well as that of Bond – and she, not Bond, is the one who actually finds out that Drax is going to fire the missile at London. And there’s a twist at the end – she doesn’t end up getting romantically involved with Bond (this may explain why ‘Gala Brand’ has never been a character name in the films). In creating James Bond, Ian Fleming came up with a winning formula but that didn’t mean that his thrillers had to be formulaic.

They really got me

Musicals don’t tend to be my cup of tea, although there are exceptions. Sunny Afternoon, featuring the music of The Kinks, is such an exception.

I’m biased of course; I happen to be of the opinion that The Kinks are one of the greatest bands ever to have existed, and that their lead singer-songwriter, Ray Davies, is some sort of genius. I’m pretty sure that there’s more to this than the North London factor.

They were highly innovative, for example – the distinctive intro to ‘You Really Got Me’ was the first use of distortion sound (see below), and when they moved away from  hard-driving rock, Ray Davies developed a flair for social commentary (as seen in ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dead End Street’ – for which they shot the promotion film, a precursor to the modern-day music video, in Kentish Town), a decrying of increased urbanisation (‘Village Green’ and the subsequent album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation  Society), a sense of British post-imperial malaise (the album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)) and the startlingly modern (‘Lola’). Their influence has resonated down the years; ‘You Really Got Me’ was particularly influential on heavy metal and punk rock, while The Jam (who covered ‘David Watts’), Blur and Oasis all cited them as a major influence. More recently, their music has been used in films like Hot Fuzz and The Darjeeling Limited and, a couple of years ago, Ray Davies released an album called See My Friends in which he had re-recorded a number of old Kinks tracks with various artists.

That said, one does get the distinct impression that they boys from Muswell Hill have been overlooked in favour of the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; no doubt the mid-Sixties ban on playing in the USA at the height of the British Invasion is a factor here, but even the band’s on-stage squabbling – Dave Davies getting knocked out by Mick Avory during a gig, anyone? – seems, when seen through the prism of history, to pale in comparison to the bust-ups of Mick ’n’ Keef, to say nothing of the trail of on-and-off-stage destruction left by the likes of Keith Moon.

Last year, someone (presumably inspired by musicals based on the works of, among others, Queen and Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons) had the idea of putting together band’s songs in a musical; this premiered in Hampstead (not far from where the Davies brothers grew up) before transferring to the West End.

The plot – I believe that in musicals, the technical term for this is ‘book’ – was about the band’s formation and how they – particularly Ray and Dave – dealt with fame and money-grubbing hangers-on. The story of how Dave (who was only 17 when the band made it big) sliced open the speaker-cone of his amplifier and then plugged it into another amp to get the distortion sound for the guitar track of ‘You Really Got Me’ (just one of the band’s many ground-breaking innovations) is retold, as is the band’s hedonistic rock ’n’ roll lifestyle (including the on-stage fights) and their getting banned from playing in America.

As well as the famous songs – ‘You Really Got Me’, ‘Waterloo Sunset’, ‘Lola’ and (or course) ‘Sunny Afternoon’ (accompanied by shameless Union Jack-waving) were all present and correct, as were social commentary tracks like ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Dead End Street’ – lesser-known tracks like ‘This Strange Effect’ and ‘This Time Tomorrow’ were also woven into the plot. None of them felt like they’d been crow-barred into it, which is the feeling one gets with some musicals. The decision to sing the somewhat fragile ‘Days’ without instrumental accompaniment was a bold one that paid off, while the last twenty or so minutes felt like a particularly raucous gig (as the best ones should be, of course), with the audience singing along and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

During the interval, Dad wondered out loud whether anyone else in the theatre had actually seen The Kinks live, as he did a couple of times at the Wembley Arena back in the day. “Wimbledon Palais,” quipped a man standing near us; this exchange led to a discussion about the relative merits of Something Else and the Kwyet Kinks EP. No-one minded; in fact, several passers-by looked like they wanted to join in.

It was that sort of evening.

Endeavour

Much though I used to like Inspector Morse, I never could get the crossword clues. It didn’t stop me from enjoying both the books and the TV series, though.

In print form, Morse – whose first name was not revealed until Death is Now My Neighbour (1996) – was killed off in 1999 in The Remorseful Day (as with Hercule Poirot in Curtain, the great detective left a letter to his less intelligent sidekick explaining the mystery), and he duly died on the telly when that novel was adapted the following year; John Thaw, the man who’d played Morse, died fifteen months later. His creator, Colin Dexter, vowed that he wouldn’t write another Morse adventure, although in 2008 he did write a short story, about Morse when he was a student, for the Daily Mail.

Its spin-off, Lewis, has been pretty decent but without John Thaw solving crosswords, driving his Mk. 2 Jag, drinking beer and, during the first half at least, jumping to the wrong conclusions (this may be why I liked Inspector Morse so much, as I am an habitual jumper-to-conclusions when watching detective shows), it just wasn’t the same. It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I heard that ITV were planning on a prequel, centring on Morse himself in his early years as a police detective. It was to be called Endeavour, after his barely-used first name. Why are we revisiting him, I thought? Can’t we just let Morse lie, and move on?

The pilot aired in 2012, and was followed earlier this year with a four-part series. I didn’t get round to seeing any of it until ITV3 had an ‘Endeavour Week’ this week, showing all five episodes.

Guess what? I loved it. Shaun Evans does a great turn as the rookie detective (has there ever been a detective series concentrating on an inexperienced youngster rather than a cynical veteran?) with just enough hints at Thaw’s Morse to keep us going. No point going for a full-blown impersonation, after all, as this can be where we see the character traits form. I also liked Roger Allam as the down-to-Earth mentor, Inspector Thursday (more of a stage man, apparently, although I vaguely remember him from the second series of Ashes to Ashes and, appropriately enough, from an Inspector Morse epsiode). The mid-Sixties setting, cleverly removed from the ‘Swinging Sixties’ stereotype by virtue of going for classical music rather than the usual pop (this is Morse, after all) and also for its fairly drab-looking costumes (just how many shades of brown were there, back then?) reminds me strongly of the BBC’s sadly short-lived series The Hour, albeit with slightly less smoking.

I failed to spot Colin Dexter’s Hitchcock-like cameo appearances, though. I guess that means I’ll have to watch the show again.