Reflections on Seeing a Magpie

Mick Robertson and Jenny Hanley on set

of the Thames TV show Magpie (c. 1977)

 

 

I. 

 

Whenever I see a magpie, I think of the ornithomantic nursery rhyme which offers a series of binary oppositions in which one term is more highly valued than the other.

Such metaphysical privileging - be it in the field of emotions, biology, or metallurgy - is politically unacceptable to those who reject all forms of hierarchy based upon violence and subordination, but it's also philosophically untenable for those who, like Nietzsche, recognise that joy and sorrow, for example, are related and grow together; that attempting to reduce the latter will also diminish the other.

 

Thus, for Nietzsche, whoever wants the happiness associated with two magpies, must affirm the grief and suffering associated with a single bird [1]. 

 

 

II.

 

But whenever I see a magpie, I also think of the children's TV show of this name that was broadcast on ITV from July 1968 until June 1980, providing a much hipper (and unscripted) alternative to Blue Peter over on the BBC - who wants Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves when you can have Jenny Hanley and Mick Robertson?  

Mick may have been a bit of a hippie and a Brian May lookalike, but he was younger and way cooler than Purves (in my eyes at least). 

 

And as for the English actress Jenny Hanley - who some readers may recall as the Irish Girl in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), or as Sarah, in the classic Hammer horror Scars of Dracula (1970), or even as Magda, Lord Brett Sinclair's new valet in the final episode of The Persuaders! (1972) - well, she was almost too sexy for a twice-weekly tea-time kids programme and is remembered fondly by many male viewers of a certain age.     

 

Murgatroyd - the show's logo and mascot

 

Notes

 

[1] See The Gay Science I. 12 wherein Niezsche asks his readers to imagine pleasure and its opposite tied together in such a manner whoever desired to have as much happiness as possible must also accept a maximum of suffering. But note, Nietzsche is not arguing that suffering is in some manner justified or vindicated by happiness. Later, in Zarathustra, Nietzsche will absorb this idea into his concept of the eternal recurrence.  

 

For a related post to this one - 'One for Sorrow ...' (18 October, 2023) - please click here.