Not At All Boring...

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Our last day in Shropshire today; John left for home in Aberystwyth this morning and we drove over to Ludlow to have a mooch around. After coffee and croissants we perused the market's offerings and I bought the above-pictured volume from the Oxfam shop. A splendid volume of prosaic US postcards collated into a collection by the late English photographer, Martin Parr [1952-2025], whose whimsical takes on ordinary life always tickled and amused whilst being quite barbed, in a very genteel, English way.  The beauty of this splendid little tome is that it offers no qualifying or explanatory textual context, reminding me of the splendid BBC2 TV programme from around 1968 - which I'm sure I've alluded to before - which without fanfare or announcement would simply start; no title sequence, no graphics, no context. It would then present an apparently random and quite surreal series of art and socially referenced mini pieces [visual articles?], with the only faces to camera being either accidental or as one of the set-piece diatribes by a then very young Clive James, and then simply end, with the credits being read out over some randomly-chosen PA system in a public space such as a railway station, much to the [filmed] bemusement of the general public present.

I can't remember the title of the series as advertised in the Radio Times [if it indeed had a title: memory escapes me], or at what point in the weekend it was broadcast, but there you go: what I do remember is that both Nico and Ivor Cutler were regular contributors, musically, whimsically, and poetically. It presaged the similar but more structured Up Sunday! that followed it, and which featured an extended version of the same ensemble cast. It was radical TV for the time and highly thought-provoking, and I loved it as a young teenager, eager for a forward-looking culture that I could identify with. So, what I have planned for the postcard images contained within the pages of the above tome-let is a series of pieces relating its content to songs, films etc., both in these pages and possibly as physical paintings and drawings/prints that reflect some of that late 1960s sideways cultural flavour. I look forward to trying some of these ideas out in the very near future. Keep you posted...

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