COMEDY TONIGHT

Posted on November 15, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Part Five — The Comedians

As everyone knows, I am hilarious.

I have mentioned this before, but some people appear to require reminding.

In June 1971, Granada Television introduced The Comedians, a programme built around an astonishingly simple idea.

Get a collection of stand-up comedians, put them in front of an audience, and let them tell jokes.

No elaborate sets.

No complicated plots.

No actors pretending to be bus conductors.

Just comedians.

The programme brought the world of working men’s clubs, variety theatres and northern entertainment circuits into millions of living rooms.

Bernard Manning, Frank Carson, Charlie Williams, Ken Goodwin, Colin Crompton and others became familiar television personalities.

There was no need for an elaborate introduction.

A comedian appeared, delivered a succession of jokes, and made way for the next performer.

The pace was relentless.

There was little opportunity to recover from a bad joke because another one was already on its way.

Frank Carson, from Belfast, became famous for his infectious enthusiasm and his catchphrases.

“It’s the way I tell ’em” became almost as recognisable as the man himself.

Bernard Manning represented another tradition entirely.

Loud, confident, aggressive and unapologetically working-class, Manning could dominate a room through sheer force of personality.

He was also a controversial performer, particularly because of his jokes about race and ethnicity.

Charlie Williams, a former professional footballer, was another prominent figure. His routines frequently involved racial humour, sometimes directed at himself.

And that raises a difficult question.

What happens when an audience laughs at a joke about race?

Are they laughing with the comedian?

At the comedian?

At the people being described?

Or at something else entirely?

The answer depends on the joke, the performer, the audience and the circumstances.

It is tempting to divide the comedy of that period into two categories: acceptable and unacceptable.

But history is seldom so accommodating.

The comedians were performing for audiences whose expectations had been formed by a very different society.

That does not excuse every joke.

Nor does it mean that everyone at the time approved of them.

There were objections to racist and sexist humour long before the twenty-first century. The idea that nobody questioned such material until recently is itself a rewriting of history.

Yet the performers were popular, and their popularity is part of the historical record.

To understand the comedy, we need to understand the audiences.

Working men’s clubs occupied an important place in British social life. They offered entertainment, companionship, cheap drink and a sense of community.

The comedians who succeeded in those rooms developed particular skills.

They could handle hecklers.

They could judge the mood of an audience.

They could change direction when a joke failed.

And they knew that a room full of people who had paid to be entertained could be considerably less forgiving than a television audience.

The club comedian was often part storyteller, part actor and part survivor.

The jokes were frequently old.

Some were ancient.

A good performer could make an old joke sound new simply through timing, expression and delivery.

That was a skill in itself.

The arrival of The Comedians on television gave performers from this tradition a national platform.

It also exposed the limitations of their material.

A joke that worked in a particular club, among people who shared assumptions and experiences, might sound very different when broadcast to a national audience.

And as British society changed, the distance between those audiences grew.

By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, alternative comedy was beginning to challenge the established circuit.

The new performers rejected many of the conventions of club comedy, particularly its reliance on racial stereotypes, sexism and predictable mother-in-law jokes.

But alternative comedy did not emerge from nowhere.

The Goons, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python and other innovators had already demonstrated that comedy could be absurd, intellectual, political and deliberately unconventional.

What changed was the wider audience’s willingness to embrace those alternatives.

The old comedians did not all disappear.

Some adapted.

Others continued performing to audiences who remained loyal to them.

And a few became symbols of everything the new generation wanted to reject.

Looking back, I find myself resisting the temptation to divide the performers neatly into heroes and villains.

Comedy is more complicated than that.

A comedian may be technically brilliant and politically objectionable.

A joke may be funny and cruel.

An audience may laugh without examining why.

And the passage of time may transform something once considered harmless into something deeply uncomfortable.

None of this means we should stop examining the past.

Quite the opposite.

Comedy provides an unusually revealing record of what a society believed, feared, desired and was prepared to tolerate.

We can learn a great deal about Britain in the 1970s by examining what made its people laugh.

And sometimes what made them laugh tells us things they might not have admitted in a serious conversation.

There is another question worth considering.

Have we become less tolerant of comedy?

Or have we become more conscious of the people who were once expected to endure being its targets?

Again, I suspect the answer is both.

The old club comedians belonged to a particular world.

That world has largely disappeared.

But its influence remains, sometimes in unexpected places.

And if we are going to tell the history of British comedy, we cannot simply edit out the people whose jokes we no longer enjoy.

They were there.

Millions watched them.

Millions laughed.

And that, whether we approve or not, is part of the story.

Comedy Tonight will continue.

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COMEDY TONIGHT

Posted on November 15, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Part Four — A Little Bit of Sauce

As everyone knows, I am hilarious.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

By the late 1960s, British comedy was undergoing something of a revolution. The old restrictions were weakening, the permissive society was arriving, and comedians were discovering that there were things you could now say on television that would once have resulted in a stern letter from the BBC.

