Author: Jon Bounds

Jon was voted the ‘14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands’ in 2008. Subsequently he has not been placed. He’s been a football referee, venetian blind maker, cellar man, and a losing Labour council candidate: “No, no chance. A complete no-hoper” said a spoilt ballot. Jon wrote and directed the first ever piece of drama performed on Twitter when he persuaded a cast including MPs and journalists to give over their timelines to perform Twitpanto. But all that is behind him.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World No. 68: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Scrambled Creme Egg

Trap one in the gents at my work is always locked. No one ever goes in; no one ever comes out. I call it Willy Wonka’s shithouse. To myself that is – it doesn’t really come up much in conversation.

That, rather than the two films, the West End musical, or the use of ‘Oompa Loompa’ to describe the spray-tan aficionados on Broad Street, is how I know that Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is truly part of our popular consciousness.

Cadbury World, without ever explicitly saying so, plays on the ubiquitous idea of a chocolate factory being an exciting and magical place, staffed by smiling, singing and dancing workers in primary coloured uniforms. The real Cadbury workers will be in hairnets and white coats, worried for their jobs after the Kraft takeover, and unlikely to do much singing as there isn’t a pub for miles. I’ve no idea what is in Cadbury World, the attraction, but chocolate rivers and sweet-laying geese are less likely than a moth-eaten tableau of Mr Cadbury’s Parrot and some large sepia photos of Bournville looking pretty similar to how it does now.

A capitalist bait-and-switch on poor parents looking to fill the long dark half-term of the soul the place may be, but Birmingham has every right to trade on Charlie Bucket and co. For without Birmingham, there’d be no Cadbury’s and without Cadbury’s there’d be no Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in any medium.
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Satirical Cartoon: 2014 in review

A very wide fish-eye lens ‘shot’ of Centenary Square and Chamberlain Square – this is a big New Year double page spread, ‘a year in Kerslake review’ if you will, a bonus for all fans of our satirical cartoons.

Outside the new library there is a group of people protesting with ‘Save the Library’ placards, they are chanting ‘No to the cuts’. Malala Yousafzai is holding her Nobel prize, which has her name and what it is on the plaque, and leading the protest.

A fat man who may be Eric Pickles (wearing a badge that announces who he is, and carrying a big pair of scissors labeled ‘cuts’) is hiding in a Trojan wheelie bin, and being pushed inside the council house by someone with a Ukip rosette. They both wear flat caps with razor blades in.

Outside the old library there is a group of people protesting with ‘Save the Library’ placards. A man swings a wrecking ball. He has a bunch of papers sticking out of his pocket – they say ‘Kerslake Review: Council are crap’ on them.

One man with a box brownie camera is trying to film everything, spinning around. He has a tabard that identifies him as working for City TV. Another man in a hat that says ‘Press’ is not watching anything but is taking notes with a pencil on a pad, while reading Paradise Circus on a laptop.

A man in a suit stands in the centre of the cartoon, talking to another man in a suit. The one man has a ‘Leader of the Council’ badge, he says: “I haven’t seen so many people since the Police and Crime Commissioner election.”

The caption reads: “Forward.”

Big buildings, big ideas, big men. In suits.

This essay features as part of our 2015 Brutal calendar — which is free to download today, but will be half price if you wait until the New Year.

John Madin. Image provenance unknown.

If you’ve ever seen a photo of Central Library architect John Madin you might notice that he always seems to be wearing a suit. I’m guessing that for a man in his profession in the ’50s and ’60s that isn’t too unusual. But somehow it seems too conventional for a man that produced such stark and, even now, startling buildings.

Ian Francis from 7 Inch Cinema once described to me in detail his concept for a TV show set in the architecture scene in Birmingham in the middle of the last century. It would have Madin in it, of course, but also Harry Weedon of Handsworth (the designer of many won- derful Art Deco Odeons and a number of huge car plants and fac- tories) and Jim Roberts of the Rotunda (and King’s Heath). They deserve commemorating. These were men at the top of their game and every bit as much of a part of the story of the British ’60s as anything to do with skirts or guitars.

They’re slowly being pulled down, not just the buildings but the men too. Roberts and his Rotunda survive, Madin doesn’t and neither soon will his masterpiece. We lose loads if we clone stamp them out of history.

In her novel The News Where You Are Catherine O’Flynn draws these parallels between the modern dismissal of the worth of unfashionable buildings and the lack of care paid to people who aren’t in some way useful to society. Birmingham City Council are having parts of their collective anatomy warmed as a warning by central government that they have failed the vulnerable, children especially. Their first announcements to deflect attention from this were focused on their decisions to not look after our vulnerable architectural heritage; or even the use of their toy-like descendants.

Those campaigning to save Central Library, or those miffed at the cavalier way that its destruction is not open for debate, may not realise that the Rotunda nearly suffered in the same way. It got the help it needed.

Colin Toth saved the Rotunda from demolition in 1991, and it eventually got listed and refurbished: the 21 storeys forced through a post-modernist 12 steps programme. Make it bright, they say, and it can stay.

