Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} British Teeth An Excruciating Journey from the Dentist's Chair to the Rotten Heart of a Nation by Wi Michael Heath (cartoonist) Michael John Heath is a British strip cartoonist and illustrator. He has been cartoon editor of since 1991. Contents. Biography Cartoon series Great Bores of Today The Suits The Regulars The Gays Style Victims Numero Uno The Outlaw Partners Henry King Bibliography Collections of Heath's cartoons Partial list of works illustrated by Heath Notes References External links. Biography. Heath was born on 13 October 1935, in Bloomsbury, . [1] His father, George Heath, was also a cartoonist of boy's adventure comics, a job he detested. Heath's relationship with both his parents was distant and neither birthdays nor Christmas were celebrated. During the war Heath was evacuated to his grandmother's house in Torcross, in Devon. In 1947 the family moved to Brighton. While studying at art college, which he loathed, Heath sold his first cartoons to Melody Maker for two guineas. He later got work illustrating album covers for Decca Records and drew a strip called "Nelly Know-all" for the Women's Sunday Mirror . By the 1960s he was part of the social crowd that included Jeffrey Bernard, and Francis Bacon. [2] His work has appeared in numerous British publications including Punch , Lilliput , the Evening Standard , The Evening News , The Guardian , The Spectator , , The Sunday Times , The Mail on Sunday , and ; all his work is signed simply as "HEATH". He has been cartoon editor of The Spectator since 1991, [1] and the cartoons which are published have not always adhered to the magazine's conservative politics. Heath's own political cartoons have also appeared in The Independent . In August 2016 he was the guest for the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs. His favourite choice was "Criss Cross" by Thelonious Monk. His other choices were "Dance of the Infidels" by Bud Powell, "Teddy Bears' Picnic" by Henry Hall & His Orchestra, "Max In An Air Raid (I Never Slept A Wink All Night)" by Max Miller, "Take a Step" by Jack Buchanan, "All the Things You Are" by The Quintet, "Funny Face" by Fred and Adele Astaire, with Julian Jones & His Orchestra and "Lover" by Charlie Parker. His book choice was The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith and his luxury item was an artist's painting set. [2] Heath has been married three times, the first time for 32 years, the second time for 18 years. He has four daughters in total, two from each of his first two marriages. He kept a black and tan Dachshund, Charlie, a gift for his daughter, Daisy, when she was 11, for many years until Charlie's death in August 2019. Michael now lives with his third wife, Hilary (née Penn), in Bloomsbury. [2] Cartoon series. Great Bores of Today. Great Bores of Today was a long-running series in Private Eye . Each has a single frame, in which some immediately recognizable species of modern cultural bore is seen in his or her natural environs, haranguing bystanders, reporters, the viewer, or imagined listeners. Underneath is a lengthy chunk of the logorrhea that the bore utters distinguished in particular by the bland inconsistency of the bore's opinions. (The text is contributed by other Private Eye regulars.) The series has been resurrected in Richard Ingram's monthly magazine, The Oldie , with illustrations again by Heath. The Suits. A series that appeared in The Spectator , lampooning the interchangeability and solemnity of men in their suits (or the utter helplessness of the normally besuited when temporarily deprived of their suits). The Regulars. "The Regulars" ran in Private Eye ; the "regulars" are Jeffrey Bernard and the other regular customers of the Coach & Horses in Soho. The cartoons were used in the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell . The Gays. Another series in Private Eye , from the early 1980s. Style Victims. Published in the London Sunday Times , this series makes fun of the conscious, and unconscious, style or fashion victims. (One frame shows a pair of sour-faced judges in ceremonial clothes and wigs, one grimly asking the other "What is a style victim?") Numero Uno. A series that ran in Private Eye , "Numero Uno" makes fun of baseball-capped youth, with Walkman earphones permanently implanted in ears. The Outlaw. A short lived strip set in the year 2000, where Michael Common is "the last person to smoke in England". Published in The Spectator . Partners. Partnership and baby-rearing in the England of the 90s. Published in The Independent . Henry King. A disturbingly precocious baby, permanently wearing a baseball cap. Published in The Spectator . Bibliography. Collections of Heath's cartoons. Private Eye Michael Heath. 