nuffink to this acting lark

Spellbound by the magic box in the corner of the front room flickering black and white images from the 14" screen programme content was not a contentious issue during the burgeoning medium of TV in the '50's. We were just enthralled by the very phenomenon. Perhaps that's why we as both kids and the adults watched Tom Brown School Days, Wacko and Billy Bunter unquestioningly. The fact that these and other school based programmes were situated almost exclusively in Public schools didn't seem to matter. Apart from the strange plummy accents the language and expressions such as rotter, beastly, horrid and dare I say it, welshing. were also alien. The plethora of public schools appearing in our working class terraced houses despite representing only about 5% of the educational system spoke volumes of the type of people running the BBC. The chaps at Beeb seem to live in a different world to the rest of us.

British films were much the same. Posh actors with home county voices depicted every character from street urchins to Queen Victoria. These toffs attempts at cockney dialogue like "gawd luv a duck" and "gawd blesha guv'nor" made Dick Van Dyke's Bert sound like the Pearly King. There was the ubiquitous Sam Kydd, God rest his soul, who seemed to appear in every British film at the time as the token prole, but that was about it. Apparently the break-thorough was provided by the misanthropic John Osborne with Look back in Anger which we were informed from those on high was full of gritty realism of a kitchen sink drama. The fact that Jimmy Porter used everyday language such as pusillanimous and parsimonious seemed rather incongruous. As Ted Bovis might have said "Spike the first rule of drama is realism".

Middle class thespians survived this to literally hold centre stage. How often have we at annual awards such as the BAFTAS witness a celebrated audience of luvvies staring at the screen in rapt silence enthralled in a clip of Sir Alan Bates or Dame Judy etc..eliciting deep human emotion with profound dialogue interjected with dramatic pregnant pauses for the trance to be broken by cutting away to the misty eyed euphoric audience? Now I'm not a great fan of Eastenders but I believe that they along with other soaps have made huge strides in demystifying the acting profession and wrestling it away from the graduates of RADAR. At the BAFTAs and soap awards amongst some of the dross we now stare up at that self same screen so monopolised for decades by established pseudo highbrow luvvies and watch with rapt incredulity Comprehensive school failures many of whom are generally inarticulate have in some cases never read a book exercising the same ability to portray high drama and the full spectrum of human emotion. There are some special episodes when only two actors in one room skillfully hold our attention for the full half an hour. Who could forget the scene in Eastenders when the cuckold and the cuckolded Grant brothers both demented for opposite reasons, one with an alchemy of tears and snot over his face bring much of country to a standstill. Much of this excellence is despite appalling writing.

There has been a growing and noticeable trend to extend the group occupations traditionally regarded as "the professions". They use to attract the more academic amongst us such as teaching, medicine, and law. But now you often hear "I have been in the window cleaning profession for 20 years" or "A market holder is an honourable profession". At first I was irritated by such grandiose posturing but with closer scrutiny these people have a point. Again the middle class have commandeered certain occupations elevated them to historically high paying and exclusive positions giving them gravitas by calling them professions. In many instances the kudos attached to these jobs is often misplaced. Why does an optician drive to Lisvane in his BMW and motor mechanic or electrician ride home to Lead Street on his push bike? We all learnt everything to know about an eyeball in a couple periods of science in Form 1(Year 7). An eyeball is about the the size of an oxo. What's there to know anyway? So you're finding it difficult to read sir, OK look through these magnifying glasses. Eureka!! Job done. A mistake by an electrician as he finds his way around a complicated circuit diagram could shut down the national grid or even kill. A dentist's brief is the inside of someones gob and covers an area about the size of a shoebox. Yet for some reason there is a huge shortage of them driving their incomes through the roof. I would guess that the fault finding diagnostics of the average car is far more complicated than those found in dentistry. The tooth that has been driving a patient demented is fairly easy to locate.

I would suggest as an experiment that at the next factory closure redundant workers should be retrained in dentistry to meet the current demand.