I sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and realised that I am dissatisfied with the word “post” to describe an individual blog entry. Henceforth, at Hooting Yard, what was once a “post” will be known as a “postage”. That, by way of preamble to this:

In a comment on yesterday’s Gubbinsy postage, Georgy Riecke wrote: Punchy, Zippy, Bangy, Crashy – aren’t they the names of characters from the infamous Belgian kid’s TV show ‘War Zone’? A mean-spirited bunch, make no bones about it, but they’re embarrassingly photogenic and would sell a corpse for a bride if you paid them in jellybeans. Mr Riecke is almost, but not quite, correct. Punchy & co are indeed characters from a Belgian television programme, ostensibly designed for children, but it is not called “War Zone” and they are not mean-spirited. The adjective that best suits these characters is, I think, “bewildering”.

Punchy is an intricately-constructed puppet of wire and cardboard and straw and sandpaper and tin foil and rubber bands. Zippy is a tea strainer the handle of which has been punched through the top of a bag of icing sugar. Bangy is a rag. Not a rag doll, merely a rag, and a singularly grubby one at that. Crashy is a piece of special effects digital wizardry and takes one’s breath away, if one is the sort of person to have one’s breath taken away by special effects digital wizardry. Not all of us are. Some of us are more likely to be breathtaken by, oh, I don’t know, the unbridled energy of Boswell’s London Journal, or, in a different register, the sixteen Revelations Of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich.

Certainly Julian’s classic text inspired Gus Van Der Vim, the creator of Punchy and Zippy and Bangy and Crashy. In fact the entire series of shows, screened between 1972 and 1976, is a thickly-disguised adaptation of the first Revelation, the one with the hazelnut. Although none of our bewildering quartet resembles a squirrel visually, there is something of the squirrel in the personality of Punchy, if a puppet can be said to have a personality as such. Perhaps what it has is, rather, a puppetality. That being so, it allowed Van Der Vim to express his frankly hysterical response to the First Divine Revelation in the form of a weird, knockabout, psychedelic, baffling, and occasionally creepy children’s television programme, in which pursuit of a hazelnut is the starting point of each show.

The fact that the programme was cancelled by Belgian television executives in 1976 has led many soi disant cultural commentators to argue that it was a victim of punk’s Year Zero. Jon Savage and others, who have forged careers based on their real or counterfeit presence at early Sex Pistols gigs, like to claim that Gus Van Der Vim was ousted from Flemish children’s television because he had long hair and wore Lennonite granny glasses. The truth, as ever, is more mundane, but what it is, that shining truth, is clouded in the mystical mists of which Julian of Norwich gave us such a majestic account, an account which gives due prominence, in the First Revelation at least, to the hazelnut.

 

In one corner of the room a huge church bell lies on its side. It is battered and dented but its clapper remains intact.

Next to the bell is a crate of toads. The toads have been counted, and re-counted, at least three times, by the toad counting person, whose coat and cap are hung on a hook on the back wall between the bell and the crate. The toad counting person himself is no longer present. We are to understand, later, that he has been called away to an urgent toad count elsewhere, one for which he is permitted to dispense with his coat and cap, hence their presence on the hook. The toads have all been injected with a narcotic drug. They are still. Some of them are toxic toads, but it is not immediately apparent which ones, and this will prove significant, later on.

Alongside the crate of toads is an occasional table on which has been placed a fiendishly embroidered tablecloth. It is a bit tatty around the edges, which overhang the table almost to the floor. The tattiness, we will learn, is the result of it having been gnawed by wild beasts. Arrayed atop the table, upon the cloth, are a whisk and a jar of unidentified paste and a Bible and a squirting utensil moulded from bright plastic. Later, we will learn that an accompanying funnel has been stolen from this tabletop arrangement, by person or persons unknown, as the legal parlance has it. Detectives will become involved.

Then there is a gap. There is a trapdoor in the gap, but it has been secured with fastening pins to prevent accidents.