1973. Book of Bores. London: Private Eye & André Deutsch, 1976. Michael Heath's Automata. London: A. P. Rushton, 1976. The Punch cartoons of Heath. Harrap, 1976. Love All? Michael Heath's Cartoons from the Guardian. London: Blond & Briggs, 1982. Private Eye's Bores 3. London: Private Eye, 1983. The Best of Heath. Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1984. Welcome to America. London: Heinemann, 1985. Baby. London: Heinemann, 1988. The Complete Heath. London: John Murray, 1991. [n 1] Heath's 90s. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997. [n 2] Partial list of works illustrated by Heath. Back with Parren, E. W. Hildick, London: Macmillan, 1968. The Computer People, Anne Denny Angus, London: Faber & Faber, 1970. Robert Morley's Book of Bricks, Robert Morley, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. (Illustrated by Heath and Geoffrey Dickinson.) The Job of Acting: A guide to working in the theatre, Clive Swift, London: Harrap, 1979. Robert Morley's Book of Worries, Robert Morley, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979. (Illustrations by Heath and Geoffrey Dickinson.) Loose Talk: Adventures on the streets of shame, Tina Brown, London: Michael Joseph, 1979. The Anti-Booklist, Brian Redhead and Kenneth McLeish (eds), London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981. Fanny Peculiar, Keith Waterhouse, London: Michael Joseph, 1983. Second Best Bed, Fenton Bresler, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1983. Merde! The real French you were never taught at school, Genevieve, London: Angus & Robertson, 1984. No Laughing Matter: A collection of political jokes, Steven Lukes and Itzhak Galnoor, London: Routledge, 1985. How's Your Glass? A quizzical look at drinks and drinking, Kingsley Amis, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985. Waterhouse at Large, Keith Waterhouse, London: Michael Joseph, 1985. Merde encore! More of the real French you were never taught at school, Genevieve, London: Angus, 1986. Talking Horses, Jeffrey Bernard, London: Fourth Estate, 1987. Beyond Fear, Dorothy Rowe, London: Fontana, 1987. Winewise; or, How to be streetwise about wine, Alice King, London: Methuen, 1987. All Gourmets Great and Small, Clive and Angela Russell-Taylor, Southampton: Ashford Press, 1988. High Life, Taki, London: Viking, 1989. Generation Games, Laurie Graham, London: Chatto & Windus, 1990. A Parent's Survival Guide, Laurie Graham, London: Chatto & Windus, 1991. Countryblast, Clive Aslet, London: John Murray, 1991. British Teeth: An excruciating journey from the dentist's chair to the rotten heart of a nation, William R. Leith, London: Faber & Faber, 2002. The English at Table, Digby Anderson, London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006. Notes. ↑ Not the complete Heath by any means, but a collection of cartoons from the series "The Suits", "The Regulars", "Style Victims", "Numero Uno", and "Great Bores of Today", as well as political and other topical cartoons. ↑ Reproduces "The Outlaw", "Partners", "Henry King", new installments of "Great Bores of Today", as well as many political cartoons. Related Research Articles. William George Rushton was an English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor and performer who co-founded the satirical magazine Private Eye . Rupert William Simon Allason is a former Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom and professional author. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Torbay in Devon, from 1987 to 1997. He writes books and articles on the subject of espionage under the pen name Nigel West . Paul Bede Johnson is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian. Michael Anthony Holding is a Jamaican cricket commentator and former cricketer who played for the West Indies cricket team. One of the best fast bowlers ever to have played Test cricket, he was nicknamed "Whispering Death" due to his silent, light-footed run up to the bowling crease. His bowling was smooth and extremely fast, and he used his height to generate large amounts of bounce and zip off the pitch. He was part of the fearsome West Indian pace battery, together with Joel Garner, Andy Roberts, Sylvester Clarke, Colin Croft, Wayne Daniel and the late Malcolm Marshall