by Alan Coren
CHOCOLATE AND CUCKOO CLOCKS
ALAN COREN (1938–2007) was a celebrated English humorist, writer and satirist who was also well known as a BBC radio and television personality. He was the editor of Punch magazine for nine years, and was described by the Sunday Times newspaper as ‘the funniest man in Britain’.
GILES AND VICTORIA COREN are both writers, living in London.
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks
THE ESSENTIAL
ALAN
COREN
Edited by Giles Coren and Victoria Coren
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © The Estate of Alan Coren, 2008
Foreword and selection copyright © Giles Coren and Victoria Coren, 2008
Introductions copyright © Melvyn Bragg, Victoria Wood, Clive James,
A.A. Gill and Stephen Fry, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd., 2008
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2009
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Coren, Alan, 1938-2007.
Chocolate and cuckoo clocks : the essential Alan Coren /
Alan Coren ; editors Victoria Coren, Giles Coren.
ISBN: 9781921520655 (pbk.)
Ebook ISBN: 9781921834424 (pbk.)
English wit and humour. Great Britain--Social life
and customs--20th century--Humour.
Coren, Giles.
Coren, Victoria, 1972- .
828.91409
‘Since both Switzerland’s national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.’
ALAN COREN
Contents
Foreword by Giles and Victoria Coren
1. Present Laughter
Southgate–San Francisco–Fleet Street: 1960–1969
Introduction by Melvyn Bragg
2. No, But I Saw the Movie
3. Through a Glass, Darkly
4. It Tolls for Thee
5. . . . that Fell on the House that Jack Built
6. Under the Influence of Literature
7. This Thing with the Lions
8. Bohemia
9. The Power and the Glory
10. Mao, He’s Making Eyes At Me!
11. Death Duties
‘The Funniest Writer In Britain Today’: 1970–1979
Introduction by Victoria Wood
12. Boom, What Makes My House Go Boom?
13. Suffer Little Children
14. Ear, Believed Genuine Van Gogh, Hardly Used, What Offers?
15. Father’s Lib
16. Let Us Now Phone Famous Men
17. The Rime of the Ancient Film-maker
18. Good God, That’s Never The Time, Is It?
19. Going Cheep
20. Go Easy, Mr Beethoven, That Was Your Fifth!
21. Take the Wallpaper in the Left Hand and the Hammer in the Right . . .
22. Owing to Circumstances Beyond our Control 1984 has been Unavoidably Detained . . .
23. Foreword to Golfing for Cats: An Apology to the Bookseller
24. Baby Talk, Keep Talking Baby Talk
25. The Hell at Pooh Corner
26. And Though They Do Their Best To Bring Me Aggravation . . .
27. Life mit Vater
28. Dr No will See You Now
29. Bottle Party
30. The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World
31. The Hounds Of Spring Are On Winter’s Traces, So That’s Thirty-Eight-Pounds-Forty, Plus Making Good, Say, Fifty Quid
Appendix: The Bulletins of Idi Amin
32. All O’ De People, All De Time
33. A Word F’om De Sponsor
34. De Whitehall Snub
35. A Star Gittin’ Born
The Golden Age: 1980–1989
Introduction by Clive James
36. Tax Britannica
37. Blue Flics
38. Smiling Through
39. The Gospel According to St Durham
40. O Little Town of Cricklewood
41. Just a Gasp at Twilight
42. For Fear of Finding Something Worse
43. Mr Noon by D.H. Lawrence
44. No Bloody Fear
45. Getting the Hump
46. True Snails Read (anag., 8, 6)
47. One is One and All Alone
48. £10.66 And All That
49. Red Sales in the Sunset
50. Cave Canem
The Cricklewood Years: 1990–1999
Introduction by A.A. Gill
51. Here We Go Round the Prickly Pear
52. Uneasy Lies the Head
53. Salt in the Wound
54. Good God, That’s Never The Time? (2)
55. Japanese Sandmen
56. Card Index
57. Brightly Shone The Rain That Night
58. Tuning Up
59. The Queen, My Lord, is Quite Herself, I Fear
60. The Green Hills of Cricklewood
61. Making Old Bones
62. Osric the Hedgehog
63. Doom’d For a Certain Term to Walk the Night
64. Garden Pests
65. Time for a Quick One?
66. The Leaving of Cricklewood
67. Lo, Yonder Waves the Fruitful Palm!
68. Fabric Conditioning
69. Numbers Racket
70. Eight Legs Worse
71. Do Dilly-Dally on the Way
72. On a Wing and a Prayer
73. And Did Those Feet?
74. Nothing But The Truth
The Last Decade: 2000–2007
Introduction by Stephen Fry
75. Radio Fun
76. Not My Bag
77. Queening It
78. Domestic Drama
79. Road Rage
80. Southern Discomfort
81. Poles Apart
82. All Quiet On The Charity Front
83. Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well!
84. I Blame the Dealers
85. The Long Goodbye
Foreword
by Giles and Victoria Coren
Giles: So who’s going to write the introduction?
Victoria: I thought we were doing it together.
G: I don’t know. I’ve never written with anyone else. He never wrote with anyone else.
