You're on in Five, Mr Mudchute

Another old unpublished article - this time from 2018.

___________________________________________

I was travelling on the London Underground yesterday when I remembered a story I was once told about Charlton Heston. The story – completely untrue it transpires – was that he chose his stage name by randomly stabbing a map of London with a pin. 

Charlton. 

Heston. 

Perfect. But what if he’d been distracted by an errant fly? What if a capricious gust of wind had moved the map a little? 

El Cid starring Wapping Penge. 

Planet of the Apes starring Morden Oval. 

Or how about Soylent Green starring Croxley Blackfriars? 

What a great name Croxley Blackfriars is. 

I may change my name by deed poll. 

After amusing myself with these thoughts for a while, it suddenly dawned on me that I was travelling on the Bakerloo Line; a line that took its name from Baker Street and Waterloo, the original start and end of the line. But what if the tunnel had begun at Piccadilly and ended at Marylebone? Would it now be called the Piccabone Line? Would a line from Paddington to Elephant & Castle be the Elton Line? Or the Paddiphant Line? 

Elton Paddiphant. Another fine name. 

I mentioned this to my travelling companion and he said, 'Piccabone? Don't be daft. They’d never have called it that. It doesn’t sound right, does it?'

'But does it sound any less right than Bakerloo?' I argued, 'Or does ‘Bakerloo’ sound right simply because it’s familiar?' 

I was on to something here, I realised. 

Imagine for a moment that the Duke of Wellington was the person who asked for a piece of beef between two slices of bread; or that Lord Cardigan demanded rubber boots for his troops; or that the Earl of Sandwich felt chilly enough to request a front-buttoning pullover. We’d all now be wearing sandwiches when we get cold, cardigans on our feet and enjoy a packed lunch of cheese and pickle wellies. It may sound daft to you but, if things had happened differently, this would be the accepted norm. Familiarity may breed contempt but it also creates acceptance and our version of normality. 

I recall a mate of mine once saying that the aim of marketing is to turn ‘prototype into stereotype’. In other words, to turn something new and different into something familiar, cosy and acceptable. When satellite dishes and ‘squarials’ (remember them?) first started sprouting from house fronts, a lot of people groaned about how ugly they were. Do we even notice them any more? The same thing happened with the first TV aerials in the 1950s. By the time the first dish came along, familiarity had made those aerials invisible for most of us. 

And now I come to think about it, it’s amazing the things we take for granted – that we accept – simply because we’re used to them. Noise, for example. During the Millennium celebrations, Radio 4 ran a series of interviews with people who were alive in 1900 and asked for their impressions of the past century. One interviewee recalled that, as a boy, there was only one car in his home town. It belonged to rich friends of his parents and they lived two miles away on the other side of the city. When invited for a meal, they would toot the horn upon leaving home so that the hostess could put the veg on to boil (the cross-town journey took twenty minutes). How much chance would you have today of standing one side of a town and hearing a solitary car horn two miles away on the other? Noise is everywhere. Even the remotest places on Earth have jets flying overhead. We are surrounded and swamped by a cacophony of traffic noise, aircraft engines, rattling trains, power tools, blaring radios and squawking television sets. Add to that the ubiquitous trilling of mobile phones, the repetitive hissing beat from over-cranked MP3 players and the raucous voices of several million commuters and you get some idea of what any trip on the Underground is like. Yet I don’t even notice it most of the time. 

I don’t notice the dissonance around me because it’s familiar dissonance.

Familiarity creates normality. 

I no longer bat an eyelid at stage names like Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga, Alice Cooper or Johnny Vegas because they’re familiar stage names (and surely the best ever was comedian Craig Ferguson’s alter-ego Bing Hitler?). It's also the reason why well-known celebrities become strangely unfamiliar when you muck about with their names: Bradley Pitt. Penny Cruz.  Jimmy T Kirk. Ange Jolie. Richard Gervais. Stephanie Nicks. Benny Cumberbatch. The names we find so recognisable could have been very different but we would be none the wiser because they would sound normal to us. 

All of which is why, in some alternative universe, I am currently travelling across London on the St Plop Line (St Pauls to Fairlop) and musing on what other names the famous actor Leyton Mudchute could have chosen. 

Charlton Heston, maybe? 

Ha! That’s a good one.