UR TV CAST

The idea, perhaps, is that the mass of writhing bodies looked like they could be getting down to something altogether more serious than dancing when the camera stopped rolling. “I suppose it does look like there could be quite a party kicking off,” smiles Jon ruefully.
In fact, few groups can be as wholesome as The Beloved. Still clearly, endearingly besotted with each other, their songs of love and sex are all contained within the sanctity of a happy marriage. The Beloved may take house music as their first inspiration, but they write songs with memorable choruses and should be, like M People, the kind of club act that are liked by people who never go to clubs.But they can also be perversely unconventional, which is why they’ve never enjoyed the same kind of success. The Beloved are a good-looking couple, yet “Satellite” is the first record ever to show their faces on their packaging – and since the picture was taken with a brain scanner and shows the inside of their heads only, you could be forgiven for not recognising them.

Jon happily hauls his record boxes up and down the motorways every weekend to work as a DJ at various club nights, yet has so far refused to tour as The Beloved on the grounds that he’d hate the repetition. Their singles always include an underground dance mix, and they admit that hearing these played in a club like New York’s Sound Factory gives them a bigger thrill than any commercial success “We still feel that we have a point to prove. We’re treated as being half in and half out of the church of dance music: people in mainstream pop music don’t have any concept of real dance music at all, and most people in dance music have unfortunately gone up a very one-dimensional alley. We genuinely like both styles of music, and don’t see why we have to choose.”The Beloved’s story began in a club. Inspired by acid house in 1988, Jon Marsh slimmed what had once been an indie guitar band down to a dance- influenced duo whose first big hit was “The Sun Rising”, probably the definitive anthem for a generation who first discovered nature’s best light show while off their heads at a party in a field. While Tulloch attempts to read through this week’s essay, on Romanticism, Queenie bustles in and out, offering barbed and dismissive comments on Tulloch’s opinions, and quarrelling with FR about his attitude to his mentor, Q – the late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Into this already prickly atmosphere bursts the anarchic student Costain, a fiery young radical more interested in action than ideas.
You can’t help wishing that something of Costain’s attitude had rubbed off on the author. The Last Romantics is bustling with thoughts and ironies – indeed, the whole play is founded on the big irony that Leavisite criticism, with its emphasis on the poem on the page and its rejection of context, was itself a product of the Leavises’ circumstances. The traumas of their own lives – FR’s time in the trenches, Queenie’s split from her family – led them, you gather, to seek refuge in literature; their rejection of Q’s cosy “other men’s flowers” view of English literature was no more than a retreat into a different kind of cosiness.But Williams fails to integrate the ideas and the characters. Then John “The Hat” burst into Rigoletto, bought me a whiskey and I signed over my incredulity..

“Collaboration”, wrote FR Leavis in the preface to The Common Pursuit, justifying the role of the critic, “may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with.” You hope Nigel Williams can muster up some gratitude for the critics at the moment; if he can’t, it’s understandable. Last week, his comedy Harry and Me attracted near-universal scorn from the reviewers at the Royal Court. This week, his television play about the Leavises, The Last Romantics, transferred to the stage at Greenwich, and will presumably do the same. The play is set in the Leavises’ suburban villa in Cambridge in 1968 (dread year!), where the ageing FR, an isolated figure within the university establishment, is teaching one of the few undergraduates he can now get: Tulloch, an innocent working-class boy from Glasgow, bursting with enthusiasm for books and for Leavis’s lofty, intransigent approach. With all the mythologising drifting around the Carlton Club, I was reminded of the punk motto “never trust a hippie”. I waited for someone to try and sell me a wrap of talcum powder or a knob of liquorice.