that devastated batting line-ups throughout the world in the seventies and early eighties. Early in his Test career, in 1976, Holding broke the record for best bowling figures in a Test match by a West Indies bowler, 14 wickets for 149 runs (14/149). The record still stands. During his first-class cricket career, Holding played for Jamaica, Canterbury, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Tasmania. In June 1988 Holding was celebrated on the $2 Jamaican stamp alongside the Barbados Cricket Buckle. Kenneth Vivian Rose was a journalist and royal biographer in the United Kingdom. The son of Ada and Jacob Rosenwige, a Bradford Jewish surgeon, Rose was educated at Repton and New College, Oxford. He served in the Welsh Guards 1943-6 and was attached to Phantom, 1945. He did a brief spell of teaching as an Assistant Master at Eton College, 1948. His journalistic career began when he joined the Editorial Staff of , a position he held from 1952 to 1960. He founded and wrote the Albany Column, 1961–97, for the Sunday Telegraph . David William Gentleman is an English artist. He studied illustration at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden and John Nash. He has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving, at scales ranging from platform-length murals for Charing Cross Underground Station in London to postage stamps and logos. Nicolas Clerihew Bentley was a British author and illustrator, best known for his humorous cartoon drawings in books and magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. The son of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, he was given the name Nicholas, but opted to change the spelling. Jeffrey Joseph Bernard was an English journalist, best known for his weekly column "Low Life" in The Spectator magazine, and also notorious for a feckless and chaotic career and life of alcohol abuse. Richard Langton Gregory was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. The Coach and Horses at 29 Greek Street on the corner with Romilly Street in Soho, London, is a grade II listed public house. Nigel Nicolson was an English writer, publisher and politician. Sheridan Morley was an English author, biographer, critic and broadcaster. He was the official biographer of Sir John Gielgud and wrote biographies of many other theatrical figures he had known, including Noël Coward. Nicholas Kenyon called him a "cultural omnivore" who was "genuinely popular with people". Colin Spencer is an English writer and artist who has produced a prolific body of work in a wide variety of media since his first published short stories and drawings appeared in The London Magazine and Encounter when he was 22. His work includes novels, short stories, non-fiction, cookery books, stage and television plays, paintings and drawings, book and magazine illustrations. He has written and presented a television documentary on vandalism, appeared in numerous radio and television programmes and lectured on food history, literature and social issues. For fourteen years he wrote a regular food column for The Guardian . Clive Aslet is a writer on British architecture and life, and a campaigner on countryside and other issues. He was for many years editor of Country Life magazine. George Worsley Adamson , RE, MCSD was a book illustrator, writer, and cartoonist, who held American and British dual citizenship from 1931. Charles Mark Edward Boxer was a British magazine editor and social observer, and a political cartoonist and graphic portrait artist working under the pen-name ‘Marc’. Private Eye is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986. The publication is widely recognised for its prominent criticism and lampooning of public figures. It is also known for its in- depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups. Andrew Annandale Sinclair FRSL FRSA was a British novelist, historian, biographer, critic and filmmaker. He was a founding member of Churchill College, Cambridge and a publisher of classic and modern film scripts. He has been described as a writer of extraordinary fluency and copiousness, whether in fiction or in American social history. Ian Dunlop is a Scottish writer and former art critic for the Evening Standard . His first book, The Shock of the New , about seven historic exhibitions of modern art, was published in 1972. It was followed by books on Van Gogh, and on the life and art of Edgar Degas (1979). He has also written books and articles on contemporary American and British art and has contributed