Innholdsfortegnelse for 7/23/2018 i The Big Issue

Knock knock. Who’s there? Biggish Biggish who? Big Issue only £2.50! This week you can enjoy our Summer Comedy Special, where some of the funniest comics of yesteryear (still around today!) brighten up our already quite bright July. These ‘end of the pier’ comedians are joined by Sooty – who was discovered literally on the end of Blackpool’s North Pier 70 years ago this month. I sell The Big Issue in Salisbury, where there’s not been much to laugh about at recently, but there is a good sense of community here. You can read my story on page 46.…

A man walks into a bar. With a giraffe. He says to the barman, “Pint for me, pint for the giraffe.” And so begins the greatest joke in the English language. Or, to some people whom I have repeatedly told this, the worst joke in the English language. Part of the problem with it is that the punchline – and we’ll get there, don’t panic – written down, is open to misinterpretation. And disappointment. And also tedium. Some people may insist they want to get to the end, but others decide for that, for them, they want another joke, a joke that speaks for them more clearly. It is in many ways a metaphor for Brexit. Though, actually, it’s not. This has, so far, been a clumsy attempt to make…

Big Issue founder John Bird’s push to make credit more affordable for some of the poorest in society last week reached a key milestone in its journey towards becoming law. The Creditworthiness Assessment Bill, introduced last year, has completed its first stage of readings through the House of Lords and will now head to the House of Commons. There were no amendments made to the Bill during the report stage earlier this month or the third reading in the Lords last week. The private member’s bill will now go through the same process in the Commons and – if given the green light – will just need Royal Assent from the Queen to become law. If approved, the bill, which has been given widespread cross-party support from Nicky Morgan MP…

When I was 16, I was boarding at Blair’s College seminary. It was like a borstal for Catholic boys, but I loved it. It was strict but not Dickensian. It wasn’t like a workhouse. We got up really early in the morning and we prayed, ate, learned and played. It was out in the country, beside Aberdeen. My own family life was a bit chaotic, so for me it was a stable thing. My family lived in Dunoon [on the Cowal peninsula in the south of Argyll and Bute], which was a very safe place. I used to go climbing and cycling. But I never went swimming. I couldn’t swim. My dad was a submariner and he died in the [Second World] War, so I had a superstition about going…

My earliest joke as a kid: They used to have a radio show at lunchtime called Workers’ Playtime. It was to cheer people up during the war but they carried on afterwards. Basically a couple of comics, a singer, and a multi-instrumentalist would go round to a factory and do a little show for the workers. It kept morale going. That’s a great idea for people who have to clock on and clock off. They should bring it back. I’d be up for going around anyway. I remember one joke was… “A guy runs into a hardware shop and says: ‘Can I have a mousetrap please, and hurry up – I want to catch a bus.’ And the assistant says, ‘I’m sorry sir, we don’t have mousetraps as big as…

On Get Your Own Back , kids got the chance to gunge a grown-up, but they had to stake one of their treasured possessions and if they lost, Dave Benson Phillips torched it in a furnace. The magic of television usually meant the item was saved, but once it went wrong. “One girl’s teddy bear went up in flames,” Phillips recalls. “It was supposed to drop into an area beneath the flames and never get touched. Unfortunately the bear was not co-operating and it threw itself into the flames. “We were bad boys then at the BBC, the nation’s children were up in arms. We had to make an apology on the national news, I had to go on Newsround and Points of View. I had to…

Apostasy is a powerfully sombre British drama set in a small, inward-looking community of devoted Jehovah’s Witnesses. It arrives in UK cinemas not long after First Reformed, and though this debut film from writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo hasn’t the wintry mastery of Paul Schrader’s latest (do see it if you get a chance), both films are complex, compellingly serious and emotionally fierce explorations of religious obsession. They’d make a formidable – and formidably intense – double bill. Set in Manchester, Apostasy’s focus is on three women: sisters Alex (Molly Wright) and Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and their mother Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran), all practicing Witnesses. Their commitment to their faith is signalled from the opening scene. Prone to anaemia, Alex (a beautiful performance that hovers between steely certitude and shy sensitivity from Wright)…

“Knussen’s work dazzles for its creativity” The sub-tropical temperatures made wearing the gowns hot but, given the circumstances, few minded the inconvenience. London’s St Marylebone Parish Church and the new Susie Sainsbury Theatre bustled with students receiving their hard-earned degrees from the Royal Academy of Music (RAM). The graduates were joined by a clutch of eminent figures from the arts world who were also receiving awards. Among them was pianist Paul Lewis, who accepted an honorary membership, along with Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton, and composer and conductor Oliver Knussen, who was given the degree of Doctor of Music ‘honoris causa’, following in the footsteps of Elton John, Peter Maxwell Davies and Daniel Barenboim. Knussen’s work – as artistic director (including Aldeburgh Festival 1983-98 and Tanglewood Music Centre 1986-93), teacher…