Beyond the gap is a sofa, plumply upholstered. BAXTER is reclining on the sofa, wearing a cardigan and slacks and plimsolls. He is smoking a pipe, and, between puffs, is whistling Oh Danny Boy. He is an inexpert whistler, and the sound he makes is grating upon the ears. His hair is absolutely caked with brilliantine.

Behind the sofa looms a piece of classical statuary. It is a representation of a generic Greek or Roman God. Later, there will be a brouhaha over the identity of the God, which will remain unresolved, even after blood has been shed and a terrible vendetta sparked. The head of the God is out of proportion to the body, and the legs are ill-made and of a Wordsworthian lack of ornament, although they are for the most part hidden by the sofa.

Past the sofa there is another toad, this time solo and uncrated, although like the other toads it has been anaesthetised and is still. This toad may have escaped the earlier toad counting, and it may be toxic. Or the converse may be the case, on both counts, that is, the counting and the toxicity. The toad may have been counted, and it may be a non-toxic toad. BAXTER will be compelled to address these issues later, leading to the irretrievable loss of his wits.

Finally, at the opposite end from the battered and dented bell, there is an iron spigot. By dint of a faulty washer it is leaking, and drops of water are falling into a pan placed at its foot. It is quite a big pan, tin, and pristine, as if it has come directly from the manufacturer’s production line. Lights are cleverly directed to shine upon it, making it gleam brightly, almost as brightly as the sun.

Enter, stage right, THE ANTI-BAXTER

These are the opening stage directions for Istvan Scrimgeour’s drawing-room tragicomedy The Bell And The Toads, Etcetera. Its 1951 production at the Festival of Britain closed twenty minutes in to Act I. It has never been revived.

This is a guest post  by Vladimir Ilyich Foxglove

In his piece on the Hooting Yard to O’Houlihan’s Wharf branch line, Mr Key at one point tries to emphasise the horribleness of the Horrible Cave by suggesting that “it makes every other cave… seem like a Prudence Foxglove Sunday School”. We are meant, I think, to gasp and gawp at the force of the contrast. Well, I for one do not. I am Prudence Foxglove’s grandson. I was both a pupil and, later, an instructor in her Sunday Schools. What I know, which Mr Key clearly does not, is that each and every one of my grandma’s religious and moral education hubs was situated in a deep and dark and dank and damp and gloomy cave. This makes a nonsense of Mr Key’s attempt at vividness.

My grandma decided to set up a network of Sunday Schools because she was much troubled by the moral dereliction she witnessed all around her. In a letter to the football ace known as “the daisy cutter”, Steve Bloomer (1874-1938), she listed some of the things she had seen on a weekend outing:

I saw a gravedigger with an unwaxed moustache, a butcher without a hat, a tiny cadet loitering near a bordello, an urchin with rickets whistling in the presence of a widow, a tippety fellow manipulating figs, a wretch in the gutter, a Papist on the loose, and I saw much else besides.

Convinced that the nation’s moral resurgence could only be effected by brainwashing every five-year-old in the land, Prudence Foxglove fell under the spell of the pedagogue Walter Mad. Mad is best-known today for his involvement in a curious postage stamp scandal, but it ought not be forgotten that he was the author of dozens and dozens of tracts, the one that compelled my grandma’s attention being An Essay Upon The Brainwashing Of Five-Year-Olds Through A System Of Pedagogy Conducted Within The Confines Of Dank And Gloomy Caves.

My grandma went to meet Walter Mad to discuss his ideas. The man was an athletic, and, obviously, a most powerful ruffian. On his face he carried more than one large glazed cicatrix, that assisted the savage expression of malignity impressed by nature upon his features. And his matted black hair, with its elf locks, completed the picturesque effect of a face, that proclaimed, in every lineament, a reckless abandonment to cruelty and ferocious passions. Prudence herself, familiar as she was with the faces of pedagogical madmen in the dreadful hours of sack and carnage, recoiled for one instant from this hideous ruffian, who had not even the palliations of youth in his favour, for he seemed fifty at the least. But appearances, as we know, can be deceptive, and Walter Mad was all bonhomie and good cheer, albeit of a stern Protestant kidney, and not remotely the ruffian reminiscent of a minor character in Thomas De Quincey’s Klosterheim, or The Masque (1832) whom he so strongly, if not exactly, resembled.