Naturally, much of this newfound freedom was devoted to sex.

Or, more accurately, talking about sex without actually mentioning it.

The British had elevated the double entendre into something approaching a national art form. A raised eyebrow, a meaningful pause, a suggestive remark, and the audience knew exactly what was intended.

Enter the Carry On films.

Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor and the rest of the company became familiar faces to millions.

The early films had generally been affectionate send-ups of British institutions: hospitals, schools, the police and the armed forces.

Later came historical adventures, exotic locations and increasingly elaborate excuses for somebody to lose their trousers.

The films were inexpensive, cheerful and frequently ridiculous.

They were also enormously popular.

Kenneth Williams could turn an innocent sentence into something positively scandalous simply by adjusting his expression. Sid James needed only to laugh. Barbara Windsor could cause a national sensation with a malfunctioning bikini.

And Hattie Jacques, often cast as the formidable authority figure, could reduce the entire male cast to terrified schoolboys.

The humour was frequently childish.

But childishness, properly executed, can be very funny.

There was also something reassuring about the regular cast. Audiences knew what they were getting. The actors played variations on familiar characters, and much of the pleasure came from watching them do it again.

The Carry On films were not alone.

Frankie Howerd was enjoying renewed popularity, especially with Up Pompeii!, in which ancient Rome became a convenient setting for modern innuendo.

And then there was On the Buses.

Stan Butler, Jack Harper and Inspector Blakey occupied a world of bus depots, conductresses, domestic arguments and sexual frustration.

It was hugely popular.

It was also, viewed today, astonishingly sexist.

Women were frequently presented as either objects of pursuit or figures of ridicule. The male characters were often rewarded for behaviour that would now attract considerably less sympathetic attention.

The television series was successful enough to produce three feature films.

And this brings us to an interesting question.

Were audiences in the 1970s fundamentally different from audiences today?

Or were they simply accustomed to different rules?

I suspect the answer is both.

The jokes were products of their time, but they also helped reinforce the assumptions of that time.

It is possible to remember laughing at something without insisting that it remains funny today.

It is equally possible to recognise the prejudices in old comedy without pretending that nobody ever enjoyed it.

By the middle of the 1970s, the British sex comedy had become a genre in its own right.

The Confessions films, starring Robin Askwith, abandoned much of the relative innocence of the earlier Carry Ons in favour of more explicit situations.

The formula was straightforward: an improbable occupation, an even more improbable collection of attractive women, and a young man who appeared to have extraordinary difficulty keeping his clothes on.

Nobody was likely to mistake these productions for Shakespeare.

Although, come to think of it, Shakespeare was hardly a stranger to a dirty joke.

There was something peculiarly British about the whole business.

A society that had spent generations insisting that sex should not be discussed in polite company suddenly found itself discussing almost nothing else.

Yet the humour remained full of embarrassment, euphemism and anxiety.

The sexual revolution had arrived.

The British were still looking for somewhere to put their trousers.

I don’t believe we should approach the comedy of the past with either unquestioning nostalgia or automatic condemnation.

Some of it was brilliant.

Some of it was dreadful.

Some of it was both.

And much of it tells us a great deal about the society that produced it.

The laughter was real, even when the assumptions behind it deserve examination.

Which brings us to another branch of British entertainment.

The comedians who didn’t need a script, a fictional bus depot or a collapsing bikini.

They needed only a microphone, an audience and a collection of jokes.

And in 1971, television gave them their own programme.

Next: Comedy Tonight — Part Five: The Comedians.

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THE BUTTER AND THE DISHWASHER

Posted on November 15, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Or: How I Outlived My Fears and Acquired Some New Ones

As everyone knows, I am a man of considerable intellectual ability.

Modesty prevents me from elaborating.

I have also been accused, entirely unfairly, of being something of a procrastinator.

My philosophy of employment was always straightforward: a good month’s wages for a fair day’s work.

I retired shortly before my fifty-third birthday.

It was a tremendous relief to everyone concerned.

During my working life, I occasionally found myself at home during the afternoon when, strictly speaking, I might have been expected to be somewhere else.

On one such occasion, I was watching American daytime television.

Dr Phil was appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s programme. Or perhaps Oprah was appearing on his. I cannot remember.

Anyway, Dr Phil said something that stayed with me.

Eventually, we outlive our fears.

And I thought he had a point.

When you’re working, you worry about losing your job.

When you’re paying a mortgage, you worry about losing your home.

You worry about bills, wages, promotions, redundancies and all the other things that make working life such a delightful experience.

Then, if you’re fortunate, you retire.

The mortgage is paid.

The pensions arrive.

And nobody can sack you.

In our case, my wife and I eventually found ourselves in a more secure financial position than we had ever enjoyed during our working lives.

