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Unread 09-30-2010, 03:15 AM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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Default Competition: Pseuds' Corner

Competition: Pseuds corner
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35.

I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not Inkerman Street. Coronation Street is, however, an ongoing paradigm, a speculum humanae vitae, whose cobbles incorporate the Heideggerian necessity of existence. The street qua street is no thoroughfare, it has no beginning and no end, a Ding an sich leading nowhere, but with at its still centre the Rover’s, the bourne to which all travellers return. Birth, copulation and death revolve around the old gods: Ken, whose very name means ‘knowledge’, an aged Silenus set against the Ewig-Weibliche, Deirdre of the Sorrows. The all-too-human plotlines are suffused with original sin — bodies remain in the concrete, love-children in others’ cradles, and the commercial proximity of kebabs and lingerie scarcely needs a Freud to interpret, nor need we speculate why the factory is called Underworld. The populating she-devils would grace a Mystery play! Foucault once remarked...
Brian Murdoch

When, in glossing Hegel’s famous remark that history repeats itself, Marx added ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’, he might have been proleptically describing the classic series of Carry On films that distinguished British cinema between 1958 and 1978 — the last two decades of consensus politics in the UK. As Professor McCabe has suggested, their ‘deep springs of creativity’ derive from the perilous but socially unifying years of the second world war, imaging a nation which had not yet suffered the divisive impact of Thatcherism. Moreover, in pursuing the multiple semantic associations of ‘carrying on’ they add to a traditional ribaldry the sophistication of an approach to language that foresees the postulated ‘flux of signifiers’ found in Barthes and Derrida. Equally, in engaging with material previously treated by Shakespeare, Carlyle and Kipling they erode the cultural Berlin wall between the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’.
Basil Ransome-Davies

Numerology has heritage: in the arithmancy of the Chaldeans, in the rabbinical tradition of the Qabalah. I am not writing here of the duplication and re-duplication of sums in the incrementally impoverished sequencing of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (‘New’ or otherwise), the lineal descendant of Double Your Money: but of the radical indeterminacy of numerical selection presented in Deal or No Deal. The opening of the red box mimics not only the trappings of political power, but also the ‘mouth’ in a priestly or psychosexual sense, inviting the voyeuristic to participate in transformational spectacle. The mimicry here of both reproductive and liturgical overtures is what identifies the programme as superior. There may also be a nod to popular culture, as in Mick Hucknall’s song ‘Open Up The Red Box’ and its reference to ‘An overweight greasy little man with a mouth/ That opens more than now and again.’
Bill Greenwell

Mother Goose’s Funbook is an opulent repository of tribal myth, arcane religious lore and Freudian/Jungian archetypes. The lecteur is offered, in brief rhymed capsulets, a surrealistic interrogation of nothing less than suffering humanity: the scourged Polly Flinders, Jack and Jill who replicate in miniature the terrible narrative of The Fall, Humpty-Dumpty fractured beyond repair in spite of royal patronage by his indecision, Miss Muffet, sexually menaced, the abused infant, Hush-a-bye, primed for destruction in the tree top. In this monograph I shall refer particularly to the religio-sexual dilemma of Goosey Gander. Torn between ‘upstairs’ (Paradise) and ‘downstairs’ (Hell) and ‘my lady’s chamber’ (female pudenda) he is obliged to ‘wander’, thus cognate with the Wandering Jew of tradition. The ‘old man’ is liable to divaricate exegesis: he would not (could not?) ‘pray’ (prey?); therefore he is brutally punished for his atheism and impotence, by expulsion and exile. Furthermore…
Gerard Benson

To appreciate the paradoxically complex simplicity of this allegorical conceptualisation, one need only consider its title, which embodies both direction and destination which, by definition, is terminal. The seeds of what must surely be a journey to oblivion are propagated through a diversity of characters whose sum represents what might be regarded as a single entity reflecting the multilayered personality facets integral to everyman. Janineic jealousy and Philian ferocity augmented by the idiosyncratic attributes of the entire dramatis personae combine to form an existential unity symbolising an inseparably synthesised universality. Turning to technical considerations, the association of title tune and script with the ‘estrangement effect’ or, in Brechtian parlance Verfremdungseffekt, encourages a critical view of what is clearly a representation of reality rather than reality itself. Believable or not, the stentorian echoes of ‘Oi – Rickay’ will doubtless reverberate in the collective unconscious long after EastEnders eventually ‘goes west’ and ends.
Alan Millard
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