P'tang yang kipperbang and Laziness

 

P’tang yang kipperbang

Is the title of a TV play by Jack Rosenthal. As Lenny Henry remarked it must be the strangest title ever. It is the poignant , bathetic and humorous account of a boy whose twin obsessions are cricket and to kiss a particular girl in his school class. Duckworth ( nick name Quack-Quack) thinks his opportunity comes in a school play but his nerve fails and he just shakes her hand. When she can’t understand why he confesses his adoration and she kisses him.

The title saying is just a group code among his fellow pupils and takes no significant part in the play except that they delight in flowery and obscure word play. A part of the humour is that his internal cricket voice is John Arlott talking about Duckworth’s exploits on the pitch. After the kiss he exceeds Len Hutton’s record innings of 364 in his imagination.

Although broadcast in the early 80’s the cricketer’s that Duckworth imagines are from an earlier era, more like the 50’s and 60’s. I derived special enjoyment as they were among my own boyhood heroes, such as Alec Bedser, Denis Compton and of course Len Hutton himself.

Jack Rosenthal was a major TV playwright from the fifties to the eighties dying in 2004 from cancer. He had a characteristic simple style in his plays with gentle humour about life’s foibles. His characters were often given nick names which were amusing in themselves. For example in “London’s Burning” a firefighter is nick named Charisma because he thought he had it but didn’t.

Internal voices were another common feature. In “Saturday afternoon and sweet FA” a football referee gets carried away at the end of the match scoring a goal. All the time he imagines the roar of the crowd.  In “Eskimo Day” he shines light on children leaving home to go to university with their feelings of excitement and fear coupled with their parent’s sadness as they leave home. The title likens this to Eskimo’s achieving adulthood..

Rosenthal turned his hand to many facets of the TV writers craft as in, among  other things, many episodes of “Coronation Street”.

During his life he was recognised by 3 BAFTA’s and a CBE.

His was a distinctive voice whose loss has left TV drama poorer.

Laziness

I may as well admit it straightaway; I’m lazy. Certainly through my school years I was mostly lazy with occasional ( very occasional) bursts of diligence. This continued through university and onto working for a research degree. The latter was offering big opportunities for laziness which all too often I couldn’t resist.

I well remember reading an article by an eminent philosopher entitled ” In defence of laziness “. The essence of the argument proposed was that laziness led to thinking about easier ways of doing tasks and that this fuelled innovation. While there is an element of truth in this I think there is far more to say. It was also no excuse for me.

I think that I reached something of a turning point in middle age. There is a mental trick to working hard and I think I began to exploit it. This trick is not to think of the work as a task but rather how it personally helps you, yourself, in some way. This may be just to advance your career or it may be to meet a personal goal. My wife tends to pooh-pooh this idea saying that as I grew older with greater management responsibilities I had greater choice in what I did. Also I could delegate less congenial tasks to others. Certainly freedom to work as I wished helped.

Again there is some truth in her view. I’ve always been one to break up tasks, to do a bit of one and then something on another before returning to the original task. From early on in my career I could organise work as I saw fit. The more autonomy I had the harder I tended to work. The difficulty was to make sure the work I chose was aligned with the organisation objectives. I had trouble with this at first.

To be considered fairly hard working was part of my self image. I would labour on sometimes just to be considered diligent. When I reached the stage of becoming a hard working self starter I also found there was personal value in identifying with the objectives of the group or company. The final ten years of my career I worked part time at a small company. I found satisfaction in feeling I made a measurable contribution to the success of that company. It is necessary to take ownership of the task in hand.

This general idea of personal targets is I’m sure behind most otherwise useless objectives. Climbing Everest or rowing across the Atlantic have no intrinsic worth. They are objectives which give personal satisfaction. I’m sure that while sometimes overtly  linked to charity it is the appeal to personal or psychic worth that is the attraction not the money raising..

I think the enduring appeal of something like the Duke of Edinburgh awards is linked to the appeal to a sense of adventure by participants.  However the objectives only work if the individual takes ownership of them. The eventual award is rather incidental although useful for young people to brandish as evidence of worth, Only one of our children chose this but her interest, taken up initially as part of the award, led to a hobby of lifelong interest in genealogy .Almost incidentally through helping her we became interested ourselves.