We had earned it.

We had both worked for relatively modest salaries, and my wife had the additional pleasure of discovering that changes to the State Pension age meant she would have to wait considerably longer than she had originally expected.

But Dr Phil was right.

We had outlived many of our fears.

Or so I thought.

The Bank

My wife and I opened our joint bank account in Portadown in August 1982, shortly before we married.

Friday the thirteenth, as I remember it, was involved. My wife was sufficiently unimpressed by the date that the paperwork was arranged for the twelfth.

Years later, after I had retired, we decided it would be more convenient to transfer the account to the Lurgan branch.

We went in together and met a very helpful young woman.

We sat down and talked.

We talked about the Portadown branch, the manager, the chief clerk, the staff we had known, and the gentleman who had arranged our mortgage.

Some had retired. Others had moved on.

It was a pleasant conversation, lasting perhaps half an hour.

Then the young woman said:

“Right. Can I have some identification?”

Identification?

We had just spent half an hour discussing the history of the bank!

I didn’t drive, so I had no driving licence. And I had never considered carrying my passport around Lurgan in case somebody wanted to know who I was.

I expressed my astonishment.

My wife, meanwhile, looked sympathetically at the young woman.

“Think of me,” she said. “This is what I have to live with.”

There are moments in a marriage when silence is the only dignified response.

This was one of them.

The whole episode had a distinctly Victor Meldrew quality.

I don’t believe it!

Of course, the young woman was simply doing her job. The bank had identification requirements, and knowing the name of a retired chief clerk was not sufficient proof of identity.

But there is a wonderful ending to the story.

A few years later, the Portadown branch closed.

And all its accounts were transferred to Lurgan anyway.

The Victor Meldrew Years

I think there is a period in life when we become particularly irritated by the absurdities of everyday existence.

Bureaucracy.

Petty regulations.

People who insist on following procedures when common sense appears to suggest otherwise.

Victor Meldrew was the great fictional representative of this condition.

And I went through my Victor Meldrew years.

But something interesting happened.

I came out the other side.

Nowadays, I find that many things which once infuriated me simply don’t matter very much.

I have opinions, certainly.

Anyone familiar with my political writing will confirm that I have never suffered from a shortage of opinions.

But I no longer feel obliged to argue with everybody who disagrees with me.

I can express an opinion and leave it there.

Other people are perfectly entitled to disagree.

I am equally entitled not to care.

My wife, who is somewhat younger than I am, is now occasionally entering what I mischievously describe as her Victor Meldrew years.

When something irritates her, I naturally offer calm, sympathetic reassurance.

“Calm down, dear.”

For some reason, this is not always appreciated.

The Butter

But there is another stage in life.

And this is where Dr Phil’s theory becomes rather more complicated.

When you’re forty and walk into the kitchen, forget what you went there for, or accidentally put the butter in the dishwasher, you laugh.

You return to the living room and announce your achievement to the family.

“Do you know what I’ve just done?”

And everyone laughs.

“Daddy, you’re losing it!”

It’s a family joke.

But when you’re seventy-four and put the butter in the dishwasher, you might not tell anybody.

Because suddenly it doesn’t feel quite so funny.

At forty, forgetting something is evidence that you’re distracted.

At seventy-four, you begin to wonder whether it’s evidence of something else.

And the really troubling thing is that you may have done exactly the same thing thirty years earlier.

The mistake hasn’t changed.

The fear surrounding it has.

I have recently noticed that I sometimes struggle to retrieve a familiar word.

I know perfectly well what the word means.

I can describe it.

I can almost feel it sitting somewhere in my vocabulary.

But I cannot quite get hold of it.

The first word I remember having this difficulty with was procrastination.

I was trying to remember the word for putting things off.

Two days later, the word suddenly came back to me.

Procrastination!

There is something wonderfully appropriate about taking two days to remember the word for putting things off.

Apparently, even my vocabulary has adopted my philosophy of employment.

I have since learned that this experience is known as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

A much more agreeable expression than some of the alternatives that inevitably cross your mind.

Of course, occasional forgetfulness does not automatically mean serious illness. And persistent difficulties deserve proper medical attention rather than either panic or denial.

But the fear itself is real.

And it can change our behaviour.

At forty, you tell everybody about the butter.

At seventy-four, you keep quiet.

Outliving Our Fears

So Dr Phil was right.

And he was wrong.

We do outlive some of our fears.

I no longer worry about losing my job.

The mortgage is paid.

Our pensions provide a degree of security that we did not always enjoy.

But new fears take the place of the old ones.

Our health.

Our memories.

The health of the person with whom we have shared our lives.

And, increasingly, the future of our children and grandchildren.

I grew up in Northern Ireland and lived through the Troubles.

I know that peace is not something to take for granted.

