That's my boy!

I've been involved in entertaining (even educating) children for the best part of twenty years now. Inevitably I have had a good deal of contact with parents. And, oh my goodness, there's nothing worse than a parent who keeps banging on about how talented his or her child is...

The problem is that now I'm doing it myself. It started when my son was two. We were in the car and he was sleeping in his car-seat next to me. I decided to profit from this rare moment of calm by luxuriating in an old tape of Richard Burton playing Coriolanus. After half an hour or so, my son awoke from his drowsy sleep. He turned to me and asked, "is this Shakespeare?"

Hats off, gentlemen! A genius I do declare...

So you can imagine my delight when a similar occurence happened just a short while ago. Listening to an indifferent performance of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony on the radio, my son (now aged three) turned to me and asked, "Is this Russian music!"

I beamed pure paternal pride. This boy is really something, I thought.

Unfortunately, my son continued, "it sounds like Bob the Builder music".

Tom and Jerry AT THE BBC!

A few days ago, I penned some thoughts for posterity and passing bloggers on the subject of Tom and Jerry. Well, would you believe it? Today, Tom and Jerry actually features as a major news item (sandwiched between 'the Middle East' and 'bowel cancer drugs') on the BBC News, in the Evening Standard newspaper, ITN bulletins....

Following a complaint from a UK Viewers' Association(!), the BBC has agreed to cut scenes which show Tom smoking a cigarette or a cigar if - in the view of a panel convened for this purpose - the act of smoking appears to be 'glamorised'. Oh, heavens, spare us!

Now, as you know, Tom's smoking is an essential ingredient of episodes like Texas Tom (1950) and Tennis Chumps (1949). It's how Tom looks cool when trying to pull the girl-cats. Cut the smoking from these episodes? It's crazy... You might as well take the skull out of Hamlet.

My urgent advice, buy your Tom and Jerry DVDs from Taiwan via eBay. They may be pirated, but at least they are THE REAL THING!

Tom and Jerry

I've been working this last half hour with my three and a half year old son sitting behind me watching Tom and Jerry. He is now a T & J connoisseur, having viewed each of the DVDs in this 10-DVD set umpteen times. What's more, as I bought the set on ebay from Taiwan, and these particular CDs have an audio soundtrack of Chinese and English, my son is clearly determined to master the Chinese (Mandarin) language. If I put the English audio track on, he insists, "No! I don't want it in English, I want it in C-H-I-N-E-S-E!!!" and promptly presses the remote control to change the audio channel...

Now of course the Chinese language option does not affect many of the episodes, there being little or no dialogue. The Cat Concerto has just finished and it is this particular episode which has prompted me to put pen to paper. One of my earliest childhood memories is this particular episode. The rarity of watching a MGM cartoon was of course an event in those days (early 1970s). In the UK there was no television at all in the morning. But i remember that around 1pm on a Saturday we were treated to a 5 minute cartoon. How each moment was savoured - and was exquisite was the sadness when the episode finished, perhaps never to be seen again. It was thus that i experienced The Cat Concerto. For anyone who has not seen it, the episode involves Tom - in full evening attire - performing Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, arranged for orchestra and piano. Unfortunately Jerry is asleep inside the piano, on the hammers in fact, and is distrubed by the playing. As Tom continues to play, Jerry tries to put Tom off, first by mocking him, but eventually by replacing some of the keys with mousetraps and so on... It's charming and beautifully choreographed to the music. I was perhaps 5 when I saw this and I never forgot the music. Whenever I heard that Liszt Rhapsody, I had forever a Pavlovian recollection of Tom and Jerry. Who knows, perhaps it even helped to form my taste in music... Repeat viewings of The Cat Concerto only confirm in my mind that this is film-making, animation and 'art' of the highest order.

