by Clive James
But it got worse when the saintly figure was Jean-Claude van Damme. Once again he didn’t want to fight, but when bad people opened up on him with a four-barrelled 20mm cannon he was forced to kick them in the chin. Jean-Claude’s face is a bodybuilder’s bicep in worried search of its original arm but he looks like Bertrand Russell when compared to Chuck Norris. With two eyes sharing the one socket, Chuck is an action hero whose countless movies kick their way straight to video. Master of every military weapon, Chuck would still rather fight barefooted, which gives you a clue. Personal, stylized cinematic violence is really a way of giving you a holiday from the world in which guns are decisive.
Much further upmarket than Jean-Claude and Chuck, it happened again in An Officer and a Gentleman, when Richard Gere, who was born with narrowed eyes, was a trainee jet pilot who turned out to have kickboxing skills hitherto unsuspected until he and his girl were harassed by provocative hoodlums. Soon he would be flying a Tomcat off the deck of the USS Nimitz with enough firepower under his wings to melt a city, but now he was kicking the eyebrows off a bunch of bar-room thugs. And they all picked themselves up and slunk off to their lairs, and not one of them came back with a gun.
And that’s what the bare hands are all about, and it’s even what the swords are all about. It’s even what the movies with guns in them are all about, because Hollywood bullets swerve around the star and anyone on the feature list that the audience might like. Real bullets don’t do that. Real bullets don’t care who they hit. Real bullets fired by a real gun turn your highly trained kickboxing feet into instruments for running away with if you’re lucky. You don’t get to rise into the air, spin around, and elegantly kick the weapon from the nerveless fingers of the awed assailant. It’s a lie to suggest otherwise, and we could tie ourselves in knots worrying about how a free society can persuade its most powerful medium of entertainment to stop peddling drivel, but there’s at least the bitter consolation that the people who most terrify us are probably the ones who spend least time watching exquisite mid-air ballets of acrobatic combat. They’re out there on the lower deck of the bus, heading for the demilitarized zone.
Postscript
As with the previous broadcast, the underlying topic here is about our helplessness in the face of youthful violence in the streets. Despite continual assurance from the police that the incidence of adolescent gun crime was going down, everybody knew that it was always going up: not in your street, perhaps, but in other streets you’d heard about. You don’t, however, need to see a gun in order to feel uneasy. It is enough to have your home burgled a couple of times. Ours was burgled twice, and neither time was I at home, or I would have . . . would have what? A favourite newspaper horror story is about the homeowner who retaliates and is jailed for excessive violence against the thief. Though this apparently inverted judicial procedure is not without merit – electing yourself as the executioner of some dolt who nicks your videos does seem a touch excessive when you come to think about it – dreams of retaliation are hard to quell. But unless you really are a master of martial arts, you lack the means. So the dream machine takes over.
NOB VOICES, YOB VOICES
Dates of show: 2 and 4 March 2007
Helen Mirren deserves her Oscar for having learned to sound like the Queen, but the Queen should get two Oscars for having learned to sound like Helen Mirren. It took Her Majesty a lifetime of study but she finally managed to overcome her origins and start making the same sort of noise as any other well-brought-up girl from the Home Counties. She and Dame Helen might not precisely be two Essex girls together, but they share roughly the same distinction, dignity and air of authority, although I suppose Dame Helen is still the one that springs to mind when, if you’re a red-blooded male with propensities towards larceny, you think of the detective inspector you’d most like to be arrested by.
It’s nice, though, to see the class business losing its sting. When I first came to Britain forty-five years ago, there was still a class gap, not to say a class gulf. Most countries bigger than an atoll have different social classes but what makes for a really noxious class divide is that there are feelings of inferiority to match the feelings of superiority. In Australia, there are plenty of people who feel superior, especially if their share of a race horse is big enough to run on its own, but hardly anyone feels inferior: they’re all in it together. In Britain, the same is at last more or less so. The homeland has caught up with its colony. But when I first came to London, there was still plenty of quietly simmering resentful envy going on from the lower class towards the upper, which only increased the arrogance of the upper class towards the lower.
