Reflections of a stormy petrel

Very likely. It's not necessary that all public schoolboys should like each other. But I think we agree that they are the type.

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super-pan.livejournal.com

You know, I really love the eleventh Doctor, but yes, he is YOUNG! The doctor has been de-aging at an even more alarming rate than Superman. Superman has taken decades to get as young as he is, but the doctor has gone from mid 40's to young 20's in 5 years!

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ihuitl.livejournal.com

While the two main heroes of my film are in their late teens, I made sure to include a number of heroic characters alongside him who were older, often considerably so. This was not only to serve as mentors in the coming of age trope, but also a display of virtue and courage in their own right. I also am loathe to focus all the credit on one single person in any epic story; group efforts are more realistic in such scenarios.

However, I might offer to turn this on its head. Per Epstein, what we decided to (recently) call 'adolescents' were, in the past, were expected to fulfill adult responsibilities.* Therefore it should not be surprising that the presence of younger heroes is not uncommon to literature through the ages (Jason and the golden fleece, etc.). Perhaps we can use youthful heroes as Trojan horses to again encourage adult virtue in those age groups.

* Yes, life expectancy has increased, but that's because less people die earlier. Even centuries ago, people did live to what we would consider old age as opposed to keel over at 45 jut because, so the argument of relative age is groundless.

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I don't actually think it's a good idea to make the heroes of ancient Greece the benchmark for everything. Even so, most of the heroes of the Iliad are well on into their forties - Achilles is an apparent exception, but Achilles is different from most mortals in most ways. And when ancient epics stress the youth of a hero, from Cu Chulainn to Achilles, it is to make him die pitifully young and be mourned on those grounds - that is, as the image of all the untimely dead youths in the world, and indeed of youth itself, passing and fading as it is. The thing with the "Dean Cain as Superman" hero is that we don't expect him to die. Smallville is on, what, its tenth year? The War of Troy hardly lasted longer.

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ihuitl.livejournal.com

Yes, but heroes who were older often had heroic actions in their younger years as well, like Theseus.

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eliskimo.livejournal.com

I've actually noticed the opposite in one franchise: Robin Hood.

Leaving aside the BBC Robin Hoods who are always in the their early 20s, the movie Robin Hoods have been getting older and older

* Russell Crowe was 45 in the most recent "Robin Hood" (2010)
* Cary Elwes was 31 in "Men in Tights" (1993) - breaking the pattern, but then it was a parody
* Patrick Bergin was 40 in his "Robin Hood" (1991)
* Kevin Costner was 36 in "Prince of Thieves" (also 1991)
* Richard Todd was 33 in "Robin Hood and His Merrie Men" (1952)
* Errol Flynn was 28 in "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1928)

Of course, Douglas Fairbanks was the ripe old age of 39 when he played Robin in the 1922 silent version, so maybe the later versions were just gradually working their way back up in age after the young Errol Flynn's version.

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Robin Hood is a rebel. Of course he is not a paternal figure! A rebel who was a bit on in years would begin to be a grim and sorry figure, one without hope or prospects. Even so, Errol Flynn's Robin Hood has,when necessary, a gravitas and seriousness that looks well beyond the teen-age heroes of today; remember when he states the case for the serfs to the aristocratic Maid Marian, who listens in bewilderment. You can't imagine the Dean Cain Superman acting with such force.

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#1 Surely neither Christopher Eccleston not David Tennant were public school material? (And Matt Smith, for all his RP, isn't, and certainly not in the way that Benedict Cumberbatch very much is - the assumption contained in "He's with me" shrieks major public school.)

#2 Sherlock and John, if anything, are older than Holmes and Watson in A Study in Scarlet, since Holmes when Watson first discovers him in the laboratory at Barts could still pass for a medical student, and Watson himself has not spent more than a year in uniform after getting his own medical degree....

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Speaking as a public school victim, I disagree with you about Tennant (let alone that his name is that of a great landed house). And David Eccleston lasted how long?

