Speccie: Haute Critique

John Whitworth · #1 12-31-2009, 05:06 AM

So the Speccie lurches into foreign language mode. First the rhyming prophecies. British references were preferred by Lucy. Sorry all the rest of you but the honour of the Sphere wasept up with a win for Jerome Betts and a win for me. Well done, Jerome. Well done me. Th winners will be found here under Competition.

Meanwhile...

No. 2630: Haute critique
A literary giant of the pre-telly age is guest TV critic on The Spectator. You are invited to submit an extract from his or her column (150 words max). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 January.

Wekl I suppose Doctor Johnson is obvious. I think if you kept it very general then not knowing about British TV (which is bloody dire I can tell you - thank God for American cops and international cricket) need not be an obstacle. Also, I don't see why, say Chaucer, shouldn't do a rhymed crit. OK people - get the rabbit!

John Whitworth · #2 12-31-2009, 05:10 AM

Competition
Lucy Vickery
Wednesday, 30th December 2009
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition 2627 you were invited to submit a rhyming prophecy for 2010. The entry was short on optimism but bursting with wit and ingenuity. Hats off to Mae Scanlan, a more-or-less lone Pollyanna in a sea of Cassandras, who foresees global peace and economic prosperity. She narrowly missed out on joining the winners, printed below. It’s £25 each and an extra £5 to Noel Petty. Happy New Year!

January opens sunny,
Bankers vote for parsimony,
BBC sacks Ross (‘not funny’),
Burmese colonels all resign.
Waving fields of green shoots sighted,
City overtake United,
Ferguson says ‘Great! Delighted!’,
Climate change declared benign.

GDP continues palmy,
Scientists turn back tsunami,
Afghans form a model army,
Taleban apologise.
World Cup won by Rooney thunder,
Brown takes blame for Labour blunder,
England four-nil up down under,
Pigs observed in southern skies.
Noel Petty

Three men in a vote,
Out on the stump,
Whatever one offers
The others gazump.
A flowering of flags,
Red and white in profusion,
The quadrennial dream
Another-four-gone conclusion.
A beknighted inquiry
Fires off its report:
Little bang for the bucks,
It’s what most people thought.
A sporting star somewhere
Bares feet made of clay:
It never quite works
Playing god and away.
W.J. Webster

British troops are in retreat,
Korea, North and South, unite.
Gordon Brown vacates his seat,
Mandelson again takes flight.
Soldiers leave Afghanistan,
Crisis strikes the Middle East:
Israel attacks Iran.
Tony Blair becomes a priest.
Rioting in Birmingham,
Lootings in Trafalgar Square,
Cameron appeals for calm,
Gets support from Father Blair.
Cyclones, floods and hurricanes
Batter Britain without cease.
BNP makes massive gains.
MPs get a pay increase.
Frank McDonald

Capello’s lot won’t light up grounds
Yet make it to the knockout rounds
Where, trounced in extra time, dog-weary,
They’ll blame the second Hand of Thierry.
Long after spring has been and sprung
The House of Commons will be hung
And Brown and Cameron will beg,
To save their skins, the Hand of Clegg.
The roof at Wimbledon will pass
Two weeks shut tight to save the grass
While outside, in the wet and mist,
Umbrellas shield a Hand of Whist.
Test Matches too will be a pain
When shrunk to one day due to rain
And as the light is offered — Boo! Hiss! —
We’ll curse the Hand of Duckworth-Lewis.
Jerome Betts

Winter — polar bears are stalking through the streets of Aberdeen.
Scottish Terror blames the English, firebombs Windsor, shoots the Queen.
Her Britannic Majesty restored, our second Good Queen Bess
Leads invading English armies to the walls of Inverness.

Spring — the Caledonian chancer, Brown with all his pirate crew,
Rogues and fools and tarts and gangsters, staggers to his Waterloo.
Rampant Ukip sweeps the country, vows to ban all minarets,
Then to halve the hellish tax on petrol, booze and cigarettes.

Summer — and the doughty English, in their raincoats and galoshes,
Vote to shun the Evil Empire of the Frenchies and the Boches.
At the Oval, an XI of our brave and stalwart sons
Whacks the Pakistani tourists, wins by seven hundred runs.

Autumn — see the caped crusader, Boris Johnson on his bike,
Rescue four and twenty virgins from a London Spud-U-Like.
Then our Mighty London Mayor, connoisseur of wit and drama,
Flogs the Twenty-Twelve Olympics off to President Obama.
John Whitworth

The coming year, I understand,
Will be a future Wonderland.
Reality will be in doubt,
Turned upside down and inside out,
And everything we take for granted
Will be increasingly supplanted
By nightmare scenes that would defeat
The surreal vision of Magritte.
Indeed, the world will be awash
With grisly creatures à la Bosch,
While Dennis Hopper or Bin Laden
May turn up, grinning, in your garden,
Prepared to terminate your life
With bomb, Kalashnikov or knife.
A modern Hades — that’s the glad news.
I’ll now prognosticate the bad news...
G.M. Davis

Jerome Betts · #3 12-31-2009, 01:17 PM

John, glad we managed to raise the DA standard high and well done, indeed, to you. Thought yours was by far the most fun, and they even preserved your stanza breaks.

Only the second time I've entered a Spectator comp. The first was in 1972 and I got £3 for a slightly wonky ballade, now matured over the intervening years into something considerably better IMHO.

Hmm, I wonder what Jane Austen would make of the Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley shown on TV the other night?

'It is a truth universally acknowledged that adaptors of novels must be in want of sense and sensibility . . .'

Happy new decade to all Spherites!

John Whitworth · #4 12-31-2009, 02:47 PM

Keira Knightley is the worst actress I have ever seen, well since Susan George anyway.

Terese Coe · #5 01-01-2010, 08:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

Keira Knightley is the worst actress I have ever seen, well since Susan George anyway.

I've often thought the same about Knightley, John. Artifice incarnate. Though I'm unaware of Susan George, who evidently never reached the same heights of celebrity.

Well done you and Jerome!

John Whitworth · #6 01-02-2010, 05:14 AM

Susan George can be found in the worst film I have ever seen (well nearly) the risible Peckinpah/Dustin Hoffman bloodfest set in the English countryside whose name I have mercifully forgotten, though Peter Vaughan as a mad yokel sucking his teeth and snarling is worth paying money to see. Susan George gets raped but then that was always happening to the poor girl.

Aha! I have remembered. Straw Dogs!

R. S. Gwynn · #7 01-05-2010, 01:59 PM

REALITY! Thou Goddess of the bor'd,
In whose name many an unearn'd fame hath soar'd,
The fat mechanic and his sluttish spouse,
Who plan a "billiard parlour" for their house;
The dentist who, with spittle in each line,
Doth mangle Sondheim, Hart, and Hammerstein;
The gaunt bulemic whose "designer" clothes
Nothing conceal and not much more disclose;
The haggard housewife, mark'd with bruise and mole,
Ascending weekly to a featur'd role;
The studded youth whose piercings daily grow,
Who wants a "reassignment" down below,
So that his girl, lolling in ebon slip,
Might have a single-sex relationship--
In thy name, Goddess, hath such spawn been born
And for whose sake my set have I forsworn.