My grandma was astonished at the scale of the pedagogue’s ambition. He had a vision of a vast network of caves where tinies would be entrapped from their fifth birthdays onwards, learning by rote a curriculum of decisive moral rectitude. She fretted, however, that Walter Mad seemed quite oblivious of the impracticality of his project. She fired questions at him, to which he had no answers save an airy wave of his arrestingly hairy hand.

Had he sent out a scouting party of spelunkers to identify caves suitable for his purpose? Conversely, was it his intention to employ a gang of geologists familiar with explosives to blast brand new caves where now stood only grim forbidding rock? How would he propel the tinies into his caves? Did he see himself acting as a sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin figure? Was he not concerned that so prolonged a stay in the cavernous gloom would ruin the sight of the tinies and render many of them almost blind?

Prudence swept away from their meeting convinced that Walter Mad was a nutcase, and a sinister one at that. She wondered if he had more in common with the Klosterheim ruffian than she had at first supposed. I am not sure if she ever learned of his later involvement in that postage stamp business, but had she done so, she would have felt to some extent vindicated in her decision, when she arrived home, to make a waxen doll of Walter Mad and to stick it with pins, with many, many pins.

But my grandma saw, too, that beneath all the weirdness, there was a grain of sense in his cave-based education hub scheme. His plans were too lavish, too grandiose, but reined in and properly organised, they could, she thought, usher in a transformation in civic life. It was this insight that made her, rather than Walter Mad, the true visionary.

She wrote her own version of Mad’s tract, entitled An Essay Upon The Brainwashing Of Five-Year-Olds Through A System Of Pedagogy Conducted Within The Confines Of Dank And Gloomy Caves, But Only On Sundays, and threw herself into making it a reality. She took on an assistant, a man even more like the Klosterheim ruffian than Walter Mad. This fellow’s name was Ed Balls, incidentally, though as far as I know he was unrelated to the current government minister. Balls sought out apt caves, kitted them out with Sunday School furniture and equipment, and appointed tweedy bespectacled types to teach the tinies, allowing Prudence Foxglove to concentrate on devising the curriculum, much of which was devoted to the more alarming passages in the Old Testament, with a leavening of twee drivel about fluffy animals and pretty flowers and submarine warfare.

Two generations of five-year-olds were brainwashed at my grandma’s Sunday Schools, and it is an experience none of them forgot. Balls, as we know, turned out to be a less than competent judge of caves, for one by one they suffered collapses, or flooding, or seismological trauma, until no trace of Prudence Foxglove’s magnificent obsession remained.

In closing, may I say what a fantastic time I have had writing this piece for Hooting Yard, and should I be invited to contribute again, I have a cupboard full of articles ready to publish, including several about beatniks, one about the shovelling of agricultural waste materials, and a potted biography of Ed Balls. Not my grandma’s assistant, but the new one, the government minister.

Never one to be troubled by the chronology of cultural fads, poet Dennis Beerpint is trying to reinvent himself as a beatnik. He has been seen about town sporting a goatee beard and a jet black polo neck sweater. A concerned Beerpint-watcher suspects a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl may have fallen into his hands.

“Knowing Dennis Beerpint,” writes my correspondent, “His version of Howl will probably be called Bleat or Oooh, Missus!”

This seems a bit harsh to me. Though Beerpint can be incorrigibly twee, and often fatuous, at its best his work has reduced me to a sincerely sobbing heap of woebane. I am thinking of such pieces as Lines Upon The Collision Of A Little Peewit With A Hot Air Balloon, a poem I consider to be the finest peewit-related poem of the last millennium. It will be interesting to see where he goes in his new beatnik persona, daddy-o. Well, perhaps not interesting, but at the very least mildly diverting in a Beerpinty way for those of us who follow his doings.