Pension delays Elizabeth Stanley [Correspondence, July 9-15] is not quite correct in saying that women born in 1953 suddenly found that they would have to wait two to five years longer for a state pension they expected in 2013 as a result of the Pensions Act of 2011. Most of the increase was the result of the Pensions Act of 1995 (16 years before they originally expected to retire) under which they would have received a pension between September 6 2015 (Two years eight months late) and September 6 2017 (Three years nine months late). The 2011 Act added up to six months for women born in 1953 and six to 15 months for those born in 1954. Hilary Johnson, email Lee’s a cut above I just had to respond…

You definitely shouldn’t make placards out of Big Issue covers at protests. Sorry, we misspoke, you definitely should. That’s what one London protestor did as they joined thousands at the demonstration against President Trump’s visit to the UK earlier this month. Our ‘Flake News’ cover, which reimagined the US leader as a traditional ice cream, clearly had a bigly impact, inspiring an activist to recreate it on a placard. And up in Scotland, the magazine was also deemed the highest level of special by the controversial Trump baby blimp. The mid-tantrum toddler couldn’t resist getting his tiny hands on the magazine at the Edinburgh protests (top right). Hopefully he didn’t dismiss it as fake news. Sad!…

Could localised bidding offer an alternative way for the Big Issue-backed Guardians of the Arches campaign to save their livelihoods? Last week, Hackney mayor Phil Glanville has written to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling in support of a localised approach, allowing councils to bid for railway arches in their area, which Hackney MP Meg Hillier supported at a meeting in parliament where The Big Issue’s John Bird was a key speaker. The move comes as campaigners met with Transport Minister Jo Johnson to voice opposition to the planned Network Rail sell-off of 5,476 railway arches across the UK amid fears they may be railroaded into accepting huge rent increases in the £1.2 billion sell-off. Now the pressure is on the government to return to the negotiating table. “This is a powerful…

“The greatest opportunity is to put children on a trajectory towards higher wages” If you don’t want people in poverty make them well waged. Make them skilful, artful and careful. Make them knowledgeable. Make them dedicated to the power of application; to the 10, 000 hours of practice Tiger Woods put into perfecting his skills – by learning how to get a golf ball into a tumbler across a large room. To putting in the sweat of brow and mind. Of course, you can have all this shit going for you (I use the word as meaning ‘good stuff’), but then the economy, mental wellbeing or accident can take the shine off your hopefulness. Ideally, we would create safety nets to catch you from falling. And we would create clever…

BERNIE CLIFTON Stage duo Bernie Clifton and Oswald the Ostrich have worked together since 1970s. Despite Oswald retiring earlier this year, Bernie’s career at the age of 82 still has legs... Bernie says: “Seaside is my territory, sadly that should be ‘was’. The demise of summer shows and with them family entertainment is a shame.” Clifton recalls the words of the late great Ken Dodd: “The greatest compliment you can pay me is to call me an ‘End of the Pier’ comedian. Imagine, three generations battling their way up the pier, roped together, in the teeth of a gale, just to be entertained. Families laughing together, I’m proud to be part of that.” My earliest joke as a kid: In my weekly comic, Lord Snooty and his pals couldn’t afford…

1. Sooty was discovered on the North Pier in Blackpool on July 19 1948 2. On a family holiday, Harry Corbett bought the glove puppet from a joke shop to entertain his sons David and baby Matthew on a rainy day 3. Sooty cost seven shillings and sixpence 4. Before he became famous, Sooty was called Teddy 5. Harry was an amateur magician and performed at children’s birthday parties with Sooty (Teddy) in Yorkshire 6. Sooty’s magical catchphrase ‘Izzy-wizzy, let’s get busy!’ was developed while doing kids’ parties 7. This is the oldest known picture of Sooty, before his ears were blackened 8. Sooty made his TV debut in 1952 on the BBC’s Talent Night 9. Sooty won the talent contest after making a live mouse appear from a silver…

