JIM BOUTON: THE LAST WORD

Although I'd recorded the interview with Matthew Bannister a month ago, my appreciation of Jim Bouton has just been broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Last Word. It's a wonderful show: it begins with Peter Fonda and ends with Bouton: two icons of Sixties rebellion, of counter-culture, from different ends of the American spectrum. You can listen to the show on BBC IPlayer (actually now rebranded Sounds! to appeal to those too young to seek out obituary programmes) with this link . Fonda leads off the show; my bit is at the end, starting around 21 mins. The rest of the show is as interesting as usual, but I do love the way Fonda and Bouton play off against each other.

In case you missed my story at Arc Digital, going into more detail, you can link to that here.

JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

JAMES MC CORD: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the Watergate burglar James McCord went up on the Guardian online Sunday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, as I went through it carefully with my editor to try to keep in on point to the Watergate saga and not digress too far into some of the other points of McCord's career. Thus there wasn't room for more detail on the deep background of Watergate, the relationship between Nixon and the CIA, and indeed the formal investigations: what they did and didn't approach and who indeed Deep Throat actually was. I will write more on this later, but after I talk about McCord on BBC Radio4's Last Word later this week.

The link between the Watergate burglary and Dallas is of course the biggest non-Watergate talking point. The placing of McCord in Dallas is double-hearsay, while Howard Hunt of course lost a libel suit when he was publicly named as being there on the 22nd of November 1963.

I should have brought up McCord's first big job with the Special Research Staff, which was cleaning up after the 1953 murder of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Olson had been dosed with LSD a few days earlier in Maryland, as the CIA seemed to be worried he would inform on the 1951 incident in France involving an experiment with drugs--the deaths in the village of Pont Saint Esprit were blamed on rye bread and ergot. This was part of various CIA operations intended to use drugs as instruments of mind control and interrogation, as well as possible weaponisation. McCord helped ensure Church's death would be listed at suicide; the CIA#s MK-ULTRA program would resurface in the alleged brain-washing of Sirhan Sirhan.

STEVE DITKO: MY BBC LAST WORD ESSAY

I've done an essay on Steve Ditko, creator of Spider Man, Dr Strange, The Question, and Mr A, for BBC Radio 4's Last Word. You can listen to it here; the introduction comes just before the 17 minute mark. But as is so often the case with Last Word, the programme itself is worth the listen, especially the lead item on Oliver Knussen, about whom I wrote right here last week. I knew of Sam Chisholm from my days working at Sky, and then there are two fascinating obits for people I didn't know, Barbara Harrell-Bond and Anna Sandor de Kenos. It's this mix that helps explain why I love being part of the show. Thanks to producer Neil George.

Ditko called out for more length. Some of what was cut out of my script as recorded was in my Guardian obit of Ditko, which like the Knussen you will find just before this post. I probably should have spent a little more time on his weirdest super-hero, The Creeper. But look at that (very early) Mr A panel, and think that decades later, Ditko was writing far more argument into far more static panels. It was outsider art indeed. And I am writing a deeper dive into Ditko and Ayn Rand, which I will let you know about....

STEVEN BOCHCO: ON BBC LAST WORDS

I spoke about the television writer and producer Steven Bochco on BBC Radio 4's Last Word programme
today. You can link to it on BBC IPlayer here, my bit is the last one on the show, starting about 22 minutes in. But it's a programme worth listening to from the start, with Winnie Mandela, Drue Heinz, and two important British sportsmen, Ray Wilkins and Eric Bristow.

If your very sharp eared you might be able to discern that some of my stories are edited down; producer Neil George cut it so you probably won't (except where, for example I refer to his friends whom I actually haven't mentioned in the edited version) but it flows wonderfully, which is as it should be as his was a wonderful story to tell. And I should have mentioned the name of the really great TV composer Mike Post, who did the Hill Street Blues theme.

What was lost was some background details, a couple of stories, and some explanation of the nature of his importance in the history of episodic television. You can fill in some of that with the Guardian obituary, to which I will post a link along with an essay filling in the bits from both. The obituary is in today's paper Guardian as well....

