by Mark Lawson
Ned guessed that Tom must have fucked – or, which was little different these days, been accused of fucking – a student. But he said: ‘Are you worried about the cuts?’
‘The what? I can’t hear a thing at parties now. The doctor says it’s completely normal.’
‘Everyone’s worried about another round of redundancies.’
‘What? Well, hopefully it won’t come to that.’
‘Tom, what the fuck’s happened?’
‘I’ve had a message from Special, asking me to see him tomorrow. He hasn’t asked to see you?’
‘What? No. Not that I know of.’
The quacking babble of the gathering suddenly rose in intensity and Ned, already stooped to reduce the difference in their heights, only partly caught what Tom said next. Something something trail. Had there been a trailer for something on TV? But there was no new series due and the channels didn’t generally advertise repeats. Ned bent even lower but could only make out something again trail and then, as the din dipped, more clearly: ‘I’m just worried about Daggers.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Daggers,’ Ned reassured his colleague. ‘Harmless enough old nut. As long as no one expects us to be his student or his carer. I’ve always been more concerned about Quatermass. If we ever come in to find the department roped off by a hostage siege team, it will be Prof Q in the AJP Taylor Lecture Theatre with a grenade strapped to his goolies.’
‘Ha! But Special definitely hasn’t sent for you?’
‘No.’
Tom made a pained face but, as the background soundtrack gave another swoop fuelled by Italian effervescence, Ned lost the next sentence. It felt weirdly as if a face-to-face encounter were aping a mobile phone conversation from a train.
Shrugging surrender, Tom made the ring-you gesture with finger and thumb. ‘I’ll … tomorrow, okay? And don’t tell Hells I’m worried. Which I’m not really.’
The sound levels fell as serving staff urged the guests to sit down. Reaching the top table, Ned saw that a place setting and name card were being removed and the gaps between the chairs on that side widened. Tom flicked his eyes to the close-up strip of his bifocals and read the folded cardboard as it was placed on a tray.
‘Oh, no great loss,’ he said. ‘It’s Fumo.’
Smiling, Helen asked: ‘And, in your cast list of nicknames, which is … ?’
‘The Vice Chancellor.’
‘Yes, he’s had to cancel,’ said Emma, coming up behind them. ‘Another of their beloved crises, apparently.’
‘Oh? I expect LGBT Soc is trying to no-platform the Macaulay Memorial Lecturer. After I’ve gone, Hells, don’t ever let them put a statue of me up on campus, however hard they ask.’
Personal History
Teaching is a kind of public speaking, but thirty years of lecturing seemed to be no help with other forms of oration. Tom Pimm had been almost breathless with terror before each of his three best man’s speeches (two of these, anti-romantically, for the same groom), three funeral eulogies, four fortieth birthday party tributes, three fiftieth bashes (the number reduced by one of the eulogies), and, now, his first attempt at summing up sixty years.
‘As an historian,’ he began, lightly stressing the indefinite article for the pleasure of pedantic and therefore almost certainly older guests, ‘Ned Marriott has dealt in centuries, even millennia.’ Pausing to let the same constituency be thrilled by the correct plural. ‘But – tonight – we focus on six very special decades.’
At these cue words, earlier confided to a youth in a booth, the electric candelabras dimmed. On all four walls, screens, which would once have been regarded as large but were now smaller than most domestic televisions, filled with images.
Ned as an infant, gummily grinning, held upright astride the laps of his parents, from whom, it became clear in a series of pictures taking him from nappy-fattened dungarees to baggy grow-into primary school blazer, he had inherited his mother’s large, dark eyes and his father’s lankiness, broad brow and wide nose. These were scenes from a childhood in the decade that had featured in Ned’s first TV series and non-academic book, called, with the consensus-denting that would become his signature: The Fabulous Fifties – Defending a Demonized Decade.
Next, in early adolescence, huddled on a beach (windswept, Norfolk or sort-of) with his mum. In old photos, from before timers and selfies, there was always the unseen sub-plot of who took them. Was the unseen photographer Ned’s dad, whose early death had made him a shadowy but sanctified figure for his son? Or the stepfather, who was at the top table tonight, but to whom Ned had pointedly never dedicated a book, excluding him even when Elizabeth I – Elizabeth II: Who Wins? had been ascribed: ‘To Mum, at 80’.
