Richard Beard

The Fabulous Trumpet Orchestra

Richard Beard — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:57:37 +0000

Blow Your Own

The noise, the noise. Oh, the blowing of trumpets. In the front row of the Internet orchestra are those blowing their own, but these are easily outnumbered by those modelling their brass on John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558).

Every internet rant is a blast that wants to be first, and ranting is such a natural fit to the form that the temptation ought to be resisted. Over the past month I have resisted ranting about Ryanair, automated sales calls, and two more subjects that are so rantishly scrawled on a scrap of paper I have no idea what they were. Paddles, apparently, and errors in tenant paranoia. Whatever was hurting, the pain has passed. Maybe I wanted to rant about bad handwriting. I hate that.

I prefer blogs that follow the example of the Angels. Write down five good things that happened today. Add those to the base-notes of indignation, merge them with the sound of own-blown trumpets and out comes the true sound of the Internet, the Fanfare for the Common Man.

That’s the noise the Internet makes.

Norwich Pride

Richard Beard — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:38:01 +0000

Monday 22 Feb 7pm UEA

I’ve enjoyed the continuing positive reaction to Becoming Drusilla, but we’re still spreading the word. On Monday 22nd Feb Dru and I will be in Norwich at UEA to give the LGBT History Month Lecture. There is a full month of events in Norwich and we’re providing some, though not all, of the T.

It is very nice to be invited, and these opportunities to keep going with the book remind me of a misunderstanding I had with Dru on the walk.

When we go walking we drink a lot of tea, which means that we’re often overtaken by other walkers while brewing up in a cosy hollow or on a friendly flat rock.

As the more earnest walkers struggle past I used to shout out ‘Keep Going!’ in what I took to be my jovial, even convivial voice. As the days went by, Dru grew increasingly gloomy. This surprised me, as she would usually support any attempt to make the world a more jovial and convivial place.

A family of Germans march by in the rain. ”Keep going!” I say, and Dru smoulders me a look.

‘What’s wrong? I thought you liked it when we talked to strangers?’

‘Yes,’ Dru said. ‘But you keep on telling them to keep going. How rude. You should try asking them to stop.’

Clint Does Rugby

Richard Beard — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:22:59 +0000

: The Real Thing

There’s an old rugby saying: if you’re good enough, you’re big enough. The actor Matt Damon would have to be very good indeed. In Clint Eastwood’s new film Invictus, Damon plays the role of 1995 Rugby World Cup winning captain Francois Pienaar. He is 5 inches shorter and 4 stones lighter – the All Blacks would snap him in half.

At 5’10” Matt Damon is also shorter than Nelson Mandela (6’1”), who in Eastwood’s film is played by Morgan Freeman (6’2”). Winning the World Cup as the shortest man in the room is the kind of exploit that Hollywood loves.

Invictus is based on John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy, which describes Nelson Mandela’s use of rugby to seduce white South Africans to his vision of the Rainbow Nation. ‘Don’t address their brains,’ he said at the time, ‘address their hearts.’ And deep in the Afrikaaner heart is a love of Rugby Union.

For a potential Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, the obscurity of rugby presents a problem. What, exactly, is this strange-looking game? The bemused film critic of the Tucson Weekly described the Invictus sports action as ‘a bunch of guys groaning a lot,’ while over at the Kansas City Star rugby ‘pretty much looks like a group mugging.’

Over here, though, everything will be different. We know what rugby is supposed to look like.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen Invictus and rugby doesn’t look like this. As with any sporting setback, it’s not fair to place all the blame on the captain. Matt Damon isn’t given much of a team. His stand-in Springboks look like college boys, though not necessarily students of acting, and their emotional range is limited even for rugby players. They sometimes cross their arms to express indignation.

These are pat-a-cake Springboks led by mini-Matt Damon and they will never win the Webb-Ellis Trophy. In that sense, the casting is perfect for the formula – Nelson can lick the boys into shape. If they follow his crazy reconciling ways, then one day, perhaps at a World Cup on home soil, they will ultimately prevail.

The Anxiety of Influence

Eastwood, too, is in the business of addressing hearts and not brains. Mandela is a complicated man in a troublesome country, but as with the rugby it’s easier to keep things simple. The Mandela bio-pic soon becomes a plot-standard sports movie: he’s black, he’s from the wrong side of the tracks, but can kindly ex-con Nelson Mandela inspire a bunch of undersized students to become Rugby Champions of the World?

Maybe he can, if these actor Boks show they know their rugby. I certainly hadn’t written them off in advance, especially as in America Invictus was rated PG 13, for ‘brutal sport action’.

Which is exactly what rugby should provide, when played properly. By ‘properly’, I mean as we’re used to seeing it on TV, most of the weeks of the year. To capture the full dynamism and grace of the game, and also the brutality, TV sticks to the basics. High-spec cameras follow the action.

In Invictus, because the players aren’t a patch on the real thing, the camera does exactly the opposite. It obscures the action. Eastwood keeps cutting away, and no single sporting sequence is allowed to develop.

I can see just enough to make out that Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky is having a bad day with the boot. He can’t punt a rugby ball, and his incompetence is so striking (in a Test Match, Brian!) that I want to see immediate replays of his flawed technique.

That’s my Pavlovian TV-spectator response to unusual sports phenomena, a category that includes all the rugby in this film. I want Eddie Butler to explain why the wingers don’t sprint and the Samoans are weak in defence. Is it the altitude? Have the All Blacks been poisoned? And why has Andrew Mehrtens appeared in a World Cup final wearing an Andrew Mehrtens wig?

Instead of this sense of involvement, I gradually realise I’m watching the one activity on earth that is as far from real life as it’s possible to get: the rugby looks like amateur dramatics.

