The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I got racism from teachers, I got it from bus drivers…’
Growing up in west London in the 1970s Sanjeev Bhaskar soon learnt how to talk his way out of trouble. No wonder he makes such a charming TV cop
U ‘nfortunately, my mind goes straight to Starsky and Hutch,” says Sanjeev Bhaskar, when I ask him about his favourite cop duos. For a teenager of the 1970s, that’s not a surprise, nor is the fact that the former Goodness Gracious Me star used to have on his wall a Charlie’s Angels poster that he’d torn out of a magazine. “I didn’t really rate them as cops,” he confesses.
Of course, these days, Bhaskar is part of a hit cop show himself – ITV’s Unforgotten. Chris Lang’s intensely watchable cold-case drama is back for a fourth series, with the 57-year-old playing DI Sunny Khan opposite Nicola Walker as DCI Cassie Stuart. “I think the reason crime shows are popular is that it’s probably the one kind of show, maybe alongside quiz shows, where the viewer is intrinsically taking part,” says Bhaskar. “So we are the detectives.”
Sunny and Cassie make a fascinating duo. Sunny is normal, understated, droll; Cassie, emotive, penetrating, yet normal too. That shared aspect sets the pair apart from the car-crash cops we’re used to seeing, from Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison (booze, loneliness) to Line of Duty’s Ted Hastings (porn, loneliness). “There’s a warmth and emotional stability,” he says. “Not many other detective shows have that.”
Bhaskar has it in person, too, and there’s no doubt that it has helped him make the transition from comic to straight actor. We catch up via video call; he’s dressed in black and tucked away in a book-filled corner of the north London home he shares with wife Meera Syal and their son, Shaan, who’s 15. Home schooling has not been the challenge it is for parents of younger children but, Bhaskar protests, it has involved him making lunch. He also has a stepdaughter, Chameli, who’s 26.
His parents, who were famously the models for Madhuri and Ashwin Kumar in his 1990s comedy/ chat show The Kumars at No 42, are both in their 80s. They’ve been part of the same support bubble; he’s seen them regularly, and reports that both have now been vaccinated against Covid-19. I have a soft spot for Bhaskar’s father’s response when he first told him he wanted to be an actor – “It’s pronounced doc-tor.”
Inderjit and Janak Bhaskar arrived in Britain in the 1950s from the Indian Punjab, after the bloodshed and upheaval of Partition. Sanjeev was born in 1963, his sister
Sangeeta four and a half years later. They grew up in Hounslow, west London, above the family launderette, next door to the fish and chip shop run by “working-class, funny, polite” Phyllis and Gordon Fullagar, who first formed Bhaskar’s sense of Englishness, along with Roger Moore in The Saint.
There was little of that wit or warmth in evidence when the Bhaskars had “NF” painted on their door by the National Front. He wasn’t afraid, he says: “At that age you take your cue from your parents, and they just went and painted over it.
“There was a lot of casual racism and casual sexism in society and on television,” he notes. “I still find it amazing now, thinking about some of the jokes that were in Benny Hill at prime time. As a kid growing up, to a certain extent you get inured to it, you get immune from it, because you hear it every day in school. I mean, I got it from teachers, I got it from bus drivers. As an 11-year-old, I remember this guy talking about ‘Pakis’, and people looking at me, just me and about 10 pensioners on the bus.”
As he got older, nearby Southall became a focus for far-Right skinheads, and his anxieties shifted: “I was afraid more for my parents than for myself. Because from early on, I thought, I could probably talk my way out of most situations. But I knew my parents couldn’t.”
Bhaskar was too young to attend the Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall in 1979 – at which the teacher Blair Peach was killed by a member of the Met’s Special
Patrol Group – but he can recall the “frightening” morning after. On the way to school that day, he says, “I remember thinking about that phrase, ‘You could cut the atmosphere with a knife’; it was the first time I’d experienced it, the air felt heavy.” Does he think there should be a historic prosecution, as there was with Hillsborough? “There shouldn’t be a moratorium on criminal activity,” he says. “Blair Peach had family, and may still have family, and for them, there’s no closure.”
