That Monday Morning Feeling

 

A Long Perspective

It was actually a Thursday, a dreary, overcast evening in late May or early June, 1972. The dull weather didn't matter, though, because it was a good evening on the television: Top Cat, Where in the World (a travel quiz which I unaccountably liked), Top of the Pops, The Goodies. The Cricklewood trio’s antics ended at 8.30, leaving a half hour gap before the Nine O'Clock News. This thirty-minute slot was, for just three weeks, occupied by a short documentary looking at the lives of various working people. It wasn't the kind of programme that held much appeal for me, but for some reason I particularly noticed the title: That Monday Morning Feeling. I was just eleven years old and would not enter the world of work for another eleven years... a whole lifetime in the future. Yet that title, and a passing glimpse of the programme set me thinking about how it might feel when I could go to work instead of going to school. I've always liked a well-turned phrase, and 'That Monday Morning Feeling', with its hint of drudgery and dull routine really caught in my mind. Maybe it was the dreary oppressive atmosphere that held sway on that Thursday evening, but somewhere a connection was made.

It was a phrase I could relate to, even as a schoolboy: going back to school on a Monday morning after a weekend spent playing with toys, drawing, watching television was always a comedown. I didn’t hate school as such, it’s just that I could always find other things to do with my time. Going to work, though, that felt different somehow. No longer under any obligations to teachers, homework, exams. I’d always been intrigued by the notion of ‘going to work’, and had often wondered what my dad did all day in his office job at the GEC in Witton, Birmingham. Sometimes he let my brother and myself have used forms, old desk diaries and suchlike to use as drawing paper, but I was always intrigued at the forms themselves, with their columns and boxes to tick.

Going to work had seemed like something exciting and interesting. Now, along came a programme whose title suggested otherwise. For me, television was a parade of fantasy, comedy and adventure, but here was a glimpse of real life, a hint of what the grown-up world of working people was really like. I didn’t sit down and watch any of those three programmes, but the title really set me thinking, and I’ve remembered it all this time.

Fifty-one years later, glancing through the pages of my diary for that year, I was reminded of that Thursday evening so long ago and how it made me stop and think, if only for a moment, about the grown-up world I would one day inhabit. What kind of a place would I find myself working in? As things turned out, I would ultimately spend less than a decade actually 'going out to work'. From 1991 onwards, my workplace became the home. How would I have felt to be confronted then with the knowledge of where my future lay? Back in 1972, the future was still mysterious and intriguing. All manner of possibilities lay in wait: growing up, going to work, marriage, a home, perhaps even children. It didn't seem too much to hope for: I'd been to the weddings of a couple of cousins and guessed something similar must lie somewhere over my own horizon. By the following year, I had even found myself a potential role model in the shape of Likely Lad Bob Ferris. I seriously saw myself married to someone like Thelma and living somewhere like the Elm Lodge Housing Estate... modest ambitions indeed, but it was, after all, the 1970s, and middle class suburbia was my milieu.

Ultimately, none of this happened. But now, as I confront the end of my own working life, it's strange to look back at myself standing on the brink of the grown-up world and wondering what kind of life and career lay ahead of me. Strange and, I have to say, ineffably sad. Stumbling across that memory brought to mind some lines of Philip Larkin... not, as one might expect, his meditations on what he called 'the toad work' but rather, the following observation, set down in his poem 'Reference Back':

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

What I have as it once was... curiosity, hope, a child's naive outlook on a life still to be lived. This is indeed a long perspective, one that, perhaps, it is best not to contemplate for too long. Larkin was actutely aware of time and its effect on people's lives... in another verse he writes of life as 'the unbeatable slow machine that brings what you get'. I know now what the machine brought for me, just as I know for certain that I will never experience 'that Monday morning feeling' again. And somehow, the world seems a sadder place for it.

However Many Years it is of Eurovision, it's Too Many

Is there anywhere on Earth a more worthless endeavour than the Eurovision Song Contest? What little I saw of this year’s effort was enough to convince me that it was designed by AI and performed by ChatBots. In all the five-hour farrago, there wasn’t a single entrant who didn’t conform to the required stereotype of pretty girl/boy/don’t know from central casting whose costume designer was having a laugh at their expense. As you were – I believe I spotted a bunch of scary men from Germany playing an inappropriate heavy rock song (also obligatory).

Eurovision, like so much of modern life, has become a victim of overthinking. What was once a one-night event has now become a sprawling multi-media monster, dragging out over weeks of heats, semi-finals and endless pontification (most of it courtesy of the BBC, whose curation smacks increasingly of entitlement). Eurovision is clearly organised by the kind of people who believe Christmas begins in September – people to whom the philosphy ‘less is more’ might as well be written in Sanskrit. This year, horrors, it came from Liverpool, which meant that, the night before on BBC4, we got an evening of Liverpool-related music. Whoever it was that managed to conceptually drag Paul McCartney into the whole tawdry celebration should be sent to a Gulag along with the bloke who came on at the end last night and murdered John Lennon’s Imagine whilst wearing a kind of semi-transparent vest/shirt. He couldn’t sing to save his life. But these days, who can?