A measure of arrogance is that you really don’t care what the people around you think of the way you sound. Still lingering, in the early 1960s, one of the main differences between the working class and the middle class was that working-class married couples would rarely raise their voices to each other when they fought in public. Middle-class married couples, on the other hand, would bellow at each other as if nobody else was there, which is the true sign of unshakeable class confidence, because if you’re that arrogant, nobody else is there.
One of my first visits to the West End theatre was to the Aldwych to see a Peter Hall production of King Lear. Paul Scofield played Lear in a leather outfit that squeaked when he walked. I got so obsessed with the sound of his leather trousers squeaking that I missed most of the words, but I would probably have missed them anyway, because he had pitched his voice very low. He was a gravel-voiced, nearly inaudible Lear. Even going mad on the blasted heath, he didn’t howl, he growled.
In the foyer afterwards there was a lot of polite murmuring and I started to wonder if I hadn’t come to a country that had lost the power of speech. Then, through the crowded foyer, there strode towards the street a very suave well-brushed couple who had clearly come in from the stockbroker belt for their weekly culture ration. As the female stalked away towards the exit she shouted back over her shoulder, ‘I’m not your slave, John.’
But it wasn’t just the volume of her voice that made it stick in my mind. It was the elocution. The full cut-glass number, it was what I had come to London expecting to hear a lot more of. In Australia I had been brought up on the sort of British movies where you could identify everyone according to class by the way they spoke. You couldn’t do that in American movies, but in a British movie like In Which We Serve you knew that Noël Coward was upper deck and Richard Attenborough was lower deck. Upper deck had a stiff upper lip and lower deck had a trembling lower lip. In Brief Encounter, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson were doomed never to consummate their passion but you could tell they were made for each other by the way they spoke.
Celia, even more than Trevor, had that wonderful clipped eccent by which all the vowels were formed in the beck of the mithe and the lips never went sleck. I’m bound to say that when women were speaking the upper-class British accent it turned me on a treat, but my arrival in London seemed to be the signal for the whole thing to disappear. All the women from the north started sounding like Rachel Roberts in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and nobody in the south sounded like Celia Johnson any more except the Queen, who still, when addressing the nation at Christmas, sounded as if she had only recently attended her own coronation and been stunned by the spectacle of the Archbishop of Canterbury in full drag.
The history of Britain since that time can be roughly summarized as the successful attempt to persuade the monarch to approach, from the top down, nearer to the happy medium that linguistic experts call standard English, or received English, or even BBC English, although you might wonder how there can be such a thing as BBC English if someone like me is on the BBC. The BBC, along with the nation’s broadcasting system in general, has been instrumental in this change. Regional accents were correctly judged to be worth hearing.
A mistake, however, although not the biggest mistake, was to suppose that the regional accents were all equally understandable. I could gladly listen to Ken
Stott reading the whole Bible aloud, but even a short reading by Jimmy Nail would leave me puzzled, and not just because I’m an Aussie. It’s because a Scottish accent is inherently more intelligible than a Geordie accent, except, perhaps, from Ruth in The Archers. By intelligible I mean intelligible to other English-speakers. Americans, wherever they come from, almost invariably pronounce the whole word. So one of the secrets of American cultural power is that all Americans understand each other instantly across three million square miles and everybody else in the world who speaks English can understand them too, whereas there are plenty of British people who can’t understand their own countrymen across a distance of a hundred yards. But let’s suppose, for a moment, that all British regional accents were equally easy on the general ear. The biggest mistake was to think that yob is a regional accent as well.
But the yob voice isn’t regional. The yob voice doesn’t come from a geographical division. It comes from a social assertion, the way that the upper-class accent once did, and a sure sign of the yob voice’s deliberate aggressiveness is that it’s produced with even more effort. It once took a lot of energy to speak like Sir Alec Douglas-Home. You practically had to swallow your own mouth. It takes the same kind of effort to produce the yob uproar, whose sheer volume is the chief sign that what’s really happening is a newly dominant social force arrogantly asserting its privileges. But the privileges aren’t class privileges. This is a different thing.