reviews and art criticism to The Times , Studio International , Apollo , The Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator . Open Wide. Recently, while submitting to the fond attentions of a dental surgeon, I found myself musing idly, in an opiated haze, about the symbolic weight of teeth—musings disturbed only by the surgeon’s resolute yanking on the offending tooth, a yanking that came to me only distantly, as a not entirely unpleasant tugging, punctuated by the occasional squeak, reminiscent of the sound of a nail being pried out of a floorboard. Maybe it was the Novocain, but I found myself wondering if the widespread fear of dentists is at least in part a subconscious, perhaps even archetypal, fear of teeth , or if that’s just the perspective of someone whose dental history is written in anxiety and agony (and all the requisite drama-queen hysterics that go with them). Certainly, the mouth, as the biggest breach in the body’s integrity, holds its own terrors ( What’s this big hole in the middle of my face?! What if something falls out? What if something falls in? ). Not for nothing has the face of mythic horror been a slavering maw ( Alien ), a toothy portal welcoming you to the afterworld ( Jaws ). Teeth are scarier still. TV dramas such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and police-procedural fiction such as Patricia Cornwell’s novels about the forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta have forged an ubreakable link, in the mass imagination, between teeth and death. In such narratives, teeth and dental records are often all that remain of the murdered; mute witnesses to their owner’s last moments, they testify to the victim’s identity and, ultimately, help finger the perp. Teeth are by definition uncanny, the point at which the skull beneath the skin erupts through the body’s surface. It’s the Return of the Repressed (© Sigmund Freud; all rights reserved)—in this case, the death we do our best to forget while we’re busy living. A bony reminder that mortality is the subtext lurking just beneath the human comedy, teeth are the skeleton’s insistence that it, too, is ready for its close-up. Okay, I’m over the top, here, but sometimes too much is just enough. Besides, who can top Freud, who took dental horror to Siegfried & Roy-like heights of rhetorical excess in his notorious theorization of the vagina dentata? Sure, Freud’s Victorian hysterics were all about sexual phobias, but his misogynistic horror story wouldn’t have packed the wallop it still does without the old Viennese devil’s canny use of the Dental Uncanny. Poe, a Freudian avant la lettre , gave shape to primitive male fears of the Monstrous Feminine in his story “Berenice,” in which the narrator Egaeus, monomaniacally obsessed with his lover’s teeth, yanks them from her undead cadaver. His obsession is equal parts desire and horror: The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. (The critic Killis Campbell has suggested that Poe’s tale was inspired, in part, by a newspaper account of grave robbers who pried teeth out of corpses for use, presumably in the manufacture of false teeth, by local dentists, and Richard Zacks claims, in his eccentric compendium of weird facts, An Underground Education , that a “whole generation wore ‘Waterloo’ dentures made from teeth yanked from the corpses on the battlefield, and the practice continued as late as the Civil War, when thousands of teeth were stolen from bodies moldering at places like Bull Run and Gettysburg.” This ghoulish practice is echoed, in contemporary dentistry, by the use of “cadaveric pure aura mater sterilized under X-rays” to facilitate bone regeneration around dental implants.) Illustration: Fritz Eichenberg. From Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (New York: Random House, 1944), author’s collection. Freudians have extracted psychosexual subtexts from “Berenice,” reading Poe’s story as a literalization of male attempts to defang the vampiric feminine. Given the psychoanalytic interpretation of the mouth as a visual metaphor for the vagina (and vice versa), Berenice’s predatory “smile of peculiar meaning,” which so terrifies—and mesmerizes—the narrator, hints at the vagina’s unsettling (at least, to the patriarchy) ability to swallow all comers and spit them out limp, drained of their potency. By robbing Berenice of her gleaming teeth, the narrator enacts a sympathetic magic, “castrating” the Phallic Mother and repossessing the emblems of his lost virility. (In this