by Clive James
Postscript
In the short span of a broadcast there is little time available in which to cover yourself if you risk an insensitive statement, so I had to leave out of this piece the interesting but desolating information that the Hollywood plastic surgeon, after showing me how he could fix my face, asked me to fix his own life. Telling me that he wanted to move into stand-up comedy, he asked me for my advice, and wondered if I might care to look at a script he had written. My face fell: a sight he would normally have greeted as a business opportunity, but on this occasion it must have been all too clear that what he had induced was dismay rather than hope. I was within an ace of hearing him audition. It was a desperate moment but I didn’t want to appear ruthless by saying so on air. For similar reasons, I didn’t mention the startling effect of meeting Kirk Douglas face to face, as it were. (Later on, in my book of memoirs The Blaze of Obscurity, I did mention it, because it fitted the story.) An actor whose on-screen gurning I deplored but whose intelligence I admired – his book of autobiography is a model of reflective sanity – had turned himself into . . . into what? Into a bad drawing of Kirk Douglas. But to prove myself sympathetic as well as observant, I would have needed a thousand words for that point alone, and it seemed more useful to go on stressing the general point that the perfectly sensible work of reconstructing faces blighted from childhood by a callous providence had largely been made possible by the perfectly senseless desire of the spoiled rich to wish Fate undone.
It should be added, however, that a plaything for the rich has by now become a requirement for the poor, in line with the modern mass-democratic tendency for all privileges to be claimed as common property. Low-rent hookers acquire the same face as a goldfish, and in India high-school students have dimples put in because they think it will give them a better chance at university. Almost always the results are too incongruous to be effective, but as with the celebrity culture, there is no legislating against delusion. One can merely hope that the storm will blow itself out. Yet the whole farrago would still be worth it just for making it possible for those children in Africa to have their cleft palates repaired.
FIDGETS ON THE MARCH
Dates of show: 16 and 18 February 2007
I once knew a young man who tapped his fingers on the table while he spoke. He didn’t tap them loudly. He just tapped them to accompany the rhythm of what he was saying, so that the general effect was more varied than monotonous. But it drove me crazy, and I went even crazier because I wasn’t allowed to say that I was going crazy. In the polite Anglo-Saxon culture from which the Australian culture derives – and I want to examine this word ‘culture’ in a minute – you don’t tell people who have the fidgets to stop fidgeting. This young man was in our house quite a lot, tapping away for a couple of years, and never once did I feel that I had the leeway to tell him to stop doing that or I would arrange to have him escorted outside and inserted upside down into the wheelie bin for compostable matter.
Then he married one of my daughters and I felt free to speak. I spoke gently, trying to leave room for the consideration that I might be unusually sensitive to the fidgets in other people, and might even have a case of the fidgets myself that I didn’t know about. The possibility that there are deliberate cases of the fidgets is one that we will have to examine, but surely the fidgets in general are just a sign of nervous energy, and almost all young people fidget. My son-in-law has been exemplary since I finally felt free to explain my point with the aid of a mallet, and lately he hasn’t even needed to keep his hands in his pockets during a conversation.
But fidgeting is a bad sign in adults, and the mental version of the fidgets is practically a defining mark of the age we live in now, when the liberal democracies, as if they couldn’t count on enough trouble from illiberal forces of all persuasions, nevertheless behave as if they had a duty to demoralize their own populations by changing the name of everything that people have learned to rely on. The excellent social commentator Christopher Booker once called the widespread official urge to change the name of everything that works Neophilia, but I think we need a new name, the fidgets.
Thinking that anything needs a new name is, of course, an example of the fidgets, but in this case I think we need it because the word Neophilia suggested that the urge came from a mere love of the new, whereas I think it comes from something more comprehensive, a demonically playful urge to see how far people can be driven towards insanity before they protest. Not long ago, at Paddington, I ran to catch a train that was called First. The long version of the name is First Great Western, which is already bad enough because it suggests the possible existence of a Second Great Western. But the First Great Western company insists on referring to itself and its trains as just First.
My problem, as I ran with a heavy bag in each hand from the barrier end of the platform, was to find the first second-class carriage in a train all of whose carriages were marked First. I cursed First in the worst language at my command, but my outburst at First was nothing beside the imprecations I rained on One. Yes, what used to be simply called Anglia Railways is now even more briefly but far less simply called One. This leaves the way clear for the railway station announcer to inform potential passengers that one One train will leave from platform two and the other One train will leave from platform three.
If the first One train leaves at twenty to one, it’s the twenty to one One train, and if the other one leaves at ten to one it’s ten to one on that it’s the one One train one actually wanted but one couldn’t understand the announcement. What happens when you have to change from a First train to a One train I leave to you, but you might face a situation where you should catch the first First train if you want to change to the one One train that will get you to the mental hospital before you crack up.