He extends that thought to the sins of the British Empire. “If we want an honest society, then I think we have to explore all of that stuff. The difficulty is that that’s seen as somehow not being patriotic… Atrocities are atrocities. If you just shut the door on it, then you learn nothing from it.”
When he told his dad he wanted to be an actor, he replied, ‘It’s pronounced doc-tor’
I wonder what he makes of the way TV treats vintage comedy now, in which certain scenes are excised or labelled with trigger warnings. “I think it’s fair enough to put up a warning to contextualise it, like this was made in the 1940s, 1950s, 1970s,” he says. But, for instance, “the whole issue of blacking up didn’t feel right to me even as a child… I’m not saying that simply blacking up in a programme now is grounds to dismiss it, because you go, ‘What’s the context?’ Context is the thing that gets lost in all the noise in every argument.”
We chat about why there have been so few successors to Goodness Gracious Me in the 20 years since it aired. The sketch show, with its brilliant takes on everything from going out for an English – “What’s the blandest thing on the menu?” – to the difficulty of pronouncing “complicated” English names, still feels like an outlier. “There’s plenty of people out there who are good,”
It is 50 years on Monday since once of the great upheavals of our culture: the adoption of the decimal currency. The first campaign for decimalisation was launched in 1682, and it shows our desire to preserve our way of life that it took nearly 300 years to achieve it. In an old country, people get used to things, and they become a part of the culture; the culture changes only when it suits those with political power to do it.
On February 15 1971, the 12 times table ceased to be a matter of life and death for schoolchildren, and the consequent collapse in our mental arithmetic skills was catastrophic. The ease of totting up sums of money came at the cost of centuries of history. It was typical of the obsession with change that scarred the early 1970s. Despite the listing of buildings, ignorant and sometimes corrupt councillors pulled down fine Georgian and Victorian architecture to accommodate tower blocks and hideous shopping centres. (I read recently that one such urban horror is to be demolished and replaced by a park, because of the slump in high street retailing: may there be many more.)
We still had Victorian coins in our change in the 1960s – “Bun” pennies and halfpennies from a century earlier. They were usually heavily worn and the Queen’s head, her hair tied in a bun, had a ghostly aspect as a result: but there was a feeling of history in your pocket, as with the coinage of Edward VII, George V and George VI that was commonly around.
Talk of us adopting dollars and cents, as Australia had in 1966, came to nothing; “penny”, around since the seventh century, remained as a name, even though that Anglo-Saxon term found itself truncated to the unfortunate “pee” in speech. But the hefty halfcrown, a fine canvas for the coin engraver’s art since 1549, went even before decimalisation; the florin (1849, a tenth of a pound and thus the first decimal coin) and the shilling (equivalent to 5p), descended from the testoon of Henry VIII but named after the
Old English scilling, lasted another 20 years until the coinage was downsized, and 10p and 5p coins were no longer their pre-decimal size. The sixpence stayed in circulation until 1980, as two-anda-half pence, but the threepence, which like the sixpence was first minted under Edward VI, went in 1971. The farthing, first coined in 1272 in the reign of Edward I and worth a quarter of a penny, had gone in 1960, a victim of inflation.
The pre-decimal coins had handsome designs – Britannia, coats of arms, the British lion, royal ciphers – and were richly engraved, nothing like the blank, boring and minimalist designs of the first decimal coinage. Once art, and history, were erased from coins, people stopped noticing them. And therefore they stopped having a relationship with them: our coins have no nicknames such as tanner (sixpence), bob (shilling) or half-dollar (half-crown). There are no songs or rhymes such as
Sing a Song of Sixpence, or I’ve Got Sixpence; no child will instinctively know what “You owe me five farthings/ Said the bells of St Martin’s” means. No novelist today would echo a title such as The Moon and Sixpence. And when Christmas was coming (and the goose was getting fat) we used to sing: “If you haven’t got a penny/ A ha’penny will do,/ If you haven’t got a ha’penny/ then God bless you.”
Our language has lost idioms.
