When I was making plans for Six Things in 2026, it occurred to me that it might be quite fun to do a podcast version. So once a month, instead of the regular Six Things newsletter, I’ll invite a guest to chat about six things of interest to them – things they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre. My second guest is Chris Coates, purveyor of (his words) “niche drivel” on Bluesky, Medium, Instagram and now here on Substack.
You should have the option of downloading the podcast or copying and pasting the RSS link to play it in your usual podcast app (click the three dots to the right of the 30-second button above).
The music for the podcast was written and recorded by Oliver Parikian.
Lev Parikian: Hello and welcome to Six Things, a podcast for the curious. I’m Lev Parikian, and every month I invite a guest to bring six things that they find joyful, amusing, fascinating, comforting, magnificent, or just downright bizarre. My guest this month is Chris Coates. Hello, Chris.
Chris Coates: Hello.
Lev: Chris has what I, a feckless artist and flâneur, call a proper job, writing about social science and other things in higher education. But he is also, in his own words, a part-time idiot, and in that capacity, posts – and again his own words – niche drivel on Medium and Bluesky, where his speciality is the thoroughly entertaining Odd This Day. Chris, perhaps you can tell us a bit about that to kick us off.
Chris: Yes. When I joined Twitter in 2013, I noticed that there were people doing “here is some history that happened on this day” stuff. And there used to be – I don’t know if there still is – a thing in the Times called On This Day. And I have an obscure book from 1980 by Jeremy Beadle called Today’s the Day. So I was kind of aware that people are interested in what’s happened on this day in history. But a lot of those are fairly conventional so it’s like, you know, Queen Victoria was born, Queen Victoria died, you know, and obviously, on this day is, you know, “today is the day that Queen Victoria survived the eighth of eight assassination attempts” or whatever it is. And William McGonagall wrote one of his terrible poems about it.
Lev: Magnificent.
Chris: But the other thing was there were people on Twitter doing “here’s something obscure from history that you might not be aware of”. So basically, I just took those two ideas and biffed them together.
Lev: And it’s an inspired idea. And obviously you’re very widely read and very knowledgeable about all sorts of things, but it comes across in the way you write about them – but do you spend an awful long time trawling the Internet for these things or do they arise as part of your regular daily reading, shall I say?
Chris: Yeah, I do read a lot of obscure, random things. Yes, I’ve always quite liked that saying of Ken Campbell’s: “I’m not mad, I’ve just read different books.”
Lev: That’s a lovely one.
Chris: I’m an apprentice in the foothills of Ken Campbell’s heights of lunacy. Yeah, I do read kind of a lot of different things. I’m reading about the Surrealists at the moment by Ruth Brandon, I think her name is. It’s called Surreal Lives. And there’s already, you know, I’ve folded over lots of corners.
Lev: Oh, you fold over corners as well?
Chris: Yes.
Lev: I’m so pleased to hear it, because… people, you’ll get the book crowd, the baying mob of “books are sacrosanct” people coming for you on that, but I dog ear books as well, especially when I’m researching things, and this is apparently… and I also write in them in pencil… and this is of course disgusting, because when you have a book you must frame it.
Chris: Yes, I used to be quite like that myself. I lent a friend a book a few years ago, and we’ve known each other since university, which is like 30-odd years ago. And she and I used to lend each other books. And I gave her this book and she said, it looks like you haven’t read it. And then went, oh, yes, of course, it’s one of your books.
Lev: Well, I think this interest in the random and the obscure sets you up very nicely to be a guest on Six Things, because we quite like random, obscure stuff. And you have presented six excellent, some fairly random things. So let’s kick things off with your Thing Number One.
