Another reason Harry Truman's my favourite President

The day FDR died Harry Truman suddenly had the biggest job in the world thrust upon him – at the very moment when that job was hardest to do.

Hitler was still alive, the war in Europe wasn't over, Stalin was seeing what he could get away with, there were senior people in Washington who thought Germany should be reduced to an agrarian economy, the war in Japan was looking as though it might cost a million American lives and this guy from Missouri who looked like a small-town haberdasher, which is what he had been, was suddenly behind the desk of the man who had been widely regarded, both in the USA and abroad, as the saviour of the world.

Over the next three months he had to make the most momentous decisions any President has ever had to make: to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, to back democratic governments in Europe, to extend the credit needed to rebuild a continent, to walk into a room at Potsdam with Stalin and Churchill, neither of whom knew him from Adam, and tell them how things were going to be.

It's a story I never get tired of reading. This new book has lots of detail I didn't know. When Truman got back to the White House at the end of those three months this is what he did.

Did an LP ever get anybody into bed?

In the 1970s you could ask a girl back to your place "to listen to my albums" without being openly laughed at.

Why was that? Primarily because the only way you were going to hear Neil Young's "Harvest" or Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get it On" at the time they came out was to go to the home of somebody who owned a copy. The experience of listening to records like these simply wasn't available any other way. Saying "I have a record" was a legitimate overture.

As well as the small bump of delight that came from hearing something you hadn't heard before, there was also the fact that certain long playing records imbued their owners with prestige. In the early 70s I was aware there were other males who spent their disposable cash on cars rather than records but reasoned correctly there was no future in a girl who was more impressed by an old MG Midget than the new album by Todd Rundgren.

There was also something intimate about the two of you just listening to a record in your room, a place with no other facilities or distractions. It wasn't like watching a video was to become in the following decade. Responding to a record was something both personal and public. There was nothing to look at apart from each other and the album cover. In this way playing a record to a girl turned into a form of wooing. With a little bit of luck the record – its sound, its appearance, its fresh, unscratched surface, its manifold associations – would melt the space between you and render possible things that without it would have been impossible.


But you could overdo it with the boudoir albums. When I worked in the record shop we would smirk knowingly at the would-be Lotharios who came in to get an import copy of Roy C's album "Sex And Soul". This was a standard Southern Soul album which opened with the line "a man can't go no further than a woman let him" and had a woman on its cover apparently delighted that she has extended just such permission. They were clearly planning to use it to facilitate a seduction.

 I've never been convinced that any albums "worked" just like that. Maybe that was just my failing.

Is this the reason Mum works?

I can't think of another sitcom where the lead has no funny lines. The way we look at her younger family through Lesley Manville's eyes and find them hopelessly weird is exactly the way the young heroes and heroines of her youth looked at the adults in their lives in films like "The Graduate" and "Billy Liar". Maybe that's what makes it work. It's a twist on the traditional teenage misfit movie where she doesn't get to leave. Instead she stays at home where everybody depends on her while fooling themselves they can get by without her.