Crewe Lyceum – Billy Liar 8/10 can’t really fault it..as the film…if you haven’t seen the film shame on you. Poor woman was on 6 oranges a show.

Regent Theatre – The History Boys (Alan Bennett)…..5/10 I was somewhat distracted by the character who wheeled himself on stage…Something of a cross between Herr Flick and Chris Morris. Good performances…had the feeling of being somewhat smug and ‘in’ for the teaching brigade.

Regent Theatre – George’s Marvellous Medicine (Roald Dahl) I enjoyed this mostly for the fact the theatre was half full of kids who would not doubt go home and poison their parents with toilet duck.

Set in a retirement home for musicians, the stage version of Quartet tells of Reginald, Wilfred, and Cissy, a group of former opera singers, who along with Jean, a newcomer to the home, set about preparing a gala concert in honor of Verdi’s birthday. I’ve never seen the show, but I’m sure it contains a goodly amount of bittersweet good-old-daysing; the kind everyone today seems to be engaged with, in some form or another.

Speculation aside, we can be certain that Quartet, directed by one of the greatest actors in the world, will star three of the greatest actors in the world (review John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar to brush up your Courtenay), with a script by Harwood, one of the greatest dramatists in the world. I suggest you search your search your local internet for a credit roll, but I can’t miss the opportunity to single out his adaptations of The Pianist, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (no easy gig, that), The Browning Version (The Figgis/Finney version, far better than the Anthony Asquith/Michael Redgrave of 1951), and of course, The Dresser, which provided Finney and Courtney with some of the most succulent acting opportunities of their career (not to mention Eileen Atkins as Madge, who delivers the kind of life-capping, career-summarizing statements that just about every mid-level show business employee might take as their motto: “No, I haven’t been happy. Yes, it’s been worth it.”) I told you I was excited.

It all brings to mind a terrific documentary, a clip of which I’ve included above. To watch Tosca’s Kiss, Danie Schmid’s 1985 film of the residents of Milan’s first nursing home for retired opera singers (founded by Verdi himself in 1896), is to sit in the front row of the world’s greatest magic show, and watch – dumbfounded, if you’re me – as a group of elderly artists are transformed into previously lost, younger versions of themselves in the space of an aria, or a trembling, impossible-to-sustain high note. They’re both the magicians and the white rabbits.

As film and theatergoers, we know firsthand what joys performers can bestow upon an audience, but rarely are we privy to the private ecstasies they offer to themselves, the reasons why they do what they do. Pop psychology has its own reasons, but no textbook theory is expansive enough to match Schmind’s wordless inquiry into the stage artist’s heart and mind. It’s All That Jazz if Bob Fosse lived into his eighties.

Backstage films like All About Eve are good on struggle, the sweat and greasepaint and thankless effort, and today, with Hollywood cynicism at an all-time high, there’s no shortage of behind-the-scenes misery. But what about the good? How does it feel to nail that moment on stage? What kept Albert Finney’s “Sir” (in The Dresser) coming back, year after year, as the theater was crumbling in the midst of an air raid? Tosca’s Kiss. It shows how art sustains the artist, even after the spotlight has been taken away. Perhaps Quartet will too.

Did I say I was excited?

Six years earlier, Schlesinger directed Billy Liar, a semi-comedy based on the novel by the prolific Yorkshire-born writer, Keith Waterhouse. At one point in the novel, we hear the phrase “Why don’t you tell the boring little man to stick the job up his jacksy?”

The word is relatively young, appearing first in 1896 in Farmer and Henley’s Slang IV where they offer the definition; “Jacksy-pardy, the posteriors.” The next reference according to the OED appears in 1943 as service slang (army, navy, air) where we see “Jacksie, service slang for ‘rear,’ ‘tail,’ or ‘bottom.’ (Hunt and Pringle, Service Slang).

In 1966, Michael Caine played the eponymous anti-hero of the movie Alfie, based on the play by Bill Naughton, who, like Waterhouse, wrote working-class dramas. And at one point, Alfie says “She’s sitting there on her jacksie, reading one of those colour” things out of a newspaper.”

The etymology of jacksy is unclear. The OED simply offers “[f. JACK n.¹ + -SY.], the latter of which being reasonably understandable as a diminutive, but the former remains obscure.  The noun “jack” has over 35 entries, none one of which refers directly to the anal regions. The closest seems to be the definition of a “jack” used in telegraphy as a input port:

A socket or receptacle having one or more pairs of terminals and designed so that insertion of a suitable plug enables a device to be quickly introduced into a circuit.

This is similar to its use today in the field of media equipment. But the original definition appeared in 1891 in Poole’s Practical Telegraphy Handbook where he writes “The effect of inserting a plug in one of the jacks is that the end of the plug lifts the line spring R from pin Y.”

I'm a jack - see?

The metaphorical distance between an input jack and an anus is not that far – from jack to jacksy wouldn’t take much imagination. Against this is the fact that the Handbook was printed in the US and the slang appears to be restricted to the US. But Farmer and Henley’s book on slang was an Anglo-American production, with John Stephen Farmer being an American and William Ernest Henley an English poet and writer. So it is possible that jacksy could have made its way across the pond.