Thing 1 – Portsmouth Sinfonia
Chris: Thing number one is the Portsmouth Sinfonia. It’s kind of, it seems appropriate to have a bit of music. This is an orchestra with a difference, I think we can say. It was founded at Plymouth School of Art in 1970, I think. And one of the people who founded, or the principal personal who founded it, was someone called Gavin Bryars, which to somebody like me who knows almost nothing about music is a sort of vaguely familiar name but it probably means quite a lot to you. The idea was that anybody could join this orchestra, essentially, and you didn’t have to be the best musician. And apparently people who could play an instrument were encouraged to pick up one they weren’t familiar with. I’ve kind of come to these people fairly recently because it’s sort of been talked about on Bluesky because I think their first album has just come out on CD. So I’ve come to this fairly recently and I’ve just sort of fallen in love with it, because it’s… you know that saying about, I think it’s supposed to be the sign of a sophisticated mind if you can hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time. Well it’s basically a perfect example of that, because there is this kind of serious, or at least semi-serious idea behind it in that it’s democratising access to music and to playing music. And the idea is that anybody can feel that kind of communal joy of making a piece of music, you know, in a group with other people. And rather than feeling that – as I would, for example, you know, I have no musical talent at all… it’s got this lovely kind of idea behind it, and at the same time it’s hilarious to listen to. They were billed by their publicist as the worst orchestra in Britain, I think, or in the world or something like that. And the opening track on this particular album, which is called The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics… and they open with the William Tell Overture.
Lev: Excellent. I mean, not excellent, as it turns out. It’s interesting because I’m all in favour of that idea. As you may know, I’m a musician. I conduct orchestras, and I conduct amateur orchestras quite a lot. Community orchestras, non-professional orchestras, whichever way you like to describe it. My father was a very good violinist, a professional violinist. And so I grew up in a house of some musical sophistication. And so when the Portsmouth Sinfonia came on, presumably it was on Nationwide or something in 1971 or 1972. I was very young. But I remember seeing them and thinking, what is this? And there being a general sort of air of sniffiness around them. I’m all in favour of that joyful playing of music together. Absolutely. And I’m interested in the idea that anybody should have to listen to it – but I’m delighted that you get joy from listening to it because as a musician I find it almost impossible to listen to for more than about 30 seconds, simply because that’s my job, going, I have to make this better. And the conductor, I think, didn’t know how to conduct at all. He was just kind of doing gestures that he thought looked interesting – which actually, some people would say, describes many professional conductors. But that’s a different story. But it does raise questions. And I think the other thing is that you say you found them hilarious to listen to, but if you put this to Bryars or any of the other founders, any other participants, there’s very much a sort of defensive thing. “No, no, it’s not funny. It’s not funny. It’s a very serious thing.” “But surely you must realize that people are going to find it…?” “No, no, no, it’s not funny at all. It’s a very serious experiment in art.” It’s an art installation of a kind.
Chris: Yes, I wonder about that. There’s a couple of documentaries about them on YouTube as well. One of them is an old Radio 4 show. Julian Jenkins, I think his name is. And he interviews Gavin Bryars. He puts to him the point about people being asked to pick up an instrument that’s unfamiliar to them. And Bryars says, “I think that’s a scurrilous rumour put about by the BBC.” So I do wonder if Gavin Bryars just has a good line in poker-faced interview technique.
Lev: Yes, possibly. And of course, the joke’s on us because they sold out the Albert Hall, didn’t they? Or something. There were concerts there, and they got a publicist on board who was obviously very good at it and managed to spread the word. There is now, I don’t know if they’re still going, but certainly a few years ago, there was a similar project in Edinburgh, which is, I think it’s the brainchild of Alexander McCall Smith, the very popular author. It’s either his brainchild or he’s deeply involved in it. And they’re called the Really Terrible Orchestra. And it’s a very similar thing. You know, the maximum requirement is Grade Three. And he’s an amateur bassoonist, I think, and loves tootling away on his bassoon. They get together for their own pleasure, but as a by-product, they have turned into this sort of popular spectacle.
Chris: Yes.
Lev: So it does raise… I’m sure he… this was the 70s after all, so there was a lot of experimental art going on anyway. And it was an art school, it was an art school project originally, wasn’t it?
Chris: Yeah, yeah.
Lev: And so it’s one of those things that becomes, you know, “well, anybody can do that.” “Ah, yes, but you didn’t.”
Chris: Yes. So I was trying to kind of work out a way to describe it so people know what to expect.
Lev: Excellent. I’ll look forward to this.
Chris: And it occurred to me, it basically it’s like a cross between that rising orchestral bit at the end of A Day In The Life on Sergeant Pepper, and that school band playing Jingle Bells that does the rounds on social media every Christmas. It’s just this kind of glorious chaos, but it’s not quite chaos.