A professional ceremonial photographer was clearly responsible for the one of Ned in his King’s London graduation robes, with a beginner’s beard that had grown to only a smudge on his upper lip. Then a dark thick moustache was the only facial hair as Dr Ned Marriott, circa 1985, stood in front of a blackboard chalked with the question Was Churchill A War Criminal?, a breakthrough book and (though banned by the BBC governors under pressure from Margaret Thatcher and not screened until twenty years later) TV documentary that had been the thirtyone-year-old historian’s breakthrough into newsworthiness. That same moustached snap would have been on the back of the dust jackets flashing up from The Fabulous Fifties (1990) to Fawlty Britain – How TV Punchlined Britain (2000), although he was clean-shaven by the time of Tony Blair’s second election victory in 2001.
And here now was the former prime minister, boyishly thin and honey-tanned, squinting into the sun under a palm tree by a pool, with golden minarets in the distance. ‘Ned,’ he said. ‘I’m caught up in a bi’ of history here myself.’ Tom had hoped that Blair, once out of office, might stop the dropping of t-sounds that had presumably been an egalitarian tactic. ‘Bu’ the happiest of birthdays, okay, May? And, look, hundreds of thousands of students have benefi’ed from the work you did as History National Curriculum Adviser. Look, people say I’m history now but you will always be part of the history of teaching and of broadcasting. Listen, Cherie and the kids send their love to Emma, Phee, Dee and Toby. Wish I could raise a glass to you there, bu’ I’ll do it here. Happy Birthday, Professor Marriott!’
Just in time, the ex-premier hit a T, indeed two together, as he lifted a glass of what looked like white wine. Behind him, a camel jerked past. The room filled with applause, except for one yell of ‘War criminal!’ that Tom thought came from Dee.
A freeze-frame of Blair’s Middle Eastern refuge dissolved into a clip reel of Ned’s television career. On a steel-and-leather chair in a Late Show discussion apparently filmed during a power cut, Dr Marriott hairily declares: ‘The saviour of this nation was Emperor Hirohito, not Churchill. If it hadn’t been for Pearl Harbor, this discussion would be in German.’ Cutaway to Sir Winston’s Churchill’s grandson, whose colour suggested that he was near to a seizure as he tried to catch the attention of a worried-looking presenter, who would later run unsuccessfully to become Prime Minister of Canada. ‘People say the Fifties were just dull, fumbling foreplay before the ecstatic orgasm of the 1960s,’ Ned projects above a howling gale on the site of the 1851 Great Exhibition. ‘But people are wrong. In this series, I want to make a forgotten decade memorable.’
Now, captioned as Professor Ned Marriott, he stands, hair clipped short in a man’s first bulwark against baldness, holding a candle in the prow of a boat on the Thames, St Paul’s floodlit in the background. ‘No longer an international Empire,’ he says, ‘Britain still hoped to be an international Umpire. But Blighty was still trying to apply the rules of cricket to what had become – in the American century – a game of baseball.’ This was a clip from UK 2000: The Story of Our History, which, a cruel TV reviewer had said, ‘puts the “um” into Millennium.’
On a drawbridge with a sunlit castle in the background, a summer day’s sweat not quite disguised by make-up, Ned, in an extract from The English Wi
tch Hunts, noticeably more demonstrative as his TV career proceeds, booms: ‘If they did not conform to the beliefs of the day, burn them! If they might be trouble, burn them! If polls showed that the public liked bonfires, light more! Although she didn’t know this, Jane Wenham was already as good as dead. To be called a witch was to be christened a corpse!’
Seeing the sequence now, Tom was surprised by the angle of the presenter’s head, an extreme profile favouring one cheek, which he attributed to the whim of one of those directors whom his friend would shudderingly describe as imaginative. And Ned, he noticed, grimaced and looked away when that piece to camera came on screen.
