Red Riding: a view from the ’Hood

I’ve been watching and thinking about the Red Riding trilogy these last 3 weeks. I grew up just a few miles from the setting of the films, the cooling towers that loom in many of the films’ shots a reminder of the ones I could see steaming away from my bedroom window.

I am about the same age as David Peace and so around at the time of the films, his imagined world seems a little alien and so I’ve chosen to treat them as a hard boiled enjoyable fiction and not worry about too much about the anachronisms.

Except that is for the following:

“Half chips half rice”:
The character eating a Chinese at lunch time in “1983” in Yorkshire! When every one knows you can’ t get fast food even chips in many places except between 4 and 6.30pm even today. Many chippies even closing before the pubs turn out and never being open on a Sunday. Don’t get me wrong Yorkshire wasn’t backwards its just well people ate at home or not all. Oh and noodles what’s wrong with chips with your choppy Suey I mean one “Chinese” (I won’t use the name we use to use) near us use to even sell apple crumble or arctic roles for “afters” score!

“What time’s the Jump Circular due, love?”:
Another anachronisms common to most these films is driving; less people had cars in the olden days I know in drama cops and reporters can’t hang around waiting for Yorkshire traction to roll up but majority of people didn’t have cars back then. I bet even reporters had to use staff cars and went round the centre of Leeds etc on the bus.

“there’s a lass down the Rec who’ll let you do owt for a ride on y’BMX”:
Oh and I can say from bitter experience that Yorkshire women aren’t that easy. Of course brittle lonely needy blondes with a cruel past and inner nihilistic demons may have been in short supply at our school but me and my friends rarely popped round some lasses house and then cross faded to smoking sorrowfully regret laden post-coital fags in the gloom of thin light barely breaching the brown curtains. Having said that we all weren’t middle age men in car coats and fake tashes so were much much less of a catch obviously.

“Any shade you like as long as it’s brown”:
Oh and for the record after my magic roundabout curtains passed to my younger brother we had some home-made ones with vintage cars on them and I can’t think of room with large geometric wall paper in all my youth it was textured Anaglypta or wood chip as far as I can remember all painted white.

“Packed full of nuts.....”
Oh and in these 70’s re-creation shows they never mention Dutch Elm disease (imagine if all the foxes in Britain died out over 10 years) or the outbreak of Planter’s dried roast peanuts that swept through kids in 1978. Forget scag or rent boys there were kids at school who were on 3 or 4 packs of peanuts a day. Strangely I don’t remember anyone ever having a nut allergy.

“ Luxury......”
Everything else in the films was fine:
Being tortured with a small mammal tick, I have had ferret down my trousers (some regional clichés do have a basis in fact!).

Random violence tick (apart from the kids there were a number of teachers who would randomly hit, clip, whack you for not much reason at all).

Drugs tick (apart from peanuts for all my childhood years we existed on a heady mix of refined sugar, sherbet, liquorice(Spanish), cheap crisp, midget gems, ice pops and of course warm cans of top deck shandy, refrigeration being a modern invention apparently).

Corrupt violent racist police tick (yep when the Met invaded South Yorkshire to illegally and immorally suppress the Miners’ Strike the place was immediately full of dodgy, cruel, foul and bent coppers!)

ps do you like our S’s picture of rhubarb fields and powerstations in the sodium glare, talented chap that S.

Old Big ead

Just finished The Damned Utd by David Peace. It's excellent, he takes as the basis of his story Brian Clough's 44 days in charge of Leeds United in autumn 1974. It's a brilliant story, told exclusively from inside Cloughies' head. So convincing is his writing that it's in danger of becoming the official history(thanks P). It might seem that with the paranoia and linguistic mantras and ticks that Peace uses, Cloughie would come out of it badly, but it gives him a great deal of depth. Yes he's driven and you wouldn't want to be him but you can start to see what drove him. As a fan of another Yorkshire club (the mighty Reds) you might think I'd be pleased to see the Leeds donkeys getting a literary kicking and you'd be right tee hee. The Leeds players (most of them) come across as spoilt and petulant children, the board and directors typically random and capricious in their actions. The sense and feel of 1974 really comes through really you smell the fag smoke and sour aftershave and see the dingy offices and tatty hotels.

Peace's style reminds me of James Ellroy in the way certain phrases are repeated and repeated and the whole driven men on mission motif. It's interesting to see that Peace includes Leeds' poet Tony Harrison in his bibliography as even though it doesn't rhyme like Harrison's work his book does have a prose poem style.

So an excellent book. Leeds by the way haven't really won much since Cloughie left, Cloughie on the other hand won the European Cup twice.

ps. Thanks to P and L for recommending the book.