And in Invictus there’s no escape, because the ‘95 Final is shown at length, almost thirty minutes of ersatz rugby action. The fearsome Jonah Lomu is replaced by a slightly chubby student. He is occasionally jumped on by other students, but before we can assess his contact skills the camera cuts to another unrelated set-up. There are scuffed kick-offs and elementary back-moves, all performed at rehearsal pace so as not to confuse Wisconsin.

Eastwood knows something is wrong. How could entire nations be in thrall to this? He therefore decides that the fervour of rugby is best expressed by sound-effects.

Springbok Back Line

In Invictus, the major injury risk to the players is earache. Every tackle boofs like a blunt object thumped into stuffed leather, and out comes the stuffing as grunts and oomphs. This is the aural equivalent of the Batman biff and boom.

Just when the rugby can’t get any worse, the match goes slow-mo. On television, slow-motion exists to repeat the interesting bits. In feature films, it means the emotional heft is so weighty that time stands still. Or feels like it does.

As the action slows, so does the sound. Ellis Park fills with whale-song, as the groans wallow deeply from one amateur tackle to the next. The Springbok fly-half Joel Stransky, who isn’t Stransky and who has forgotten his kicking boots, is calling for the ball in slow-audio, an unintelligible last word direct from a Hollywood battlefield, possibly Iwo Jima, and I expect him at any moment to receive (tragically) a solitary bullet between the eyes.

Instead he pops over a drop goal.

Clint gives rugby the fatal Hollywood treatment. In doing so, he undermines his film about Nelson Mandela, the nature of leadership, and the new South Africa.

In the best Hollywood sports films, usually about baseball or boxing, the protagonists are allowed to be grown men. Their lives depend upon their sport. The 1995 Springboks were also men, much closer to the flawed and grizzled heroes of Eastwood’s earlier work than they are to the college-boys of Invictus. They were playing for their old life and their new life, and also for themselves.

It does the truth of the story a disservice to insist, less than fifteen years after the event, that Mandela and the Boks can be simplified to serve the narrative conventions of this film. The rugby is central to this weakness. It becomes apparent long before the end that the epiphany of Invictus depends on the Springboks winning the Cup.

South Africa win. The film ends, and as choral arrangements squeeze the last sentimental tear from any dry eye, the credits roll against a montage of still photographs from the final. The real one.

There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela, the great man himself, at Ellis Park before kick-off. He is famously wearing the No.6 Springbok jersey, in green-and-gold, and he looks tiny against the blonde Afrikaaner bulk of Pienaar, the man he called ‘captain of rugby’. Anyone genuinely inspired by Nelson Mandela, and indeed by the game of rugby itself, will know that the triumph would have been as great if South Africa had lost.

How To Build An Igloo

Richard Beard — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:21:46 +0000

I could live in this forever

First, it must snow. It must snow a great deal.

Then you will need three small children. Close their school for the day, and find an expanse of snow-covered ground. Be the first there, because that makes it more fun.

Okay, I can’t do the instruction thing any longer, because it hurts. But this works best if you don’t have dogs – with dogs, you can never quite scoop up snow with abandon. However, you can be sure that some of your whites will go yellow. I recommend, before building an igloo, that you put down the dog. Igloos are a significant challenge. Respect the igloo.

As with all building projects, appoint a foreman. For best results select a woman, because it cuts out the arguing. Preferably a strong energetic woman from a country where the knowledge of how to build igloos is passed from generation to generation. Iceland and Greenland would be first choice, followed by the Scandinavian countries, though Switzerland will do at a pinch, and also possibly Southern Germany, the French Alps, and some regions of Italy and Austria.

Listen carefully to your foreman, then do what she says. Send the small children to collect huge amounts of snow. They will understand, especially if you can find a whelbarrow with a flat tire and an old broken bucket. One of the secrets is to think ‘cone’ and not ‘dome’, at least in the early stages. Another secret is to pack the snow in hard. This is an edifice, not a toy.

Hearth and Home

I can’t tell you any other secrets, because then I’d owe my soul to Smilla, Inuit Goddess of Feeling. However, I feel able to reveal that a wood-saw helps with the final stages, and also a frisbee or similar instrument.

Ah, now that’s a way to spend the day. School’s out again tomorrow. We’re going to build an ice hotel.

Drusilla Marland is Unwell

Richard Beard — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:24:44 +0000

not enough information

I had an email from Dru that wasn’t from Dru. It was her daughter, ambushing Dru’s email account like a policeman at the door – Dru had spent the night at A & E, she was being kept in hospital, she had to have an operation.

This news came across like smoke signals from the young: the smoke was bad but the signals were cheery. The message ended:

P.s dru’s mobile is out of charge so don’t try to ring it L

What were the Indians trying to say? How bad is L?

I wouldn’t say I panicked, but I googled Bristol Hospitals and started with the Royal Infirmary, thinking I could work down from there. Right first time. They did indeed have a Drusilla Marland on the wards, and yes, I could speak to her on the old-fashioned telephone.

Except Dru wasn’t exactly on the wards, she was somewhere north of Planet Nebula. She was on the wrong side of most of Bristol’s Royal painkillers, but at least they’d done their job. Those gallstones were sending out pain that was no longer reaching the brain. Dru tells me (because she is still in there) that an operation is imminent.

She came back to earth just once, to report that the Trav was parked outside and had a ticket on it.

I did what everyone does with health problems and looked gallstones up on the Internet. They are very painful, the internet says, and the condition is twice as likely to be suffered by women as men. The operation is usually successful.

At Schloss Marland, I’m glad to say, normal transmission should shortly be resumed.