Someone who toured with this band of Romanian gypsies told me they sing and play the same

Someone who toured with this band of Romanian gypsies told me they sing and play the same way at breakfast. It would be too much for any ordinary mortal, for their show at the Barbican on Bank Holiday Monday evening was utterly delirious. Fiddlers, accordion-players, cimbaloms (zithers played with mallets), and double bass split into small groups for several numbers at a stretch and eventually all came together for a manic finale, which also included, for the first time, a guitar. They didn’t just play, they also sang, or yelled sweetly, in throaty tenor voices, and sometimes they danced, old as well as young, with short, rapid steps, twisting this way and that. One of the older men showed that it’s no disgrace to wiggle your bum even if your waistline isn’t quite what it was. Everyone was a star, and had a solo at some point, but the stars that shone most constantly were the fiddlers, playing without shoulder rests, some without chin rests. Their bowing was phenomenally fast, and one held his instrument upwards at an angle you would have thought painful.

Their sounds varied, but all were piercing and wiry especially with the loud amplification – and without vibrato. Instead, they would approach certain notes from below, then bend the pitch, so weirdly sometimes, you wondered where the harmony could be going And the harmony occasionally modulated alarmingly. A trick not used too often was to replace the bow with a wire that was pulled at right angles to the strings, and vibrated with the fingers while the left hand changed the pitch. One of the cimbalom players also turned his instrument upside down and struck it like an unpitched percussion instrument.
The sung numbers seemed to be narrative ballads, and the names caught from one suggested it recorded recent history, but unfortunately there was no programme, no documentary back-up, so we were left in the dark.

The evening went at such a pace that it would have dispelled momentum to have explanatory introductions, but still, it was a pity not to have anything to take home and check up on.The energy and panache of the group was amazing – opening their arms to us, grinning both to each other and the audience, they really invited us to enjoy ourselves. Yet virtually all the music, however fast and furious, was in what we would call the minor mode, which could either prove that minor may equal ecstatic joy, or that the harsh realities of the gypsies’ lives have ingrained a deep melancholy even in their most abandoned styles of expression. There lies their allure, for the rich moodiness of their harmonies equals their rhythmic drive and the constant variety of their tempi. Above all, they seem like a band of individuals, not disciplined exactly, but fused by a common fire.. The somewhat open ending of The Vanishing Man (ITV) suggests that last night’s comedy thriller was intended as a pilot. One can only hope that it proves more competent than the one played by Neil Morrissey, a man who climbs into his twin-engined plane without a pre-flight inspection, and then stows a set of golf-clubs in the front seat, where they are virtually guaranteed to rearrange his instrument panel at the first quiver of turbulence. He can’t even claim ignorance as a mitigating factor: “I was carrying golf clubs on the plane,” he says wearily, after being jailed for plutonium smuggling.

“The metal sometimes interferes with the compass.” His lawyer, stunned by this explanation for a radar-dodging approach back to England, summarises his predicament: “If I don’t believe you, how can I make a court believe you?” And if she doesn’t believe him, where does that leave us, grappling by now with an armful of improbabilities?

We haven’t even got to the bit where he starts to turn see-through after being interfered with by a shadowy scientific organisation known as Gyges. By then, though, our nagging friends the Plausibles have been shown gibbering to the door, and you will either have switched off or settled back to enjoy the special effects. These are rather good, modern computers being far more effective at creating the impression of invisible presence than a length of fishing line with a teacup dangling on the end. Truly pedantic viewers will still find something to niggle at – Morrissey’s body, for example, has a conveniently variable index of refraction, sometimes displaying an outline gleam of distortion (when knowing his position in the room will add a little frisson for the audience), at other times offering not the slightest barrier to passing light rays (when a magical levitation will give us more pleasure).
A recent literary version of this storyline handled the matter with something close to rigour (once you’d swallowed the central conceit), noting that until food was digested, it hovered in mid-air as a disgusting cud, and also generating tension from the fact that it is relatively easy for modern technology to detect an invisible man – fluorescent powders, infra- red sights, ultra-sonic beams were all deployed to make things tough for the notionally imperceptible hero.

The Vanishing Man is altogether less sophisticated in its treatment, settling instead for the charm of a protagonist who can knock baddies on the head just when they think they have things under control, and then unpredictably reappear in the nude for a bit of comic relief. In its rather innocent glee at such devices and its taste for comic banter, it reminded me most strongly of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, a bizarre Seventies series in which the detective was assisted by the ghostly presence of his late colleague, who registered his moribund status by wearing a gleaming white suit. If they do make the series, they should schedule it for Saturday tea-time, when its natural audience will be able to enjoy it.Army of Innocents, BBC1’s documentary about National Service, rather threw away a rich and obliquely topical subject. It didn’t help that the makers had decided to dramatise the experience of basic training – the reconstructed NCO being, for simple reasons of transmissibility, a mere shadow of the original obscene horror.