A New Year and Lockdown 3.0

There are words and terms which, frankly, I'm getting rather sick of hearing. One is that this current pandemic is 'unprecedented.' It seems to be over-used by the media, mostly on BBC news programmes. The whole pandemic is becoming something of a bore generally and it has taken over media at every point. I think the BBC, in particular, have over-done their reports, such as the roll-out of the different vaccines. I know it's good news, but any excuse to do an item on it is just overkill in my opinion. They do overdo the 'gloom and doom' aspect of the pandemic and never report good news, although the vaccine roll-out can be described as being good news. So, what exactly IS the 'new normal'? Does it refer to living under lockdown? Nothing new or normal about it. It almost suggests that we have to endure this way of life, which, frankly, we don't.

I'll attempt to ignore further reports on the pandemic. It had overtaken Brexit as being newsworthy, but hopefully, that has been finished and done with since a trade deal was done over Christmas.

The microphone was delivered around lunchtime. I have managed to set it up and get it working. I'm very pleased with the results. Using a piece of free software called Audacity which allows me to record with very few problems. I have spent some time this afternoon experimenting with it, and it comes with a 'pop' filter as well as an arm that can be bolted to any piece of suitable furniture and allows the microphone to be positioned in various configurations for the best recording. It will take me a while to get the best from this microphone, although I have been doing recording using a tape-recorder since I was at school. I even bought a reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder from a teacher at school and I taught myself tape spicing, which came in use when I worked in stage management and had to create sound tapes for the shows I worked on.

(Later) Oh no! Boris has been on television telling us that we're to be back into a lockdown! All I can say is- come on, lockdowns don't work. How much more of this do we have to endure and when will the government listen to the alternative scientists regarding the pandemic? We soon won't have an economy left and I feel sorry for the next generation and probably the next couple of generations who have to pay off  the debt created by this disaster.

Living At Home- Part 4

we didn't have any sort of record player at home when I was growing up until quite late into the 1960's. I have a feeling that there was an ancient gramophone of some sort, probably only capable of playing 78's, but not a modern one capable of playing modern L.P.s and 45s. We eventually got a small portable machine when my great aunt died and there were heaps of Greenshield Stamps which were converted into this new player. If you remember Greenshield stamps, you used to 'earn' them when you bought things at certain retailers, such as Tesco, so many stamps when you shopped and then stuck them into books. I suppose the equivalent today would be Tesco Clubcard points, or Nectar points, although these are collected on a card, electronically saved and then 'spent' when you have sufficient, either on your grocery bill or on other items such as free tickets for places such as Alton Towers or Sealife World, Warwick Castle or Madam Tussaud's. This record player was eventually replaced by a far better player which my brother Sandy and I shared.  I remember my mother deciding that we needed a decent record player as she like to hear the occasional bit of classical music. We went to Weatherhead's, a local electrical retailer which had a large shop at the corner of Bedford High Street and Dame Alice Street. It's long since gone, replaced at the last time I visited Bedford by a pub. A shame really, as it was an independent company. Anyway, we went there to choose a record player, one of those semi-portable machines, only playing records, but one with a device in it which was the height of technological wizardry which enabled you to stack a pile of 45 r.p.m. discs on this system which allowed you to play these records one after the other without having to get up and do it manually. My brother was more into pop music than I was. I became interested in classical music and began my own collection of LPs of standard classical repertoire. I also became interested in recording using a tape-recorder, as a result of being influenced by a teacher at Rushmoor School who used a tape-recorder in some of his classes to record our voices, reading poetry and prose. Later on, when I moved to Abbey Secondary Modern School, I bought a Grundig tape-recorder from one of the teachers. I know Sandy used to record pop music off the radio (as did everyone else during this period) and be was (and probably still is.) obsessed by motor sport, and in particular, Grand Prix races. Was it called Formula 1 in those days? I don't know, but he used to record the radio commentaries on a tape recorder. I eventually replaced my tape-recorder with an early Philips cassette recorder.