Lev: That’s the thing. It’s people trying very hard to do it well, as well as they can. I think that was part of the joy of it. If you’re able to shelve aside any musical things, there is a genuine desire to do this thing well. It reminds me of the way I play cricket. I’m not good, and the team I play for, we’re... there are some people with some talent but we’re getting on a bit and sometimes the point is not to do it well but to do it really really badly, but honestly. To do it as well as you possibly can, but I wouldn’t expect anybody to come and watch me play cricket…
Thing 2 – Japan’s Master of Restoration
Lev: So the wonderful or terrible or execrable, whichever way you describe it, joyful Portsmouth Sinfonia… an excellent and very interesting and lovely thing for people to explore. Contrasting with thing two, which is not people trying to do things as well as they possibly can and doing it badly, but precisely the opposite, I think.
Chris: Yeah, it’s expertise on the most extraordinary scale. This is Japan’s Master of Restoration, which I happened upon on iPlayer. My children mock me regularly for watching obscure documentaries about bits of the arts and stuff. My daughter’s favourite refrain is, “oh, you’re watching another documentary about pen lids, are you?” Which I haven’t actually done, but yeah.
Lev: Well, yeah, but it’s a documentary that’s crying out to be made, quite frankly. I probably would watch it.
Chris: Yeah, indeed. I would as well. I mean, there’s the physics of, you know, putting the little holes in the end.
Lev: Absolutely.
Chris: Swallow the pen lid, you don’t choke. I mean, you know. Anyway, Japan’s Master of Restoration is, I think I described it in an email to you, as it’s like The Repair Shop, but set in Japan. And with only one expert and turned up to 11. The people on The Repair Shop are, you know, clearly some of the best in their field. They’re obviously, you know, brilliant people. This guy, Koji Mayuyama, is, they call him, apparently his nickname is the God Hand. And he’s just extraordinary. There was a bit– it’s about 20 minutes into the first episode – where I was genuinely shouting at the television, “How are you doing this? How is this possible?” Basically, he is a restorer of Japanese artwork and specialises in ceramics, which is a big thing in Japanese culture. And yeah, there’s a bit, 20 minutes into the first episode, I think, where he’s working on a bowl or a dish or something, and he starts rubbing glaze into a crack in the thing with his finger, and the crack disappears.
Lev: It’s not filming magic it is… they’re just, you know, recording what he does. His extreme speciality is, he’s a master at in particular matching colours.
Chris: People may well know about Kintsugi, which is where you restore something with gold, so you kind of make a virtue of the fact that it’s broken and you draw attention to the fact that it’s broken, and this is like the exact opposite of that
Lev: Yes, although I think at one point he does say that sometimes he gets asked to do things so that the repair isn’t actually invisible. But there are, you know, he acknowledges Kintsugi as part of what he does. And it kind of depends on what the client wants. But still, yes, that complete invisibility.
Chris: Maybe the second episode, there’s a vase anyway. They discover it’s one of a pair and the other pair is, I think, in the British Museum. But it’s got a huge chunk missing from it, which has been covered up with a kind of metal clasp thing. So he prises off this metal clasp and you’re watching him do these things and go, this is going to, you know, if I was doing this, it would be in many, many more pieces by now. And yeah, he just builds these whole new sections of things and makes them look like they are hundreds of years old. It’s just extraordinary.
Lev: It’s extraordinary technical skill and dedication and patience. But there’s also the detective work that he goes into to discover which bits have been restored by somebody else quite badly or been restored by somebody else quite well, and how he’s going to approach the repair and how he’s going to reproduce these things with whichever it is. Another element of it that I loved – I’ve seen the first two episodes, there are three, I think, is that right? – is that his son is his apprentice and is working in the same field. And there’s this relationship of master and apprentice, father and son. And there is, I think, underlying it, there’s obviously a deep, deep love and respect. But there is also this feeling that he is quite a strict taskmaster and expects perfection. And to wring a compliment out of him would be the ultimate. It feels like that any kind of, any kind of congratulation from him is very, very hard won.
Chris: Yeah.
Lev: Is that fair?
