Saturday night at eight o’clock found me not at the movies but at the Cinema Museum, a hidden gem near the Oval cricket ground in South London, located in a former workhouse which was briefly home to the young Charlie Chaplin after his mother fell on hard times.

Truth be told, I rarely venture south of the river. As Dave, from the Winchester Club, warned Arthur Daley: ‘Lot of very wicked people’ in Sarf Lunnon.

Coincidentally, the occasion was a one-man show by my old mate George Layton, actor, director, scriptwriter, author, whose finest hour – at least to my mind – was playing Des, the dodgy car mechanic in Minder.

George was reading from his collection of short stories set in the 1950s, when he was growing up in post-war Bradford. They’re beautifully written, warm, funny, evocative, a slice of history, a working-class version of Richmal Crompton’s Just William adventures.

The storylines are based on the trials and tribulations of a boy being brought up by a single mother – an unconventional family life back then, sadly only too common today. The Fib And Other Stories has been in print since 1975 and found its way on to the school curriculum, where it remains today.

I can’t help wondering, though, how often these glorious texts are used in class these days, in between teachers stuffing their pupils’ little heads with fashionable far-Left propaganda about ‘white privilege’, colonialism and, of course, climate change.

The kids in the monochrome school photograph which formed the backdrop to George’s reading were certainly white, but no one could have described them as privileged. Those were the days when ‘austerity’ meant living from hand to mouth, not having to settle for a basic 50in flat screen TV, instead of a 65in OLED Ultra model, and only being able to afford an iPhone 14 rather than the latest all-singing, all-dancing AI version.

Child poverty was real, bread-and-dripping, holes-in-your-shoes stuff, not dining on Deliveroo and reluctantly wearing last season’s Nike trainers.

Until the digital/social media revolution, children gained their knowledge primarily from books, writes Littlejohn

In the 1950s, children experienced genuine hardship, not the poverty of ambition and imagination which blights this generation, through no fault of their own. Today, kids live via their mobile phones, instead of roaming free and experiencing life to the full.

Until the digital/social media revolution, children gained their knowledge primarily from books. Yes, TV played a big role, as did the movies, but nowhere near the domination of TikTok and other apps offering instant gratification in byte-sized chunks.

And how can squinting at the latest CGI generated blockbuster on a cellphone a few inches wide ever compare with the kind of old-school, big screen, Technicolor and Cinemascope, best-out-of-Hollywood experience celebrated at the Cinema Museum?

It can’t. Just as the best pictures are said to be on the radio, even better pictures can be found in the printed word.

One of the most depressing things I’ve read recently was the author Anthony Horowitz bemoaning the fact that his 300-page books are far too long to engage the shorter attention spans of today’s children.

No wonder child, and indeed adult, literacy levels have plummeted alarmingly. All this has contributed to the shocking revelation that white, working class pupils – boys in particular – are being left behind. Even Labour’s Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has been forced to admit they have been ‘betrayed’ by the modern schools system.

They suffer from a lack of parental involvement and consequent paucity of aspiration. The white, working class boy in George Layton’s stories certainly didn’t suffer any parental neglect from his domineering mum. Nor did he lack imagination or aspiration.

Education was the way out of poverty. It produced eloquent wordsmiths like George, in post-war Bradford – and our own dear Keith Waterhouse, late of this parish, who grew up in poverty in nearby pre-war Leeds.

Literacy is the greatest gift we can bestow on any child. My grandmothers taught me to read before I went to school, setting me on the early road to a fulfilling career at the wordface rather than the relative drudgery of the workplace.

George Layton is considering taking his one-man show on the road, to small provincial theatres. I’ve got a better idea.

If the Education Secretary wants to reverse the betrayal of white, working class kids she could start by picking up the phone and inviting George to tour schools, reading from his short stories.

I honestly believe that if they could be persuaded to look up from their mobiles for an hour, they’d be enthralled and inspired by the adventures of a young boy not that different to them, despite the distance in decades.

You never know, there might even be another Charlie Chaplin among them.

When they’re not tasering one-legged 92-year-old men or nicking people for posting hurty words on the internet, the police are increasingly taking second jobs to supplement their income.

Some are working as painters and decorators, others as scaffolders nand delivery drivers. More intriguingly, second jobs also include a DJ (PC Hammer, anyone?) and a reiki instructor, whatever that is.

My favourites are beekeeper and kickboxing coach, although the copper running a tea shop has to take the biscuit.

It’s also reported that some officers are working as supermarket checkout assistants. I don’t suppose there’s any danger of them nicking a few shoplifters.

Mind how you go.

Read More

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Couple in their 70s who bought a baby from a stranger are selfish in the extreme

First the frogs, now the octopuses
The illegal migrant armada crossing the Channel daily may turn out to be the least of our problems. We now learn that a fleet of foreign octopuses from the Med is devouring crab stocks off the coast of Devon and Cornwall and threatening to put local fishermen out of business.

It’s bad enough French trawlers hoovering up our fish without migrant molluscs helping themselves to what’s left.

We’re also told that parakeets from India and Pakistan are an ‘unstoppable invasive species’ having escaped into the wild and are colonising cities as far afield as Plymouth and Aberdeen. No doubt we’ll be putting them up in the nearest Holiday Inn before long.

And that’s before I get to the buzzard that’s been dive-bombing children in a school playground in Romford, Essex. Where the hell did that come from?

We’ve got enough trouble with home-grown Stuka-style pigeons without importing kamikaze buzzards.

Take Labour’s ‘ambition’ to spend a pathetic three per cent of GDP on defence by the year 2525 with a shovel-load of Maldon’s finest. The way Rachel From Complaints is taxing the economy to death, there won’t be any GDP left in a few years’ time. And three per cent of stuff all is still stuff all.

AN NHS surgeon who compared Islamist terrorists to the Nazis has been struck off. If he’d said the same about those of us who want to leave the European yuman rites convention, Surkeir would have made him Attorney General.

Having recently claimed that the original ancient Britons were black, the woke revisionists now allege the Vikings were Muslims. Don’t these people ever take a day off?

Качествени спортни екипи за активни жени, които ценят удобството
модерни дамски спортни екипи https://www.sportni-komplekti.com/ .