Yob privileges are classless privileges. One of them is automatic individuality. In the age of universal stardom, everyone has a right to stand out even if he has no detectable characteristics. With half the consonants missing, the sound the voice makes is telling us that it doesn’t matter if there is no information to be conveyed, as long as the message is heard, and the message is ‘this is me’. The angle-grinder loudness of the voice serves to amplify the message ‘this is me’, even if the person shouting it might himself doubt the validity of that statement when he looks into a mirror. On a train, you will hear just how classless yobbery can be, when every carriage except the quiet carriage is occupied by yobs with jobs, important men who are proving it by using their mobile phones as megaphones. The quiet carriage is full of them too, conveying the further message that your space is their space if they say so.
It’s an ugly sound they make, and any dreamy-eyed social pundit is foolish who asserts that all voices have equal value. He would be closer to being right if all voices had equal volume, but the loudness is still the tip-off. Once it was one bunch who didn’t care what you thought, and now it’s another. It’s a change for the better. Long ago, Sir Alf Ramsey was mocked when he went into secret training to pick up his dropped aitches. But he was right to believe that there was indeed such a thing as being well spoken. There still is. When some commentators correctly decided that what Jade Goody said about Shilpa Shetty couldn’t have been a race thing because racism is an idea and Jade hasn’t got an idea in her head, they incorrectly decided that it must have been a class thing. But it wasn’t. It was just that Shilpa sounded like Zeinab Badawi and Trevor McDonald and all the other people who grew up speaking a reasonably pleasant-sounding English, and poor Jade didn’t. She had plenty to resent, because nothing makes you nervous quite like knowing that you get on other people’s nerves. Not that we should encourage the idea that changing the way you sound is an easy trick for an adult. It can take years, even if your face is on the stamps. But it can’t be that hard to just turn down the volume.
Postscript
Even today, when the reaction has set in and a return to decorum is thought desirable by almost everybody, you will still hear the proposition being advanced that the idea of a received standard pronunciation is a phantom. But the proposition is the phantom: we pay attention, find friendship, fall in love, and even marry, always with the proviso that the voice we hear is tolerable. Even the most stridently confident ladette knows that she has missed out on something by not sounding like the voice of that effortlessly classy woman reading out the information on the London Underground. When the luscious courtesan Abi Titmuss came to prominence, it was instantly clear why so many quite intelligent men were keen to know her. To go with her appearance, she was well spoken, and they were at least as interested in a leg up as a leg over. The same quite intelligent men rarely feel the same way about Katie Price, because she sounds as rough as a gravel road. There are no prizes for pointing out that the proper names of these flamboyant women are already fading on the breeze, but at the time of my broadcast they were common currency, if ‘common’ is the word we want. In the case of Abi, one would have thought, it isn’t: there is no gainsaying a pretty knack for speech. The ability of a model for proactive lingerie to sound better than at least one ranking duchess would have given William Blake material for a poem about the death of England.
I was a bit premature in declaring that the strangled tones of the upper class vanished from Britain at the same time as I arrived from Australia. But there can be no doubt that the tones of the middle class were already sounding more, well, normal. When I was a TV critic you could still hear the beautifully spoken presenter Vanya Kewley on television every week, and one night in Stratford, at the opening night of Les liaisons dangereuses, I thrilled to the delicious voice of Lindsay Duncan. But her voice would not have been so lovely if she had not pronounced the words so well. No form of enunciation that mangles the language can ever be attractive, and it is a mark of sentimentality to suppose it can. One of the disastrous consequences of the BBC’s elevation of Estuarine English to the status of a legitimate regional dialect was that scarcely any new female recruit to the BBC television screen sounded bearable unless her parents came from the Indian subcontinent. Nor is America exempt from the rule that a lack of vocal education is tough on the listener’s ears, mind and nervous system. Mira Sorvino sounds good in Mighty Aphrodite only because Woody Allen sounds so bad. How should a man sound? At the time of writing there is no man in Britain who sounds quite as good as the Archbishop of Canterbury, not because of his Christian principles but because of his precise articulation, although his naturally deep timbre helps.
