"Pit! Pit! Pit!" (No Other Blue - Craig Charles)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	No Other Blue - Craig Charles
Date:	06/11/02 (1320 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Short, and sometimes sweet.

Disadvantages: Far too skimpy, predictable and un-skilled., For devoted fans only.

Let theediscerning start by saying he has never been a fan of Craig Charles. He is poor on Robot Wars, never made him laugh once on that Red Dwarf thing, and as we may well remember, seemingly poor with women - though he got let off that time.

So it is with trepidation, but a mature lack of bias, that theediscerning decides to grab the bull by the horns and give the world the low-down on No Other Blue, by said person. (And, haven't you always been suspicious of people with two first names and no real surname? I know I have).

The cover first. A blurry pic of Mr CC smirking, fingertips on chin. How thoughtful. Otherwise, just bands of blue, a tiny title - way smaller than his name, and something else... "His first collection of poetry". Now I for one don't like being threatened, and that implies a threat to me.

Next, the introduction. Well, this covers the cause of the book well enough. Unemployed layabout, after a small career in never-heard-of pub bands, has a booklet of lyrics, and ends up becoming a local pub poet with the output. Hence name-checking Roger McGough and Adrian Henri. Oh, these are that good, then?

Well, no. But never let it be said that Mr CC is not a brave man (going out in public with a face like that is proof enough, surely). Some of these poems have turned up in his stand-up routines, apparently. And he's still alive...

Others have been on the back-burner for years. And we mean years. "Some of the poems in this book were written during puberty. Please be kind to their naive innocence."

Well, we can but try.

The volume starts off with the juvenalia, which doesn't help. "I like writing poetry" is clunky - forced rhymes on off-kilter rhythms. Yes, about the artistic level theediscerning is at himself. The second poem here does at least have a decent punch-line pay-off.

"I want to feel your bum" - sorr
y, the award-winning "I want to feel your bum" - is very droll and amusing, and reminds us all of being a preenager, or whatever they're called these days.

And then, WHAM. It's the Matilda of maturity, the Sergeant Bash of Sensibility. "Shipwreck my soul", inspired by Dylan Thomas. Not worth worrying about though, so I won't cast further comment.

Poems about brewer's droop (see what I said about women above?) and over-presumptuous racist policemen follow, before the real purpose of the rest of the poetry comes to the fore, a general left-wing black harangue from a left-wing black haranguer. Psycho screws in prison, prozzies, yuppies, Scouse life and South African racism all get a hand in. It's a varied bag of subjects, and still there's room for one about pretty flowers and pretty women.

Most of the poems come with little introductions, which are on the whole just as autibiographical as the verse - "Written from my remand cell..." "Written in my first bedsit, aged seventeen..." (Which came first, I'm not sure).

To shine a light through the negativity, there are verses that come off well, and show a human, possibly private side, to Mr CC. Principal among these is the title poem, which is an out-and-out love song, and strong for its kind.

I'll come to the style of the lyrics in a roundabout way, for first you must be told that the vast majority of these poems have been illustrated. A lot of credit for the book as a whole must go then to Philippa Drakeford, who has done all the pen-and-ink and paint-work. Now on the more verdant items there are simple line-drawings, which show she must be an A1 draughtswoman, but for the rest of the time she was stuck with the commission of putting the words into a comic-strip world, which hardly matures from the first couple of juvenalia.

As a result CC's efforts are shrunk to a very tiny size, an
d scattered around the frames like the wackiest of comics/graphic novels/whatever. Sometimes you have to make sure you have found all the lines before turning the page, for they can end up wherever.

The fact that some pages have ten or more panels on, and others one, goes a long way to disguise the lack of strong rhythm in the verses, and hides the fact that there is hardly ever what might be called a disciplined rhyming scheme. Some of the poems, "Jump" for example, have a verse-chorus-verse-chorus format, as one might expect from the background given. Others are much more higgledy-piggledy, and come off very poorly to one who is a fan of John Hegley.

I'll quote one of the better verses for you, "Family Way" - the beginning thereof, at least.

Mother sits alone and knits
Bonny boots for auntie's newborn baby
Father sits alone and spits
Right into the grate,
And tells my mum
To shift her bum
- The dinner's getting late.

As you can see there's rhymes inside the lines, and then a clunking rhythm forces its way in at the end of the verse to shunt the ABBA couplets in. The two pictures for this part of the poem are of a woman knitting, and er, a man spitting into a fire-place. How illustrative. Nice that Mr CC has such faith in his readers. He can talk of a "desire to share the images in my mind's eye", but isn't that what poetry is for?

Now theediscerning is not one to tell people off for having a go, especially as he has himself done pub poetry, on occasion. But it must be said that very few of the works here, if they are the creme de la creme of two decades' writing, show any superiority to the general stay-at-home wordsmith, who has no hope in hell of being published.

But published it is, and that's why one must take notice of it. But still, did you realise Penguin were vanity publishers? And working for such a vain &qu
ot;personality", they really come off the poorer. Here we have the worst article of celebrity books, the un-tutored dabblings of a C-list personage who has not been told to stick to what he can do - reading autocues, and mugging in sit-coms in this instance. CC must be proud of the whole work, but on the whole there must be few fans who would ultimately appreciate the cost.

For our £5.99 we get 25 verses, plus 20 or more introductions, and the art-work. It took theediscerning half an hour only, to read the whole volume, out loud, and do the necessary pondering each verse deserved, and take the notes for this op. I'm sorry, but I wish I could have saved you more time. I'll save the insistent more, and say that Amazon "are currently unable to offer this title".

Aw shucks.

Still, at least we now know who writes those stupid, stupid end poems on Robot Wars.

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