Up in the air

The Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific has introduced a beer designed to be drunk at altitude.

Betsy is a 5.1% abv unfiltered, bottled beer brewed by the Hong Kong Beer Co. which uses a lager yeast, English Fuggles as well as local New Terrritories hops and 60% wheat malt in the mash. It's named after the first DC-3 aircraft the company flew in its early days in the mid-40's. and supposedly has a flavour profile which works particularly well at thirty-five thousand feet. It all sounds a bit gimmicky to me.

Having a beer on the plane is a ritual which is part of most people's holidays, although you're most likely to get served the product of a global brewer like Amstel or Stella. The one beer I look forward to drinking when flying is Lufthansa's in-flight beer Warsteiner which always seems to have a bit more hoppiness than the average mass-market German Pils.

Another ground, another planet

I went to Edgeley Park in Stockport on Saturday afternoon to watch FC United, the club which split from Manchester United following its takeover by the Glazers, play Stockport County in National League North, the sixth tier of English football.

The last time I went to a match at Edgeley Park, back in 2008, Stockport were in fourth-tier League Two, (heady days!) and I sat towards the back of the Main Stand, amongst the grumbling, seen it all before old codgers you expect to find in that section of the ground, as they beat visitors Accrington Stanley 2-0; this time, I stood with the away fans on the open Railway End as the home side recorded a 2-1 win.

There were four things which separated the match from the modern experience of watching top-flight football:

1. Paying in cash on the turnstile at prices even lower than the already pretty reasonable ones of nine years ago.

2. Standing throughout the match in unreserved seats bolted onto the terracing, allowing groups of teenage lads, older mates, and most importantly the loudest singers to congregate together, so that sound builds behind the goal before spreading across the end.

3. Watching the whole match in the resulting kind of noise which, as it should, leaves you slightly hoarse/deaf when you come out of the ground.

4. The teams playing in unnamed strips numbered 1-11: might seem a minor point, but it just looks right to me.

I don't remotely think that the Premier League is going to allow any of the above any time soon, although there are admirable efforts underway to re-introduce safe standing at top-flight grounds, as already happens in Germany, and from this season at Celtic Park in Glasgow too.

Just not cricket

The International Cricket Council is once again discussing how the game can be reformed and expanded , beyond the ten Test-playing nations which are its heartlands, especially those on the Indian sub-continent where it's a mass sport.

It's interesting to see that rugby union is being held up as an example of a sport that has expanded beyond the former British Empire, but there are important differences between them which mean that its successes are unlikely to be repeated by cricket.

Except in South Wales, and to a lesser extent the neighbouring areas of South-west England, rugby union is a sport of the upper and middle classes. That means that in both former colonies of the British Empire (Australia, Ireland) and those countries that are not (Argentina, Italy) the game has a social prestige and is thus the chosen sport of private schools and universities rather than the football codes which are the mass, working-class sports in those places.

Although privately-educated players have featured quite heavily in the England cricket team, usually as batsmen, unlike in rugby union they're balanced out by a group of more working-class players from the North and Midlands who often make up the bowling attack (that mix was also present in nineteenth century England rugby teams, before the split between rugby union and rugby league, with Oxbridge backs and forwards from the pit villages and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire). And when it comes to race and national identity, pretty much any match England plays is against a team descended from colonial subjects, convicts or slaves.

Attempts by rugby league to expand beyond its heartlands (Northern England and the urban east coast of Australia) are also instructive: whereas they have failed repeatedly in London and Wales, where the game has no real roots, and more importantly no social significance beyond the pitch, they have flourished in the politcally and religiously dissident working-class and small-peasant areas of South-west France where, to quote the author  Tony Collins, "rugby league symbolised much more than an alternative set of rules for rugby",

RIP Alan Simpson

Alan Simpson who died yesterday aged 87 was, along with Ray Galton, one half of the scriptwriting team which wrote two of the most celebrated British TV sitcoms of the 50's, 60's and 70's, Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.

A number of themes run through both programmes, contributing to the pathos as well as to the comedy in them.

1. Class: all the best British TV comedies are about class, whether inverted as in Dad's Army, with the lower middle-class bank manager Captain Mainwaring in supposed charge of his aristocratic clerk Sergeant Wilson, both of whom rely on the black marketeer Private Walker for essential supplies, or aspiritional in Only Fools and Horses where Peckham tower block dwellers and wheeler dealers Del Boy and Rodney strive unsuccessfully to become yuppies in the Thatcherite 80's.

In Galton and Simpson's sitcoms, there's a lack of connection between how characters see their class position and the reality of it: Albert Steptoe is a working-class Tory who sees himself as a small businessman, and therefore a cut above the neighbours, while his left-wing son Harold, a partner in the firm, nevertheless sees himself as an oppressed worker; Hancock similarly has social aspirations beyond his working or lower middle-class background, in contrast to the spivvy Sid James and their charwoman Patricia Hayes.

2. The frustrated artist/intellectual: Hancock and Harold Steptoe both see themselves as frustrated men of letters, philosphers, artists and actors, unlike those around them who invariably mock their artistic pretensions.

3. Claustrophobia: Hancock's Half Hour takes place first in a small house in Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, and later a bedsit in Earl's Court. Steptoe and Son live in a gloomy house amid a ramshackle, rickety-gated scrapyard in Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd's Bush, which in the episode where Harold takes up amateur dramatics, only to be upstaged, inevitably, by his father, the director of the play mistakes for a theatrical set. The episode of Steptoe and Son where escaped convicts led by Leonard Rossiter turn up there late at night could easily be a short piece by Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett.

4. Post-war imperial decline/the nuclear age: there's a feeling in both series that Britain and the characters' best days are behind them: Hancock and Harold Steptoe probably dreamt of, and might even once have achieved, a place of some sort in a now rapidly disintegrating British Empire. The latter did his National Service in Malaya during the so-called Emergency, an end of empire conflict which eventually led to the colony's independence, while the former's finest hours, as recounted in no doubt exaggerated tales of battlefield exploits, lie further back, in World War II. And hanging over both is the sense that their frustrated, claustrophobic lives might end all too soon in thermonuclear destruction.

Back in Port Street

Club 43, the place to hear modern jazz in Manchester from the early fifties to the late sixties, is returning to its original home, the newly-reopened Stage and Radio Club at 43 Port Street, a thoroughfare between Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter best known now as the location of Port Street Beer House.

Club 43 was owned and operated by jazz promoter Eric Scriven, first at Port Street, then from the mid-fifties in a building on Oxford Road later demolished to make way for the Mancunian Way, and finally, with business partner Ernie Garside, on Amber Street off Shudehill. Pairing British jazz musicians including drummer Phil Seamen and local bebop pianist Joe Palin with such stellar American names as Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins and Max Roach while the latter were on tour in Europe, its closure was the result of a crackdown on late-night music clubs in the late sixties and early seventies by one James Anderton, later a hugely conroversial Chief Constable of Manchester. 

Most of what I know about Club 43 are things I've learnt from fellow members of Manchester Jazz Society who patronised it, played or worked there, including Bill Birch whose book Keeper of the Flame: Modern Jazz in Manchester features photographs, programmes and maps of it.

The relaunched Club 43 kicks off at the end of this month with a session featuring Matt Nickson, of Matt & Phreds jazz club on Tib Street, whom I filmed performing with Mancunian blues legend Victor Brox last year at the Smithfield Market Tavern on Swan Street.