Although quite good for recording from the radio, the occasional bit of voice work and listening to music, cassettes had their limitations. For a start, you couldn't edit them. The tape was extremely tin and had a tendency to stretch. You could never find specific points on a tape, for example, the beginning of a piece of music. Eventually pre-recorded cassettes were introduced, as a sort of replacement for LPs, but the technical quality of cassettes wasn't up to much. It took a long time to re-wind a cassette and, because the tape was very thin it could get caught up in the mechanism of the machine as well as stretching and this eventually lead to them not functioning. In-car players were eventually introduced, some with built-in radios, but if you kept your collection of cassettes in your car, they could become damaged if there was warm weather, as heat seemed to cause all sorts of problems to the tape. My brother Sandy had an 8-track player at one point, I think perhaps it was a birthday present. The cassettes were bulky and not as good as cassettes, and I recall he had all sorts of problems with the machine which constantly got jammed. The tape was far wider than a Philips cassette, but eventually he gave up on the thing and the whole system was eventually abandoned by the manufacturers.

A friend of mine when I was at Mander College, John Gregory, introduced me to The Goon Show. His father had recorded the original episodes off the radio and onto reel-to-reel tape. John allowed me to record many of the episodes onto cassette when he used to visit me at home over several Saturday afternoons. I am still an ardent fan of The Goons and listen to some of the episodes which are broadcast regularly on the digital radio channel, BBC Radio4 Extra. Not just The Goons, but I also enjoyed many other BBC comedy shows, such as I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again, Round The Horne, The Navy Lark as well as The Men From The Ministry. All re-broadcast on BBC Radio4 Extra. I, and probably loads of other people, recorded from the radio using a microphone, but I eventually managed to find a way to link the tape recorder to my transistor radio by using a lead from the tape recorder fixed to the loudspeaker, linking to the soldered points inside the radio. It worked! Which meant I could get a far better recording as there was no background interference as you would get if you used a microphone set up in front of the radio, for example, cars going past or people talking in the room.

My interest in tape-recording and recording in general was a very useful skill because when I worked in stage management I was sometimes called upon to operate the sound desk at several of the theatres I worked at, having to make up the various sound effects tapes and I learned how to edit and splice tape. In those days it was physically cut, using a special splicing machine and sticky tape. No doubt today all this would be done digitally and saved onto either a CD-ROM or at least on a computer hard drive.

The Lord of The Rings- as a book, on radio and as a movie

We are currently listening to the BBC radio adaptation of 'The Hobbit.' I had  the entire Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on CD as a Christmas present two years ago, and have not yet got round to listening to it. As I bought Carol a DAB radio with a CD player in it we decided to start listening. I remember listening to it when it was originally broadcast in 1968. Those were the days before cassette recorders, there was no way to record radio broadcasts, and even if there was, I doubt I would have still had the recording. I did have a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Grundig, which I bought from a teacher at school. You could record programmes by putting the microphone in front of the radio's speaker and record that way, but it wouldn't have been very good as you'd get all sorts of extraneous noises recorded, if someone spoke at the same time as the programme being aired, or a car went past. I think, later on, I managed to be able to connect a lead somehow to the speaker and use the direct link into the tape recorder which was a good deal better. Today, or course, you can download an MP3 file from the broadcaster's website or record onto CD, but thankfully the BBC has had the good sense to release a good deal of their material onto CD. This complete recording has presumably been re-mastered digitally.

I've read 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of The Rings.' I have to admit to being something of a J.R.R. Fan. I had heard of 'The Hobbit' when I was at school, but never read it until I was a good deal older because I had considered it to be a children's novel. But I read it and loved it. It's got so much going for it. As if you didn't know, it's a sort of prequel to 'The Lord of The Rings.' A teacher was reading that when I was at school, so I knew about it. Being an avid reader for most of my life, I would read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. I think I have always had something or other to read for most of my life, a habit I began at school, where we were expected to have a book to read or to at least get something out of the library and have it to read if we had nothing else to do. I'm so glad to have had that habit. I originally had the paperback of 'The Hobbit' and later got the illustrated edition which was done by Alan Lee. He was the concept artist for the Peter Jackson adaptation of 'The Lord of The Rings.' His illustrations fit quite well with how I imagined the characters and the locations of Middle Earth might look like.