Except, of course, that it’s never now called a train, it’s called a service, just as the passenger is now a customer. Linguistic philosophers have already written theses about how the vocabulary of marketing has invaded the realm of transport, which logically should have no need of marketing, because people know exactly what they want and demand nothing except for the means of transport to be safe, clean and on time. But the language of marketing spreads inexorably because it gives those who use it a chance to be creative, which everybody has been taught is a desirable thing to be.
In fact, the last thing that a passenger who has already been outraged by being called a customer wants to hear when he is sitting, or probably standing, in a train running late, or probably not running at all, is a voice on the public address system calling the train a service, when providing a service is exactly what it is currently in the process of not doing. Nor does the voice on the public address system show any sign, once it gets started, of wanting to shut up. The voice supplies the information that the buffet car is situated in the middle of the service, for the benefit of anyone who thought that it might be travelling along separately some way behind the service. The voice apologizes for the delay caused to your journey, a way of softening the fact that the delay has been caused, not to your journey, but to you.
The voice continues to audition for a career in broadcasting by pointing out that the first One service to arrive at the next station will be the last One service to continue any further until the engineering works have been completed. Where did it all start? Well, it probably started when the name British Railways contracted to British Rail. Contraction of a system’s name is a bad sign and rearrangement of the name’s components is another. It’s a rule that this rearrangement of the name’s verbal components should only take place at a time when the system’s mechanical components are melting down. London Transport, for example, changed to Transport for London in the very period when the Jubilee Line extension was in a continual process of coming to a halt because its hyper-sophisticated signalling system was doing what state-of-the-art technology always does, i.e. proving that the technology you want is the stuff that used to work. The total cost of changing a logo for an organiz
ation that big is so frightening that the figure is seldom published.
Sometimes the total cost happens twice. History has forgotten the brief period when the name Royal Mail, which everyone understood, was changed to Consignia, which nobody understood. The cost of changing the name on every facility and product of the Royal Mail to Consignia was astronomical, and the cost of changing the name back again was astronomical twice. A country that could do that to itself was ready to construct the Millennium Dome, a monument to the fidgets said to be visible from the moon, an attribute valued by the kind of people who think they have already been there.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Millennium Dome is that it still has its ‘the’. The unwanted, unwarranted and unwieldy suppression of a preliminary ‘the’ is a sure sign of the fidgets at executive level. The Tate Gallery, for example, in either of its main manifestations, Tate Britain or Tate Modern, is now officially not the Tate, but Tate. This leaves the way open to meet at eight at Tate to eat, in which case we ate at Tate, or we were late at Tate and had to wait, and thus missed our Tate-at-eight tête-à-tête.
Such changes of name were once made by freshly appointed executives who wanted to announce their arrival, and who, unable to change what they should, changed what they could. But by now, surely, it’s done out of a kind of desperation, as if words can work magic. It happens throughout the culture, and the misguided use of the word ‘culture’ is a disturbing further development of what is essentially voodoo. Regularly now we hear about young men shooting each other, and sometimes shooting their own girlfriends, as a response to what they call ‘disrespect’. The misuse of the word ‘disrespect’ is just a pitiful sign of the vicious stupidity by which young men demand to be respected when there is nothing to respect them for. But when the upmarket newspapers run worried articles about what they call ‘the gun culture’, that’s something else. Calling it ‘the gun culture’ not only solves nothing, it actually compounds the offence, by tacitly conceding that the responsible authorities can’t be expected to confiscate the lethal weapons from the individual bone-heads waving them, but should wait until a complex sociological phenomenon has been explained in the appropriately elevated words. And you can’t blame the responsible authorities for waiting. Actually to do something about a young crack-head fidgeting with a gun takes more than high-flown language. It takes bravery. But that’s another subject.
Postscript
This broadcast drew a lot of letters – not always with a psychiatric clinic as the sender’s address – from people who had been driven nuts by the way the names of trains changed as the ‘service’ got worse. Calling an actual train a ‘service’ was, of course, the initial signal that the rot had irreversibly set in. A large public innovation in language is always the sure sign that a damaging alteration has taken place in reality. Most of the alterations come about as a result of rampant managerialism, which is an impulse in itself. It is a universal law that if the new management of a company can do nothing else, it will change the company’s name. Later on there was a blatant case when the reliably named Norwich Union building society changed its name to Aviva. Everybody in Britain liked the sound of Norwich Union, and people abroad were proud when they learned to pronounce it, but it was decided that a group with global ambitions needed a name equally and immediately impressive in all countries. That the new word ‘Aviva’ was no more impressive that the strangled cry of a drunken Spanish football fan was not held to be relevant.
FLYING PEOPLE, FLAGRANT PIFFLE
Dates of show: 23 and 25 February 2007
A journalist who lives near Clapham High Street in London recently wrote a piece in which he wondered why that famous street was turning into what he called a demilitarized zone. Judging from the context he so frighteningly evoked, I think he must have meant a militarized zone, but he could be excused for losing his grip on the English language. Stray into the wrong side of that road and you can be in gangland. The now commonly canvassed idea that the nation’s youth is sinking into a state of hopelessness just one step away from open warfare is hard to accept, but only if you haven’t actually seen one young man being assaulted by a couple of others, or, more likely, by half a dozen others.
