About the one time I ever gained any recognition in the public sphere was in 1979 when I won a national sports quiz on BBC radio in England. Attach excellent memory powers to an interest in sport and training yourself in picking up obscure facts - the perfect combination.
Memory powers are though curiously inconsistent and selective. I quit teaching in January 1980. I sometimes try to remember the name of some of the kids that I taught during the six years that I was teaching (all of whom will now be adults in their 40s and 50s ....). Only a few names stick. A lot of the brightest kids that I ever taught (two girls called Gabriella and Juliet and a boy called Chris stick particularly in mind) and unfortunately most of the villains .....
There are also a number of quotes that you would like to remember, but cannot recall exactly. There was a quote, for instance from former American talk show host and noted liberal, Dick Cavett, on the Marx Brothers. The exact words I cannot recall sadly, but it ran on the lines:
"Groucho was a liberal, Harpo was a liberal, and Chico bet on the Chicago White Sox" ....
Nice, concise way of taking a sly dig at so-called "conservatism" being essentially based on gambling and not always that straight either!
Which brings me on to the Marx Brothers. I have stopped visiting YouTube so much recently - the powers that be in Germany seem to enjoy enforcing copyright powers on just about everything - but last night I spent watching snippets from Marx Brothers movies. The first question arises as to whether this is timeless comedy, or whether they were simply a product of their period. Could they have appeared in similar fashion in the second decade of the 21st century, as brilliant as they were?
No answer from me, I am afraid. Successful pundit I am not.
All sorts of other questions arise - did Italian children in the 1930s dress like they did in "A Night At The Opera" for example?
And then there was Chico's piano playing. I watched a 12-minute compilation today and asked myself whether behind the brilliant comedy, did people appreciate just how good a pianist he was. Could he have played Chopin or Liszt at Carnegie Hall for example, when he wasn't gambling his money away?
Different times, different places. At a time when being a "liberal" - in the American, not the European sense - seems to be endlessly subject to sneers and derogatory comment (a recent Pew Global Attitudes survey suggests that Europe is getting even worse than the US in that respect) having a Groucho Marx around would be more than a bit useful to blow most of the usual nonsensical conservative theories and attitudes out of the water .
Certainly comedy has its place. We need some way though of exposing the ridiculous mixture of austerity, gambling and greed that drives conservative thinking for the nonsense that it is and the mass unemployment and increasing debt and poverty that it provokes.
But given the collective lack of memory powers we even seem to have forgotten the history of what brought about the 2008 crash for starters. And the fact that most of the people on the receiving end of the resulting fallout were not the people who caused it in the first place!
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