When I write about the possibility of our society moving from post-conflict towards pre-conflict, I am thinking not simply about political institutions, elections or constitutional arrangements.

I am thinking about the world my grandchildren will inherit.

And that is a fear no pension can remove.

Perhaps the real achievement of growing older is not that we stop being afraid.

Perhaps it is that we learn which fears deserve our attention.

And which ones can be laughed at.

I have outlived my fear of unemployment.

I have outlived much of my fear of other people’s opinions.

I have even outlived my enthusiasm for arguing with strangers on the internet.

But I have acquired a new collection of worries.

Some serious.

Some probably unnecessary.

And some involving dairy products and domestic appliances.

We outlive our fears. Then we live long enough to acquire new ones.

And if I ever do put the butter in the dishwasher, I hope I shall still have the confidence to tell somebody.

Preferably before the wash cycle starts.

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COMEDY TONIGHT

Posted on November 11, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Part Three — And Now for Something Completely Different

There is a tendency to imagine that comedy progresses in a nice straight line.

First there were the old-fashioned comedians, then the clever young comedians arrived, and everything became sophisticated.

It wasn’t quite like that.

Indeed, some of the most revolutionary comedy was being produced while the traditional entertainers were still packing theatres.

Consider The Goon Show.

Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe created a world in which almost anything could happen, usually without the slightest regard for logic.

The Goons didn’t merely tell jokes. They attacked the very idea that a comedy programme needed to make sense.

Characters appeared and disappeared. Sound effects became jokes in themselves. Stories wandered off in directions that no reasonable person could have anticipated.

And behind much of it was the extraordinary imagination of Spike Milligan.

It was anarchic, frequently ridiculous and sometimes completely incomprehensible.

Which was rather the point.

Then came Beyond the Fringe.

Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller represented something different again.

They were educated, articulate young men who were perfectly prepared to make fun of the people who ran Britain.

Politicians, military officers, the Establishment itself.

This mattered in a society where deference was still expected.

It was one thing to make a joke about a pompous official. It was another to suggest that the people supposedly in charge of the country might be rather absurd themselves.

And then there was Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

First broadcast in 1969.

An interesting year, for all sorts of reasons.

Python took the absurdity of the Goons, added elements of satire, television parody and surrealism, and produced something that didn’t always bother with conventional punchlines.

A sketch might simply stop.

Or turn into another sketch.

Or be interrupted by something completely unrelated.

The famous announcement, “And now for something completely different,” was itself part of the joke.

It often wasn’t completely different at all. It was simply another excursion into madness.

But I think we should be careful about treating all this as the moment when comedy suddenly became intelligent.

The older comedians weren’t necessarily stupid, and their audiences certainly weren’t.

They were working within different conventions.

Nor was the new comedy universally admired. Plenty of people found it irritating, pretentious or simply unfunny.

And they were entitled to that opinion.

Comedy is a peculiar business. You can explain why a joke works. You can analyse its structure, its timing, its cultural significance and its place in the history of popular entertainment.

But you cannot make somebody laugh by explaining that they ought to.

And that brings us to another interesting question.

What happens when comedy stops merely making fun of authority and starts challenging the social rules themselves?

Because by the 1970s, and certainly by the 1980s, the argument was no longer simply about what was funny.

It was increasingly about who was being laughed at.

And who was doing the laughing.

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COMEDY TONIGHT

Posted on November 11, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Part Two — You Lucky People!

One of the curious things about comedy is that we inherit much of it from generations who came before us.

I was born in 1952, which meant that much of the comedy I encountered as a child had its origins in music hall, variety theatre and the wireless.

The comedians themselves were often considerably older than their audiences. Their jokes might have been older still.

Take Tommy Trinder.

“You lucky people!”

It was his catchphrase, and it belonged to a particular tradition of British entertainment in which a comedian could walk onto a stage, address the audience directly, tell a few jokes, sing a song and generally behave as though everyone had come along to see an old friend.

There were also comedians such as Arthur Askey, George Formby and later Norman Wisdom, whose popularity was built around recognisable comic personalities.

The little man. The cheeky fellow. The innocent who somehow triumphs over authority.

Comedy was often about class, although it wasn’t always described that way.

The man in the audience might spend his working week being ordered around by employers, supervisors and assorted people who considered themselves his betters.

For an hour or two he could watch someone make fools of precisely those sorts of people.

And then television came along.

Television didn’t immediately destroy the old variety tradition. Quite the opposite. It brought it into millions of homes.

Sunday Night at the London Palladium was one of the great showcases for entertainers who had learned their trade before television became dominant.

But television also changed the relationship between comedian and audience.

A music hall performer might have to win over a different audience every night. Television allowed the same comic character to return week after week, becoming almost a member of the family.

Some survived the transition brilliantly.

Others belonged to a world that was disappearing.

And the audience was changing too.

