May 29th, 2007
With the rubbish that is on television these days, sometimes the adverts are better than the programmes themselves.
Just wanted to try writing in the style of The Telegraph there: on the contrary the advert wasn’t accentuated by the poor quality of the programme; the advert was wonderful in itself. It was advertising the pleasure of driving a VW Golf at night. I caught it one evening and felt an immediate wave of despair: I knew the narrator and I knew the piece, but I couldn’t remember–for the life of me–their names!
The next day, coming home on the bus from the final day at college, I was thinking about the Bob Dylan song Times Have Changed. Dylan. It hit me–didn’t even have time to think of something more original than–like a bolt of lightning! Dylan Thomas!
I’m doing this extra exam called “Extension English”, which is supposed to mark out the Oxbridge candidates from the hoi-polloi. I say supposed to as it seems too much fun to mark us out for Oxbridge. You would have thought they would have devised some boring fact-parroting exercise instead (like regular English), but bizarrely it has been quite enjoyable: we just go in and discuss literature generally. I suppose it’ll succumb to the box-tickers soon enough (they say no opinions are wrong in English–but evidently there are some righter than others). Anyway it’s worth saying I’m not actually going to Oxbridge; yes–the extra hour is fun enough to warrant going with no other motive.
The background to the advert, of course, is Richard Burton’s rendering of Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood”. We listened to it right at the start of the year, and I confess I hated it at first (I was reading Hemingway at the time) but secretly the literary side of me found it very appealing.
Simon and Garfunkel did a piss-take of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” called “A Simple Desultory Philippic”, which also referred to Dylan Thomas (whoever he was). So it’s deliciously strange that Bob Dylan stirred my, often frustratingly glacial, memory.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Just a note regarding Under Milk Wood
I think it isn’t Richard Burton, but actually Anthony Hopkins.
The original with Richard Burton is the better rendition however.
Glyn