This week we’re looking at two authors riding high in terms of their careers at the moment. This seems to be Megan Abbott’s year. Entertainment Weekly recently ran an article entitled ‘Is Megan Abbott Hollywood’s next big novelist?’, citing the fact that her two most recent books have been optioned in big deals by major producers. This next to the fact that her previous novel, Dare Me, is in production for television, and she recently came off the back of co-writing The Deuce series with The Wire’s David Simon, and it’s clear the American writer is much in demand. Give Me Your Hand, Abbott’s latest novel, is a perfect example of her strengths as a writer. Dealing with toxic female relationships, this terrific modern noir thriller is set in the…

“Perhaps the BBC were merely testing us, like Heinz with Salad Cream” The BBC news and current affairs department continues to confound me. The strange decisions on the stories it promotes and the people it is addicted to giving airtime to, such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance and Ann Coulter, will make conspiracy theorists of us all before long. Each morning, I depress myself by turning on social media too soon and observe the usual trending outrage about The Today Programme and the mollycoddling of some lickspittle promoting chaos capitalism under the guise of the will of the people. To save the few remaining tendrils of my sanity, I take advice from Derek Jarman’s punk film Jubilee: “As long as the music is loud enough, we won’t hear the world falling…

With reference to the article about body donation [What happens when you donate your body to science? July 2-8], I would like to say that my late husband and I had chosen this option. He died in July 2016 and was collected by Bristol University. I was notified in February 2017 that they had completed their studies and his funeral was arranged. It was a wonderful thing that he did and I am so proud of him. People asked why and the answer is you can bury your body, burn it or give it to science and we chose donation. Bristol University hold a thanksgiving service every year for friends and family to attend and I’m sure other universities do the same. I have left instructions for my family to…

Scottish seller Brian, 39, was a big hit at the Stirlingshire bash headlined by the Levellers, Temples and Akala, selling more than 100 magazines to happy customers – and his famous name attracted attention from revellers. “I had a brilliant response at the festival,” he said. “I was given a very welcoming reception from everyone and I got lots of comments about how it was such a good idea to have a Big Issue vendor at the festival. “I was telling jokes, like the Ferrari is in the shop, or the Lamborghini needed a valet or I needed to sell magazines so I can make the flight back, and it went down really well, I could hear people laughing at the jokes in the caravans as I walked past. “I…

I was homeless growing up. My dad was disabled, lost his business and we ended up losing our home. I was 11 years old. We were passed from pillar to post by local authorities before being put into emergency accommodation at a B&B with four of us in a single room. I had just started secondary school and my sister was coming to the end of primary school. It was very chaotic, I remember trying to do my homework on the bed because there wasn’t space for a table. We moved into temporary accommodation for a couple of years before being placed in a Housing Association flat. Because my dad was disabled, we were given a ground floor flat but it used to flood with raw sewage a few times…

There’s nothing like having a father who’s an undertaker to set you up for a career in comedy. James Mulgrew, better known as Jimmy Cricket, was one of the biggest comedy stars of the 1970s and 1980s. Humour was instilled in him from a young age. His father would take him to see Chaplin films in the cinema and variety theatre shows in Belfast. Cricket remembers his dad’s unique sense of humour. “He imported a Rolls-Royce over from England and had it converted into a hearse to give people a good send-off,” Cricket recalls. “He was coming back from a funeral and two American soldiers were thumbing a lift. He said, ‘Jump in the back!’ then when he was dropping them off a couple of miles later one of them…

Children who grew up in the 1990s had hope because of one man. Dave Benson Phillips presented Get Your Own Back for 14 series. It had a simple but fantastic premise; kids competed to have an embarrassing parent or grumpy teacher of their choice dunked into gunge. It was the fantasy of playgrounds across the land, and presented with infectious manic glee by a born entertainer. The show was a slimy success for the BBC and turned Phillips into one of the UK’s most recognisable faces. But then in 2009 he died. Sort of. His killers were cruel hoaxers who spread rumours of his demise online. And then his problems went from dead to worse. “One day a mother came up to me in the street and short of almost…

KUMUKANDA by Kayo Chingonyi Both nostalgic and tender, Kayo breaks through a young man growing up into lightning bolts of sharp lyricism. SUNSHINE by Melissa Lee-Houghton This is a heartbreaking, challenging collection, but the honesty on display is completely life affirming. It always forces me to look deeper inside of my pain to find some kind of resolution. UNICORN by Angela Carter No one to me is anywhere near as brutal with language as Angela Carter. She’s a force of violent imagery, and best of all in this are her takes on the banality of human behaviour. The whole experience really fires you up. HOLD YOUR OWN by Kate Tempest I used to carry this with me everywhere, ‘just in case’. I think the just in case situations I needed…