The generation that had lived through the Depression and the Second World War did not necessarily find the same things funny as the young people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.

That didn’t mean one generation had a sense of humour and the other didn’t.

It meant that comedy, like almost everything else, was changing.

And somewhere in the background, a rather different kind of comedy was already making itself heard.

Sometimes quite literally.

On the wireless.

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COMEDY TONIGHT

Posted on November 11, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Part One — As Everyone Knows, I Am Hilarious

As everyone knows, I am hilarious.

I am very funny. And I have had a lifelong interest in comedy.

I thought it best to establish those facts at the outset, lest there be any misunderstanding.

My earliest memories of comedy go back to the late 1950s, when I was a small boy watching television at my grandmother’s house.

There was Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko. There was Jack Benny. There were British comedians such as Charlie Drake and Tony Hancock. And there were the Marx Brothers.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Karl and Zeppo.

I was particularly fond of Karl, although his material was rather political.

There was something wonderful about discovering that words could be funny. Not merely the things people did, or the faces they pulled, but the words themselves. A sentence could begin in one direction and end somewhere entirely unexpected.

A misunderstanding could become a joke. A perfectly ordinary phrase could be turned upside down.

And sometimes the funniest thing was what wasn’t said.

I liked slapstick well enough, but it was verbal comedy that fascinated me.

I suppose I was becoming a wordsmith, although I doubt I would have described myself that way at the time.

Indeed, having now described myself as a wordsmith, I find myself struggling to think of any words.

Comedy was everywhere on television, but it came from several different traditions. American sitcoms, British variety performers, old films, radio comedians and the increasingly familiar television personalities all competed for our attention.

There was The Dick Van Dyke Show. There was Bewitched. There were the old Marx Brothers films, which seemed to belong to another age but were still extraordinarily funny.

And behind much of British television comedy lay an older world of music halls, variety theatres and touring entertainers.

A comedian might spend years travelling from Sunderland to Norwich to Bradford, delivering essentially the same ten-minute routine to audiences who might not have heard it since the previous year.

That was perfectly sensible when entertainment was local and temporary.

Television changed everything.

A joke delivered to a few hundred people in a theatre could now be heard by millions on the same evening. A routine that might once have lasted a comedian for years could become familiar almost overnight.

Television didn’t merely give comedians a bigger audience. It changed the nature of their work.

Some adapted brilliantly. Others found that their familiar routines were becoming rather too familiar.

And a new generation was waiting in the wings.

But before we get to them, we need to spend a little time with the old variety performers.

You lucky people!

To be continued.

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‘Allo ‘Allo! Listen Very Carefully, I Shall Say This Only Once

Posted on November 10, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

About six weeks ago, I bought a set of eight 1/32-scale figures made by a company called Replicants. They represent members of the French Resistance, or perhaps partisans operating elsewhere in occupied Europe during the Second World War.

They’re rather unusual figures.

Most of the figures I paint are soldiers. British, German, French, Napoleonic, whatever. They wear uniforms, and generally speaking, there are recognised colours for painting them.

Not so with these figures.

They’re civilians. Ordinary men and women wearing ordinary clothes. Jackets, trousers, skirts, caps and overcoats. The sort of clothing you might have seen on the streets of France or Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945.

And that presents an interesting problem for the model painter.

What colours do you paint them?

Now, here’s where modern technology comes in.

I asked Artificial Intelligence for some advice. Not only did it suggest appropriate colours for civilian clothing of the period, but it also supplied the reference numbers for the Vallejo model paints I use.

Amazing.

I’m 74 years old, and the idea that I can ask a machine what colour to paint a French Resistance fighter and receive a sensible answer, complete with paint manufacturer’s reference numbers, still blows my mind.

So I painted them.

I’m not entirely happy with the results. My painting isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. Age does things to your eyesight and your ability to hold a paintbrush steady.

But I enjoyed painting them, and that’s really what matters.

One of the figures is a clandestine radio operator. He’s crouched beside his equipment, presumably transmitting information to London while hoping that nobody is listening who shouldn’t be.

Another is preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail.

Others carry rifles or pistols.

But perhaps the most interesting figure is a woman carrying a baby while drawing a pistol.

Apparently, this figure was inspired by Lucie Aubrac, one of the most celebrated women of the French Resistance.

Aubrac was a teacher, a mother and an active member of the Resistance. In October 1943, while pregnant, she helped organise the daring rescue of her husband Raymond from German custody.

An extraordinary woman.

I haven’t been able to establish whether the Replicants figure represents a particular incident in her life, or whether the sculptor simply took inspiration from her story.

But the figure raises an interesting question.

A woman, a baby and a gun.

I’m not entirely comfortable with it.

Is the baby being used as cover? Is the woman defending herself? Has she been caught unexpectedly in a dangerous situation?