Alas, the OED suggests a gap of almost 50 years between the jacksy-pardy of Farmer and Henley, and the jacksy of Hunt and Pringle’s Service Slang of 1943. If jacksy had been around in England, it seems to have been at least under the written radar. Or it could be that the 1940′s jacksy represents a separate emergence of the word, with the original being a “hopeful monster” that failed to evolve and the new one appearing during the war years. The “jack as insert location” could still be a plausible explanation, particularly with the rapid development of telecommunications between the 1880′s and the 1940′s.

If I were an academic with a library and a grant, I could probably do a much better investigation into the origin of jacksy but my trips to the local University library – excellent as it is – has to take place outside my real job, which doesn’t pay me to be an etymologist. C’est la vie, as those French chappies say.

Should anyone be in a position to provide me with examples of jacksy or jacksie between 1890 and 1940 I’d be extraordinarily grateful. In the meantime, feel free to disagree with this analysis and offer a jacksy-free “up yours!”

Six years earlier, Schlesinger directed Billy Liar, a semi-comedy based on the novel by the prolific Yorkshire-born writer, Keith Waterhouse. At one point in the novel, we hear the phrase “Why don’t you tell the boring little man to stick the job up his jacksy?”

The word is relatively young, appearing first in 1896 in Farmer and Henley’s Slang IV where they offer the definition; “Jacksy-pardy, the posteriors.” The next reference according to the OED appears in 1943 as service slang (army, navy, air) where we see “Jacksie, service slang for ‘rear,’ ‘tail,’ or ‘bottom.’ (Hunt and Pringle, Service Slang).

In 1966, Michael Caine played the eponymous anti-hero of the movie Alfie, based on the play by Bill Naughton, who, like Waterhouse, wrote working-class dramas. And at one point, Alfie says “She’s sitting there on her jacksie, reading one of those colour” things out of a newspaper.”

The etymology of jacksy is unclear. The OED simply offers “[f. JACK n.¹ + -SY.], the latter of which being reasonably understandable as a diminutive, but the former remains obscure. The noun “jack” has over 35 entries, none one of which refers directly to the anal regions. The closest seems to be the definition of a “jack” used in telegraphy as a input port:

A socket or receptacle having one or more pairs of terminals and designed so that insertion of a suitable plug enables a device to be quickly introduced into a circuit.

This is similar to its use today in the field of media equipment. But the original definition appeared in 1891 in Poole’s Practical Telegraphy Handbook where he writes “The effect of inserting a plug in one of the jacks is that the end of the plug lifts the line spring R from pin Y.”

I'm a jack - see?

The metaphorical distance between an input jack and an anus is not that far – from jack to jacksy wouldn’t take much imagination. Against this is the fact that the Handbook was printed in the US and the slang appears to be restricted to the US. But Farmer and Henley’s book on slang was an Anglo-American production, with John Stephen Farmer being an American and William Ernest Henley an English poet and writer. So it is possible that jacksy could have made its way across the pond.

Alas, the OED suggests a gap of almost 50 years between the jacksy-pardy of Farmer and Henley, and the jacksy of Hunt and Pringle’s Service Slang of 1943. If jacksy had been around in England, it seems to have been at least under the written radar. Or it could be that the 1940′s jacksy represents a separate emergence of the word, with the original being a “hopeful monster” that failed to evolve and the new one appearing during the war years. The “jack as insert location” could still be a plausible explanation, particularly with the rapid development of telecommunications between the 1880′s and the 1940′s.

If I were an academic with a library and a grant, I could probably do a much better investigation into the origin of jacksy but my trips to the local University library – excellent as it is – has to take place outside my real job, which doesn’t pay me to be an etymologist. C’est la vie, as those French chappies say.

Should anyone be in a position to provide me with examples of jacksy or jacksie between 1890 and 1940 I’d be extraordinarily grateful. In the meantime, feel free to disagree with this analysis and offer a jacksy-free “up yours!”

Revelation, here, becomes a varied discovery of both the places you have dreamed about and the failings you fear revealed.

The downside to 2009 was the closure of Borders with its excellent magazine section, meaning that Interzone is no longer available in the shops round here, as well as various other writing or story magazines, particularly American imports like Asimov’s. Yes there’ll be a core subscription market, but there must be many others like me who would flick through a copy in the shop then buy it if something in the issue grabbed them, so there will be an inevitable loss of sales.

Last thing to mention is the death of Keith Waterhouse in September, author of (among many other things) Billy Liar, a good book which became a brilliant film (largely filmed in Bradford) which I’ve seen many times and which has had quite an influence on me. Big Brother of course introduced me to the film, though I read my dad’s copy of the book. Billy Liar showed me it’s possible to be obviously Northern and still be taken seriously (no matter what I was taught at school), long before I encountered Alan Bennett. David Peace seems to have been carrying on the tradition in fine fashion this year, and eventually I hope to join them.

Here’s to 2010.