V: It’s not that hard. One person types, the other one paces . . .
G: And how do we refer to him? If it’s a serious essay, making a case for his inclusion in the canon, he ought to be referred to as ‘Coren’. But that would be weird, coming from us.
V: Well, we can’t write ‘Our father’. That sounds like God. ‘Daddy?’ We can’t call him Daddy. That’s just embarrassing.
G: Maybe it would be better if someone else wrote it. If we do it, it looks like vanity publishing. Any old twonk can die and have his children bind up his writing and say it’s great. Maybe we should ask an academic to do the introduction, to give it some gravitas.
V: He’d like an academic. For a long time he th
ought he was going to be one, after all. He spent those two years at Yale and Berkeley on the Commonwealth Fellowship.
G: And there was post-grad at Oxford before he went. And his First was a serious First. I think maybe even the top one in the year. He got the Violet Vaughan Morgan scholarship.
V: I always confused that with his medal for ballroom dancing.
G: No no, that was just called ‘the junior bronze’.
V: Do you think he’d have enjoyed being an academic?
G: Probably, but I don’t think his students would have enjoyed failing their exams because all they had at the end of term was a lot of jokes about Flaubert’s haemorrhoids, and an ability to write parodies of Trollope as spoken by two dustmen from Croydon.
V: He was brilliant, though. It’s a rare man who can go on a panel game and work an argument about the exact dates of the Augustan period in English literature into the middle of a John Wayne impression.
G: He was happier doing it in the middle of a John Wayne impression. Remember how he used the phrase ‘homme sérieux’, with a little flounce of the heel? He thought the very idea of a serious person was somehow preposterous.
V: He could have made a wonderful tutor in the 1960s, when it was about infusing students with a love of literature, rather than the rigours of critical theory.
G: But he had a short attention span. That’s also why he never wrote a novel. He had ideas for novels, but they were always flashy ideas with a great first sentence. He could never quite be bothered to sit down and write them.
V: Let’s not get an academic to write the introduction. We’ve got serious people introducing each decade anyway.
G: Serious like Victoria Wood, do you mean? Or serious like Stephen Fry?
V: They’re serious comedians. And Clive James is a heavyweight.
G: And A.A. Gill spells his name with initials, which is the sine qua non of academia. That’s better than being a Regius professor. T.S. Eliot, A.J.P. Taylor, F.R. Leavis, A.C. Bradley . . .
V: P.T. Barnum.
G: We still need someone for the 1960s.
V: The four people doing the later decades have written ‘appreciations’ of someone who was already quite established by then. They’re brilliant pieces. But for the 60s, it would be nice to have someone who knew him really well personally, when he was young.
G: Uncle Gus?
V: I was thinking more of Melvyn Bragg. They were at Wadham together, they’ve been friends ever since – and if you asked most British people to name an academic, they’d probably say Melvyn Bragg anyway. Or Peter Ustinov.
G: Melvyn is a big name. And he does carry intellectual weight. But he won’t get the bums on seats at readings in Borehamwood and Elstree like Uncle Gus would.
V: I’m asking Melvyn. And I think we should do the main introduction ourselves. So what shall we write in it?
G: Well, if we were going to treat him as a serious writer, we’d start with the Saul Bellow stuff. The lower-middle-class Jewish home in Southgate. Osidge Primary. East Barnet Grammar. The inspirational English teacher, Ann Brooks, who encouraged him to join the library and start reading. Growing up in the war. The mother who was a hairdresser. The father who was a . . . what was Grandpa Sam exactly? A plumber?
V: That’s what they said. I think it’s just that he had a spanner. He was an odd job man really. I also heard he was a debt collector.
G: And I heard Great Grandpa Harry was a circus strongman, but I doubt it was true. Harry was born in Poland in 1885 and left in 1903 before the pogroms started. A smart man is what he was.
V: Sam and Martha dreamed of Daddy being articled to a solicitor, didn’t they? That’s the other reason he loved Miss Brooks, because she went round to the house and persuaded them that he should apply to Oxford instead.
G: God, a solicitor. He’d have been so miserable. And, of course, nepotism being what it is, we’d have ended up solicitors as well. And then we’d have been really miserable too.
V: You are really miserable.
G: So then he went off to Oxford. And there was that first morning when he came downstairs in his digs and the landlady had cooked bacon and eggs . . .
V: He always called it ‘egg and bacon’ . . .
G: . . . she says with Talmudic precision, of the kind which crumbled in 1957 when he took the first forkful. And that was the beginning of the end, really, for all things Jewish.
V: He was always sentimental about Jews though.
G: He was always sentimental about everything. Like America.
V: He loved Yale and Berkeley . . . Do you think he ever actually wanted to be a don, or was he just so happy as a student that he wanted it to go on longer? Going to Oxford transformed his life.
G: Yes, but people know about all that. Not necessarily about him, but about that generation of 1950s grammar-school boys – the Alan Bennetts, the Melvyn Braggs, the Dennis Potters – that brief window between two educational Dark Ages, when a certain kind of lower-middle-class boy got a chance, went to Oxford and had a crack at the Establishment. That’s the irony of the antagonism between Punch and Private Eye later in the ’60s . . .