reading, the teeth are phallic symbols. Isn’t everything?) Still not convinced? Exhibit A : Actual photo of a real, live vagina dentata , found on Rotten.com. Exhibit B : Actual photo of an antique female mannequin with really scary teeth and a deeply creepy leer, found on eBay. Case closed. Personally, I’ve always viewed women’s nether regions as the Gates of Delirium. The mouth, however, is a bacterial killing field. My dental armamentarium is serious . (Remember that scene in The Matrix , where Neo says, “Guns, I need lots of guns,” and— wham-o , he’s in that celestial Wal-Mart, an infinite expanse of blinding white soundstage whose only displays are endless aisles of matte-black gun racks bristling with AK-47’s and Beretta 92FS pistols and HK MP5K’s and Micro Uzi SMG’s? Well, imagine all that hardware in white. And, uh, with fuzzy little FlexiSoft brushheads. And 3-D brushing action.) I’m fully loaded with the ubiquitous floss, although like all serious floss jocks I prefer Crest Glide® tape (“your weapon against plaque and gingivitis!”) to the standard-issue stuff civilians use. I’ve got the Glock 9 of electric toothbrushes, the Braun Oral-B Power Toothbrush with “ultra-speed oscillation,” a Waterpik® “dental water jet,” and that increasingly common prosthesis known as a night guard, the first line of defense against nocturnal tooth-grinding. Oh, and I’ve got this wicked little instrument my hygienist gave me, a gold-colored tool that looks like a miniature pharaoh’s crook, its curved end culminating in a rubber barb for cleaning those hard-to-floss crevasses. Not that any of this heavy weaponry has availed me much in my never-ending battle against plaque, gum recession, and other fifth-columnist infiltrators of the body politic. It certainly didn’t forestall my Appointment with Destiny in the oral surgeon’s chair. It’s a genetic thing. Well, that, and growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, in that Lost World before glucose intolerance and vegan vigilance and organic anything, when “natural” was for those gap-toothed Oakies in WPA photographs and breakfast was a Pop Tart or a heaping bowl of Count Chocula and no sack lunch was complete without a Ding Dong or a Devil Dog and nothing slaked your cottonmouth thirst on those parched Southern California afternoons like a pitcher of Kool-Aid or, when I was out of short pants, an ice-cold Fresca. All of which brings me, in the usual divagating way, back to the question of whether or not teeth are inherently fearsome things. Do they inspire fear and loathing for reasons buried deep in the cultural unconscious, or would I see them in a more innocuous light if I had the radiantly beamish grin of, say, Julia Roberts or the scary Steinway smile of motivational guru (and acromegalic giant?) Anthony Robbins. On my back, with the good doctor attacking the recalcitrant molar with hammer and tongs, I thought about the brief fad, back in the glory days of industrial culture, for graphic images of extreme dental surgery, ripped from surgical textbooks and remixed in underground ‘zines. In that innocent time before Columbine, Abu Ghraib, and Rotten.com, nothing gave normals the fantods like in-your-face images of maxillofacial surgery. (Okay, the pre-MTV “music video” Despair , by the industrial band Surgical Penis Klinik, pretty much knocks the spots off even the grisliest dental-surgery photos, but needless to say, it remained a vanishingly obscure cult item, little known and rarely screened.) The fourth edition of the massive mail-order catalogue for the underground bookseller and publisher, Amok Books—one-stop shopping for style- conscious transgressives, in the late ’80s—includes a selection of pathology titles, featuring, for your delectation, the Color Atlas of Oral Cancers . Post-industrial artists such as Nine-Inch Nails have mined this vein in videos such as “Happiness in Slavery,” which features the late S/M performance artist Bob Flanagan strapped into a dentist’s chair from Hell and tortured by robotic drills with a mind of their own. (Oral horrors seem to be an ongoing obsession of NIN’s Trent Reznor, whose 2005 album was going to be called Let It Bleed but has been retitled With Teeth , at least according to rumor.) Marilyn Manson has been there, too, in his “Beautiful People” video, a KISS Army-meets-Joel-Peter Witkin fantasia in which the singer is fashionably accessorized by a gothic contraption that looks like the Grand Inquisitor’s idea of a dental retractor. (These days, Manson’s teeth are