Pebblehead’s typewriter after the bestselling paperback potboilerist completed a particularly strenuous bout of key-thumping in his chalet o’ prose.
(The picture found its way on to London’s Lost Rivers, where I found it thanks to Marina Organ.)
I decided not to extend the daily diary entries theme beyond the end of January, for the simple reason that I suspect it might become somewhat restrictive and also unforgivably dull. So there will be no overarching theme at Hooting Yard this year, just scrapings from the interior bran tub of my brain as and when they occur. Such scrapings may include the occasional thousandish-word essay “On…” a particular topic, and indeed the occasional diary entry, from the great or the not so great or the frankly fictional, but if so they will be slotted in alongside general witterings, insights, reportage, sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose, and whatnot.
Malcolm Muggeridge describes “fact-finding” tourists to Stalin’s Soviet Union in The Thirties (1940):
Their delight in all they saw and were told, and the expression they gave to this delight, constitute unquestionably one of the wonders of our age. There were earnest advocates of the humane killing of cattle who looked up at the massive headquarters of the Ogpu with tears of gratitude in their eyes, earnest advocates of proportional representation who eagerly assented when the necessity for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was explained to them, earnest clergymen who walked reverently through anti-God museums and reverently turned the pages of atheistic literature, earnest pacifists who watched delightedly tanks rattle across the Red Square and bombing planes darken the sky, earnest town-planning specialists who stood outside overcrowded ramshackle tenements and muttered: “If only we had something like this in England!” The almost unbelievable credulity of these mostly university-educated tourists astonished even Soviet officials used to handling foreign visitors.
It is exactly sixty years ago today that the lumbering walrus-moustached psychopathic serial killer Babinsky made his appearance on the radio programme Squalid Criminal Lair Discs. This was a short-lived offshoot of Desert Island Discs, the difference being that the guest was invited to choose what music he would take to a squalid criminal lair rather than to a desert island. The programme proved controversial, not least because Babinsky took the opportunity to hack to pieces with his axe and slicer the presenter, one Roy Plum. That is why it was a short-lived show. In fact, the Babinsky episode was the only one ever recorded.
But the on-air slaughter of the presenter, and Babinsky’s daring escape from the studio pursued by Detective Captain Cargpan and his coppers, were not the only sources of controversy. There was much comment, in The Listener and the Radio Times and elsewhere, regarding the fact that Babinsky’s choices were all self-penned songs, including titles such as “Homburg”, “Conquistador”, “Mabel”, and “Repent Walpurgis”. (Many years later, much reworked and faffed with, and with the more terrifying passages excised, the songs were rerecorded, and claimed as their own, by a popular beat combo.) For Squalid Criminal Lair Discs, however, Babinsky engaged his own band to perform the songs, a one-off grouping including the jazz maestro Dollar Crane, the mysterious science fiction writer – yachtsman – cult leader L. Ron De La Car, the Dancer Lola R., and Errol D. Canal, alter ego of Dr. Leon Clara, the so-called “Lala Crone Dr.” whose work with various lala crones predated Dr. Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy. It was the bloodcurdling screaming of the lala crones that made Babinsky’s songs so puissant.
In his flight from the studio, Babinsky stuffed into a sack not only Roy Plum’s head but the master tape of the programme, which he carried back to his squalid criminal lair. Neither head nor tape has been seen since that day, sixty years ago. Nor, for that matter, has anybody seen hide nor hair of the lala crones, despite searching for them high and low in various Mercy Homes for the Bewildered and the Fraught and the Baffled and the Lala.