Chris: Yeah, I think so. Yes. And I think that relationship is lovely to watch as well as all the other stuff. Koji, the father, he kind of looks like an accountant and the son has got this kind of slight rock star thing going on. And he’s sort of a little bit more, not quite irreverent but sort of almost…
Lev: He went to art school didn’t he? And after leaving art school did he think “I’ll go and be an artist”, or was it always going to be “No, you’re going to join the family trade.” And Koji’s father before him was even more perfectionist, and he talks about him with reverence, you know, “Well I’m no good but my father was really good”, so you imagine his father before that would have been even more… And there is something mesmerizing not just about his skill but the way the film’s made which is… it allows for slowness as well… this slow unfolding of a story and just the quiet industry of watching him go about the work, and the thoroughness. “We’re not going to rush into it. We’re going to assess this thing and see what needs to be done. Consider all the possibilities.”
Chris: Yeah. And, you know, I love The Repair Shop, but there is that kind of, you know, “We’ve got to fit three or four stories in and we’ve got to tell you the story behind the object”, and all of that. And this is much more slow and gentle and just, you know, “Here, look at this.”
Lev: Yeah.
Thing 3 – Julian & Sandy
Lev: …from the Japanese restoration master.
Chris: One of my notes is “from the sublime to the fantabulosa.”
Lev: Excellent.
Chris: So this is Julian and Sandy, who, for those who don’t know, were two recurring characters in a BBC radio comedy sketch show from the mid-to-late 1960s. It was called Round the Horne because it was kind of centred around this guy called Kenneth Horne. It was a sketch show with recurring characters who popped up and Kenneth Williams did lots of silly voices. I love, love Julian and Sandy. They are resting actors. In their own words, they are filling in between engagements and they do a variety of jobs because it gives the script writers a chance to throw in different things each week so they can be estate agents or hairdressers or lawyers or anything. The big thing about them is that they are played by Hugh Paddick as Julian and Kenneth Williams as Sandy, who were both gay men. And they are just unfeasibly camp characters. They’re just wonderful. So the first sketch that they appeared in was in March 1965. It was called Rent-A-Chap and they play male domestic servants who turn up because Kenneth Horne has called this agency called Rent-A-Chap. Two male domestic servants are going to come round and clean his flat for him. So you have all these conventions of radio comedy, you have the sound effect of the doorbell and the door being opened and then you just get this this voice going, “Oh hello I’m Julian and this is Sandy”, and then Kenneth Williams goes, “Yes, we’ve come to do for you”, and basically four minutes of camp anarchy is unleashed.
Lev: Extraordinary innuendo.
Chris: Yes.
Lev: I think, we’re looking back at this from the distance of half a century, more than half a century, and I suppose for anybody who’s not familiar with this, it’s important to point out that at the time this was broadcast, homosexuality was still illegal…
Chris: Yes, yes.
Lev: …in this country and the standards of BBC broadcasting were of the highest decorum, and, you know, it wasn’t… I don’t think it was still the age of bow ties on the radio, and dinner jackets, but it was still not far off. There was still a formality and standards to be maintained and lines across which you would not cross. And they somehow managed not to cross them while absolutely pole vaulting over them at every possible opportunity, getting away with things that nowadays seem quite blatant filth…
Chris: Yeah…
Lev: … and yet somehow they managed to smuggle it past past the censors.
Chris: It was interesting, it was written by two straight men Marty Feldman and Barry Took… yeah… and I discovered them in like 1982 or 83 when I was 12 or 13, and at that time Barry Took was the presenter of Points of View. But they obviously they were both, you know, in show business. So they knew or knew about this thing called Polari. And nobody’s entirely sure where it comes from, whether it’s kind of circus people or sailors or whatever.
Lev: There seem to have been different versions of Polari, I think.
Chris: Yeah. It evolved in weird and wonderful ways, and by the time these sketches are happening it’s kind of known as the the gay slang. So, I’ve got loads of the lines written down…
Lev: Oh well give us a few…
Chris: So when they’re being agents for variety acts they talk about a muscle man that they represent and they describe him as “a great butch omie with thews like an oak and bulging lallies”. And presumably there’s a BBC audience just going, “Well, I don’t understand a word of that, but it sounds fun.”
Lev: The rhythms of it, I think the rhythm and the music of the delivery is a huge part of it.
Chris: It’s got that. It’s just intrinsically humorous and comedic, but there’s this BBC audience kind of going “Yeah I don’t know but it sounds good”, and then there’s this other audience of people at home who presumably know some Polari, and go “Oh my God they’re talking to me on the national radio”. I interviewed a guy once who was a student in 1964, and obviously, you know, he was 18, he already knew he was gay, and he graduated in 1967, the year that homosexuality was finally partly decriminalized, and he talked about listening to Julian and Sandy with his parents and there were these voices that… you know… and he couldn’t talk to his parents about it… yeah, it was extraordinary…
Lev: What did his parents… did they enjoy it on a different level?
