My Sitcom Odyssey, Episode Two: Whack-O!

I've decided to watch my way through as many old sitcoms as I can. So I went back to pretty much the beginning of British sitcom history (excluding, obviously, the early sitcoms of which no episodes survive). I watched this episode of Whack-O!, a school-themed British sitcom that ran for sixty episodes from 1956 to 1972, and also spawned the dreaded movie adaptation. (There were forty radio episodes, to boot.) I'd never heard of it before I started investigating old sitcoms.

Whack-O! was created by Frank Muir and Denis Norden. I only knew Denis Norden from blooper compliations and I only knew Frank Muir from the humour section of the public library, where his name frequently crops up in various collections of humorous writing-- none of which I ever found startlingly funny.

I have to say that Whack-O! seems to have been pretty good, judging from the single episode I watched. It completely sidesteps the cliché of the strict, buttoned-down headmaster and gives us a shameless hedonist instead. This is Professor James Edwards, played by Jimmy Edwards. (Following the same English comic convention, I suppose, by which most of Sid James's Carry On characters were also named Sid.)

The episode I sampled was called "Pools Win" and was broadcast in 1960. Its plot involves-- you guessed it-- a win on the football pools. (For those who don't know, these were a sort of lottery. There was a guy who collected money door-to-door for the football pools in my own childhood, although even that already seemed like an anachronism. I think they were much more British than Irish.)

The twist of the story is that it isn't the headmaster who's won big on the pools, it's a rather ascetic and otherwordly teacher called Mr. Pettigrew, played by Arthur Howard. (The brother of Leslie Howard, as I've just discovered.) Mr. Pettigrew wants to give the money to charity, but Professor Edwards-- who's an overbearing, blustering kind of fellow-- persuades him to have a taste of the high life before he does so. This involves booking a room in the Ritz and inviting a lot of "girls" (who seem to be hotel staff, but why are they so scantily-clad and eager to please?), consuming vast amounts of champagne and fine foods, and dancing the conga. Sure enough, Mr. Pettigrew begins to rethink his charitable intentions, ahead of the impending arrival of a clergyman to collect the money (even though it's going to an animal charity).

I'd give this episode six out of ten. There weren't really any surprises (other than the fact that Pettigrew does become corrupted), nor were there any hilarious lines of dialogue. The main source of humour was the comic acting of Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Howard. Professor Edwards seems like a wonderful character-- a headmaster who isn't just a bit disreputable, but is more or less a scoundrel and hardly bothers to hide it. I enjoyed the light-hearted cynicism of the show.

There were some surprisingly risqué moments. At one point Professor Edwards ogles a young woman's bottom when she bends over. It's not done subtly, either. I think TV was eroding sexual morals from the start.

Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories

Today I finished Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories. The title is a bit deceptive. Roald Dahl didn't write any of the stories. He selected them.

However, he certainly put a lot of work into that selection. According to his introduction, he read 749 ghost stories to select the fourteen he considered the best. (He was actually doing this for a TV series that never got made.) Dahl was pretty scathing about most of the stories he rejected, including those (he says) written by famous writers. However, he also candidly admits that he was never able to write a good ghost story himself.

(I think his introduction might have influenced my recent blog post about ever-receding excellence, without my even realizing it. You'd think this group of stories would be all gold, right?)

Anyway, this is what I thought of the fourteen stories, for what it's worth:

1) "W.S." by L.P. Hartley. This is one of the best of the bunch. A very efficient little tale about an author who starts getting mysterious fan letters from someone who only uses the signature W.S. The locations from which the person is writing get closer and closer... 4/5.

I really liked The Go-Between. This is only the second Hartley work I've read..

2) "Harry" by Rosemary Timperley. This was fairly good. A ghost story about a child's imaginary friend. 3/5.

3) "The Corner Shop" by Lady Cynthia Asquith. This was one of my favourite stories in the book, perhaps because I'm a sucker for tales about mysterious shops. A typical English ghost story protagonist, a young barrister, comes across a rather cosy curiosity shop run by two friendly sisters. His next experience of the shop is very different. 4/5

4) "In the Tube" by Robert Benson. This story started excellently, with one character telling another the story of a mysterious experience he had, while a storm rages outside. I love stories within stories. However, the denouement rather over-eggs the pudding. 3/5.

4) "Christmas Meeting" by Rosemary Timperley. A woman alone in a hotel over Christmas has a strange encounter with a young man. This was such a slight affair that it's hard to even call it a story. Nor was there any shudder involved, although Dahl claimed that a shudder was what he was mostly looking for in a ghost story. 2/5.

5) "Elias and the Draug" by Jonas Lie. I can't rate this story as I skipped it after a couiple of pages. It's something to do with a Norwegian fisherman trying to harpoon a seal. I'm an incredibly insular person when it comes to fiction, and especially ghost stories. Norwegian fishing stories don't really float my boat (pun intended) when I'm looking for a spooky tale.

