A Wizard Story

I suppose I should be proud that the retiring Wizard of Christchurch is an Englishman.

Any of my fellow countrymen who may feel a bit funny about being associated with such oddness will be relieved that Ian Brackenberry Channell (no, I don’t make everything up; this is his real name) has spent his entire wizard life in Australia and New Zealand.

Bad enough, you might think, that he was appointed to the above title 30 years ago, but what could Prime Minister, the Honourable Mike Moore, have been thinking of when he officially proclaimed him Wizard of New Zealand in 1990. Under his spell, no doubt.

But now the Wiz is retiring; and would you believe the City is seeking an apprentice to carry on the tradition. They had better hurry because this is the last season that Ian (if I may call him that - I’m not keen to raise his wrath) will act the Wizard.

I discover also that Ian served in the Royal Air Force as a navigator and I wonder if he got too carried away by the air force catchphrase ‘wizard prang’.

To digress. I had often wondered what prang actually means, so I have just looked it up. It will not surprise you to know that it means to crash or damage an aircraft or vehicle and to bomb a target successfully.

But why a ‘wizard’ prang? Is it magical? Well, with the help of the Oxford English Dictionary I can solve that one too.

It is simply that as archaic slang it means wonderful or excellent; not that I would want to be in a crash even if it is archaically wonderful!

But to get back to Ian, he developed an identity for himself while an academic in Australia as "The Wizard" with a world view that comprised a complex mixture of magic, esoteric philosophy, sociology and Situationist performance art. Er...

Magic and esoteric philosophy I can see together, even perhaps with sociology. But situationist performance art?

Of course it will help to know what situationist means; and from the dictionary comes ‘situationism’ the theory that human behaviour is determined by surrounding circumstances rather than by personal qualities. Oh! Yes! I see.

The ‘not me guv’ School of Irresponsibility.

While ‘performance art’ is a kind of visual art in which the activity of the artist forms a central feature. And I thought it meant watching someone make a fool of themselves. And, as a ‘situationist’, without any idea of what he is doing?

But still, perhaps I should sympathise; after all his later career could have happened in Australia (Oz).

So he just missed being THE Wizard of Oz.

Uncle Joe