I met James Roberts a few years ago at the launch of a book we were both featured in — 21 Stories, Nic Gaunt’s oral history of the building — and he was not only charming but charmed at the attention and love that his building has attracted. He also managed to tuck away quite a lot of the free wine. And he was wearing a suit. TV execs looking for a West Midlands answer to Mad Men, get on it.

Big buildings, big ideas, big building blocks. They were big men; and not just because they spent their days being photographed towering over model villages.

Brutal 2015

Download and print our free 2015 calendar today

Satirical cartoon: the cuts, the cuts

A man in a suit with a badge on that says ‘Sir Albert Bore, Leader of the Council’ is at the enquiries desk of the Library of Birmingham – you can tell that because of the sign.

Further behind the counter are empty shelves, marked ‘Sports And Lesiure’, ‘Accoutancy’, ‘Children’s Services’ and so on.

A fat bloke – Eric Pickles – is in the background with a wheelbarrow of books and cash and football and food.

Sir Albert asks the librarian, “have you any books on standing up to the Tory government?”

The caption reads “Shhhh.”

101 Things Birmingham Gave the World: The Book

101 Book cover

This is the book that proves that Birmingham is not just the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, but the cradle of civilisation.

It’s the definitive guide to the 101 things that made the world what it is today – and all of them were made in Birmingham.

Read how Birmingham gave the world the wonders of tennis, nuclear war, the Beatles, ‘that smell of eggs’ and many more… 97 more. It also includes a foreword by Stewart Lee called ‘A Birmingham of the memory,’ all about his relationship with the city.

“101 Things Birmingham Gave The World, is not a Birmingham of the memory. It is a living breathing thing, wrestling with the city’s contradictions, press-ganging the typically arch and understated humour of the Brummie, and an army of little-known facts, both trivial and monumental, into reshaping its confusing reputation.”
Stewart Lee

The book is now available to order and released on 12th December.

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Satirical Cartoon: Devolution and the Kerslake Review

Interior of a council house meeting room, with wood paneling and a framed portrait of Neville Chamberlain doing his Munich paper waving dance. In the room is a big meeting table: one side are three men, we don’t really know who they are but luckily their name plates give us a clue.

L to R: Albert Bore, Labour, Council Leader: he has a rosette.
Bob Kerslake, Chairman.
Thomas Shelby, Local Businessman: he wears turn of the last century dress including a smart looking flat cap.

Kerslake is speaking to the assembled reporters (ie one man in a hat with ‘Press’ on it.

“The conclusion of the review is that we should leave things just as they are, but with a greater role for business in governing Birmingham.”

The cartoon is captioned: A local tradition upheld.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 64: The Second (and Third, and so on) Iraq Wars

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I was watching Sportsnight, or maybe Midweek Sports Special, when the first Iraq war really kicked off, it was the 17 January 1991 and the star attraction on the late night TV show was the Football League Cup fifth round tie between Chelsea and Spurs. Dennis Wise was scuttling around the midfield, about to swing a shin at a loose ball, when all of a sudden there was a flash of light.

The stadium appeared to go dark, lines and movement picked out in only a flickering glow. The floodlights were not white, but green — I would later find out when I watched again on a colour TV — and were picking out not the misplaced passes of Andy Townsend and John Bumstead but laser US Tomahawk Cruise Missiles.

I’d dozed off for a second and coverage of the game had been replaced with live action — of the start of ‘Stormin Norman’ Schwarzkopf’s bombardment of Baghdad. They never showed the end of the game. They haven’t shown much on telly since, apart from different versions of manly America and usually ‘us’ bombing the fuck out of some part of the Middle East. The first Iraq war begat the second, begat the third, and still it begets, much like the famous literature of that general region. And it begets because of oil, and of money, and of power and of war-mongering bastards like Tony Blair. But it also begets because it looks good on TV, and it looks good on TV because of Birmingham.

Back in 1918 Oliver Lucas’s company — Lucas’s to any Brummie — really got working on the military search light and the British forces were able to create “artificial moonlight” to enhance opportunities for night attacks. That practise continued, for many years, but it wasn’t until the days of rolling news that it became a form of infrared entertainment. An entertainment too good to resist sequel after sequel, whatever the quality.

I’ve just looked up the result of the game: it was 0-0. And that couldn’t be more apt if it was a metaphor.

It is a metaphor, guess where they were invented.

Photo, of the first Iraq war (Dennis Wise not pictured) CC By: John Martinez Pavliga

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Great Brummie Chat Up Lines, No. 2: Trevor Eve and the tattoo collection

The 70s. When men were real men and real men were Brummies. Trevor Eve, of Sutton Coldfield, may have been working on a shoestring but this is a class gambit. The video below will start just at our highlight (15mins in), but try to make time to watch it all so that you can enjoy Christopher Biggins, Toyah, Linda Bellingham, a young Pete Beale and Gary Holton (later of Auf Wiedersehen Pet) – and also so you can see if he takes him up the Ackers.

You’ve got a nice collection there, wife doesn’t object then?