“If I had told my old boss that one day I’d be leaning on a gas pump in Vienna he’d of said you must be outta your mind.” - Tom Waits on the height of success.

I seldom attend poetry readings. They don’t really do a great deal for me. I spend a lot more time listening to poetry than reading it. That’s because I prefer musical poets. People like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Michael Marra.

But right at the top of that list I’d probably put Tom Waits. He’s an incredibly prolific writer who has been making great albums for well over thirty years. His words are less cryptic than Dylan’s and he still has an inventive, cutting edge to his music, which Dylan, although still writing good songs, has all but lost.

I don’t think anyone introduced me to Mr. Waits. I used to borrow tapes from my local library and was attracted to his album covers with unusual titles such as Swordfishtrombones. The songs and the way they were sung was like nothing I’d ever heard before. In fact, it was so different that, much as I wanted to, I’m not sure I liked it. But it was interesting enough to persevere and I soon heard Rain Dogs. I liked it a bit more and gradually got into it. To this day it always quickly springs to mind when I think of the best albums of the 1980’s.

I soon heard some of the earlier stuff too. Closing Time is mellower, Waits’ voice is softer, he hadn’t yet set fire to his vocal chords with Marlboro. Closing Time could well be in the top 10 of albums I have listened to most in my life. It’s late night bliss and it makes me want to say up right through the wee small hours.

If you have a spare half hour and like Tom Waits or are curious about him you could do a lot worse than watch the programme on the link below. It follows a young Waits on a European tour in the seventies. The sound could be better but it's well worth watching. There’s evidence here of Waits’ poetic and story-telling talents which show he could just as easily entertain for hours without need of musical instruments.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e2JYSwd5lX4

Tom Waits has also appeared in and provided the music for some fine movies:

http://www.officialtomwaits.com/a_movie.htm

I would recommend many of these. Especially those directed by Jim Jarmusch: Down by Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth, Smoke and Coffee & Cigarettes. Short Cuts is a great film too.

Among the Youtube discoveries of programmes I thought I would never see again is Mind your Language. I must confess we watched it avidly in our house while growing up in the seventies. Since then, I’ve often heard how racist it was. So, I sat down to watch it on YouTube with some trepidation. Was it going to be blatantly racist?

While watching, I found myself looking beyond the race issue. That aside, several of the women are quite flirty and there are breast jokes that wouldn’t have made it past the first draft of a Carry On script. But most notably, the episodes I watched again reinforced national stereotypes in a very obvious way. Perhaps, rather than being racist MYL could be said to convey a message that foreigners are stupid. That depends on how seriously you take it but no doubt there are people who have their prejudiced views reinforced by comedy. Love Thy Neighbour, Rising Damp and the recent Borat are cases in point. Scriptwriters of these programmes would probably argue that they are making fun of the prejudiced but that may be lost on some of the viewing public.

The wordplay in MYL is far from intellectual but I think the writer(s) did attempt to play around with language and think about how foreigners might speak in English. Occasionally it works, but at other times it just seems lowest common demoninator comedy. I still found parts of it amusing in a daft, almost slapstick kind of way.

MYL is like an infant’s playground version of how teaching English as a foreign language really is. I can see how the romantic interplay between the headmistress and English teacher Mr Brown, and the woodwork teacher’s challenging Mr Brown to a fight in the gym after school, would have appealed to Seventies children like me.

It is worth remembering that it was a programme of its time and surely no-one would suggest that it could ever get near the screen in these politically correct times. Yet, I meet people who still seem rooted in the 19th century and think Britain is superior to the rest of the world. One reason being that, in theory at least, we can speak English properly. MYL must have been a great comfort to those who believe that their own ineptness with foreign languages doesn’t matter as long as they can speak the ‘most important’ language well. This type of linguistic superiority also lead to fallacies such as “English is the most difficult language in the world to learn”. I’ve heard this from a number of English speakers and it is utter poppycock, as some of them might eloquently put it. Take a look at English verb tables: I play, you play, etc., and compare them with equivalents in other European languages. No foreign language is easy to master but gaining a grasp of English is not so difficult.

I’ll leave you with another language problem. Why is it that making fun of someone’s accent is okay, unless they happen to be non-white, in which case it immediately becomes a racist act? I would seriously like to hear people debate these sort of questions rather than repeating the platitudes of our language police.

"I'm suing a cigarette company because on the package they promised to kill me, and yet here I am." - Kurt Vonnegut