6) "Playmates" by A.M. Burrage. Excellent and rather moving story about an intellectual who decides to adopt an acquaintance's orphaned daughter, mostly to put his theories of parenthood to the test. They move to a remote country house and she starts to play with (apparently) imaginary friends. It was too long, but excellent apart from that. 4/5

7) "Ringing the Changes" by Robert Aickman. I've always regarded Aickman with great suspicion, because he's a "literary" horror writer. However, this was a gripping tale, and the stand-out of the whole volume. A honeymooning couple visit a seaside town where all the churchbells are ringing all day long. The only other guest at their hotel warns them to leave before nightfall, but do they? Well, what do you think? 5/5.

8) "The Telephone" by Mary Treadgold. Telephones can be used to great effect in horror stories, but this isn't an example of that. A young woman gets involved with an older man who's already married. The first wife does away with herself, but then the couple start getting mysterious phone calls. It's a promising plot, but it's developed in a way that's completely devoid of tension. 1/5

9) "The Ghost of a Hand" by Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was a master of the spooky tale, but this is a rather silly and throwaway sort of story. It's all in the title, really. 2/5.

10) "The Sweeper" by A.M. Burrage. This is a very effective and chilling tale, even though there's absolutely nothing original or surprising about it. A young woman in domestic service wonders why her very elderly mistress is so freaked out by the sound of someone sweeping leaves in the garden at night. 4/5

11) "Afterward" by Edith Wharton. This might be the second best story in the collection. It has a rather unpromising start, but becomes genuinely disturbing as it moves towards the climax. The central idea (as the title suggests) is that, if you do meet a ghost, you might not realize it's a ghost until long afterward. 4/5

12) "On the Brighton Road" by Richard Barnham Middleton. A very short story with a tramp as a protagonist. While I think there should be more stories featuring homeless characters, it inevitably lacks the cosy element that I generally look for in tales of the phantasmal. And really there's not much to it. 1/5

13) "The Upper Berth" by Francis Marion Crawford. Apparently Crawford was a Catholic convert, which is interesting in itself. But I gave up on this story after a few pages. The whimsical, ironic tone grated on me. Of course, humour isn't fatal to a ghost story, but I think it should be applied sparingly. No rating.

Father Knows Best

Recently, I asked several Irish people if they'd ever heard of the American sitcom Father Knows Best. Actually, I didn't even tell them if it was a sitcom, I just asked them if they got the reference. None of them did.

I was quite surprised by this. I've heard many references to Father Knows Best. For instance, the title of a book by the Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin is The Fathers Know Best. (It's about the Church Fathers.) I've also often heard it mentioned in relation to the "bumbling Dad" stereotype which is at this stage a hoary cliché in sitcoms. Apparently, this was itself a reaction against sitcoms like Father Knows Best.

(But before I get to the sitcom itself, it's very interesting to me that after about a century of immersion in American culture, Irish people still have surprising blind spots. For instance, I asked several Irish people recently if they knew who Jefferson Davis was. None of them did, except one guy who thought he might have something to do with the American Civil War. And honestly, that was about my level of knowledge also, until I happened to read about him recently. He was the President of the Confederate States. But these blind spots aren't only historical, they often have to do with pop culture or idioms.)

Anyway, I'd never actually seen Father Knows Best, so I watched an episode this afternoon. It was this one, "The Great Anderson Mystery".

It was fairly good. I laughed out loud on a couple of occasions. It was charming, and it held my interest for most of the time-- although, honestly, there were a few points where I found it a bit of a drudge. Despite the title of the series, the father figure doesn't actually know best in the episode. In fact, he gets fooled by his youngest child-- as does the rest of the family.

I've decided I'm going to try to see episodes of as many sitcoms as I can. A lot of them are on YouTube.

I've long been an admirer and defender of the sitcom format. I think they're wonderful windows onto social and cultural history, and celebrations of the ordinary.

Last Christmas I did something like this already. I found a YouTube channel that had Christmas episodes of lots of different sitcoms. But there's so many sitcoms out there that I've never seen at all.

Have you ever done anything like this? For instance, deciding to watch a film set in every American state, or to walk down every street in a city (apparently this is a fairly popular occupation), or to play as many sports as possible? I'm fascinated by such personal, self-imposed projects.

Another Thought on Hype

I recently asked the question "is hype good?". I meant "hype" in the most fundamental sense. Not just commercial publicity, but every effort to excite anybody about anything.

This has been on my mind a lot recently, especially regarding one memory in particular.

My birthday is in October. (In four days, actually.) One year, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve, my father gave me a birthday present of A Christmas Carol on audiotape. Books on tape were quite a big thing back then and I was keen on them.

I can remember him saying as he gave it to me: "This recording has been done by some of the best actors in the business". Or something like that.

