Ian Mc Ewan 'On Chesil Beaach', Women in Love, Kiddult: Cuban Punch Up

Kiddult: Cuban Punch Up BBC 4.

This follows four boxers, Cuban Pioneers, who live away from home in dorms and train and study with Havana City’s club. One of the boy’s featured dad was an Olympic gold medallist and World Boxing champion. His legacy was a broken down car-there are few cars in the film- and a flat, and, of course, his son. He makes it to the final of the inter-regional contest for his particular weight and size. They are all aged 11 or 12 and are evenly matched. They all get up at 4am to begin training and train again after school. One of the other young boxers came from a similar environment, but he was younger 8 or 9 and training in ballet before crossing over. So it is no surprise Cubans have, arguably, the best boxers in the world. Those that have defected to become world champs in the US side of the world have their pictures stripped from Havana’s boxing finishing schools, but it’s all not blood sweat and tears. The World boxing champion’s son wins his tournament and is voted best boxer. Dad cries. The boy cries. That’s the thing that comes through. There’s a lot of love and concern between the kids in the dormitories and in the real world.

Women in Love BBC 4

I read D H Lawerence’s novel about 30 years ago. Or it might have been Sons and Lovers. I can’t remember anything about it, apart from the Barbara Streisand song. Ok I made that bit up. I can remember Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, but I don’t think they were in the books. More specifically I can remember Oliver Reed wrestling naked with Alan Bates on a bearskin rug in front of a log fire. I think that’s how it happened I’m not quite sure. So BBC 4s remit was to get everybody naked and outdo the homosexual undertones of the Ken Russell film. They did this by showing the upper class Gerald, the industrialist, manfully kissing his prim middle class friend Rupert, the school inspector, on the lips after dancing with some wench, the scallywag, and drunkenly telling him he loves him, whilst their lovers, the two sisters Ursula and Gudrun, look on. The camera focuses on Ursula and a big sign comes up on her forehead saying, ‘is it just me? Or is he a bit too prim; a bit too proper? Does in fact prefer shagging guys to me?’ But you need to be quick to catch this. Later Rupert and Gerald have the real set do, naked on a beach, rolling around in the surf, in a ‘Here to Eternity’ moment. There may have been questions about Rupert, and with a name like that, it’s difficult not to see why, but Gerald is a real man’s man. Nothing namby-pamby about him. So when he finally stands naked with Gudrun in their hotel room, you’d expect a bit of movement, you know, down there, but perhaps he was too overcome with emotion. I know how he feels. I once had an erection myself and archaeologist have dated it from the 1920s.

Ian McEwan (2008) On Chesil Beach.

If boxing is the pleasure of self deprivation and discipline and D H Lawrence is about the primacy of sex, or the moment, then On Chesil Beach is about what happens if that moment never comes, if in fact the husband gets the bride into bed and she’s frigid. How can you spin that out to 166 pages? Well, there’s a lot of back story about that era, when sex wasn’t really talked about, and although boys were trying to get into girl’s knickers, to be too pushy was to be of a certain type; a bad egg. Edward is not a bad egg. Neither is Florence. That milieu was cosseted, and protected, against sexual intimacy, or so we are led to believe. She’s just frigid. Fuck her.