The Sunday Telegraph Sunday 11 August 2019 *** 27
Luton, but it’s depicted as a town full
of small minds and casual violence that
the protagonist is desperate to leave.
Same with Kes and Barnsley, or Starter
for Ten and Southend. The final two
parts of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto
Trilogy – Hot Fuzz and The World’s End- are both about people who feel
suffocated when they move out of
the city.
Perhaps that is the allure. If you
want to make something that’s about
ambition and opportunity and
excitement, you set it in a major city.
But if you want to explore more
everyday themes, such as boredom
and loneliness and flat existential
sadness, you shift your focus a few
miles away. The Office, which revolved
THE WEEK IN ARTS
STUART HERITAGE
Arts
I
come from Ashford in Kent. In
terms of cultural legacy, it’s a
wasteland. Nobody has ever
written a classic song about
Ashford. No blockbuster films
have ever been set here. The
most famous person who went to my
school was Neil Ruddock, a
footballer who played for England a
grand total of once 25 years ago.
When you come from a place like
Ashford, it’s easy to feel jealous of the
big city and all the attention it gets.
Nothingy little towns like ours will
always get blown out of the water by
metropolitan allure. Take London,
for instance. Not only does it seem to
get obliterated in about a fifth of
every blockbuster movie ever made- which is basically the highest
compliment you can pay a location in
the superhero age – but there are
actually classic songs about specific
places in London. Up the Junction.
West End Girls. A Nightingale Sang in
Berkeley Square. That couldn’t
possibly happen here, not unless
anyone decides to write a stirring
power ballad called “I Left My Heart
in the Mobile Phone Repair Shop
Next to Greggs”.
I think I understand why. It’s rare
to find a work of art about a
provincial town or a humdrum
suburb that is truly fond of its
setting. Gurinder Chadha’s new film
Blinded by the Light might be set in
Can humdrum
towns inspire
great art?
around a paper merchants in that most
derided of towns, Slough, wouldn’t
have worked if the firm had been
based in London. Nor would other
sitcoms such as Ever Decreasing
Circles, or Keeping Up Appearances.
None of the characters would have
been very funny if they lived in a place
where they had actual things to do.
Then there’s pop. When The
Specials wanted to capture their
feelings about Coventry, they wrote
Ghost Town; a song that sounds like it
was recorded on the set of an
abandoned Spaghetti Western. When
Paul Weller wanted to write a song
about his home town of Woking, he
called the end result A Town Called
Malice. Sham 69’s Hersham Boys might
have aimed for a more celebratory
tone, but then reality kicked in and the
result (the local girls are “not beauty
queens”) stinks of defeated
compromise.
However, there is an escape route.
Not all small-town songs and films are
about miserable people hemmed in by
limited opportunity. Dig deep enough
and you can find moments of real
celebration. Last year’s The Bromley
Boys clawed moments of joy from
a tale about a young man’s
determination to enjoy lower-league
football in suburban Kent. Tom Jones’s
Green, Green Grass of Home might have
originally been written by a man from
Princeton, Alabama, but there’s
enough yearning in Jones’s voice to
root his version deep in the heart of
Pontypridd. Ed Sheeran’s Castle on the
Hill drips with fondness for
Framlingham, the Suffolk town where
he grew up; for its winding country
lanes and the smell of its grass. So it
can be done.
But you’ll notice that it can only be
done from a distance. The Bromley Boys
was set in the Seventies, long before
the writer, Dave Roberts, upped and
left for the comparative bustle of
Leeds. When Tom Jones recorded
Green, Green Grass of Home he’d
ditched small-town Wales for the life
of a big-shot millionaire. And let’s notFILM STILLS/BBCforget that, for all his yearning about
his perfect childhood, Ed Sheeran now
lives in such an upper echelon of fame
that an actual princess once cut his
face open with a ceremonial sword.
So that’s your choice. You can stay in
a dead-end town and mourn its
deadbeat stagnation, or you can leave
and look back with rose-tinted glasses.
As far as art goes, that’s it. It’s one
or the other.
I still have hope for Ashford, though.
It might not ever become the subject of
an Oscar-winning film, or a celebrated
poem, or a song that grows to define a
generation, but I’m happy to lower my
standards a little. Maybe someone
might roller skate through it in a music
video, like Cliff Richard did in Milton
Keynes for Wired for Sound. It’s not
much, but at this point I’d take it.London calling: Blinded by the Light is
about being desperate to leave LutonCome, friendly bombs: part of the appeal
of The Office was its Slough settingCRITICS’ CHOICES
WHAT TO SEE
THIS WEEK
Pop
Gwyneth Herbert
This terrific singer-
songwriter with a line in
bittersweet humour has
fully spread her wings in
recent years, composing
film scores and music for
the feisty “Notes to the
New Government”,
commissioned by the
London Sinfonietta. At this
intimate gig, the British
musician will be
showcasing songs from
her forthcoming album
Letters I Haven’t Written.
Ivan Hewett
606 Club, London SW10
(020 7352 5953), tonightExhibitions
Dóra Maurer
This is the first-ever UK
retrospective for Maurer,
an influential Hungarian
avant-gardist born in 1937.
The show spans the course
of her varied career, with
work from her time as a
graphic artist in the Fifties,
her abstract, geometrical
paintings and illustrations
of the Seventies and her
playful photography for
which she is best known.
Mark Hudson
Tate Modern, London SE1
(020 7887 8888), until July 5
2020Film
Once Upon a Time
in HollywoodFor his extraordinary
ninth film, starring Brad
Pitt, Leonard DiCaprio and
Margot Robbie, Tarantino
examines Hollywood’s
heyday, culminating in a
restaging of the horrific
1969 Manson murders.
Tarantino luxuriates in
bringing this pre-Manson
golden era roaring back to
life, and the effect is pure
movie-world intoxication.
The transgressive thrill is
undeniable; the artistry
mesmerisingly assured.
Robbie Collin
15, 161 minTheatre
Red Dust Road
Bengali poet Tanika Gupta
(Hobson’s Choice) adapts
the poet, playwright and
author Jackie Kay’s
award-winning 2010
memoir Red Dust Road. In
an odyssey that takes her
from Scotland to Nigeria,
Gupta explores the
complexities of race and
identity as well as family
secrets in her 20-year
quest to track down her
birth parents.
Dominic Cavendish
Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131
248 4848), Weds-Sun)25$6WKHERG\ZLWKRXWWKHVSLULWLV
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