Chris: I don’t know, actually. That would be really interesting.
Lev: They’d be sort of chuckling… “Oh, isn’t he a funny person?”
Chris: I think the thing about them is, at the time, gay characters were all... they were either tragic or they were villains. It was like you were Dirk Bogarde being blackmailed in Victim or in The Killing of Sister George you were this awful, awful woman. And these two are just, they are joy. They’re happy. They’re incredibly funny. And the thing is, they’re not the punchline. They’re delivering the punchlines. Kenneth Horne is, in every sense of the word, the straight man. And they take the piss out of him.
Lev: And his incomprehension is a huge part of the joke, isn’t it?
Chris: They pull the strings. They hold the power in it. And as they kind of bed in as characters, he goes and knocks on the door of the shop. And Kenneth Williams goes, “Oh, it’s Mr ‘Orne. Oh, how bona to varder your jolly old eke again.”
Lev: You do that very well, by the way.
Chris: Thank you. And they do things like, oh, yes, they go into alternative medicine one week. They say, “We are your actual homeopathic practitioners.” And then, “Yes, we’re not recognised by doctors.” All in the subtext, all in the subtext and the delivery. And there’s a wonderful one where they’re solicitors one week. And Kenneth Horne says, “Yes, yes, yes, but will you take my case?” And Julian says... “Well, we’re very busy, you know, we’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.” I think it’s probably reading too much into it, but you kind of get this feeling from the way the studio audience laughs… there is this kind of sense that public opinion is maybe slightly ahead of the establishment on this one. They’re kind of, they’re sort of laughing supportively. It’s quite lovely to hear. But yeah, and also, like you say, they get away with just... filth. I mean, there’s one where Kenneth Williams, as Sandy, is saying that Julian is a gifted piano player. And he says, “Oh, he’s a miracle of dexterity at the cottage upright”, which is, you know…
Lev: This is a tradition continued, of course, by Humphrey Lyttleton on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
Chris: Yes.
Lev: Fantastic. It just got worse and worse and worse, or better and better and better, depending on how you view these things. Excellent. Thank you for bringing Julian and Sandy, who I think for people of a certain age – people possibly even of a greater age than us – that will bring back some lovely memories. And people who are not of a certain age might be interested to know how they used to do things back in the day.
Thing 4 – The Hunt for the Golden Mole
Lev: Tell me about this book that you’ve chosen.
Chris: This is The Hunt for the Golden Mole by an environmental journalist called Richard Girling. And it’s ostensibly about the Somali golden mole. But the subtitle is All Creatures Great and Small and Why They Matter. And there’s an illustration on the front of the book of a kind of montage of animals, none of which is the Somali golden mole, which is a clue to the contents and to the kind of thing you have to bear in mind as you read, especially the opening chapters. There is very little about the Somali golden mole.
Lev: He drops it in occasionally as if he’s been reminded to by his editor.
Chris: Yes, that element of it gradually builds up as you go through the work. But basically, it’s an excuse to talk about, you know, biodiversity and the importance of ecosystems. And it’s absolutely fascinating. The reason why the golden mole plays quite a small part in it is because there is one known specimen of the golden mole. It is about a centimetre long bit of jawbone. A little bit of skull attached with a couple of middle ear bones attached to that. And they were found in an owl pellet in a disused oven in Jowhar in Somalia in 1964 by a guy called Alberto Simonetta, who then described them in a paper in 1968. Because he was, you know, he was inspecting this thing that he’d found and it didn’t match any other golden mole’s jawbone – of which there are several other species of golden mole with various different names. And one of the other weird little facts is that none of the golden moles are in fact moles.
Lev: It is, as you say, it’s more like a history of conservation and the way we treat animals and have treated them in the past.
Chris: So, yeah, it kind of, it’s one of those things that could be a bit depressing, but it’s actually, you know, it’s wonderful and it’s fascinating. And there’s lots of funny stuff.
