I combined with a posse of other boys to play the handbells for music teacher Graham Caldebank’s hugely ambitious project, to perform Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde at the school.
I blame/thank Guy Bertrand for my involvement in this one. I’ll write some more about Guy Bertrand in other contexts. He was one of the more active senior school boys, whom I got to know through the school library.
Guy was the most senior of the pupil librarians and I was a keen scout for volunteering there too – because I liked hanging around in the library browsing through books and didn’t mind doing some chores to give me an excuse to be there.
Whereas Guy found an enthusiastic helper for the library, I was far more reluctant when he suggested that I participate in Noye’s Fludde. I’d had my fill of Graham Caldebank’s Benjamin Britten projects the previous year – you can read all about my dismal attempts to play the family instrument (violin) and even hear the discordant tones of my string-playing as I recorded my Psalm 150 for posterity – all in this one – click here or below:
Returning to early 1976, Guy persuaded me:
I’m leading the handbell choir. It’ll be a laugh. Come on. Give it a go…
…or words to that effect. Persuasive chap he was, Guy. I wonder where he might be now? Someone out there in the Alleyn’s alum community should know.
Thus, suddenly, out of the blue, my diary is no longer dominated by the ups and downs of my Sunday School Newspaper project. Instead, 10 days dominated by the bells.
Wednesday, 10 March 1976 CCF, good. Bells. TV Man About The House, Eric and Ernie [Morecombe & Wise], One-upmanship.
Thursday, 11 March 1976 – drama good. Bells. TV Happy Ever After, When The Boat Comes In
Friday, 12 March 1976 – NF [Noye’s Fludde] rehearsal. TV Yes Honestly, Liver Birds, Open All Hours.
Saturday 13 March 1976 – OK. Exeat [no school]. TV Celebrity Squares, Grandma Jenny.
We Interrupt This Tale Of Noye’s Fludde & Handbells With Sorry News From My Newspaper Project
Sunday, 14 March 1976 – all not ok. Comicals out – bad, TV Now Who Are You?
Ironically, a movie named “When Eight Bells Toll” followed on LWT that evening, but I don’t record having watched it. I was probably too busy licking my publishing wounds and/or reworking the pages of Shalom to expunge the censored “comicals”.
I don’t remember who was the main instigator of the censorship – possibly the Rabbi – who might have felt, with some justification, that jazzing up 1st century history with journalise was just about OK, but riddling the “newspaper” with comedic material on such serious subject matter was beyond the pale.
I have a feeling, though, that the effective censor was Jonathan’s dad, who, as voluntary printer, put his foot down on the length of the paper, given the costs of each page of print on his spanking new office photocopying machine. As an editorial team, we had to bite the bullet and realised that it was the comicals section that needed to go.
As the whole project is lost in the mists of time, I can claim, without fear of evidenced contradiction, that my newspaper project, Shalom, would have been the Private Eye of satirical classical antiquity journalese, if only it had been allowed to flourish with a blend of serious satiricals and comicals within the same organ.
Nearly 25 years later, my enthusiasm for writing comedy set in ancient times bore fruit with the much lauded Clean Business Cuisine – still available, 25 years after publication, from good and not-so-good outlets.
But I digress.
Let Us Return To Alleyn’s School & Noye’s Fludde
Monday, 15 March 1976 – NF [Noye’s Fludde] rehearsal. TV Ask The Family.
Tuesday 16 March 1976 – Noye’s Fludde went well, singing [?] good.
Wednesday, 17 March 1976 – Noye’s Fludde went well. (Tintinnabulation)
Thursday 18 March 1976 – drama good. TV World At War, When The Boat Comes In.
Friday, 19 March 1976 – music, good. Brilliant handbells performance by us.
Saturday, 20 March 1976 – school ok. Not a very good bell performance.
I love the extremes of my self-criticism in the diary, contrast the Friday review, “brilliant handbells performance”, with the Saturday one, “not a very good bell performance”.
Let’s allow the official critic, Trevor Tindale, to have his say on whether the production was good, bad or ugly. Here are his fine words from Scriblerus – the headline picture is also from that article.
Lovely touch, spelling his name “Tyndale” for that review. A 50-year-old pun that I have only just got when digging out the old piece. I’m sure I didn’t spot it at the time.
“But is Noye’s Fludde ‘discordant rubbish’ regardless of who performs it?”, I hear readers asking left, right, and centre. I thought we should all judge for ourselves, so I found a similar type of school performance on YouTube which, helpfully, mercifully, limits itself to the concluding three minutes.
The handbells come into their own right at the end of the show, although the editor of the following vid rather cut them off just as their final coda starts to ring out.
Personally, I do find Britten discordant and not to my taste, but whadda-I-know?
As most readers do know, YouTube “helpfully” uses AI to choose a follow-up video to keep viewers tuned in, these days. For me, after I watched the above video, it selected, for reasons I cannot really fathom…
…Oh Bondage, Up Yours! by X-Ray Spex. Now THAT’s satire.
It would be a year or more after the Alleyn’s production of Noye’s Fludde that we were all treated to the joys of X-Ray Spex, of course. Personally, if I could only take one of the recordings to the desert island with me, it would be the latter. In truth, I cannot imagine Noye’s Fludde making it to my top 8,000 on Desert Island Playlists.