In the text, where I mentioned the Peter Hall production of King Lear, I should have said Peter Brook. The error got all the way to the air because I spoke with such confidence nobody thought of checking it. So much for the fidelity of memory.
BECAUSE SHE’S WORTH IT
Dates of show: 9 and 11 March 2007
Let us imagine that a hundred miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, there is a little town called Moose Tooth. When the air base was still open, a few miles even further north into the snow and ice, some of the ground crew for the supersonic delta-wing bombers would come into town on Friday nights to tie one on, and the population of Moose Tooth, in order to service this sparse traffic, gradually climbed from 126 people to 214. Then the base closed and Moose Tooth shrank again to its present size. There are seventy-three people over the age of twenty-one and most of the kids who go away to get educated never come back. It’s headline news in the single-sheet local paper when one of them does.
Nothing happens in Moose Tooth, or it didn’t until this week, when it was announced that Moose Tooth would be one of the few places in the world where Elizabeth Hurley would not be staging part of her marriage celebrations. Another place was the two-house town of Bindiai, South Australia, population four people; but Bindiai never had a prayer because it hasn’t got a newspaper. Moose Tooth, as we have seen, does have a newspaper, the Moose Tooth Truth-teller, and therefore it was in with a chance. A cruel deprivation, then, that Liz Hurley and her husband Arun Nayar probably won’t be turning up.
Indeed, we should be serious here and concede that this wedding has been a comparatively modest affair, mainly confined to parts of Britain and most of India. The British part of the wedding, the opening ceremony of the ceremony, as it were, took place, as you may have heard, at Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds. Paparazzi from all over the planet gathered around the outer pe
rimeter of Sudeley Castle to be told to their surprise that they would not be allowed in. Psychologists are baffled as to how so many otherwise intelligent adult males equipped with expensive cameras could harbour the delusion that the couple about to be married had not done a deal with Hello! magazine and that they, the paparazzi, would be allowed in.
Was it a collective delusion that they would all be allowed in, or was it an individual delusion, multiplied by the number of paparazzi present, that they would each be allowed in, one at a time? Was it possible, scientists wondered, that Signore Massimo Intrusione from the distinguished Italian foreign affairs magazine Il Pesto honestly envisaged a scenario in which a heavily built security man would say, ‘Seeing it’s you, Massimo, come right in. Miss Hurley’s waiting for you beside the swimming pool in a vestigial bikini. Kir royale?’
But the paps, as always, were prepared for a long siege with nothing to sleep in except a ditch. These are men whose digestive systems are in a state of training beyond anything demanded of the SAS. These are men who can sustain life on a cockroach fry-up while they wait for a shot of Pete Doherty falling out of a window at the Priory. Only one thing breaks their spirit, and that’s when their quarry refuses to play fair. So, alas, it was in this case. It turned out that the event the paps were not being allowed in to see, the wedding ceremony, had actually taken place the day before. So what they weren’t being allowed in to see now was what was happening the day after the thing had already happened that they hadn’t been told about. They were angry in sixteen languages. Some of them were so angry they missed Elton John’s secret arrival, vertically out of the sky in a purple helicopter.
But enough of hiding the wedding’s light under a bushel. Onward to India, and the first day of a promised week of celebration. The couple came ashore in Mumbai, the new name for Bombay. In new Mumbai as in old Bombay, the Taj Mahal Hotel is the centre of the action. I stayed at the Tajma myself once, and on my first walk along the waterfront I saw a snake-charmer in action. Squatting on the pavement with the yogi-like suppleness that snake-charmers acquire after decades of practice, he played his flute above a wicker basket. A cobra came up out of the basket and bit him.