Beyond Coincidence (10 page)

Consciously or subconsciously, deliberately or coincidentally, songwriters seem to make a habit of imitating each other's efforts.

If you were to sit at your local church organ, pull out all the stops and play the opening few notes of Bach's Fugue in E Flat, while simultaneously humming the familiar tune to the hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” you would not scare the congregation. The opening notes are identical. Just coincidence?

Try another one. Dust down an old 78 rpm copy of the American song “Aura Lee,” written by George R. Poulton and popular during the Civil War. The tune bears an uncanny resemblance to the slightly more recent “Love Me Tender” credited to Elvis Presley and Vera Matson. Were all the writers involved tapping into the same universal creative consciousness? Was it just coincidence?

Similar hard-to-answer questions have been raised in relation to the highly successful musical-writing career of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cabaret act Kit and the Widow entered the territory with their withering parody of the multimillionaire's oeuvre entitled “Somebody Else.” The song works its way through some of Lloyd Webber's most familiar and successful show tunes, pointing out some startling similarities—such as those between:

• “Memories” from
Cats
and Ravel's
Bolero

• “Jesus Christ Superstar” and a tune by Bach

• “I Don't Know How to Love Him” from
Jesus Christ Superstar
and a Mendelssohn violin tune

• “Oh What a Circus” from
Evita
and Bach's Prelude in C

These are just a few of the coincidences between Lloyd Webber tunes and the works of the great composers turned up by Kit and the Widow's research. Did Kit and the Widow think he had received musical messages in his sleep from the great masters? Or, given that there are only seven different white notes on the piano and a smattering of black notes, were the similarities the result of pure serendipity—the synchronistic workings of great musical minds? They were not in fact persuaded by either explanation. They prefer to think a little bit of artful borrowing has been going on, made possible by the fact that the copyright on most of the great classical canon has long since expired.

Kit and the Widow say Lloyd Webber has admitted to them that some of the similarities between his songs and previous works are “too close for comfort.” But he also teasingly pointed out that their parody had “missed some of the best ones.”

Issues of coincidence versus plagiarism emerge almost as frequently in literature as they do in the world of music. V. S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, famously declared that the novel was dead—that all available plot possibilities had been thoroughly exhausted. Not that that prevented him writing one further novel himself.

If we assume that the novel, having been briefly resurrected to allow Naipaul a last hurrah, is once more deceased, it is hardly surprising that we find familiar stories popping up from time to time in newly published works of fiction. Not all writers can claim their every publication is a work of truly original genius. Even Jeffrey Archer has been accused of plagiarism. And in this he is in the company of no lesser writer than William Shakespeare.

Writers throughout the ages have faced accusations that they have done a little “borrowing” from the great lending library of other writers' ideas. Shortly after his death in 2002, the Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo Jose Cela was accused of being both a cheat and a plagiarist. It was said that Cela regularly used ghostwriters for most of his career, including for his
The Cross of Saint Andrew,
which won him Spain's prestigious $450,000 Planeta Prize.

It is alleged that in
The Cross
and other books, ghostwriters supplied the plots and characters, which Cela incorporated into his own prose. “Cela was a great prose writer with an exquisite style but plots and arguments were not his strong point,” said his accuser, journalist Thomas Garcia Yebra.

In the case of his Planeta Prize–winning novel, it is further alleged that the ghostwriter had plagiarized the unpublished manuscript of a schoolteacher that had been submitted for the same literary competition. Her claim has been rejected in the courts although appeal judges found “innumerable coincidences” between the two works.

Cela once said that he would like his epitaph to read, “Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible.”

British novelist Susan Hill feels she has been screwed, but only by a series of unfortunate coincidences. The chain of events began in 1971 when she published her novel,
Strange Meeting,
about two young soldiers in the trenches during the First World War.

“In that ultrasensitive state immediately following the completion and publication of a novel, I was plunged into depression when another, about the love of two young soldiers in the trenches of Flanders, Jennifer Johnston's
How Many Miles to Babylon?
came out shortly after mine.”

Years later she had another idea for a story—which became a novel she called
Air and Angels,
which she finished and sent to the publisher in May 1990. It was set in Cambridge around 1912. One of the central characters is a don and cleric who falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl.

“One fine Sunday morning we were having coffee at a café table overlooking the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the River Avon at Stratford … when my husband looked up from his paper and said quietly, ‘There is an interview with Penelope Fitzgerald here that you had better read.' Alerted, though somewhat puzzled by the seriousness of his tone, I set aside my own paper and did so. I discovered that Mrs. Fitzgerald was about to publish a new novel called
The Gate of Angels.
Its hero was a clergyman with a scientific bent who falls passionately in love with a very young girl. Its setting, Cambridge, circa 1912.”

Hill and Fitzgerald had met once but never spoken or corresponded about their work. Both novels were published and, coincidentally, sold well. But bad luck, they say, comes in threes.

Hill had set her heart on writing a novel about Captain Scott and his companions and their journey to the South Pole. Her research completed, she settled down to start writing.

“Just before Christmas, on the 8:50 from Oxford to Paddington, I opened my copy of
The Bookseller
and saw an advertizement for a new novel by Beryl Bainbridge called
The Birthday Boys
based on the last voyage of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic. Two years' work gone down the tube.”

In 1988 two books were published whose contents were very different yet whose covers bore remarkable similarities. Both Marianne Wiggins's novel,
John Dollar,
and Tim Robinson's guide to Ireland's Aran Isles,
Stones of Aran,
had covers that featured a blue dolphin, a black-and-white compass and a map.

The publishers of
John Dollar,
Secker and Warburg, were angry, claiming their cover had been widely distributed within the trade months before. John Caple, the artist who designed the cover for
Stones of Aran,
said he had never seen the other cover.

