Phoney Leeds

The last time I used a public phone box in Leeds Spandau Ballet were at number one and I had a pony tale.

I was ringing home to say I’d be late for dinner. As it was almost last orders and dinner was meant to be ready at seven thirty – it was my turn to cook, and I was still carrying the shopping I’d bought that afternoon – that was a redundant piece of information. But it had taken a long trek around town to locate a working public telephone. Most had broken receivers, dangling wires, smashed windows and battered money slots. And they all stank of piss.

Back then, nobody really expected more than one in five phone boxes to work. And that’s in the posh areas like the town centre. You wouldn’t bother even trying in Beeston.

Making actual phone calls to living people wasn’t really the point of public pay phones anyway. They had an entirely separate cultural significance. Watch any of the greatest films for the last fifty years. The phone box is a central feature. If you’re in a phone box in a film you are definitely fucked.

Phone boxes are simply handy props for filmmakers to further a plot-line, stage a life-threatening trauma, elaborate a set-piece gag, or set up and foreshadow some future harrowing incident. The phone box is the perfect confined space to frame and build dramatic tension.

The phone box was always dross as a communication device but as a cultural icon it was cinematic gold. Horror, Comedy, Thriller, Musical, every genre contains classic phone box moments.

Here’s a random few of my personal favourites.

In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Mandrake (Peter Sellers) frantically calls the president to warn him about imminent nuclear attack, but finds he hasn’t the right change. He asks the nearby unblinking Colonel “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn) for 55 cents. The Colonel hasn’t got it.

“Well, you don’t think I’d go into combat with loose change, do ya?”

The scene spirals into sheer madness, with the Colonel refusing to shoot open a Coca-Cola machine to get the change to make the call that might just save the world from nuclear annihilation:

“That’s private property.”

The same joke about not having the right change to make a call is elaborated on in Withnail and I.

Phone box horror scenes could make a whole essay in itself. The classic is Tippie Hedren about to be bayoneted by a flock of seagulls gone psycho in Hitchcock’s The Birds

Then there’s the scene in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby where Mia Farrow calls the only doctor she trusts to deliver her baby. We can guess how that will work out.

And then Robert Redford’s doomed call in Sydney Pollack’s brilliant Three Days of the Condor

Mobsters and bad fellas are always hanging about in phone boxes, like De Niro in Martin Scorcese’sGoodfellas

As are mad, bad and dangerous people on the edge of a nervous breakdown, like Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s American Psycho

Sometimes the phone box gets it, as when Michael Douglas decides he’s not gonna take it any more in Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down

Sometimes the scene is played for laughs, and Will Ferrell in Anchorman in his glass case of emotion is one of the best

And there’s sex, lots of sex… erm, Patricia Arquette to the tune of Chantilly Lace in Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance

And, occasionally, the phone box itself is the main actor in the drama

Or seen as a threat in itself, as in Brian de Palma’s Sisters (“Did you know that the germs can come through the wires? I never call and I never answer… That’s a good way to get sick. Very very sick…That’s how I got sick somebody called me on the telephone!”)

This is just scratching the surface. The phone box plays a central role in our cultural imagination. You can easily find all these films and more on youtube.

So, why am I talking about this now? And what on earth has it to do with Leeds?

Well, glad you asked.

Have you noticed in the past month or so these objects springing up around town.

I have a few minor quibbles about these things and a couple of major issues.

Here’s what it says on some of the new phone boxes.

Read that carefully: “We are removing hundreds of ageing phone boxes.”

Question. Show me one that’s been removed; from where?

I walked around town the other day and couldn’t find a single rough patch where a superannuated phone box had been put out to pasture. Nothing has been removed. So this is a lie.

Also, these are meant to be replacements? So why not remove one, replace one, and stick it in the same place? Wouldn’t that be more sensible? And cause less damage? Another lie.

Final quibble; “phone box”? A box is a sheltered space, enclosed on four sides. It affords some privacy. This thing is a screen with a half-hearted hint of protection from the elements and completely exposed to the street. The phone is superfluous. The screen is the thing. “Phone box” is a whopping lie.

My major problem with these things though is a cultural one.

Aren’t they devoid of imagination, charm, or any sensuous appeal? Aren’t they just bleak, bland and boring? Is this the best designers can do? And can you imagine a Hitchcock, a Tarantino, a Kubrick looking at one of these things and calling his cameraman?

And can you imagine ever using one? Do you even remember your own phone number these days, let alone the numbers of your nearest and dearest? Speed dial has deskilled us. Apart from 999 what other number have you got by heart? None, I bet.

Pavement billboard and screen advertisements usually require planning application and consent. But because these things pretend to be doing us a favour by gifting us shiny new phone boxes the companies responsible can stick two fingers up to the council; this is “Permitted Development”. Which is perhaps the biggest lie going. How digging up a beautiful street, plonking down an oversized advert for McDonald’s, then dumping a load of tarmac around it is “development” is anyone’s guess.

As my dad was fond of saying, such things are neither use nor ornament.

Still, tonight is Light Night. Most people will be looking up at the marvels overhead and not noticing the street below. But you can’t distract people forever. Your neck can get very cramped if you are always looking at the stars, so it’s best to work out how to make the gutters look tidy too. And sloppy tarmac is not a good look for Leeds. A European Capital of Culture would do better than crap tarmac.