Lev: Yeah, it’s funny stuff and kind of grimly amusing, but also told with just the right level of anecdote, but richly told. And told with great curiosity, but also... he has a wonderful attitude to the whole subject, I think. The way he looks back and without judging things that were taken for granted in former days.
Chris: Yeah.
Lev: But also shining a light on them and going, well, we may in those days, back in the 19th century in particular, it was commonplace just to go out and kill things.
Chris: Yeah.
Lev: But some people killed them more than others.
Chris: Yes, yes. And, you know, things like the passenger pigeon was apparently 40% of bird life in North America.
Lev: Astonishing, astonishing abundance.
Chris: Yeah. Just madness. Locking out the sky. Flocks 55 miles long, apparently. I’ve marked a page because it’s just it’s just a good example of how he’s funny. But it’s just it’s the style in which he’s funny as well. So he’s talking about hunting and about the fact that, you know, big things like rhinos and elephants and stuff. People are like, oh, yes, I’ll go and shoot something big because it’s big. He says the special vulnerability of big animals is pretty obvious. “The smallest creature I have ever heard of being shot at was a spider at which my grandfather, who enjoyed his beer, aimed an air gun so unsteadily that he shot himself in the hand.”
Lev: Magnificent.
Chris: It’s just it’s splendid. And then he talks about the famous story of the the wolves in Yellowstone Park and then he shifts to talk about whether we should reintroduce the lynx to Scotland, because that might control deer, and he says the point is you don’t reintroduce an animal because it’s going to do X. You introduce it for its own sake…
Lev: …and then X might happen…
Chris: …X, Y, and indeed Z might happen later. So it’s about the unexpected benefits. And he talks about if you make a prey animal extinct, obviously you make it much more difficult for the predator, but there’s also you know there’s the scavengers who come across the carcass and there’s the bacteria and the parasites, and he talks about the the size of the system that you’re disrupting… it’s really really interesting and eventually he meets Alberto Simonetta and and he’s just a really lovely guy, it’s just a rather wonderful book.
Lev: It was written in 2014, is that right? Or something like that. So it’s still, it’s current enough, but there’s interesting ways in which the situation continues to develop in ways that he obviously touches on. But that thing that what Douglas Adams, of course, calls the fundamental interconnectedness of all things… you don’t know what effect that’s going to have until you do it.
And by then it’s probably too late, like the cane toads in Australia, which is now overrun by the things… and of course, as you said, the passenger pigeon which famously went extinct really a very short time in the grand scheme of things, just mere decades after it had this extraordinary abundance, and so yeah as you say it’s thought-provoking rather than depressing and that’s a tricky balance…
Thing 5 – He Dances For His Cormorants
Lev: And now moving on to thing number five, which is, I suppose, similarly linked because it’s about birds, but also specifically the relationship of a human with a particular kind of bird.
Chris: Yes, this is He Dances for His Cormorants, which you mentioned in one of your 100 Birds emails.
Lev: I did. I think you’d put me onto it, so I think I’m giving you the credit for it. But it’s, yeah, it’s a fascinating thing.
Chris: Yes, it’s a French documentary, I think, from 1993, which I watched when it went out with a friend of mine I was sharing a house with at the time. And somebody came around a few days later and had also seen it. And we were just amazed.
Lev: Oh, this is terribly exciting.
Chris: And so when the Internet was invented, I sort of went looking for it. A couple of years ago, I must have put the title into a search engine and it popped up on YouTube and I was delighted. Basically, a middle-aged man, I think in rural China, who lives on a houseboat with his family. He goes out on a bamboo raft every day, pushing himself along with a pole, with a basket on the raft, and six or seven cormorants. He gets to his favoured spot in the river, and he starts jigging about and sort of humming a little tune. It’s a bit like, it’s not entirely unlike Vic Reeves singing in the club style. It’s just this... he’s sort of jigging about. And sometimes he kind of slightly pokes the cormorants with his pole just to encourage them. And they start diving off, going for fish. And they come back up onto the raft. And obviously their instinct is, I’m going to swallow this fish. But he has tied a bit of reed around their throats. So they’re like they’re like Jerry in Tom and Jerry trying to swallow a whole cheese. You know, there’s a big bulge in their throats. And he hoicks the fish out and chucks them in the basket. And sometimes they get, you know, one of the smaller fish. And it’s just this wonderfully strange, charming documentary and an insight into this presumably vanishing way of life.