Fiona Carpenter, art director of Viking, who published the guidebook, said it was just “a very unfortunate coincidence.”

Was this simply coincidence, or was it a slightly more subtle example of the technique employed by the junk shop in Clapham that shamelessly called itself Harrods, reproducing the famous colors and typeface? When Harrods threatened legal action it changed its name to Selfridges, claiming the name was valid because it did sell fridges.

When a case of theft of intellectual property comes before a court, the judge or jury must decide if the alleged copying is, in fact, nothing more than coincidence. They must consider what the chances are of someone completely independently coming up with an almost identical design or invention or, indeed, name for a store.

In 1998 director Mehdi Norowzian took brewer Guinness to court claiming a commercial for their famous brew was a copy of his short film “Joy.” Norowzian argued that the ad, which showed a man dancing around a pint of Guinness, was a substantial copy of his film and not just “a repetition of an idea.” But the judge ruled against Norowzian and ordered him to pay costs to Guinness.

It is probably no coincidence that the people who tend to come out best from litigation over infringement of copyright are the lawyers.

As we've seen, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had another possible explanation for how two people might come up with the same creative idea—his theory of the collective unconscious that people tap into: “a force of nature which drives us to come to the same conclusions to the same problems, to follow the same creative processes.”

Plagiarism even raises its ugly head in the sublime world of laughter. Ownership of jokes, one-liners, and sketch ideas can be aggressively disputed.

Can more than one person come up with exactly the same joke, by coincidence? Kit and the Widow had one of their comic creations apparently stolen from under their noses, passed round the neighborhood and then served back to them cold. Kit Hesketh-Harvey recalls, “The Lloyd Webber musical
Aspects of Love
had controversially cast Roger Moore in a singing role. Rehearsals went ahead and Roger left the cast and there was not much explanation of why. The gag we came up with was that when Lloyd Webber discovered that Roger Moore couldn't sing, he wanted to marry him. It required you to know that he had married Sarah Brightman, the star of his show
Cats,
and that there had been snide remarks in the press about her singing ability. The idea of Roger Moore, the man who played James Bond, being pursued by Lloyd Webber was so absurd, it was funny. Anyway we did this joke once at a party—and within three weeks Lionel Blair had told me that joke and so had Christopher Biggins. And Christopher had told the joke to Simon Fanshawe, who told it to us on air.” Kit and the Widow are not convinced that this was just coincidence. They think a little “recycling” had been going on.

Arnold Brown is a stand-up comedian, a profession of eggshell egos and fierce competition for the most original topical gag. Paranoia about having material stolen is a professional inevitability.

Says Brown, “Comedy is about searching for new ideas—it's almost like a scientific process. Suddenly you find that little Rubik's Cube combination—a DNA of comedy which no one else has got to.” So when he hears one of his jokes being told by another comedian, does it make him want to sue or does he put it down to coincidence? “Neither,” says Brown. “It makes me want to kill them.”

Arnold Brown believes he was the first to come up with the comic idea that cell phones were a godsend to the mentally ill, as they could wander around in public talking to themselves and no one would take any notice. But before he could use it in his act, he heard that another comedian was telling an identical joke. Mysteriously, that comedian was never heard of again.

Recently the joke appeared again, this time in Martin Amis's 2003 novel
Yellow Dog.

What does he put this down to? Coincidence? Great minds thinking alike? Or do jokes get stolen?

“I'm open…,” Brown says, “to litigation.”

Before he rushes to court, Arnold might take note of the fact that the joke has also been attributed to Jerry Seinfeld as early as 1993. Several other American stand-up comedians also claim ownership. Clearly great comic minds think alike.

Brown thinks the “coincidence” of jokes turning up in other people's acts will continue until someone invents a device that can be placed in a gag, which will explode if it is told by another comedian.

Some of the coincidences that come before the courts are no laughing matter.

Sally Clark was accused of the murder of her two baby sons. The policeman's daughter, who had always protested her innocence, was jailed for life in November 1999. She was convicted of smothering eleven-week-old Christopher in December 1996 and shaking eight-week-old Harry to death in January 1998 at the home she shared with her husband Stephen.

The crux of the case revolved around whether it was conceivable the “crib deaths” of Mrs. Clark's two children were coincidences.

The prosecution's expert witness, an eminent pediatrician told the court that the likelihood of two siblings dying of SIDS or “sudden infant death syndrome” was 1 in 73 million. This was damning evidence against Mrs. Clark and must have had a powerful influence on the jury.

However, on January 30, 2003, after serving three years in jail, Sally Clark won her appeal and freedom. The convictions were ruled unsafe, as medical evidence that might have cleared her was not heard during her trial. The court also criticized the use in the trial of the statistic putting the chance of two babies in the same family suffering SIDS at 1 in 73 million. It said it had been “grossly misleading,” as the jury started from the incorrect assumption that double crib deaths in a single family were extremely rare. The assumption had been that the cribs deaths were independent events, and so the seventy-three million figure would have been reached by squaring the probability of a single crib death. But multiple crib deaths in one family are not statistically independent. Experts told the appeal court that the risk of a second crib death could, in fact, have been as low as 1 in 100. It was suggested that the prosecution's expert witness had made a fundamental mathematical error.

The court had decided that whatever the odds, 73 million to 1, or 100 to 1, the deaths of Sally Clark's two children had been natural. The fact that she had lost two children was just a tragic coincidence.

Just months after Sally Clark's acquittal the trial began of another woman accused of the multiple murder of her infant children—a trial at which the pediatrician was again arguing that the deaths could not be the result of simple coincidence.