Or has the sculptor simply decided that a woman carrying a baby while producing a pistol makes a particularly dramatic miniature?

I don’t know.

And perhaps that’s the point.

The Resistance wasn’t made up entirely of men in berets carrying Sten guns. It included women, mothers, teachers, railway workers, farmers and ordinary people who found themselves making extraordinary decisions.

Some were heroic. Some were desperate. And some of those decisions must have involved terrible moral dilemmas.

A miniature figure doesn’t have to celebrate everything it depicts.

Sometimes it can simply make us think.

One final observation about these figures.

Although they’re marketed as French Resistance or partisan figures, their civilian clothing makes them remarkably versatile.

With suitable historical context, they could just as easily represent irregular fighters in the Spanish Civil War, resistance movements in Eastern Europe, or even participants in later conflicts, including Norn Iron.

There are no uniforms to tie them to a particular army or period.

Just ordinary people, caught up in history.

Anyway, they’re finished now and will join the growing population of my 1/32-scale world.

And despite my complaints about the painting, I’m rather pleased with them.

Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once.

I enjoyed myself.

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Norn Iron Politics: What You Don’t See on Television

Posted on November 10, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

One of the surprising things about Norn Ironpolitics is that politicians tend to get on rather better than you might imagine.

Not always, of course. Indeed, some politicians seem to have more difficulty getting along with colleagues in their own party than with their political opponents. Perhaps that’s because they spend rather more time dealing with them.

But there is also genuine cooperation across party lines, particularly on constituency issues. Whatever their constitutional aspirations or political differences, most politicians recognise that they have constituents to represent and problems to resolve.

And sometimes you see a rather different side of a politician when they’re away from the television cameras.

Gregory Campbell in the Bogside

Some years ago, I attended an SDLP Youth conference at Cultúrlann Uí Chanáin in Derry.

The Cultúrlann is a centre for Irish language and culture, with a café, bookshop and meeting facilities. It was an interesting setting for a political conference, particularly given its location in a strongly nationalist part of the city.

I was there to cover the event for this blog.

And who should walk in but Gregory Campbell, the DUP MP.

Now, Gregory Campbell is perhaps particularly remembered for his notorious “Curry my yoghurt” remark, mocking the Irish language in the Assembly in 2014.

It was the sort of comment that understandably caused considerable offence. Indeed, Campbell was prevented from speaking in the Assembly for a day after refusing to apologise.

Yet here he was, at an Irish-language cultural centre in Derry, addressing young members of the SDLP.

He had been invited to participate in a panel discussion.

Think about that for a moment.

Here was a DUP politician attending a youth conference organised by a nationalist party, in an Irish-language cultural centre in Derry. He could hardly have expected to win many votes from the people in that room.

He didn’t have to be there.

And equally, SDLP Youth didn’t have to invite him.

Both deserve some credit for that.

What particularly impressed me was Campbell’s contribution to the discussion. He spoke about disadvantaged areas of Coleraine, within his constituency, where young people felt alienated from politics.

Some didn’t vote. Some didn’t see any reason to vote. Some simply didn’t believe politics had anything to offer them.

He spoke with an understanding of the problem that I hadn’t necessarily expected.

I came away impressed.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly agreed with Gregory Campbell’s politics. I didn’t. Nor does it mean that I excuse his remarks about the Irish language.

But I had seen another side of him.

A School Visit in Upper Bann

Politicians also regularly engage with young people through school visits, discussions and organised trips to Stormont.

These events can be valuable. Young people get to meet elected representatives, ask questions and discover that politicians are human beings rather than just faces on television.

Something similar happened in my own constituency of Upper Bann about a year ago.

Four of the constituency’s five MLAs attended a discussion at a Catholic school.

I wasn’t there myself, but I subsequently spoke to one of the young people who attended. He has since gone on to university.

His impressions were interesting, although they are, of course, the observations of one young person rather than a definitive assessment of the politicians concerned.

The politician who impressed him most was Doug Beattie of the Ulster Unionist Party.

Beattie is a former British Army officer and a committed unionist. He has made efforts to reach beyond traditional unionism, although I sometimes think his approach to nationalist outreach has been a case of one step forward and one step back.

There have been encouraging gestures, but also remarks and controversies which have undermined them.

Nevertheless, my young informant found him particularly impressive that day.

Diane Dodds of the DUP spoke extensively about health and disability issues. These are subjects in which she has a strong personal interest, not least because of disability issues within her own family.

Her contribution evidently reflected that commitment.

John O’Dowd of Sinn Féin might have expected a sympathetic reception from at least some of the audience. Yet my informant was rather less impressed, describing his contribution as somewhat waffly.

Eóin Tennyson of Alliance apparently made a similar impression.

But Tennyson also said something which caught my attention.

An Alliance Regret

The politicians were asked an interesting question.