Lev: And presumably now probably vanished altogether. Who knows? I don’t know.
Chris: Well, there’s a follow up.
Lev: Aha, you have a follow up. Excellent.
Chris: I obviously rewatched it. Then I looked it up on the Wikipedia. And apparently the filmmaker has a bit of a reputation for kind of slightly manipulating events. And I mean, you know, documentary makers do anyway, but it’s enough to be remarked upon apparently, and Wikipedia says that this type of fishing is now only done for tourists, but this made in 1993, when China is already massively industrializing, and actually, going back to Douglas Adams, he and Mark Carwardine had written Last Chance to See a few years before this.
Lev: Yeah.
Chris: And had discovered that the Yangtze River was full of poison and the dolphin was now long gone. So it’s probably a kind of look into a vanished way of life, which is maybe being a bit staged for us. But it’s still, you know, largely how it would have been.
Lev: Yeah.
Chris: And it’s still lovely and quirky and strange.
Lev: A little side note on that, which is the question of truth in nonfiction. How far do you go to tell the true story and how many lies – little tiny lies – can you tell, as long as the fundamental story is true, and what is truth? I’ve been through this… one of my books was autobiographical and about my rediscovery of the love of birds, and of course not everything in the book happened exactly as I wrote it. I would conflate events, I cut things out, I put things that happened on four different days happening all on the same day, for example, which… that, for me, is storytelling, and trying to engage the reader into something that is fundamentally honest and true. There is a notorious recent example of a non-fiction nature book where this appears not to have been the case…
Chris: Indeed yes.
Lev: …which famously went out last year: The Salt Path. And that provoked a big discussion, not just in nature writing but in non-fiction writers in general, as to you know, how much massaging is permissible before you kill the subject. So that’s really interesting about how the documentary was made. It also helps for the lay viewer that the cormorant, and its friend the shag, is an intrinsically humorous kind of bird. They look odd. They’re beaky and they have this extraordinary way of swimming, these writhing kind of rubbery things underwater, incredibly agile and nimble. And of course, that’s a comedic thing that was exploited by, well, Isherwood in the poem about the shag – paper bags and all that – but also in the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life, where the school cormorant has had linseed oil rubbed into it or whatever it is. A peacock is too obvious for that gag. A seagull wouldn’t be the same. The school cormorant is perfect.
Chris: So I think that is an intrinsic part of the charm of this film. Not just the man and his endearing Reevesian ways, but also his relationship with the cormorants.
Lev: As you say, they get their fish in the end. He does keep them alive.
Chris: Yeah. I read a novel ages ago called The Fat of Fed Beasts by Guy Ware. It was one of the kind of things that was recommended in Nicholas Lezard’s Paperback of the Week thing. And there was a bit, it was just so lovely. I wrote it down in my notebook that I write bits of books down in. He described cormorants as having beaks shaped like a geisha’s eyebrow.
Lev: Oh that’s wonderful, that is very good. I might nick that – I’ll cite my sources… that’s really good.
Chris: Wonderful.
Thing 6 – Nancy Banks-Smith
Lev: So from cormorants to, again, no link to this at all, but this is… I’m so pleased you’ve chosen Thing No. 6 and it’s really mean to describe her as a thing because she’s a wonderful, wonderful and much underrated and neglected and ignored writer. And people are going to be trying to guess who I’m talking about. You can spill the beans at your own pace, at leisure. You can keep us guessing or you can just tell us straight away who Thing 6 is.
Chris: Thing Six is the entirely marvellous Nancy Banks-Smith, who I believe is now 97, and is a retired TV critic. She was TV critic of The Guardian for 40-something years.
Lev: Yeah.