Our coins no longer have nicknames. No songs or rhymes are written about them
Only those of a certain age would now say, “I haven’t got a brass farthing” or “I haven’t got two ha’pennies to rub together”. Does anyone now “spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar”, and is anyone still “a daft ha’p’orth”? In some pubs
– at least before the pandemic – shove ha’penny was still played, thanks to enterprising people selling sets of five old ha’pennies.
A tear-jerker film used to leave “not a dry eye in the one-andnines”. Soldiers took “the King’s shilling”; those who wished to dress respectably visited a “50 bob tailor”; boy scouts had “bob a job week”. Someone who wasn’t very bright was “elevenpence ha’penny to the shilling”; something or someone worthless was
“tuppenny ha’penny”; if disappointed, we looked as though we had “lost half a crown and found a sixpence”. Perhaps best of all, someone dodgy was “bent as a nine-bob note”. I quite recently heard a politician described with that phrase, so perhaps our ancient culture might survive after all.
Nancy Mitford, a regular visitor to Long Crichel, a Queen Anne rectory in Dorset, called the house “a prose factory” and its owners “the Brontës”. For Rosamond Lehmann, a visit was one of her “treats and pleasures”. Ben Nicolson, the elder son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, said that “Crichel is almost too good to be true… it seems to me the ideal house.” It was the last of the great English literary salons.
Between the wars, famous London hostesses such as Sibyl Colefax and Emerald Cunard had brought sparkling guests together as if they were mixing colourful cocktails. When Cunard’s house was bombed, she entertained on the seventh floor of the Dorchester Hotel instead, refusing to pay any attention to the din of the Blitz outside. “War is so vulgar,” she said. By 1945, when much of England’s green and pleasant land had been turned into a landscape of Nissen huts, barbed wire and aerodromes, the literary salon reconvened – this time, not in Park Lane, but in a small farming village in Dorset.
The rectory beside the Long Crichel parish church had been sold in 1945 as a weekend retreat to three friends: Eddy Sackville-West, Vita’s cousin, who had been working as a BBC producer; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, a captain in military intelligence yet to be demobbed; and Eardley Knollys, the assistant secretary to the National Trust. They were later joined by Raymond Mortimer, who in 1940 had been responsible for setting up the Free French station Radio Londres. When peace came, ShaweTaylor and Sackville-West went back to being music critics for the New Statesman, and Mortimer became the literary editor of The Sunday Times. To their friends, they became known as the “Crichel Boys”.
The house was exceptionally cold. There was no electricity, so light came from oil lamps and candles. The water supply was feeble. The septic tank in the garden was a typhoid risk. However, the new owners made improvements. They hired a cook, Mrs Deverell, who worked wonders despite rationing, and her husband became the butler (from whom guests were advised to hide their small change). There were two charwomen, a gardener-cum-handyman and a secretary for Knollys.
Soft furnishings were designed by Duncan Grant and John Piper and the dinner plates painted by Vanessa Bell. Books were everywhere – in all the rooms, hundreds of them, crammed on the shelves, in stacks on the floor, lying around on any spare bit of furniture. “I stayed the weekend at Long Crichel,” wrote James Lees-Milne, who advised the National Trust on which country houses to save, in his diary in January 1946. “Eardley, Desmond and Eddy lead a highly civilised life here. Comfortable house, pretty things, good food. All the pictures are Eardley’s, and a fine collection of modern art too.”
The Crichel Boys were soon receiving visitors – Colefax was one of the first, followed by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Kenneth Clark, Elizabeth Bowen, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, Laurie Lee and many more. When Greta Garbo came to stay, Mrs Deverell went out of her way to serve the best possible food. She asked her husband, who asked Knollys, if she could meet the Great Hollywood Star. Unfortunately, the Great Hollywood Star said no.
Both Lees-Milne and Frances Partridge, two of the century’s finest diarists, came so often – he to escape his wife, she in her widowhood – that they were almost honorary members of the Crichel coterie. Paddy Leigh Fermor came to write and play croquet. “Long Crichel has always been a sort of Mecca for me,” he told Balasha Cantacuzene, the Romanian princess lover he had met in the 1930s, on his walk across Europe, “all working hard, as in a lay-monastery, except for the delicious food and funny conversation”.