In about 1971 I went to work at the Liverpool Playhouse as an A.S.M. I took with me the complete paperback edition of the 'Lord of The Rings.' I bought it when I had gone to London with my brother Robert. I can't say I remember what we were doing in London at the time. I think he may have gone with me to an interview for a job. I would have been around 19-20 at the time I suppose. I read the book when I had a spare moment at the theatre, in the Green Room. It certainly made an impression on me. Like 'The Hobbit,' it has a journey (or two, or three, perhaps more.) at the heart of it. A quest. I think I got to really love the central characters, particularly Frodo (the nephew of Bilbo, who is the central character in 'The Hobbit.') He is flawed, like most of us. He gets scared on the way to dispose of The Ring (I won't spoil it for those who have yet to read and enjoy this magical tale.) He is reacquainted with Gollum, whom he first meets in 'The Hobbit.' A more devious and calculating character you won't find in any other book, but he's interesting and it's difficult to not feel a certain amount of sympathy for the little blighter. I have read the whole trilogy at least four more times. I think perhaps every decade (so I think a re-read is about due soon.) I had the three separate books, 'The Fellowship of The Ring,' 'The Two Towers' and 'The Return of The King.' I bought it through one of those book clubs you used to see advertised in magazines such as 'The Sunday Times' and 'The Telegraph.' You had to buy around 6 books for £5 or something, and then buy a further so many within your first year. I don't know what happened to those books. I've moved house so many times, no doubt they got left somewhere or other. Then, a good deal later, I bought the complete trilogy which came out with the Alan Lee illustrations. Again, from one of those book clubs. I think it was called The Softback Preview or something. You can see that I'm a bit of a book freak, so these book clubs were so tempting to me. Unfortunately the copy I had had a fault in it. Part-way through reading it, I discovered that there was a large part missing, one of the 'sets' of pages was missing. It was an expensive edition, selling full-price for around £50. I returned it and got a replacement. Again, another book that has been lost. More like mislaid, unfortunately. I will have to buy it again to read all over again.

Then in the 1980's the BBC did the remarkable Radio Four adaptation. I listened and loved it. It was later bought out on cassette. I was a member of the record library at Bedford Central Library and had the cassettes out to listen to. Then, much more recently, the whole set was published on the far more sophisticated CD system, along with 'The Hobbit.' I saw it for sale in 'The Works' in Milton Keynes and being sold for a ridiculously low price, something like £20. I'm not sure what it full price would have been. Probably around £100 I would imagine. I had it as a Christmas present for Christmas 2015. It has been sitting on our bookshelf ever since and hadn't been played until last night.

There had been a movie version of 'The Lord of The Rings' made in the late 1970's. It was animated and wasn't very good. They attempted to cram two of the books into one movie. Not exactly memorable. I believe that 'The Hobbit' was done a similar way but I have never seen it. Then in around 1999 it was announced that a new trilogy was to be produced, by Peter Jackson, and using the latest computer technology and to be filmed in New Zealand. I was wary of this, as it's a beloved sequence of novels and it was likely to spoil the whole Middle Earth concept. But I saw it and wasn't disappointed. It was as near as perfect as you could make an adaptation of a novel. I'm talking of the first book, 'The Fellowship of The Ring.' I think it came out in 2001. The next year saw the second film, 'The Two Towers' and the following year 'The Return of The King.' Ian McKellen played Gandalf and was, to my way of thinking, almost born to play the part. He gave the character a certain gravitas and his voice a real power and authority the character required. Also, the C.G.I. animated Gollum almost equally perfect. When the character was on screen it was captivating. It was difficult to imagine him being created any other way.

After the success of the Lord of The Rings movies, it was inevitable that a movie version of 'The Hobbit' would be made. Apparently it wasn't so easy to acquire the rights to the book, but soon it was set up and made, with Ian McKellen reprising his role as Gandalf. The only problem I have with the whole idea of this project was when they decided to make three films out of the book. As it is no more than 250 pages long, I could not see how on earth you could possibly get three movies out of it. It only needed to be done as a single movie. No doubt, with the success of the 'Rings' trilogy, the accountants got hold of the thing and realised they could make more money out of three movies instead of just one. Leaving the audience 'wanting more' after parts one and two was too obvious. At the time of writing I have not seen these movies and I'm not sure I want to. Why on earth spin out the plot over around six hours of screen-time when it obviously only required around a third of the time?