Chris: So she was a journalist from like the 1950s onwards, and joined the Grauniad in 1970, apparently. They ran a celebration of her in 2010, which said – I wrote this down – “she created the art of TV reviewing as tangential knockabout comedy, a mode that set the agenda and has been followed ever since, but never equalled”. And I think the crucial thing to note about her is that she started at The Guardian in 1970 and invented this way of reviewing TV. Clive James started at The Observer in 1972. So I discovered her in the 1980s as a teenager because my mum decided we needed to get a newspaper so that I was informed about current affairs, rather than just sitting in my room and listening to music and watching stupid comedy shows on telly and stuff. And I went for The Guardian because it was my dad’s paper. And so I used to, if it arrived in time, I would read it on the way to school. And basically, Nancy Banks-Smith is the reason why I always turned to the arts and other pages, long before I ever went anywhere near the news and analysis, because she was just brilliant. She was one of those reviewers, actually like Nicolas Lezard – who did paperbacks in The Guardian for a long time. It didn’t matter if you had an interest in the in the thing being reviewed or had seen it, it just didn’t matter. She was just a joy to read. She writes these wonderful sentences – it’s like if PG Wodehouse was reviewing TV. Yeah, she’s wonderful.
Lev: Absolutely. It’s the best kind of writing, isn’t it? It’s something where you glance at it in a paper or magazine or on the internet and you go, “Oh, I’m not interested in this. This isn’t my... Oh, God, hang on. I am interested in this, at least for the duration of reading the piece in question.”
Chris: And I think she was kind of often at her best when she was reviewing soaps, because you could be irreverent and you could mock them while still enjoying them. So for the 30th anniversary of Coronation Street, she rewatched the first episode and wrote about it. And there’s a couple of bits I have to read out. Firstly, she says, “Ena Sharples arrives in a double-breasted battle dress”, which kind of tells you everything about Ena Sharples, if you’ve never heard of her. And then she goes on to Elsie Tanner: “Her strings of improbable pearls laid out on the shelving bench of her chest, and her smalls hung on a string by the fire. Elsie was the sort of woman brush salesmen always hoped would answer the door. Ena was the one who usually did.”
Lev: I think she’s a name that many people will not know. People who know and revere Clive James, who, as you say, his career blossomed in other directions, and now there’s volumes and volumes of his writing and his poetry and his criticism, and he became a general commentator for decades. And yet, Nancy Banks-Smith probably isn’t known by anything like as many people. Do we know anything about what else she’s done when she retired and what she did before that?
Chris: Not really. And I think, yeah, I’ve been sort of thinking about this in the last few days. I think it’s partly because, or I get the impression, it’s partly because she appears to have been more interested in the work than in the life. And it’s not a criticism of Clive James at all to say that he was interested in being a public figure. I think that’s a perfectly laudable ambition. But I get the impression that that absolutely didn’t interest her. Apparently, she’s one of the people who has turned down an honour. I think at some point in the 70s, she turned down an OBE or something. And in 2014, there was going to be a book of collected pieces of her writing. I think it was announced in the Faber and Faber catalogue for that year. And John Self, the book reviewer, said on Bluesky a while ago that I think he’d heard that she got cold feet. So I think... the impression i get from all of that is that she just doesn’t want that level of fame, she doesn’t want to be a public figure. So my great hope is that she has spent her retirement writing a memoir because there are some wonderful asides in her in her writing… so there’s one where she talks about being backstage in the wings at the Palladium while Vera Lynn is on stage. She’s standing next to Marlene Dietrich.
Lev: God.
Chris: And there was another one where the helicopter, which was taking Janis Joplin to Monterey in 1967.
Lev: Wow.
Chris: So she was sat next to this woman who was apparently, you know, incapable through drink and drugs.
Lev: In a helicopter.
Chris: Yeah. She saw her go on stage and, you know, tear the place apart.
Lev: Yeah.
Chris: So she’s clearly had a fascinating life. But I suspect she is very much not writing a memoir. I think she’s not interested in that at all.
Lev: No. But also, at the very least, as you say, you’d love to have a collected volumes. I think I’ve probably got somewhere in a scrapbook, a couple of her columns because my parents used to occasionally clip things out that they thought interesting or funny or whatever. So there’s probably a few of those, but unless you’re an inveterate archive researcher and burrower, then, you know, her writing isn’t nearly as readily available as, as we say, Clive James being the obvious example, with the similarities so it would be wonderful to have. Chris, thank you so much for coming along with your six excellent things – varied and humorous and serious and random and obscure. Niche drivel, if you like. And thank you, listener, for listening. You can find out more about the featured things in the show notes and we’ll put links where appropriate. I hope they bring you as much pleasure as they’ve brought me. Thank you for listening and see you next month for six more excellent and fascinating things. Thanks, Chris.
Chris: Thank you. It’s been fun.
Lev: Bye.
Chris: Bye.