What was your biggest political

In deference to Tennyson and the quasi privileged nature of talking to high school students, I wont go into detail.

What particularly struck me about Tennyson’s reported answer was its honesty and frankness.

He had identified an episode in his own party’s history which I have long regarded as a serious mistake.

I might disagree with Alliance on many things, but I can certainly respect a politician who is prepared to acknowledge an uncomfortable episode in his own party’s history.

And perhaps that is one of the benefits of these encounters with young people.

Politicians are sometimes asked questions which produce more revealing answers than the familiar exchanges on television.

Away From the Cameras

Watch a political discussion on television and you might imagine that Norn Irons politicians can barely tolerate being in the same room.

There are disagreements, interruptions, accusations and the occasional theatrical display of outrage.

Some of those disagreements are genuine and profound. They reflect different political traditions, different constitutional aspirations and very different interpretations of our history.

But that isn’t the whole picture.

Politicians from opposing parties frequently work together on constituency matters. They may disagree about the constitutional future of Norn Iron while agreeing that a local school needs support, a road needs repaired or a family needs help with housing.

They are often on first-name terms, even when they don’t particularly like one another.

And while the television audience sees the confrontation in the studio, it doesn’t necessarily see what happens beforehand.

In the green room, waiting to go on air, the same politicians may be chatting quite amicably.

That doesn’t make their political disagreements any less real.

It simply reminds us that the public performance of politics and the everyday practice of politics aren’t always the same thing.

And perhaps we would have a better understanding of Norn Iron politics if we occasionally paid more attention to what happens when the cameras are switched off.

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Three Co-Options And An Election

Posted on November 10, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

Sian Mulholland MLA

Before the 2022 Assembly election, the Alliance Party had eight MLAs. We knew them all. Or at least we thought we did.

Then came the Alliance breakthrough, and suddenly there were seventeen.

Some of the newer MLAs aren’t exactly household names. Indeed, I suspect a few aren’t household names in their own households.

On Thursday night’s BBC The View, one of the less familiar Alliance faces, Sian Mulholland MLA, was discussing the current and referred to “my voters.”

An interesting choice of words.

You see, Sian Mulholland has had a rather unusual political career.

In 2015 she was co-opted onto Belfast City Council.

In 2019 she was elected to Belfast City Council

In 2022 she was co-opted onto Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council.

And in 2023, following the resignation of Patricia O’Lynn, she was co-opted into the Northern Ireland Assembly as MLA for North Antrim.

Three councils and constituencies. Three co-options. Three Co-Options And An Election. It is a Rom-Com.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing improper about co-option. It’s a perfectly legitimate part of our political system.

And, in fairness, Sian Mulholland did stand in North Antrim in the 2024 Westminster election, receiving 4,488 votes. She also won election to Belfast City Council in 2019.

But she has never been elected to the Assembly.

Still, after three co-options, maybe it’s time to try something different.

Getting elected.

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Glasgow Belongs To Me

Posted on November 9, 2026 by fitzjameshorse

My wife and I decided to take a city break in Glasgow at the end of last month.

Now, we’re not great travellers..Iin 44 years of marriage, most of our holidays have been spent travelling around Ireland.

It was only last year, 2025, that we ventured as far as Salou in Catalonia. We enjoyed it so much that wewent bac k this year.

So we’ve decided that, from now on, we’ll try to have at least one proper holiday a year, along with a city break or two.

And we decided on Glasgow.

Not necessarily my first choice, but Glasgow it was.

We’d originally intended going in August, but sadly a close family member passed away, and our plans were postponed.

So off we went at the end of October.

Two of our grandsons took us to Aldergrove Airport early one morning.

The first thing we discovered was that our suitcase was too big to travel free.

That’ll be £60, thank you very much.

My wife wasn’t terribly pleased. I took it reasonably well, considering.

We’re now at the stage in life where we need assistance at airports. My wife has considerable mobility difficulties and uses a rollator.

I have to say the staff at Aldergrove were wonderful. Very helpful people in their yellow gilets, making sure we were comfortable and helping us through the airport.

The flight itself was only about thirty minutes.

Hardly enough time to get frightened.

At Glasgow Airport I encountered another modern technological marvel.

Uber.

My son had installed this fancy app on my phone, and somehow I managed to summon a car to take us into Glasgow.

And quite reasonably priced it was too.

I’m still not entirely comfortable with all this modern business of electronic tickets, self-service machines and phones that apparently know more about where you’re going than you do.

But we arrived safely.

At the hotel, we decided to check in early because we needed a rest.

Naturally, that cost extra.

Our room was several floors up, and there were notices everywhere reminding guests that, in the event of fire, they should use the stairs.

Excellent advice.

Unless, of course, your wife has serious mobility problems.

We discussed the situation and eventually agreed that, should a fire break out, I would throw my wife out of the window and then run downstairs in time to catch her.