The contest can’t even deliver on the promise of its own title. Originally intended as a celebration of songwriting (I’ll come back to this later), it has descended into a textbook example of style over content, the ‘songs’ reduced to mere noise intended as accompaniment for a lot of slick, garish visuals. This kind of schtick – fireworks going off every ten seconds, cascades of silver foil, audiences whooping every time the ‘artist’ throws another shape – used to be the preserve of X Factor and its ilk. It has as much to do with songwriting as songwriting has to do with quantum physics. Less, in fact. Then there’s the whole ‘Euro’ thing. Ignoring the supreme hubris and hypocrisy of Britain still feeling entitled to participate in any event with the dreaded ‘Euro’ suffix, the contest today welcomes entrants from nations who by no stretch of the imagination have ever belonged to Europe. You can’t get further from Europe than Australia, unless there’s anyone on the Moon who fancies having a crack. And to return momentarily to the thorny issue of Britain in Europe, I wonder how many of those hosting Eurovision parties last night voted for Brexit? You can all hang your heads in shame, and fuck off while you’re doing it. Of course, since Brexit, Britain can never hope to win Eurovision. Last night, ‘our’* entry was placed second from last. Of course, the community is fine with Britain hosting the whole stupendo-expensive spectacle, which no nation can reasonably afford given the parlous state of so many economies. Not that politics can be allowed to impinge on proceedings. Zelensky was threatening to do a stand-up routine about the Ukraine war but was asked not to bother because the organisers had already lined up Kate Middleton and she’s a lot easier on the eye. Plus, it probably made her feel as if she was doing something worthwhile. Whatever the organisers think, though, Eurovision has always been political – one only has to look at the way the voting has been carved up between ‘friendly’ nations, and then there’s the notorious example of Franco bribing the judges in 1968 which scuppered Cliff’s chances of winning with Congratulations.

[* I say ‘our’ but I don’t include myself in this. ‘Not my Eurovision’ one might say.]

But hold on just a moment – today’s Eurovision might be a campy, asethetically-challenged parade of vacuous horse manure, but was it ever anything else? I’ve wracked my memory to try and think of a single good song to have emerged from the far-too-many years of Eurovision, and I’ve come up with just one – Abba’s Waterloo. It would, in retrospect, turn out not to be Abba’s greatest hit, but on the night (and I sat through the whole 1974 contest), it was a clear winner from the opening bars. It may not be a ‘great’ song, but it was hooky and memorable, two qualities that today’s crop of songwriters are signally lacking. I quite liked All Kinds of Everything, Dana’s winning entry from 1970, but in the interests of fair play, feel obliged to point out that a key, six-note phrase of the melody was ‘borrowed’ from Wonderful Land, a 1962 hit for The Shadows. [Fans of conspiracy theory may be intrigued to know that the composer of Wonderful Land, Jerry Lordan, went on to pen Dana’s next single (which flopped).] Love is Blue (Luxembourg’s winning entry of 1967) wasn’t without merit, and provided a sizeable hit across Europe for its composer, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything beyond this and Abba that had much of a shelf life away from the contest. 

So, three songs out of hundreds. Is that really it? ‘Hold on’, I hear you cry, ‘what about Love Shine a Light, Katrina and the Waves’ winning entry of 1997?’ Well, what about it? Can you remember how it goes, because I can’t. QED.

On the whole, Eurovision hasn’t done a lot to promote the art of popular song. If anything, it’s had a detrimental effect. One only has to consider some of Britain’s entries – Puppet on a String (even Sandie Shaw herself derided it as rubbish); Boom Bang-a-Bang; Clodagh Rogers’ Jack in the Box; Save Your Kisses For Me. At least they were memorable, unlike today’s efforts, but never in a good way. I’ve already mentioned The Shadows, and even they managed to get themselves embroiled in the contest with Britain’s 1975 entry, Let Me Be the One (hardly a high point of the band’s career).

In the course of writing this polemic, I had cause to consult Wikipedia’s list of Britain’s entries since we first competed in 1957 (the contest’s second year), and of those 66 entries, there were only 14 I knew well enough to be able to hum the melody. The bulk of them I didn’t even recognise as titles. Not that I’ve paid much attention to the contest these past thirty odd years. On occasions, I’ve tuned in more from a kind of horrified curiosity than any genuine interest, but back in the 60s and 70s I watched it every year. My earliest recollection is Sandie Shaw winning in 1967. Barefoot, and wearing what looked like a babydoll nightie, she looked as if she’d been got out of bed to perform. Later, we rooted for Cliff (in ‘68 and ‘73) and his mates the Shads in ‘75 (who might have done better had Bruce Welch not fumbled the lyrics), but in general, I found it hard to find much love for Britain’s entries. One often got the impression that artists had been talked into taking part by their management, whereas today it’s easy to imagine an arena full of shallow wannabe celebrities falling over themselves to be chosen. Since the 1970s, no artist of the first rank has competed, and anyone with an iota of integrity and credibility has given the contest a wide berth. Yet still it goes on, and will almost certainly continue to do so. One really does have to ask why? How much did it cost to host this year’s event, and wouldn’t that money have been better spent elsewhere in this cash-strapped economy?

It’s high time we put Eurovision out of its misery. And ours.