V: Exactly. Private Eye tried to mock Punch for being fuddy-duddy and Establishment, but Punch was run by the working-class boys, the grammar-school boys, the revolutionaries, while Private Eye was a bunch of right-wing, privileged public-school boys, sons of diplomats, who looked down on the staff of Punch because they thought they were common. And, in Daddy’s case, Jewish. In public, Private Eye pilloried them for being Establishment, in private Barry Fantoni was telling everyone: ‘Alan Coren looks and sounds like a cab driver.’
G: Which is why cab drivers liked him so much.
V: The Establishment is one of the things Daddy was sentimental about. He was so proud to feel part of it. And of Englishness – Keats, Shakespeare, churches, rolling hills, striding through the New Forest in a tweed cap, slashing at the ferns with a shooting stick. He actually enjoyed horseriding. And he was strangely good at it. Despite his grandfather having come over from Poland, he really did feel part of all that.
G: His proudest moment was meeting the Queen. Closely followed by meeting Princess Margaret. Closely followed by meeting Andrew and Fergie. He loved a royal. Almost as much as he loved a punctual postman.
V: But we were talking about America. He was so dazzled by it. All those hamburgers and giant steaks after the austerity of ’50s Britain. And better cars. And the literature, all those garish 1960s paperbacks of Augie March and On The Road. He started sending pieces to Punch from there, and they offered him a job so he chucked in the academic plans, came home and went to work in Fleet Street. El Vino’s, Punch lunches, Toby Club dinners, fellow writers, the old Punch table, the line of editors going back to 1841, he loved it all.
G: It was strange reading back through those first pieces from the 1960s. The fledgling him. You can see what was coming in a piece like ‘It Tolls For Thee’, a domestic comedy about trying to get a phone installed. But the writing is politically engaged, he was still taking things seriously – like racism in ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ and the bombing of North Vietnam in ‘The House That Jack Built’. He flips them around and makes his own sorts of jokes, but they developed out of a genuine concern for civil rights and social issues of the time – in a way that he left behind by the 1970s, when it started to be all about the jokes.
V: He hadn’t decided not to be a novelist yet. If he ever decided that. But he hadn’t even decided not to be a serious writer. He wasn’t completely a humorist, in the ’60s.
G: He was already doing the Hemingway parodies though. ‘This Thing With The Lions’, that was his first one.
V: How many Hemingway parodies are we going to put in the book, by the way?
G: Any fewer than thirty would be unrepresentative. But it might skew things a bit.
V: He must have written a Hemingway parody a year.
G: Let’s have a couple. The book will be full of parodies anyway – Chauc
er, Coleridge, Kafka, Conan Doyle, Melville, a lot of Melville – they’re some of the most enduring pieces. They work in an anthology. All jokes need a context, and the context of the parodies is, to some extent, eternal. They’re not dependent on immediate social or political or cultural context. Humorous writing doesn’t last as long as serious – look at Shakespeare’s comedies compared to the tragedies. Or Carry On films compared to . . . well, almost anything. Lots of Daddy’s pieces are still very funny, but the parodies all are. The passage of time doesn’t do the same damage to a literary pastiche as it does to a joke about the 1964 general election. We need to use the stuff which still works. He was so proud to be compared to James Thurber and S.J. Perelman – but who reads Thurber and Perelman now?
V: That’s all very well, but I see you’ve put two Winnie the Pooh parodies on the list. Do we need two?
G: But which would you remove – ‘The Hell At Pooh Corner’, or ‘The Pooh Also Rises’?
V: Isn’t ‘The Pooh Also Rises’ a double parody of Pooh and Hemingway? We don’t want to make his frame of reference seem limited.
G: But we must include it! That one’s part of a complex triptych of adult/child fictional parodies. Lose ‘The Pooh Also Rises’ and we lose ‘Five Go Off To Elsinore’. We lose ‘The Gollies Karamazov’.
V: Speaking of political relevance, what are we going to do about Idi Amin?
G: Yes. Idi Amin. That was always going to be a problem for so many reasons. The Idi Amin parodies don’t operate in a timeless context like the literary ones. The Idi Amin of now isn’t the one he was writing about. Daddy said himself that he wouldn’t have written those pieces later, once it turned out that Amin was such a monster. In 1974, he just thought he was writing about someone funny.
V: In a funny African voice. That’s the bigger problem. Even if Amin hadn’t turned out to be a monster, those pieces wouldn’t read the same now. ‘Wot a great boom de telegram are!’ ‘Dis international dipperlomacy sho’ payin’ off!’ Monster or not, if you were writing a column about Robert Mugabe, you wouldn’t do him like that.
G: Tempting though it would be.
V: But I don’t want anyone to think he was racist. He wasn’t racist. He went on civil rights marches in America in 1961. And his Idi Amin . . . he’s not a ‘generic African’, he’s a fully fledged character: childish, megalomaniac, charming, violent, funny. With this comedy voice – ‘Ugandan’ sent up no more squeamishly than if it were Cockney – but people might not read it like that.