suitably scary all by themselves, now that The Artist Formerly Known as America’s Bogeyman has opted for a Weimar-era gloss on the Bond villain look.) The Swedish electronica artist Fingertwister has gotten in on the act, as well, in his song “The Dentist”, an ominous techno-dub track that incorporates snippets of operating-room dialogue (“got some blood, here”) and the high-pitched whine of a dentist’s drill, calculated to inspire a thrill of terror in any dentophobe. There’s an inescapable viscerality to dental imagery that, er, sets the teeth on edge. The panic-attack feeling of being trapped in the chair, the helpless vulnerability of submitting to the dental dam and the tongue retractor, the inexorable descent of the whining drill, the rotten reek of burning decay: we’ve all been there. The gleaming sterility of the high-tech surgical instruments and the crisp professionalism of most dentists only serve to heighten our barely suppressed awareness of the medieval barbarity of the whole gory business. Which is exactly what makes that first prick of the needle, that first buzz of the drill, such a reality check. In a postmodern moment when our desensitized sensibilities demand ever more voltage from the atrocity exhibition that is pop culture ( Fear Factor , Jackass , Extreme Makeover ), and when embodied experience is growingly irrelevant as our “real” lives are lived increasingly on the other side of the terminal screen, the dentist’s drill is the short, sharp shock that reminds many of us that, for the moment at least, we still have bodies. In J.G. Ballard’s speculative novel Crash , the affectless narrator embraces the car crash that nearly killed him as a rejuvenating force, a bracing jolt that snaps him out of the media-induced numbness that had drained him of all spontaneous responses and genuine emotions. I’m reminded of a friend who once told me that he refused all anesthesia during dental operations for the simple reason that it’s a rare opportunity to experience the raw charge of real pain, a sensation we experience all too seldom, here in Prozac Nation. (He’s a better man than I, always wheedling that extra poke of Novocain, wussy that I am.) Then, too, one of the (forgive pun; something about the subject seems to invite them) root causes of dentophobia may be the latent sadism of the whole situation: Like an S/M top, the masked, rubber-gloved dentist is both tormentor and Angel of Mercy, a dualism exploited by the almost unwatchable torture scene in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976)— the locus classicus for dentophobes—in which the Mengele-like Nazi doctor Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) drills down to the nerve of one of Babe’s (Dustin Hoffman) teeth. In one hand, Szell holds sweet relief: clove oil, a topical anesthetic that banishes the brain-shriveling pain of seconds earlier. In the other, he holds the instrument of that agony: A dentist’s drill. There is something of the police-state interrogation cell, here, and of De Sade’s pleasure dungeon. Dustin Hoffman, under the drill in Marathon Man . As always, there’s a fine line between fear and fetish, and a Google search for “dental retractor” uncovers a clammy sub-subculture of that branch of S/M that inclines toward medical fetishes. (Google results may be biased by the fact that the fetishists’ use of “retractor” differs from the accepted dental meaning of the word. To a dentist, a retractor is a small, pencil-shaped steel instrument, typically with a hook at the business end or, in the specific case of cheek retractors, an unintentionally hilarious contraption that looks like. By contrast, when a fetishist talks about a retractor, he’s talking about something like. Dental fetishists rejoice in mock-medical paraphernalia, from double-ratchet retractors to dental forceps guaranteed to “force a mouth open to a maximum diameter of 2 1/8.”” (To what end, you ask? Discretion bids me leave the details to the reader’s fevered imagination.) What is this? The psychosexual equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome? Are those of us sentenced, by unlucky nature and unwise nurture, to long hours under the drill fated to act out nocturnal psychodramas in which we exorcize the traumas of the chair in pornographic narratives starring us, a willing co-star (or two), and the odd double-ratchet retractor? If so, I only hope that the nitrous oxide flows freely, and that I emerge from such transactions with all of my molars intact. Go ahead: Rinse and spit.