The fact that my father had gushed over the actors gave the recording a sort of glamour in my mind. It made it seem like a big deal to me. And I wasn't all that naive. I fully understood that my father was just trying to excite me about the gift. But the fact that he cared enough to try to excite me mattered.

The really interesting thing about enthusiasm (to me) is that there's no fixed quantity. It's not like everybody has, say, ten thousand units of enthusiasm (perhaps a unit could be called a "gush") and everybody assigns these units however they see fit: this much to sport, this much to work, this much to family, etc. etc.

Each person's measure of enthusiasm clearly differs. Some people are full of it and some people (or so it has always seemed to me) have very little of it. People with negligible enthusiasm used to greatly unsettle me in my childhood and teens. I called them "death worshippers" because I really believed they were indifferent as to whether they were alive or dead, or perhaps they even preferred the latter state.

Before I was a teenager myself, I really believed all teenagers were death worshippers, from the stories I heard from those who had gone before me. One teenager told me that all his schoolmates threw their weight against the side of the schoolbus when it passed the river, in order to push it in. Rubbish, no doubt, but I believed it. Teenage nihilism seemed to me the epitome of death worship. Mersault in Camus's The Outsider isn't a teenager, but I thought every teenager was like Mersault.

Of course, you can't judge somebody's enthusiasm from outside, and I was just as judgmental back then as I am now. Still, I don't think I was always completely wrong.

The other interesting thing about enthusiasm is that there's no upper limit. Beyond a certain threshold, we start using words like "wonder", "awe", "the numinous", "transcendence", "the sacred", "rapture", etc.

I think one of the purposes of poetry is to raise the roof (literally) of this capacity. I think there is, sadly, a great insight in this stanza from Coventry Patmore:

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him; but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme
And most forget; but, either way,
That and the Child’s unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

Personally, I always want to be on the side of the hypers, of the people pushing hype. There is of course hype for bad things. It's right to be cynical about the bad hype. But to be cynical about all hype--- all romance, all idealism, all poetry, all glamour-- is about the worst thing I imagine.

Everything That is Not Anti-Woke is Woke

I'm not declaring this as a principle, I'm making it as an observation. And it makes me very sad.

With very few exceptions-- mostly those cultural spaces that trade in nostalgia-- it seems that the only entertainment, commentary, comedy etc. that doesn't reflect woke assumptions about the world are those that set out to be explicitly anti-woke or at least non-woke.

The contrast is huge. It's like passing from a coloured world to a black-and-white one. I'm not even using those terms evaluatively. Make the anti-woke subculture coloured or black-and-white as you please. The point is that it's a completely different experience, one way or the other, to the mainstream.

The difference is so huge, in fact, that I've noticed that public figures who turn against woke on one topic (usually people who have been the victim of a witch-hunt for wrong-think) nearly always pass over fully into the anti-woke camp, or at least a good deal of the way. The cynical view of this is that they're "grifters" who've lost one audience and know which side of their bread is buttered.

My less cynical view is that, once the spell is broken, it's broken. Consensus seems less trustworthy; "expert opinion" seems less objective; words like "outdated", "backward", "reactionary", or "problematic" suddenly seem like words, vapour.

That's the bright side. The less bright side is that woke is still the air we breathe, even if it has had to retreat from some of its more ambitious forays. (Excuse the mixed metaphor.)

Two Phrases I Can't Stand

"Doing nothing is not an option."

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

It seems to me that progressives have one imperative: change. Change for its own sake. The ideas that continuity and tradition are good in themselves seem alien to them.

And they never seem to entertain the idea that some "problems" might really be just permanent features of human nature and by-products of freedom.

What I really dislike about those two phrases is the air of finality with which they are pronounced. Yes, doing nothing is always an option, and sometimes it's the best option. And no, not being a part of the supposed solution (and how do you know it's the solution?) doesn't necessarily make you part of a problem. I would say it doesn't make you a part of the problem in most cases.

And also, you can turn the clock back.

Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious, Luminous...Hopeful?

For centuries, we had the standard fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary: Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. I remember being taught these by an old nun in Catholic school. (Most of the religious education in that school was pop psychology and inspirational feature films, so this was a real exception.)

Then, in 2002, St. John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, and suggested they be prayed every Thursday. I follow this practice myself.

Today I learned about the Hopeful Mysteries of the Rosary, which were introduced by Bishop William Albert Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee in 2024.

They are:

Creation
The Flood
Abraham's Sacrifice
Passover
The Immaculate Conception

I must say I'm impressed by Bishop Wack's audacity. Proposing a new set of rosary mysteries when you've been the Supreme Pontiff for over twenty years is one thing. Doing so as a relatively new and obscure bishop is another.

Still, I'm the sort of traditionalist who loves new traditions, so I'll definitely pray the Hopeful Mysteries at some stage!