RICHARD WILBUR: MY BBC RADIO 4 LAST WORD ESSAY

Yesterday I mentioned, in the words I spoke at Kevin Cadle's funeral, the Richard Wilbur essay I'd recorded for BBC Radio 4 Last Word; today the piece was broadcast. You can find it here on IPlayer; it runs from 13 mins to 18 minutes into the programme. It was a very clever edit by the programme editor Neil George, who got an extra poem in, the wonderful 'Tywater', as well as created a new link into the lyrics from Candide. It sounds seamless and I'm very pleased with it. I hope it's a worthy tribute. One bit that was lost was my own reading of Wilbur's 'Museum Piece'...maybe I'll post my original script and record that one for it. Until then, Wilbur's readings are beautiful; listen and enjoy. The programme will be broadcast again Sunday evening at 8:30 on Radio 4.

HEFNER VS FEMINISM: SAMIRA AHMED (AND ME) IN THE GUARDIAN ON PLAYBOY

Samira Ahmed has written a piece on Hugh Hefner for the Guardian, on the place of Playboy and Hugh Hefner in the culture wars of the 1970s. You can link to it here. I'm quoted in it a few times. As I had just written on him for TLS and talked about him on BBC Radio 4 Last Word (see previous posts) we wound up discussing part of his place in our respective cultural developments--mostly at the point where, as I mention in the TLS, Hef had ceased to a 'revolutionary' and more a marketer widening out from the middle-brow middle-class which was his original target with Playboy.  As you might glean from the quotes, the discussion was spirited and fun: where it should have taken place was on BBC Radio 4 Front Row, but sadly Hef didn't schedule his death conveniently enough.

The first black playmate actually arrived in the pages of the magazine, via the Chicago Playboy club, in 1965: a better way of looking at the racial mix of playmates might be to consider how close they adhered to the template that Hef had established. I always assumed Hef thought of himself as a classic liberal as far as race relations went, but that didn't change what were his fetishes regarding the girl next door. I loved Samira's take on the London Playboy Club, and her parents' visits their on business (it was the only place in London to get a decent steak, they said). As I said, we should've had this talk on the radio!

I thought Samira's take on IVF, that women use it because they are forced to wait for men's immaturity to pass, was a bit harsh. I would have guessed that a bigger factor was women's desire to get ahead on the business ladder while they are young, knowing that motherhood is most often a set-back on that ladder. This is, of course, the ethos of a male-dominated world, and it raises a basic dilemma about feminism, and indeed other liberation philosophies: do you work to change society's mores, to open up opportunities for all, or do you reach out to grab your fair share of what society offers, within the existing mores, and call that equality? Samira mentioned Gloria Steinem and Debby Harry as former Bunnies with different attitudes; you might look at say Erica Jong's Fear Of Flying and the 'zipless fuck' as a way of simply appropriating the Playboy philosophy for women.

And the Guardian, being the Guardian, spelled hippie 'hippy' in the copy, meaning that even though it was my quote, when I saw 'hippy chicks' in print my first thought was confusion, and I wondered what being broad-beamed had to do with anything. But they have made the same prissy 'correction' to my copy when I've written for them too!

HUGH HEFNER: MY TAKE ON BBC LAST WORD

I appeared on Last Word last Friday, talking about Hugh Hefner, and the literary side of Playboy, which I was also writing about for TLS. You can link to it here. I mentioned Alex Haley, and they had a great quote from Hefner mentioning George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi party; in my piece you can read the story of the that interview. It's a fascinating radio show: I wish I'd heard the other quotes included, but of course, as with the TLS piece, it goes into the wider picture of Hefner and society...and the London Playboy Club.

DON RICKLES: ON LAST WORD

I appeared on BBC Radio 4's Last Word today, talking to host Matthew Bannister about the comedian Don Rickles, whose obit I wrote for the Guardian two weeks ago (link to that here.). You can find Last Word on the IPlayer here -- it begins about 22 minutes in, but it's a fascinating programme from start to finish.

There was so much to say (and trust me I said it) but I have to say Frank Sinatra tells the story of Rickles' after-dinner put down far better than I did. Yet even in such a small space, you get a fine feeling for the man. Have a listen, you hockey pucks.