The Beiderbecke Affair (1985)

What I don’t understand is this…

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) and Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) are, respectively, a woodwork teacher and an English teacher at a Leeds comprehensive. They are also friends with benefits: Trevor gives Jill lifts to school in his van, and she ‘slakes her lust on his loins’. Things get more complicated when Trevor tries to buy some Bix Beiderbecke records from a platinum blonde with a mail order catalogue, leading to shenanigans with Big Al’s secret emporium, the punctilious and censorious Sergeant Hobson B.A., and the corrupt councillor McAllister. In the end everything is more or less sorted out and Jill and Trevor escape to the Dales, where they run down the hillsides in slow motion.

‘Singin’ The Blues’

The Beiderbecke Affair is a cosy ‘sort of’ show: sort of a detective show, sort of a sitcom, sort of a comedy drama. During the six episodes the lead characters wander around the fringes of a mystery while getting on with their own idiosyncratic projects: Jill runs for the town council on a green agenda, Trevor tries to track down jazz records. It is gentle, funny and distinctly Northern in its humour and peculiarity.

It is based around a single, simple joke: what if you set a ‘40s film noir in ‘80s Yorkshire? You could call it a Film Nowt, perhaps. Instead of the stark neon night streets of LA, you have the back-to-backs of Leeds; instead of monstrous gangsters, you have the genially idiosyncratic Big Al and Little Al; instead of hard bitten shamuses, you have a pair of medium-sized teachers.

The show announces its intentions right from the start. Trevor’s very first line — ‘What I don’t understand is this…’ — is the kind of line that is supposed to come right at the end of a mystery story; after the detective has done their summing up, and their side-kick is still confused about one little detail. By starting with it, The Beiderbecke Affair turns the detective story inside out. And then has the temerity to never tell us what it is that Trevor doesn’t understand. Its daft, meandering plot is worthy of Raymond Chandler, who similarly never seemed to have a full grip on what was happening, and whose detectives frequently solved their mysteries more by luck than judgement.

The Leeds streets are certainly mean, full of demolished factories and crumbling infrastructure. This is Yorkshire in the mid-‘80s, a victim of Thatcherism, with all the old jobs gone and the old certainties repudiated. As Big Al puts it: ‘Monetarism; it may be great for the pound sterling but it's deadly for the building trade.’ For all its cosy affect and gentle antics, The Beiderbecke Affair is very angry about these things. The villains of the piece are trying to stop Big Al’s underground co-op not just because they dislike his socialist-tinged approach, but because it’s weird. ‘They like normal things, like proper shops. Uniforms. Trains that run on time.’ The Beiderbecke Affair stands against this priggish, po-faced, petit bourgeois morality, mostly by being funny. ‘80s Conservatives were deeply unamusing; getting rich and bullying the poor is a serious business.

This also explains the jazz. Trevor’s obsessive search for his Beiderbecke records not only gives the plot its inciting incident, but also stands for his oddness, his stand outside the mainstream. It also stands for the show’s own quirkiness.

The concept of ‘fake books’ is a key element in the jazz tradition. Fake books are collections of jazz standard tunes; they contain just the bare melodies and the key elements a player might need to grasp the basics of the tune. They give the players, in other words, the skeleton around which to improvise. This is The Beiderbecke Affair’s model of human relationships: a set of fundamental understandings around which we all improvise. Careful arrangements are for dictatorial conductors; this is just everyday, joyful mucking about. Like the polyphonic playing of ‘20s jazz, everyone plays their part in their own way but to the same end, pulling together to make something wonderful.

“Because my baby don’t mean maybe now”

Fellow Jazz musician Eddie Condon said that Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet playing sounded ‘like a girl saying yes’. Jazz also means sex. Literally. Well, possibly. The etymology is obscure, as all the best etymologies are. The origins of the word ‘jazz’ are much debated, but it appears to have been applied to music to mean to go at it with brio. Pep. Spunk. And it got that meaning from, well, the other kind of spunk. Jazz and jism don’t seem to be all that etymologically distinct.

As well as film noir, the other key cinematic reference throughout The Beiderbecke Affair is romance. Jill references Casablanca (1942) constantly, almost as much as she references Some Like It Hot (1959) (a film that features a pair of jazz musicians). But Jill and Trevor aren’t Rick and Ilsa, the doomed lovers of Casablanca; they’re the wise-cracking, sex-crackling, martini-necking married detectives of The Thin Man (1934), Nick and Nora Charles.

Both The Thin Man and The Beiderbecke Affair have a similar ‘sophisticated’ relationship with sex. They both acknowledge their lead characters are sexually involved (although the ‘80s couple, Jill and Trevor, don’t have to be married and can actually talk about it), but neither couple is prurient or smutty about it. By finding a pre-Code model for Jill and Trevor’s situationship, writer Alan Plater was able to find a different way of portraying and talking about sex and, perhaps more importantly, love. He manages to create a classic romantic tension in a modern story. It’s the same trick that Nora Ephron pulls off in When Harry Met Sally (1989), complete with the same Casablanca references. The question is no longer will they, won’t they kiss? Because they already are indulging in a little Bix n’ chill, on the regular. The question is when will they, won’t they finally admit that they’re in love?

This aspect of the show made a distinct impression on me as a sixteen year old. I was already very interested in sex, like most sixteen year olds, but I was also very interested in classic Hollywood movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, like no other sixteen year olds. It gave me an image of how that romanticism of Rick and Ilsa, or Nick and Nora, might fit with the reality of relationships, even modern ones.

“Clarinet Marmalade”

The other thing it gave me was Leon Bismark Beiderbecke. The nineteenth century essayist Sydney Smith said that his idea of heaven was ‘eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.’ Now, foie gras undoubtedly has its charms, but surely its means of production is unsupportable in the 21st century. So let us substitute some Comté cheese. But trumpets we can surely agree on. As long as we admit cornets too.

Smith was probably thinking of Handel, but I think heaven sounds like Bix. If ever anything sounded like ‘making a joyful noise unto the Lord’, as Psalm 100 puts it, it is surely ‘Clarinet Marmalade’.

In those days you recorded as a band, crowded around a microphone, a needle carving your performance straight onto the shellac; you can hear them all on recordings, all pressed into the room, the piano fainter at the back, the horns blaring away at the front. The lumping gallop of the banjo and the plashing high hat, the great wailing wall, the warp and weft of the interweaving brass, putting some jazz into it, all dancing around the melody like Bacchantes leaping and jiving in the train of the great god. It’s quite the party.

Jazz, particularly the early New Orleans Jazz that Bix Beiderbecke played, was not mainstream in the mid ‘80s. Madonna, Queen, maybe Vivaldi; you might hear any of these if you were on hold to a call centre, but not ‘Clarinet Marmalade’. Its use in the show is emblematic of the intention to do something a little different; of the defiant quirkiness of its main characters, of its own construction, of Northern England in opposition to the slick and suburban South.

It stands for something the show is anxious should not be lost. After all, it is the main characters’ persistent peculiarity that leads to them uncovering the town hall corruption that has been lurking in the background of the plot the whole time. It is a high stakes twist, this corporation and corporate greed, for a programme so thoroughly devoted to low stakes larks, but that is part of the message.

It’s hard to explain now just how rebellious it felt in the late ‘80s: to be a little weirdo in the face of the homogenising, implacable Thatcherite mainstream, but The Beiderbecke Affair was there to tell us that it mattered; that by being a little childish we might manage to stay adult, by being a little difficult we might keep things working, by being a little strange we might continue to be human.

---

There was more jazz on ‘80s TV than you’d expect, The Singing Detective being a case in point: