I am sure that my loyal reader will have never, for one moment, looked upon me as a man with a significant degree of sophistication and culture. It is a matter of record that I find most museums and art galleries boring because, frankly, nothing is going on. I like the museums where things do happen, like the National Railway Museum in York and the Science Museum in London, but in general, once you have seen one stuffed animal, I reckon you have seen them all. And the Roman Baths in, of all places, Bath? Dull beyond words. Give me HMV any day.
It has not escaped even my notice that this is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. He was, it is said, our greatest writer, even better than Jeffrey Archer, apparently. I do not subscribe to the view that Shakespeare was crap but I learned to have an unhealthy dislike of anything he did whilst I was at school. I remember as part of English Literature, we were forced to learn and then describe Julius Caesar. Not only did we have to read it, we had to know what all the words meant. I confess that for that year, I began to lose the will to live. If, ran my argument, Shakespeare was that bloody good, then how come we had to spend weeks on end trying to work out what on earth he, through his characters, was on about? “What,” we would be asked, “did the Bard mean when he said…” and so on. Well, I didn’t know and what’s more I didn’t care. Now where is my copy of the NME?
In 1977, my friend and I decided to take our respective girlfriends away for the weekend. We all got on well, so why not go together? We decided to take them to Stratford Upon Avon to show them just how sophisticated we were. I knew that there was a large theatre there where Shakespeare’s plays were performed. We’d rock up on Saturday morning, get some tickets and inhale a little culture. It would be so simple. Boy, would the girls be impressed.
And so it came to pass that we walked up to the ticket office on a stonking April morning to order our tickets. “Four for the stalls, please!” I said, confidently. Imagine my disappointment when I was informed that tonight’s show was sold out and had been sold out for many months. Ah.
There was only thing to do: the pub. And not just any old pub, but the Dirty Duck which was, apparently, famous. I had come up with a theory that, following a few liveneners in the pub we would confidently stroll into the theatre, on the basis of the old adage that if you walk into a place with great confidence those on the door will assume you have business there and simply let you through. That didn’t work either. We didn’t even get as far as the door.
A weekend away was rapidly turning into a drunken weekend away, which was not something the girls had in mind, although my mate and I were happy enough. “Let’s see if there is anything on at the cinema,” one of them said. So we spent a short while seeking out the local fleapit. Perhaps there would be something Stratford-related on show, something at least slightly arty. Of course there wasn’t. What was on really appealed to me, but my girlfriend had a face like thunder. Then, it started chucking it down with rain, whereupon we made the only decision possible: we went in, paid for our tickets and spent a couple of hours in Stratford Upon Avon watching Peter Sellers star in Return of the Pink Panther.
I cannot deny that I enjoyed Inspector Clousseau infinitely more than I would have enjoyed a Shakespeare play and I made the mistake of saying so. “So all this going to Stratford for a cultural weekend was a lot of old bollocks” was the nature of the girls’ comments as we left the cinema. “No, of course not,” we replied, lamely. “We can go back to the Dirty Duck now”, which we did.
For some reason, that relationship did not last very long. In fact, as we kissed goodbye at Birmingham New Street, it was pretty damned obvious that it was a matter of “don’t call me, I’ll call you, but you know full well I won’t be calling you after this fiasco.”
And so ended my narrow brush with culture. It was pubs and rock concerts from thereon in, my only nod to the arts were visits to the Bristol Hippodrome to see the stage version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and Fiona Richmond in Pyjama Tops, neither of which were exactly at the high end of theatre-going. I suppose I should add that I am deeply ashamed of the cultural vacuum that exists in my head, but I’d rather see a comedy with a bungling French detective or a stage play full of naked women than anything by the Bard. Shallow? My middle name, mate.
