EDITORIAL

OIKS AND PROLES

Nine years ago The Crazy Oik kicked off with noble aspirations – to rescue the unknown from oblivion with, perhaps, a radical slant in its content. But Marx would never have written “Oiks of the world unite…” Something not quite right here. Things were changing.

Its progenitor, Voices, was more obviously committed. It ran from 1972-1984 and would never have called a proletarian an oik. Its first editor, Ben Ainley, was a retired schoolteacher and CPGB apparatchik, like Zhdanov but less easy-going. It ran for 31 issues, and hosted stars like Jimmy McGovern, Keith Armstrong, Jim Arnison, John Cooper Clark, Ruth and Eddy Frow, Tony Marchant, and Ken Worpole et al. The first edition’s cover set the tone:

A horny-handed scribe seeks le mot juste. We imagine the missus shouting “Stop chewing that pencil Bert. It cost me two and six.” But that’s how commie proles were in those days before Thatcher’s meat grinder fired up.

Autre temps autre moeurs. Pencils are now fifty for a quid in Poundland and these days Bert would be plonking on his laptop when he wasn’t watching football on his 55 inch flat screen TV. Anonymity? No, he’s a celeb. He can reach one billion readers via his twitter account and record his every burp, fart and bowel movement on Facebook or Youtube. It’s progress innit? As for radical politics >yawn< “Naah – why bother? Whoever you vote for the government always gets in.” Mindless narcissism has reached its apotheosis with its iconic emblem - the selfie-stick.

Meanwhile, in a more rational part of the forest, we reject this passing madness and bend our energies to having a larf. I’m not sure Bert of Voices did want to be rich and famous. The floppy barnet and less than fashionable shirt suggests a more principled consciousness. Yis, I’m sure he’d have been a Crazy Oik contributor. He may still be out there, a spritely 90 year old. And he probably would favour a pencil with a well-chewed end rather than some annoying gadget which needed a battery and was always burpin an beepin. So we say Berts of the world unite – you have nothing to lose but your egomania. The Crazy Oik wants to hear from you. You won’t become famous (we guarantee it) but you’ll be respected as one of a community of like-minded souls. You may even have the odd larf.

Ken Clay January 2018

For more on Voices log onto www.mancvoices.co.uk a website which reproduces every word and graphic of the original series

ALEXIS LYKIARD

NFT

Some of my happiest London nights and days were spent
arguing over Film there, with like-minded friends during the
Sixties. But every youthful decade ends, dismissed or
analysed as just another transient phase we're cured of, when
more sober adults. Now I know these three initials that
describe the passing show 

here in our deepest, culturally-deprived South-West,
stand for a different sort of mental interest.
This code often appears in local doctors' notes,
a useful form of shorthand: no need for long quotes
or doubtful clinical assessments rambling on and on,
when such a patient simply is N(ormal) F(or) T(iverton). 

MIND THE GAP!

An exhortation one should always take to heart
On tube or train, but those three words express the hurt
Felt in-between my teeth, where the stitched gum -
Extraction's aftermath - hints of some pain to come.

A fortnight spent with sorely bruised and swollen jaw
Feeling touch-sensitive, contains still more
Passages of broken sleep, discomfort, pills
To pop and pap to eat, while paracetamol

Spells torpid, grudged abstention from all alcohol.
Only a masochist would welcome such raw thrills...
Albeit slowly, present tension fades into The Past;
Time and a bright young dentist promise sure relief at last.

Fernand Leger - Three Women 1926

Voices Issue 1 1972