Category Archives: Alan Sillitoe

Tom Whalley’s Cycling Podcast: Raleigh, Sillitoe and an impressive Chopper.

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Tom Whalley’s podcast.

I think I might be the only person in Nottingham not to have been bought a Raleigh bike for Christmas. Back in the day, Raleigh was a badge of pride for Nottingham and up there with Brian Clough, the chap in green tights, and Torville and Dean for civic pride. This was handy because everything else about my 80s childhood was pretty miserable, what with a milk stealing PM, the Falklands, and the fear of imminent nuclear annihilation.

Everyone had a Raleigh, but I ended up with a Daytona. If you’ve never heard of Daytona, don’t worry. Neither had I. Neither had anyone. Consequently, I had the piss taken out of me constantly. In hindsight, this was my ‘A Boy Named Sue’ moment, teaching humility and resilience. But at the time I had a right proper strop.

My stepfather was a tight bastard. He chiselled a mark in the bath to ration out hot water, and all of our identical shoes came from Jonathan James. I could put with the DIY basin haircuts because everyone else had them. But a Daytona? Come on.

Mining communities thrive on wit and sarcasm. The more upset I got, the more imaginative the insults. But when random strangers started to point and laugh at me as I cycled by, enough was enough. I asked if I could sell it. My mum, having a good heart and all that, suggested I give it to a straggly youth at school who looked like he got fed and washed once a year. I agreed because I’d been to his house, and he had nothing. He was delighted with the offer and came home with me after school. He peddled off with a silly grin on his face and for a brief moment, the world felt like a good place.

There wasn’t much time to feel smug. A few days later he came into school covered in chocolate. ‘Sold that bike for £20 quid’, he said. ‘Want a scoff?’. I learned an important lesson that day: Don’t buy a Daytona and don’t give one away.

I mention this because I was recently a guest on Tom Whalley’s The Cycling Podcast: Service Course. The theme was Raleigh, and we had a natter about Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning which features 21-year-old lathe operator Arthur Seaton. The episode also features Chris Matthews, a historian and author of Towns in Britain, and a man with a very impressive Chopper.

Tom is an award winning sound designer, audio producer and presenter. Best known as T-Bone, the producer of The Huey Show on BBC6 music, he also produces The Wire Stripped. He’s recently returned to Wollaton with a young family, and I guess this episode was partly driven by a desire to reconnect with his roots. We did our interview via zencastr.com which runs in your browser so you can record anywhere without installing anything. Being able to see each other during the interview was really helpful and helped create a natural flow of conversation.

The show is co-hosted by double Giro Rosa stage winner Lizzy Bank. Bet she wasn’t riding a Daytona…

Series 10. Episode 3: All the Rest is Propaganda. https://thecyclingpodcast.com/episodes/service-course  

Further reading

Twitterature: Reimagining Sillitoe’s classic for the covid generation

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To mark the 84th birthday of Sir Tom Courtenay, who played Colin Smith in the film adaptation of Sillitoe’s 1959 short story The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, I’ve updated the tale for the lockdown generation. This second of two blogs explains why Twitter was the best medium for the project.

During my A-Levels, many moons ago, I binge read every book I could get my mucky paws on by Keith Waterhouse. Next up was Alan Sillitoe. When I’d read every kitchen sink novel and play of postwar Britain, I watched the British New Wave films. Sir Tom Courtenay played the part of two of these iconic figures: Colin Smith in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Billy Fisher in Waterhouse’s Billy Liar. These books and films had a profound effect on me during those formative years, not least in terms of class, culture and identity.

To say thank you to Sir Tom, and as a means of passing time during lockdown, I decided to update Sillitoe’s story of defiance for the covid generation as The Loneliness of the Lockdown Runner. Sillitoe’s story is 17,209 words long. I broke it down to 100 tweets that were published over five days, starting on Thursday 25 Feb – to commemorate the 84th birthday of Sir Tom Courtenay, who played Colin Smith in the British New Wave film of 1962.

I chose Twitter for numerous reasons:

Twitter is a medium of constraint and constraint is a vital component of creativity. When you have a limited mode of expression you have to be economical with your choice of words as well as consider other ways in which you can utilize the medium to create meaning.

To create a ‘beat’ each set of 20 tweets had to end on a ‘page turner’ that would encourage people to come back and see what happened next. This also created another layer of constraint.

The form reflects the content – a story about someone running, taking slow thuds along the pavement, is, in some respects, like the methodical beat of a tweet.

Images and hyperlinks

Tweets can include images which enable another layer of meaning. This meant I could take stills from the film and update them to reflect themes from 2020. I was also able to mash-up covid slogans with popular cultural references.

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham and set many of his novels and short stories here so I wanted to include images of the city in my updated version. For example, in Sillitoe’s story, Colin Smith is running in the countryside and mentions a giant oak. I changed this to the Royal Oak pub in Basford.

Tweets could include hyperlinks, enabling the story to document key events from March 2020 – masks being dropped on the floor, furlough, contradictions in policy, a divided nation – people who follow restrictions and rules, sloganism, Joe Wicks – all set against the backdrop of Trump, Farage and Brexit.

I love digital storytelling because of the intertexual references and layering of meaning it allows. This enables the story to broaden out and possibly draw in a wider audience who may not otherwise have read the original story. As much as I love digital storytelling, all of my projects are about reminding the ‘user’ they are primarily a ‘reader’ and so guiding them back to the original text.

Sillitoe did not go to university. He did not do a creative writing course. He refused to have his work edited. This is what gives his writing such a raw authentic voice – it does not have the polish of a good edit (and in some places would benefit from one). There has been much talk recently that there are no working-class writers anymore and this is hardly surprising given the process of getting your work read in the first instance. Agents act as the first form of gatekeeping and are (understandably) driven by how a voice fits into the market and what will shift copies rather than notions of authenticity and what makes a good read. And I very much doubt that a lot of working class writers – especially those who do not have a degree – have any idea of where to send a book to.

All of which is an added reason as to why I love digital storytelling so much  – you have a platform that is accessible, you can say what you like without worrying about whether your words are marketable, and, should you have the inclination to do so, you have a quick and easy reference to refer publishers to should you wish to take your work down a traditional route.

Further Reading