Nancy Mitford based the hypochondriac Uncle Davey in her novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate – “such a clever cove, literary you know, you wouldn’t believe the things he does” – on Eddy Sackville-West and his medicine bottles. Another Crichel Boy, Raymond Mortimer, became her literary adviser. He could often be found on his knees consulting one of his many dictionaries, and when he sat at his typewriter, his sighs of despair ran through every room. He also dabbled with mescalin. Mitford relayed Mortimer’s comments on her manuscript for Madame de Pompadour to Evelyn Waugh: “He
says the book is extremely unorthodox & reads as if ‘an enchantingly clever woman were telling the story over the telephone’, that many people will dislike it extremely but that as far as he is concerned I have got away with murder.”
Eddy Sackville-West described a weekend stay by Graham Greene: “Odd how every place he talks of seems sinister or squalid. Told me an extraordinary story of equivocal episodes in Lyons, with a louche businessman & a mistress & a rich widow. Also – a fascinating detail – [...] the large rosary of leaden beads with which a renegade priest (c. 1890) used to murder people.” When Frances Partridge found herself sitting next to Somerset Maugham one teatime, he was probably the most famous writer in the world. She was charmed but saw him belonging “in a reptile house, a chameleon by choice, with his pale deeply furrowed brow, sunken glittering eyes and the mouth that sometimes sticks”.
Such high-minded company had its idiosyncrasies. The travel writer Rose Macaulay was overheard asking the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper if he could remember meeting William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury who lost his head on Tower Hill in 1645. Godfrey Winn, a writer for women’s magazines, was heard telling the critic Cuthbert Worsley: “You can’t go yet. You’ve only just met me.” Mortimer asked EM Forster: “Did you do any acting when you were young?” “No, never,” replied Forster. “I played the triangle once.”
The Crichel Boys were all members of the establishment – in 1962, Eddy Sackville-West succeeded to the peerage as the 5th Lord Sackville – but none of them was conventional. They were all openly gay (Waugh called Long Crichel “the buggery house”) as well as part of the Bloomsbury conundrum: the mostly homosexual James LeesMilne had had an affair with Harold Nicolson; Lees-Milne’s wife Alvilde, a lesbian, had had an affair with Nicolson’s wife Vita; Frances Partridge’s husband Ralph had been married to Dora Carrington, who had been in love with Lytton Strachey, who was gay and in love with Ralph, and so on.
In the immediate postwar years, prosecutions for homosexuality increased. In 1953, Shawe-Taylor wrote from New York, “Everyone here, when they hear of my impending return to the Land of Terror and Persecution, looks at me as if I were an incredible resistance man about to be dropped behind the iron curtain in a parachute.” A year later, a committee on homosexual offences and prostitution was formed under Sir John Wolfenden to review the laws. When witnesses were sought, only three gay men were willing to “out” themselves and give evidence, one of whom was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s younger brother, Patrick, an eminent ophthalmologist. Later, after the death of Eddy SackvilleWest and the departure of Eardley Knollys, Pat Trevor-Roper took their place at Long Crichel.
For a few years, the prose factory accommodated younger guests but as the surviving Crichel Boys aged, their literary salon faded away, sinking into anachronism along with shellac records, long letters and diaries compiled in notebooks with marbled covers. Nowadays, the talk which once took place around the Long Crichel dining table in its golden years – when Nancy Mitford or Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham held court – would happen online, or in front of an audience at a literary festival.
The memory of Long Crichel may be preserved in the books and papers of its visitors, but its legacy lies beyond that. For Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Raymond Mortimer, their salon was about fostering the arts; for Eardley Knollys and James LeesMilne, it was about architecture in particular. More than anyone, Lees-Milne was responsible for saving the English country house after decades of destruction. With the coming of Aids in the 1980s, Pat Trevor-Roper devoted himself to the Terrence Higgins Trust; his greater legacy was in the reform of laws relating to homosexuality, a reform in which all the Crichel Boys believed.
Over time, much that was unconventional has become acceptable. Long Crichel started as an experiment – its inheritance is the right to choose how one wishes to live.