Now, on juddery Skype, like pictures from the moon landings, Barbie Tim, in a living room bright with daylight, said: ‘Birthday greetings from Sydney, little Bro! Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell anyone what you did with the Subbuteo Arsenal goalkeeper that afternoon with Karen Jones. You know, people often say to me: “Has your brother become stuck-up and full of himself since he started being on television?” And I always say: “Absolutely not … he was always like that!” But seriously, little Bro, I want to say the words that I know will mean the most to you: Dad would have been very proud of you.’
A speedy sequence of clips from other shows included several cutaways of the over-enthusiastic agreement with speakers that had spawned Tom’s epithet for his friend. Then, finally, electronic trickery inserts a miniaturized Ned between Basil and the guest’s breasts he is about to accidentally grope in the scene from Fawlty Britain that was shown at the BAFTA awards when it took the prize for Best Factual Series. ‘Just as Dad’s Army surreptitiously satirized the futility of Britain’s nuclear defences,’ the shrunken pundit told the audience, ‘so Fawlty Towers, in the disguise of sit-com, presented British industry as the consumer-hostile farce that, in the Seventies, it largely was.’
Now the film shifted from slick television pictures to homeshot stills. Ned with an arm around Phee and Dee, in a quick-cut succession of images which, from the numbered cakes in front of them, seemed to have been taken on birthdays through their teenage years. With these photos, the identity of the unseen photographer was a matter of particular speculation. The earlier shots had almost certainly been taken by the twins’ mother, Jenny, who had been Stalined out of the montage, while, from the way the early and later pictures were framed against the walls of two distinct family homes, the more recent pictures had been posed for Emma, who soon appeared in a sequence of cuddles with Ned, first as a couple on white sand beside dazzling sea and then with Toby between them as a baby, a toddler and the seven-or-whatever he was now. Two family albums, BD and AD, caused by the divorce.
Ned in the main lecture hall at UME, the heads of the front rows of students jolting as they laughed at his jokes; as part of the enhanced service to justify the teaching fees, every lecture was now filmed and posted online.
Television again – the professor asking, ‘Which other head of state has been called great for never saying anything and staying out of politics?’ in the infamous Newsnight Diamond Jubilee debate – and then phone-footage of Ned’s mother’s eightieth, with a protective wedge of relatives, including the brother Tom had never met, separating Ned from the mother’s second husband.
Now a clip that had become the most familiar, through use in trails and screening at the BAFTA awards, as Ned kissed the side of Emma’s head and buttoned up his tuxedo on the way to the stage: the moment in The English Witch Hunts when Ned writes his name on vellum, then burns it with a candle to show how a curse was cast.
A final piece of TV from The British People: Ned, a long red scarf wound raffishly around him in Highgate Cemetery, saying: ‘Britons learn the stories of their kings and queens but in this series, I’ll be exploring the stories of ordinary Britons and the object lessons that rulers could have learned from their subjects’ – and then the screens wiped to white, the lights brightened and Tom Pimm, fighting stage fright greater than for any of his previous public speeches, had to stand and speak again, feeling like a politician as he raised a hand to staunch the applause for the biopic.
‘Thanks to Dominic Ogg and all the staff at Ogglebox TV – who produced most of the series from which those extracts came – for their highly generous and professional work on that tribute film.’
Allowing another round of clapping for the TV people, Tom went on: ‘Those were scenes from the life of one of the few people who has been able to call King Henry VIII a subject, but who has also made famous many ordinary Britons. And, although no one who is lucky enough to know him would ever call him ordinary, we are here tonight to celebrate the personal history of Ned, or, as I call him, for reasons you may have deduced from some of those shots of him listening, Nod.’
The butt of this insult lifted his finger in Tom’s direction, while, with instinctive maternal loyalty, Daphne Marriott-Starling threw a disapproving look.
‘As you all know, Ned always expects the worst.’ From the top table especially, a loving chuckle about his legendary pessimism. ‘But – tonight – he should expect to hear only the best. I’ve reflected for a long time on what to say about the man I have known for more than forty years, since we were students together in London, and with whom I have worked at UME for almost thirty, and what I want to say is this …’
Professor Perverse
Tom had apparently been the best man when Daddy married Mummy and so Dee had been expecting that sort of speech from him here: sentimentality with an edge of ribaldry. But she was astonished to hear him say – actually couldn’t at first believe that she had heard it – ‘Professor Ned Marriott is one of my worst enemies.’
