The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 57

40 The Guardian Monday January 22 1996 White noise Stuart Jeffries t. il II II 1 1 ill III' ill I ii I Ml 111 I Ml I III III Will i II ii II i II III Mil Ml 2 4- jJHHHL) iiliilliM i ji'll I i i i 1' a tor of rock 'n' roll, the architect of rock-n-rollrthe man who started rock 'n' roll Little Richard!" You really wanted Little Richard to say: "I'm going to play you a selection from my new free-jazz chamber opera, Gregorian Chantsi la SunRa." But he didn't He just launched into a few rock standards in a jacket apparently made of multi-coloured sweets, with shoes to match a sort of visual homage to his classic Tutti Frutti. The best thing about The White Room was the Grey Room a faded studio clip from 1968 in which Dee and Tina Turner performed Fiver Deep. Mountain High. They started the song far too fast and it kept getting faster.

Four backing singers in heels and tight frocks gave it loads with maracas and a remarkable dance routine, while Tina belted out the words in an ill-advised one-piece trouser suit. Meanwhile, Ike brooding wife beater that he was sat on a box and picked out riffs on his Stratocaster, looking even more cool and menacing than when Laurence Fishburne played him in What's Love Got To Do With It. It was more gripping and dangerous than The White Room could ever hope to be. Wired World (C4), the latest television media magazine, breathlessly threatened to "turn the flow of information backon itself and illuminate the global village in which exploring every nook and cranny of the media world from camcorders to the Internet, fanzines to satellite television. The prospect of the series alone made the life of a cave-dwelling hermit seem very attractive.

But the reality was a handful of short reports that weren't exactly at the cutting edge of media industry developments. The piece on right-wing militias in the US was better handled on a recent Panorama, and the piece on Britain's first 24-hour gay radio station, Freedom FM, fell just short of free advertising. But the report on a British-funded Kazakh soap opera called Crossroads was fascinating: if only someone had thought of exporting Noele Gordon and Amy Turtleeariier it would havespared us a lot of human misery. BABYLON Zoo looked as though they were kitted out for a primary school production of Dr Who, buttheirlead singer seemed to think he was the Bacofoil Professor of Media Studies. He minced up to the mike in a long, aluminium-coloured skirt, swirled his silvery jacket, and intoned: "Morbid fascination television takes control Electronic information tampers with your soul." These days everyone's a critic.

But he had a point: The White Room (C4) did tamper with your soul it made pop music as soulful and exciting as sitting in a traffic jam in the Blackwall Tunnel. It started badly with a car salesman's idea of a soul singer, besuited Robert Palmer, growling through Addicted To Love. It was by no means as thrilling as the ads for executive cars and insurance that filled the show's commercial breaks. The White Room is a thirtysometh-ing readers' music show, not as po-faced as the musos' supermarket that is Jools Holland's Later, nor quite as minimalist as its title suggests, but devoid of the charge that has made for the best pop music television The Tube, The Word or those very rare moments on Top Of The Pops when a band of nobodies would come on and blow everyone else away. Presenter Mark Radcliffo at least has some dry, Northern wit of the kind pioneered by John Peel on Top Of The Pops during the eighties.

His main aim seemed to be to put his guests off with ludicrous introductions. He introduced his final act with the words "stadium-filling, platinum-selling crotch-moistening Blur!" Amazingly, the band kept their composure. Earlier, he had delivered along eulogy to Little Richard, who had to sit expectantly at his piano while Rad-cliffe developed his theme: "So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the origina To his first wife, Stanley Spencer was 'holy'. To his second, he was 'dirty'. Stanley the play depicts 'a little squit but a genius' Marks of Spencer Wash and go: The Baptism, painted in 19S2 (above) and Stanley Spencer with the dilapidated push-chair and painting materials setting off to work (right).

This was a familiar sight around Cookham. "A nutter, but an interesting character," a local recalls Michael Simmons THIRTY-SIX years after his death, Stanley Spencer remains a complex and controversial figure. The art establishment is still ambivalent about him, while in the Berkshire village of Cookham, his birthplace and his divine universe, they're guarded about what they nicely call his "social For years, the little man of five foot nothing was a familiar sight in the village, in scruffy suit but neat tie, trundling his easel and clobber in a dilapidated push-chair to wherever it was he had decided to consummate his latest vision. He carried a little notice: "As he is anxious to complete his painting Mr Stanley Spencer would be grateful if visitors would kindly avoid distracting his attention from the work." According to his first wife, Hilda Carline, whom he loved all his life, "being with Stanley was like being with a holy His second wife, the predatory Patricia Preece, spoke of him as a (sexually) "dirty" little man and their marriage was never consummated. But he saw himself as being on more or less equal terms with God.

"I am Treasure Island," he told a group of students at the grand old age of 31. "Themostexcitingthing I ever cameacross is myself." Pam Gems, whose play about Spencer opens at the National Theatre next week with Antony Sher in the title role, is similarly unequivocal. "I love him," she says, "and I think he's a genius." She started the play claiming The new show from the creator of fflR TO, a certain affinity with her subject: "I am working-class too, I was brought up in a Church atmosphere, I was picked out as a gifted child, and I also grew up in the meadows, between two rivers." For Gems, Spencer clearly still lives as he does for an elderly estate agent in Cookham. "A nutter," he suggests, "but an interesting character. Not particularly popular in the village Lynda Whitworth, who until recently ran the Stanley Spen cer Gallery In Cookham's former Methodist church, recalls: "He was always happy to talk.

He was nice with children and would always tell us what he was doing." In the gallery, where a somewhat tremulous Spencer worshipped as a child, she says they've tried to keep the feeling of him "as the village Spencer saw Cookham as "a village in heaven" and it was always with him. When he went to China, ill with cancer and weighing less than seven stone he.