We might find this electronic age mystifying, to say the least, but having grown out of radio, television, telephones and smoke signals, we elderly can get our minds around the broad concepts. Try explaining to the young what it was like in those far-off days, and you’ll be lucky if you get away with a condescending smile about living in caves, wearing animal skins and clubbing your next meal over the head in the forest.
“What about visuals?” the more sensitive among them might ask us. “How can you really comprehend the world about you if the limit of your visual awareness is the occasional headshot in a broadsheet newspaper?” Well, I might reply, it wasn’t really that bad because we had newsreels.
Some of my earliest memories were of being packed into a tiny newsreel cinema in the Sydney CBD by my mother, to join scores of other footsore parents and children, seeking some respite from the melting asphalt pavements and scorching sun of an Australian summer.
I don’t know how many Australian cities and towns had newsreel cinemas but I do know that in the 15 years after the end of World War II, Sydney had several. Each seemed to operate on an hour-long cycle and ran continuously — so I suppose you could virtually live in one with only the occasional break for meals and ablutions.
Apart from the rest for burning feet and aching backs, the newsreels in those pre-television days were our only window on the big, wide world beyond the two mighty heads of Sydney Harbour. Indeed, I still recall my astonishment at footage of a track and field meet between the United States and the Soviet Union: on seeing the Russians (to us, those grotesque exemplars of the Cold War), I turned to mother in bewilderment: “But they look just like us!” What did I expect? Russian bears with gangrenous paws?
While the hour-long sequence was predominantly newsreels, (apart from the British Pathe) mostly sourced from the US, it wasn’t all po-faced pedagogy. Like all good programming, alternate light and shade were the means by which the newsreel proprietors balanced different interests, more or less keeping the punters happy. And that’s where Joe McDoakes enters stage left.
You see, Joe was the little guy in the racetrack tout’s hat who emerged from behind an eight-ball to gives us a few minutes of hard-bitten New York pearls of wisdom. He was so much a part of the newsreel experience that my mother used to greet the first shot of the eight-ball with an anticipatory, “It’s good old Joe”. In fact, her feelings were so warm towards him that I assumed he was real and must be a long-time friend of the family.
It’s at this point that I must confess my memory is a mess; for I was convinced that the most memorable Joe McDoakes snippet, was a short sequence I vividly remember as ‘Pet Peeves’. Once again, Wikipedia rescued me from ridicule by pointing out that Joe McDoakes (aka George O’Hanlon, later the voice actor for George Jetson of the animated series The Jetsons) had never performed a skit on ‘Pet Peeves’.
However, Wikipedia failed me by being unable to identify who did and when. Because so horrified was I by excessively sibilant S’es, lithpth, soup spilling onto laps, ties dragged through gravy, blaring voices in lifts, irritating tics, etc., that I vowed, there and then, that I would never ever behave in a peevish manner.
Growing up in a family where peevishness seemed to be the norm for attitudes towards those outside the house, I also swore that I would do my level best never to allow petty irritation to dominate my attitude towards others. By and large, while no saint, I think I can say that I have remained true to that wish. However.
There’s always a however. At first, it was doctor’s receptionists who managed to get under my skin. While everyone else I encountered seemed satisfied with calling me or anyone, Mr or Mrs or Miss, doctor’s receptionists, almost as a whole, claimed the right to call you by your first name alone, without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’, as it used to be said.
Nothing could more likely induce a gnashing of teeth in me than to be summoned to the doctor’s surgery by an insolent use of my first name; first-name relations, so we had learned from the cradle, were those of close friendships. And having been a student of US history for a number of years, I knew that nothing was more offensive to African-Americans in particular than to be called by their first names and never by the respectful honorific of Mr or Mrs.
Sadly, what seemed like an aberration of good manners peculiar to doctors’ waiting rooms, has over time, become the norm when those in powerful positions address those who are not. I don’t know how many times the official voice at the other end of the line fails to identify themselves yet speaks to me in a manner which I, in my eighth decade, would still describe as presumptuous.
To convey my peevishness, I tried for a while to play the smart alec by asking The Voice whether we had met before, were we well acquainted but that I, in my ignorance, had quite forgotten this close relationship. But that didn’t last, because I understood, just like an oppressed African-American, that the use of my first name without mutual agreement, is not an act of friendship, but is one of power.
So that if I wanted to achieve the intended purpose of my phone call, then I should play the game and take it on the chin. Or in the ear-drum, actually.
The surprising thing about this pet peeve of mine is that it clearly comes from some public relations handbook designed to butter people up, as one ‘best friend’ to another, before swooping for the financial kill. As most public relations handbooks, ultimately, have the odour of Charles Taylor and all the other American time-and-motion gurus about them, is it not a fair question to ask: why do they persist in this fraud when their own history transparently tells them how offensive it is?
Because it works.