I recently showed some of my psychology students the episode entitled That's My Mommy!, another highly intelligent piece of script-writing and/or story-boarding. Mozartian in its economy, there is not a wasted second in this little gem. Modelled loosely on the findings of Konrad Lorenz, the episode involves Jerry trying to save a newly-hatched duckling from being barbecued/roasted by the hungry Tom. It's a difficult task because the duckling is intent on escaping in order to find Tom again. The reason? The duck egg hatched underneath Tom and consequently the first living thing the duckling saw was Tom: a classic case of 'imprinting'. I find the humour gentle and a positive affirmation of life. I find the ending quite exceptional and heart-warming.

Of course, not all the episodes are as effective and perhaps it's true that the best episodes are from the Hanna-Barbera era, though the later episodes are not as bad as many say. Perhaps they are brasher, less subtle, but there are still some fine moments.

Many have commented on the violence in Tom and Jerry. Doubtless various Ph.Ds have been awarded from dubious institutions which consider the long-term effect of cartoon violence on the developing mind. But, to my knowledge, no one seems to have remarked on the amount of sex in Tom and Jerry. Tom often falls for a wickedly sexy 'dame' and sets about seducing her, in much the way a 60s film star might have done.

In the world of Tom and Jerry, beautiful women (or at least beautiful girl-cats) are only interested in men with fast cars, huge wads of cash, broad shoulders and fine clothes. Oh, and that 'cool' way of speaking, oft-imitated by adolescent boys... The extent to which Tom and Jerry imprinted itself on me as a wide-eyed five-year-old, I suspect I can never know.

Reservations about blogging

Since being introduced to blogging, I'm beginning to have my doubts. Why do it? Why not write a private diary instead? Surely it's easier to be more truthful in private. Sure, I can blog but, if you are reading this, you can be sure that you are only reading a version - a highly edited version - of me. And if it is highly edited, then is it me?

For example, I attended a dinner party a few weeks ago, which was attended by a senior political figure in UK politics. He was engaging and I have a lot to say about him - but I can't do it here. Similarly, much of my life is my work - which happens at present to be setting up and running a school. It's difficult to see how I can write any aspect of this without betraying confidences.

So it seems to me that prima facie I can only write about the inconsequential and the trivial (not that the trivial is devoid of meaning or indeed interest). But do I write about every sunset that moves me - or indeed the latest altercation with UK traffic police... or my views on the writing of Melanie Klein (currently engaged in)?

But worse - I have a feeling (and I'd love to be wrong) that real people who do real things are, well, doing real things. They're not sitting at home blogging. For the sake of argument, let's take JK Rowling. I can't believe that she could have blogged between penning episodes of the latest Potter novel. And even post-Potter, surely she's too busy now enjoying the fruits of her labour to be blogging?

Is blogging just a variation on daytime television?

Hmm, I'll keep on mulling this one over.

Ross Pruden

I met Ross perhaps 14 years ago now... at a party I believe after a performance in Paris of Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy (in which I played Harold). I think that was how we met... Ross likes computers. No, Ross loves computers and all their possibilities. I'm a little older than Ross and there would have been a time when my expertise far outshone his. Back in 1981, I was a TRS-80 addict and there was little that I did not know about the 16K beast which was the Model I. Two years later, I graduated to the 48K monster - namely the Model III. I remember fondly stroking the plaque emblazoned with '48K', all the while thinking 'what power!'. It's a much referred to in-joke between Ross and me.

But then, for some reason, I never graduated beyond the TRS-80. In fact I was writing my university thesis on it as late as 1989, when the rest of the world had moved on. Ross is a Mac man - and so was I, until I finally threw the towel in near the turn of the millenium and switched to PC.

So why am I rambling on about Ross? Because it was Ross who last night in a transatlantic phone call convinced me of the wonders of blogging. Keen to move on and stay eternally young, I took the bull by the horns and this morning finally created an account. So thanks Ross! Doubtless you will return throughout my blogging like some insistent Wagnerian leitmotiv.