No electricity supply. The septic tank was a typhoid risk. Books were everywhere
The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick (Constable, £25) is out on Feb 25
NOTES FROM DEEP TIME by Helen Gordon
336pp, Profile, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £7.59
ÌÌÌÌÌ
This is a book about rocks, fossils, plates, quakes, water and ash. It’s about what these things tell us about our planet’s deep history, a story that will, the author reckons, tell us something about ourselves.
To call this a “history” does not do justice to Helen Gordon’s ambition. Her adventures in the deep time of Earth hark all the way back to its beginnings as a barren ocean planet, 4.4billion years ago, while keeping one foot firmly planted in the depleted and desertified plaything we’re left with today. In between (and setting aside five extinction events), there has been life, a great deal of it, most of it vegetal. Did you know, 374 million years ago there was a tree, Xinicaulis lignescens, whose every vertical fibre behaved like a whole tree? Its mature trunk must have resembled the Eiffel Tower.
Gordon tells many good stories in her own words; she also hunts down many of the earth sciences’ great and good. She is fascinated by obsessive people – people “who devote their lives to one specific subset of knowledge”. The book is a wonderful stitching together of trips and talks and trawls through the geological literature. Still, I puzzled over this remark. Was Gordon saying that writers – our last amateurs – were actually normal, and that people who spent their lives concentrating on something in particular were, well, weird?
If so, fair enough. We bemoan the demise of expertise, but the obverse is just as worrying: we no longer take amateurs seriously enough. What can Gordon, a former Granta editor, tell us about geology, palaeontology, physics and geography? Well, quite a lot, it turns out. While she’s racked up the requisite interview hours and not a few air miles, it’s her own voice that cuts through most clearly as she attempts to extend our sympathetic capacities to encompass phenomena such as rocks and gases, radioactive decay and the collisions of tectonic plates.
I wasn’t sure, when I first opened this book, that I wanted to establish a personal relationship with the planet; it sounded like a recipe for madness. And sure enough, there’s a man in here called Donald Dowdy who believes there’s the image of a dove hidden somewhere in the pattern of the LA freeway system that serves to restrain the forces of the San Andreas Fault. Without a great deal of study and concentration, discussion and, above all, honesty, the attempt to rationalise, “to find patterns, to bring the barely comprehensible processes of deep time into a comprehensible framework”, can all too easily lead us into superstition, conspiracy theory, and checking the house prices in Glastonbury.
For the most part, therefore, Gordon focuses on the coherent, the testable, the scientific – even the boring. Maps, lists, charts, timelines: all turn out to be vital bridges, with spectacular views, by which we cross the imaginative gulf separating little us from our very old, very long-lived, very fragile planet. In the end, rational explanations are always stranger and more satisfying than fanciful alternatives. Dazzled as I was by some very wellturned popular science, I reckoned Dowdy could keep his dove.
Words struggle to encapsulate the planet’s abyssal history, which is why geologists use so many of them – and why physicists despise them for it. Gordon, who confesses that “for a writer with a background in literary publishing – a sphere where people who perhaps spend too much time thinking about language tend to congregate – geology had an immediate appeal,” then cites the verses of Tennyson (a geologist’s favourite) and the bons mots of John McPhee (who came up with “deep time” in his 1981 book Basin and Range). But my favourite oneliner here is one of Gordon’s: if you want to witness the effects of the inexorable motions of continents,
“just go for a walk on the South Downs (the African plate crashing into the Eurasian plate)”. It’s the collision of continental plates that released nutrients crucial to the evolution of life. And life, in turn, has transformed Earth’s geology, not just once but many times – an observation that steals the thunder from the idea, much put about these days, that humans have altered the planet to the point where we have ushered in “the Anthropocene”, a new geological epoch.
The Anthropocene idea spent more than a century innocently tucked away in the somewhat messianic writings of the Crimean geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, only to wake and infest every climate-inflected PhD dissertation of the past decade. We are living, we are told, (unctuously and ad nauseam) in the Anthropocene.
