AS 2014 approaches, we need to gear ourselves up for four years
of grim centenaries for the Great War. The Show to End All
Wars (Radio 4, Thursday) thus provided an overture of sorts -
since it is 50 years since Joan Littlewood's show Oh! What a
Lovely War hit the Stratford East stage with its engaging and
disturbing mix of nostalgia and satire, vaudeville and bitterness.
One commentator on this show likened its effect on British theatre
to Look Back in Anger; surely more so now, considering the
number of revivals that the work has enjoyed since.
Oh! What a Lovely War was the product of a workshop
style of dramatic creation, in which actors developed scripts that
were then supplanted by improvisation. And yet, as we discovered
here, the show drew much more of its inspiration and material from
sources other than Littlewood was prepared to admit. The format of
songs and reminiscences was derived from a docudrama from 1961,
The Long Long Trail, directed by Charles Chilton.
The other main source for the musical is more surprising: an
account of the war by the young Tory MP Alan Clark, The
Donkeys. It perpetuated the view of a lion-hearted soldiery
betrayed by the incompetence of their asinine leadership. Yet, in
this curious instance, the views of the young Tory Turk and the
wizened leftie converged; for in this legend of the Great War they
both saw the damage that a moribund establishment could do to the
spirit of a nation. The synergy was only momentary, however; for so
extensive was the quoting from Clarke's book that the author
started court proceedings against Theatre Workshop for copyright
infringement.
Part of the power of Oh! What a Lovely War comes from
the stream of statistics that undermine the bravado of the songs.
There is nothing like a cool stat. to prick a bubble of rhetoric,
which is why I still maintain that More or Less (Radio 4,
Fridays) does more for political and scientific analysis than any
other documentary show around. It is not that Tim Harford and his
team put inordinate faith in lies, damned lies, and statistics; but
that they handle them with the care and attention that they
deserve.
I might quote from any number of programmes to demonstrate my
admiration; but last Friday will do. With the help of a
psychologist, Jean Twenge, the team looked at fertility statistics
for women aged over 35. Twenge, as a wannabe older mother, decided
to look into the oft quoted claim that the success rate for women
in this age range was 66 per cent (over the course of a year); and
it transpires, quite staggeringly, that this statistic derives from
a study based on birth figures from 18th-century France.
More or Less has a phrase for stats such as these:
"zombie statistics" - figures that will never die, however often
they are slain by more accurate data; in this case, a recent study
from the United States, which puts the figure at 82 per cent, and
thus much closer to the figure for under-35s, which is 86 per
cent.
Another myth busted last week was that Africa has a drink- ing
problem - as reported recently in Time magazine. Get the
podcast if you don't believe me. They drink a lot less alcohol than
we do.