Tom had one of those drawling deliveries that make everything sound a bit like a joke and so a laugh began that the speaker cut off by continuing, sternly: ‘Ned Marriott began his life sixty years ago as he meant to go on, by being a notoriously uncaring son.’
Granny, skitter-eyed, whisperingly ruled out sudden-onset Alzheimer’s with Grandpa Jack, then looked appealingly at Dee, who shrugged.
‘He has been a faithless husband,’ the eulogist continued, causing Helen Pimm to turn her startled glance into the flasheyed semaphore of wifely social warning. ‘And a disastrous father.’
Granny and Helen stared with protective concern at Dee, who tried to catch her sister’s eye across the table, but Phee seemed not to be listening, her head bowed, probably nervous about their own turn. Helen, a domestic detective, checked the level in her husband’s wine glass. Phee turned towards Emma for facial guidance, but their stepmother was gazing urgently at Daddy. However, the target of this unexpected prosecution, with the amateur actor’s knack that had served him so well in TV, held an entirely level expression, waiting for the situation to be explained.
‘His books,’ Tom went on, ‘are filled with pithy and clever sentences – unfortunately, most of them are stolen from the work of Geoffrey Elton, Barbara Tuchman, Antonia Fraser, David Starkey, David Reynolds and many others! It would be wrong, though, to see him only as a plagiarist of work that has taken others a lifetime to research. He is also an opportunistic broadcaster, who will spout any bollocks the producer wants if it means the possibility of another TV series, tie-in book and box set.’
Dee saw on the face of Emma, who was now tightly holding Ned’s hand, a numbed, puzzled expression that she was sure mirrored her own. Helen was leaning towards Tom, glowering, as if she hoped to silence him by telepathy. Then the chilly silence in the room was broken by the happy, crackly cackle of Daddy.
‘This is a career that has taught us above all,’ Tom said, raising his voice to indicate the peroration, ‘that the best way to gain an audience’s attention is to say the exact opposite of what most people feel about a person.’
Dee realized the conceit at the same time as several others in the audience, sending a rippling giggle around the room that made even Phee raise her head to see what was going on. Emma was affectionately patting Ned’s arm, while Helen Pimm brought her hands together
in an almost-clap of comprehension and forgiveness. Grandpa Jack muttered at Granny, who smiled uncertainly, but with relief.
Without looking down, Tom located his wine glass on the table and fingered the stem, ready for a toast.
‘The Daily Telegraph TV critic,’ he said, ‘dubbed him Professor Perverse. We in this room know him as a loyal friend, warm companion, loving son, red-hot lover – oh God, sorry, he asked me not to tell you about us – and, above all, devoted father. But, in his own profitable spirit of wilful revisionism, let’s raise our glasses to the humourless egotist, Oedipal weirdo, serial child-abuser, wife-beater and woman-hater, repetitive plagiarist and dumbed-down television Autocutie who is Professor Ned Marriott!’
By now either in on the joke, or at least aware that catastrophic embarrassment seemed to have been averted, all the guests stood and echoed the name. Follow that, thought Dee, aiming an encouraging smile at her sister.
Rhyming Couplets
Although the plan had been for a collaboration – and the texts and e-mails between them always referred to the secret project as ‘our’ – Dee had been lead writer and more or less sole director and producer, which had been no surprise to Phee.
Advice-sites about twins that Phee had consulted – as a teenager feeling oppressed by the condition – had generally made three recommendations to the parents of double births: treat them completely equally, in everything from pocket money to inheritances; be wary of matching outfits and haircuts; and try to avoid them ever being referred to, by you or anyone else, as ‘the twins’.
Although the question of bequests was thankfully yet to be tested, their parents seemed to have followed the first and third instructions: even after the divorce, Daddy, when spoil-bribing them, was careful to offer identical inducements to both daughters, and friends and relatives, even now, were rebuked for referring to them as a single unit. At their one-form entry primary school, they had been in the same class, but seated several rows apart, and, once there were two or more groups, educated separately, although Mummy had agonized over Phee being ranked higher in streamed subjects.