Admittedly, we hadn’t thought this plan through in any great detail.

Anyway, we settled in and went shopping.

My wife bought a cardigan.

This was the beginning of something.

We wandered around the shopping centre, where I was astonished to discover an actual shop selling merchandise from the Scottish comedy programme Still Game.

I hadn’t realised there was such a thing.

We ended up in McDonald’s, as you do.

And my wife bought gloves.

So, running total: cardigan, gloves.

The following day I decided to find a toy soldier shop.

I had the address and one of those clever direction apps on my phone.

Unfortunately, it kept telling me I was three minutes away, then seven minutes away, then six minutes away, then nine minutes away.

Eventually I discovered that I’d set the directions for driving rather than walking.

Idiot.

When we finally reached the shop, near Glasgow Sheriff Court, we discovered that it had closed permanently.

Another Uber back into central Glasgow.

Meanwhile, my wife had discovered more shops.

Boots were purchased.

Cardigan, gloves, boots.

Then there was Holland & Barrett, scarves, various little trinkets to bring home, and a lovely 1960s-style woollen cap.

I have to say my wife looked stunning in the cap.

The next day brought Warren James the jewellers.

And then the big one.

Marks & Spencer.

A coat.

A very nice coat, admittedly.

Now, I’m all in favour of my wife enjoying a little retail therapy.

And believe me, she enjoyed a considerable amount of therapy during those four days.

You may have noticed, however, that I hadn’t bought anything.

Not a thing.

Until I discovered a pound shop in Sauchiehall Street.

And there, to my delight, were unpainted resin toy soldiers.

Scottish pipers.

A pound each!

I bought nine.

There were also Highland coos and a rather splendid cone-headed Duke of Wellington. Also one pound.

The display coo was only three legged. So I offered 50 pence. Then the shop girl dropped it and another leg broke off.

“20 pence’ I said but I got it for free. Result.

what is the point of a two legged Highland Coo? Well I am a humanitarian. The Coo.was a “rescue”. If I had not taken it home, the resin coo would have been euthanized.

Basically as a Toy Soldier collector, it’s a case of no (plastic) man left behind. Or resin coo.

Now, there’s a problem with painting Scottish pipers.

Kilts.

At 74, my painting skills are simply not up to producing convincing tartan.

And tartan paint is notoriously difficult to find.

Guy, my new AI technical adviser and wingman, also informs me that left-handed paintbrushes are increasingly difficult to obtain.

Guy is proving to be a very useful member of staff.

So I may paint my pipers in the colours of the Irish Defence Forces instead.

Green and saffron, perhaps.

Historical accuracy will have to take a back seat.

But here’s the thing about Glasgow.

It wasn’t the shopping, the hotel, the Uber rides or even the toy soldiers that made the trip enjoyable.

It was the people.

The people of Glasgow were lovely.

Friendly, helpful, funny and welcoming.

Now, I’m an old man, but I still enjoy a bit of banter with shop assistants, particularly the ladies.

And if a woman wants to have a laugh and a little harmless flirtation with me, I’m certainly not going to object.

My wife, meanwhile, tends to roll her eyes.

“Oh God. Not again.”

But that friendliness was everywhere.

We were in a Pizza place and the lady at the next table (to the bewilderment of her companion) pushed the tables together. Turns out she was a tour guide and knew a lot about Culloden and we sat for a good hour discussing the battle and the Jacobite deployment.

Before we came home, we visited a little café or restaurant which also provided meals for homeless people twice a day, including at five in the afternoon.

I thought that was wonderful.

A city with a heart.

And there was one final thing I noticed.

In Buchanan Street stands a statue of Donald Dewar, looking rather solemn.

Dewar, of course, played a central role in establishing Scottish devolution.

You could argue that he helped save Scotland for the Union.

But I wonder how many people passing his statue know who he was?

How many will know in fifty years?

Perhaps he’ll be little more than a footnote in history.

And then, just around the corner, there’s a new statue.

Unveiled only a few weeks before our visit.

Nelson Mandela.

Now there’s a man who certainly won’t be a footnote in history.

And there’s something rather wonderful about Glasgow honouring him.

A city thousands of miles from South Africa, which stood up for Mandela when he was still a prisoner.

I came to Glasgow expecting a few days away, a little shopping and perhaps some toy soldiers.

I left with a great affection for the place. Scotland has an ETHOS. Like the young woman protesting USAs Cuba policy. Or in St Aloysius Catholic church statue of martyr John Ogilvie.

Glasgow belongs to me?

Well, perhaps not.

But for four days, it certainly made me feel that I belonged to Glasgow.

The last Uber to the airport.

and the six Westlife ladies with their cowboy hats coming to Belfast for a concert. Perhaps their affection for me was fuelled by WKD.

And when my wife was offered a spare Westlife ticket….she refused to part with me.

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