There’s a lot, geologically, to be said for the idea. Think of all that weird metallic landfill we’re leaving behind us, all that strontium and platinum, that coltan and niobium! But the Anthropocene is also the cultural container for some topical anxieties. If our influence is now writing itself into the very rocks (and it is), if we’re the cause of a sixth extinction event (and we are), and if our continued survival as a civilisation hangs upon what we do in the next 30 years (and it does), what then should we do?
Gordon interviews the US historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, and together they measure the widening gap between our understanding of large, abstract events and our everyday ways of thinking, “predicated on the span of individual human lives and the inevitability of death.” Nothing wrong with this – but I did find myself wondering why I myself should worry about deep time, deep ecology, or deepanything-else, trapped as I was – as we all are – in the anxious shallows of mortality.
Don’t we have enough to worry about? Daily, the broadsheets and bulletins insist we spread our compassion like margarine across the entire naughty world, accepting responsibility (if not fault) for every atrocity littering the place. Every day from now until the COP26 climate conference in November, we’re going to be expected to wrap our heads around the apocalypse we have fashioned from our pleasant planet. Notes from Deep Time sidesteps the maundering and finger-wagging that comes with Anthropocene thinking, and shows us how much sheer intellectual and poetical entertainment there is to be had in the idea. And what does the Anthropocene idea do, after all, but put humans back at the centre of the world? As Gordon cannily observes, “at some level we can’t help finding that attractive – even if the price for that return is environmental disaster.”
The South Downs are where the African plate is crashing into the Eurasian plate
birds, that their faith in the truth of the body and the land, a faith that feels as old as England itself, is false and that salvation is only to be found in an eternal digital enlightenment. Yet the Nitrians, who consider Wayland the enemy machine, have received a sign. Their oldest member, yrvidian, has dreamt of swans. And when the swans return, Alexandria will fall.
Regular readers of Kingsnorth will know that the principal challenge and pleasure of his fiction is his use of invented first person narrative voices that point up the intimate relationship between language and selfhood, although his dialect is becoming more simple (and less invigorating) with each
passing novel. His human characters here, who narrate alternate chapters and who consist of a married couple and their young daughter el, a lusty young chap called Lorenso, plus Mother, father and old yrvidian, speak in a minimalist, stumpy present tense that dispenses with articles and conventional
capitalisation (“we come to Land at dusk”) and has an erratic dislike of the letter G. Their elemental language is a sort of rag-tag dream poetry littered with classical allusions, bits of Arthurian legend and echoes of early Christianity that hark back to a romanticised, fabled, ancient rural England, and some of it is mysteriously beautiful. “outside Sun comin down,” says mother. “day is green like birth.”
Some of it, though, is wincingly po-faced. There’s a lot of portentous talk of the “i am woman. i am blood” variety. More fundamental a problem is that Kingsnorth’s didactic message is in competition with his formidable imagination. It’s hard not to see K – who at times is
oddly the most human character here, with an unexpected sense of humour – as both an avatar of the encroaching hi-tech omnipotence Kingsnorth is writing against and a mouthpiece for his own beliefs, which he has detailed extensively as a member of the radical writers’s eco collective Dark Mountain.
It is man’s essential violence, “the sire of all [his] values” K tells Lorenso, that has made man “the perfect extinction machine”. (A seduced Lorenso duly ascends to Alexandria in search of immortality.) Theories of Gaia, which posit Earth as a ruthless self-regulating entity, and the febrile corporate dreams of Silicon Valley that fantasise over man’s perfectibility in the digital space combine in an uncompromising damnation of human history in its entirety.
For all its mythic expansiveness, Alexandria is a claustrophobic novel. Its view of humanity as fatally hubristic and pathologically self-sabotaging is without consolation. Where does this leave the reader? Kingsnorth has one solution: in the final pages the novel’s many religious allusions coalesce in an affirmation of the Christian faith as the now-depleted Nitrians stand bathed in divine light. It’s an endnote of hope, but as the culmination of Kingsnorth’s thoughts on how we might imaginatively respond to the apocalypse, it has a taste of “it was all a dream” style fudge.
There’s a lot of portentous talk of the ‘i am woman. i am blood’ variety