THIS curious sign (pictured) appeared in Dublin recently, near Drumcondra. And when I first saw it, I couldn’t help admiring the ambition of the Surrey town to which it refers.
I have only ever been to Woking once, passing through years ago en route to somewhere else. It's about the size of Waterford, I recall, and had a slightly gloomy air, although my impression may have been influenced by the lyrics of Paul Weller, who grew up there and painted a grim picture of it in The Jam's 1982 hit, A Town Called Malice.
Anyway, as the sign suggested, things had obviously moved on. Thirty years later, Woking had acquired the confidence to showcase itself to the world in a travelling expo. So why not a "Waterford Abroad" exhibition, I asked myself? Then, more sinister thoughts intervened. I remembered that in HG Wells's classic, The War of the Worlds, Woking was where the Martians landed. Their space ship crashes in a local park, Horsell Common, and when the town sends a peace delegation to meet it, the visitors respond via the traditional Martian greeting of incinerating them with death rays.
In fact, thanks to War of the Worlds, the concept of "Woking Abroad" had first been developed – by another Well(e)s (Orson) – as long ago as 1938. Thus, in his infamous radio dramatisation, he replaced Surrey with New Jersey and presented the invasion from Mars as a breaking news story.
Listener reaction subsequently made headlines around the world, even in this newspaper, which reported “Mass Hysteria in America”. And, inter alia, the event was also responsible for a quite shocking piece of name-dropping by the then Irishman’s Diarist. At the height of the controversy, he affected to wonder “what my one-time friend Orson Welles is feeling like today, after that broadcast, which seems to have driven half of America into the dithers.” Having made his real point, the unnamed diarist then – with a brassness of neck I can only learn from – pretended to wrestle with the ethical questions of presenting over-realistic drama to an impressionable public before deciding, on balance, that the US broadcast was preferable to the “monotonous fare” delivered daily by “Athlone”.
His alleged friendship with Welles no doubt dated from the great actor/director’s early days in Dublin. And the diarist needn’t have been worried (not that he was) about his pal’s ability to deal with difficult situations. Welles’s sang-froid had been thoroughly tested on the stage of the Gate theatre.
Twenty years later, now world-famous, he recalled his apprenticeship there during an era when Irish audiences still felt free to contribute to the dialogue. As on one occasion, when Welles was playing a lecherous aristocrat and, eyeing up another man’s wife, described her as “a bride fit for Solomon”, adding of the latter: “He had a thousand wives, did he not?” At this point, Welles heard someone in the audience respond: “That’s a dirty black Protestant lie!”
Yet somehow, he retained his composure and carried on. So causing mass panic in America was probably water off a duck’s back to him. The main thing was that he had made his name overnight, and all thanks to Woking Abroad.
I WASN’T able to attend the exhibition referred to in the sign. Nor did I witness the similarly-titled “Working Abroad” expo, which – now that I think of it – was on in the same venue, and at the same time. Is it possible that the two were in fact one, and that – my uncanny Wells-Welles-Weller sub-theme notwithstanding – the AA sign was a mere typo? I suppose, now that I have the space nearly filled, that must be the explanation. And if so, it underlines a point about typos a reader once made to me, after I lamented the treacherous tendency of certain letters to absent themselves in print.
My main target then was the lower-case “l”: especially its nasty habit of slipping unnoticed from the word “public”, causing unplanned references to “pubic morality”, “the pubic interest”, or even – God forbid – “pubic life”, and thereby exposing high-minded columnists to ridicule.
But I later received an e-mail from somebody in publishing who argued that the lower-case “r” could not be trusted either. If I recall correctly, her publication had an important advertising contract involving a shirt manufacturer. And as printing deadlines approached, they always had to keep that “r” under close surveillance, lest by its absence, the publishers lose a client and gain a lawsuit.
Such things happen. In California once, a Yellow Pages ad for a company offering “exotic travel” went to print without the letter “x”. No big problem there. Except that the “x” had been replaced by one of those rogue “r”s – probably absent without leave from somewhere else. Cue a $10 million lawsuit.
Which pales by comparison with a typo whose 50th anniversary falls in July. It featured during the launch of Nasa’s 1962 Mariner 1 spacecraft, scheduled to fly past Venus until a technical problem emerged soon after takeoff, forcing an abort. Mystery long shrouded the incident, but the error is generally attributed to the omission of a punctuation mark – the “overbar” – in the rocket’s computer programme.
Anyway, speaking of anniversaries and space travel, tomorrow would have been the 60th birthday of the comic sic-fi writer, Douglas Adams.
And since we're on the subject, I should mention that his absurdist dictionary The Meaning of Liff,includes the word "Woking". Not as in "Woking Abroad", of course. According to Adams, "woking" only happens at home: being the present participle of a verb to describe that everyday predicament whereby you find yourself "standing in the kitchen, wondering what you came in here for".