The best way not to see it is to live somewhere else. I myself spend a lot of time in south London, but so far it’s the right part of south London. The chances of getting mown down in the cross-fire between permanently dazed crack-heads accusing each other of ‘disrespect’ is still quite low. The only thing to be afraid of is that I might meet Danny on the bus. Danny, who has been named and shamed because Britain lacks the means to send him into orbit, is barely tall enough to nut you in the groin, but he has accumulated so many ASBOs for meaningless violence that he is no longer allowed upstairs on the bus, where, apparently, his meaningless violence is especially likely to be unleashed. As far as I can figure out on my pocket calculator, this altitude restriction on Danny’s activities increases my chance of meeting him downstairs when I struggle aboard. Meaningless violence from Danny has driven a lot of people to fear for their sanity already and I’d hate to be in a position where I would have to use my martial arts skills on one so small.
My martial arts skills were learned from martial arts movies. Nowadays, having attained the status of black belt with gold tassels and diamond clasp, I no longer need to watch these movies, but they’re everywhere and some of them are disguised as art, so they can sneak up on you. An art martial arts movie, or martial arts art movie, makes meaningless violence meaningful, or so we’re told. I was able to test this claim all over again the other night, when, still shaking from a newspaper close-up of Danny’s face, I accidentally tripped the switch on my television set’s optical fibre sidereal satellite cable box and was confronted once again, on channel 723, with the allegedly classic martial arts movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Many film critics, not all of them on medication, think that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is still the acme, apex and apotheosis of the Chinese meaningful violence martial arts art movie, mainly because of the purportedly balletic beauty with which its featured personnel run up the sheer walls of the Forbidden City and along the treetops of the enchanted forest while slicing at each other with whirling swords made from fragments of a meteorite forged in the book-lined cave of a Confucian philosopher, with extra boiled rice.
Ancient Chinese swords, despite the legendary sharpness proved by their ability to purée a passing butterfly, rarely make contact with swordsmen, or swordswomen, in such a way that the victim loses a limb or even a little finger. Two opposing swordsmen or swords-women – let’s just call them swordspersons – will emerge untouched from a fifteen-minute stretch of virtuoso choreography, a pas de deux for interlocking whirlwinds. If, after all that spinning, diving, somersaulting and grimacing, a sword strikes home, it makes only a small neat puncture which in no way lessens the loser’s capacity to speak that special dialogue from the Orient that actually sounds more Chinese after it has been dubbed into English.
‘Your skills are great,’ says Falling Snow. ‘Your sword was quick,’ says Rising Cloud. ‘Your quest is finished,’ says Passing Wind. Passing Wind is Rising Cloud’s mentor. Passing Wind is old, older than the hills, visible in the background for purposes of comparison. Yet he, too, can fly. He’s been flying since before the Wright brothers. He’s been flying since long before mainland China started turning out sword operas with flying people in them, and you probably remember him from the very first such epic that made an international hit: ‘Flying People, Flagrant Piffle’. He was a veteran even then, and by now he has run up every wall in China. All the young swordspersons fall to their knees before Passing Wind.
The sub-genre of meaningfully violent martial arts art movies grew out of the sub-sub-genre of kickboxer movies. Ever since Bruce Lee was at the height of his histrionic powers back in the early seventies, kickboxer movies have been coming out of Hong Kong like a trail of oil behind a sampan. Those who believe that Libe
race was a better actor than Bruce Lee tend to neglect the fact that Bruce, though unable to narrow his eyes without flaring his nostrils and vice versa, had hidden powers of hypnosis. A dozen assailants, strangely unequipped with guns, would corner Bruce in a car park behind the studio and sportingly give away their numerical advantage by running at him one at a time, shouting so as to ensure that he could see them coming and kick each one of them in the chin with the sound of a slamming door.
As each assailant reeled back stunned to be replaced by the next, a close-up on Bruce’s face revealed that his narrowed eyes and flared nostrils had been joined by pursed lips. Try it with your own face and you’ll find it isn’t easy, but when I saw my first Bruce Lee movie in its place of origin, Hong Kong, the whole audience was doing it. Needless to say, they were all young men, and suddenly I got the point. They were just ordinary, hard-working stiffs in suits, like those many millions of Chinese young men, everywhere in the world except in China, who had a good job and a mobile telephone.
Mobile telephones were as big as lunch-boxes in those days but the jobs were already proving that you could have a salary and still feel powerless. Soon, most of the jobs in the developed world would feel like that. And what do we dream of when we’re powerless? We dream of having amazing personal martial arts skills. The same dream spread to the West, as it were, when oriental martial arts started invading Hollywood B-movies. It was bad enough when they invaded television in the form of a long-running American series called Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as a saintly oriental figure who would withstand an hour of provocation by hoodlums armed with rocket launchers before he finally cut loose with the barefoot martial arts skills taught to him by a master even more ancient than Passing Wind.