Holmes and Watson in A Study in Scarlet were being introduced as being at the beginning of their respective careers. None of the later stories, except for Gloria Scott and The Musgrave ritual, shows either of them as very youthful. And Sidney Paget gave Holmes a visibly receding hairline.

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First, he's really called McDonald - he chose "Tennant" because of Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, not because of Colin Lord Glenconner. And, well, as another public school victim (except, really, we were better treated than in my French Lycée), I still disagree....

Christopher Eccleston was brilliant. Did you see him in Our Friends in the North?

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No, but I was very unhappy he lasted so little as the Doctor, and I feel he'd have been better than Daniel Craig at the Daniel Craig Bond (who is not James Bond anyway, but never mind, I don't even like the character in the first place).

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I loathe the Daniel Craig Bond. Craig, however, I absolutely adored in the TV version of Waugh's Sword of Honour. To go from Guy Crouchback to the brute in the Bond thing was... awful.

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Oh, and that "public school victim" was a joke. That was CS Lewis, not me.

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Have you read this?
http://fpb.livejournal.com/578587.html

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Hmm - I don't know whether Northampton is an independent school (was a grammar school in my youth) , but didn't 11 play with the wrong shape of ball to be public school material?
More seriously, my understanding (which might be wrong) is that they deliberately cast a youngster, so your second point is entirely valid

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I said he looks like one of my companions at King's, not that he necessarily was. He's an actor, after all. But that kind of lanky, vaguely detached, pale-skinned figure and sort-of but not-quite affected behaviour struck me immediately as very familiar, as did in Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock.

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Muddle, I think. I meant your more general reference to "heroes who look exactly like public schoolboys from the seventies", rather than the following specific reference to King's, In fact, is Kings a public school? I thought that it was a choir school?

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Take it from me - it's a public school.

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Thank you - that explains how the muddle arose. I thought that you were making two separate points - under-fourteen choir school and over-fourteen public schools - because most of my choir school contemporaries went on to public schools.
I lived in Canterbury for only about three months - (some years before you were at Kings), had little to do with the cathedral, and foolishly assumed that Kings was analogous to Christ Church and Westminster etc

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Would you not describe Westminster as a public school?

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Not until now. I'd previously have supposed it to be a choir school - but, as with Canterbury, I might be mistaken. As I said, my contemporaries at Christ Church and Westminster (and Magdalen and St Michael's) left those schools at 14 or so and went on to Rugby or Harrow or Stowe. In the 1950s, I suppose that some might have gone into the second or third year of a grammar school, but those I knew tended to get music scholarships at public schools (which led to my assumption that choir schools aren't public schools).

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Nah, you have it wrong re:Westminster - several of my friends & my ex attended, and it most decidely is a public school; highest Oxbrige acceptance of any school in the UK; the only oddity, understandable because it's in central London, is that boarders are only one fourth of the intake. (Same with Godolphin & Latymer & with St Paul's for the same reasons.)

... just looked it up; est. 1179, refounded 1560; one of the nine schools in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul's, Westminster, Winchester.)

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What I have wrong seems to be a typing error - I should have typed Westminster Abbey - duh!

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And I mention my experience of King's because it's my experience. Someone else might mention Stowe or St.Paul's or Ampleforth or whatever.

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It's true that King's has not only a formidable set of choirs - it supplies the Cathedral with singers - but the best music department you can imagine, at least if it remains at the level it was when I was there.

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I've just discovered, by following a link from your link, that I knew the Headmaster of Kings (Fred Shirley) but didn't know that he was the Headmaster!

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Jesus H.Christ!! Canon Shirley is the most important person in the history of King's since at least Archbishop Theodore, and you, one, knew him, and, two, did not know he was the Head? He is the person who make King's a leading public school. His name was stil all over the place in the two years I was there.

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Probably because I didn't meet him in Canterbury - I met him either in Oxford or at the RSCM - possibly both - but I remember our choirboys giggling about his name

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Well, the great hall of the school is called "Shirley Hall". It was purpose built when, thanks to his work, the school's intake more than doubled over time.

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