by Alan Coren
75
Radio Fun
Today is a really big day. That is why I have just finished servicing and polishing my father’s old Ferguson. See how it gleams! Savour how it smells!
Hear how it thunders when I start it up!
I haven’t given my old man’s Ferguson such a seeing to in the 15 years since he died, when I took it from his place and brought it to mine. I should say here (since it has just occurred to me that unlikely pictures may be forming in your mind’s eye), that it is not an old Ferguson tractor, it is an old Ferguson wireless. It was given to my parents as a wedding present in 1935, and a very snazzy present it was; I stress this only because younger readers may think of a wireless, if they even know the word, as a titchy plastic box you clip onto your belt for jogging. They may never have seen a walnut and rosewood number the size and simulacrum of a Sheraton sideboard, standing on four sturdy cabriole legs, with six brass knobs on the front to fine-tune three enormous dials that glow in three different colours to let you know they’re in business, we are Long, Short and Medium, sir, begging your pardon, sir, and we are here to serve you, we await your pleasure, sir, you have only to twiddle. It is a wireless worth getting married for.
And, culturally speaking (which it did), it brought me up. For the first dozen years of my life, much of what I learned and most of what I enjoyed came to me through this huge speaker cunningly fretworked into, for some reason, a spray of roses. Even after 1950, when my old man bought a TV set as big as a wardrobe (whose giant oak doors nevertheless revealed a screen as big as a fag-packet), thereby so filling our little front room with electronic carpentry that only two people could ever watch or listen at a time, the third having to stand in the hall, it was the radio that did the business. Not only did it teach me more of this and that (though not, in those Reithian times, the other) than any schoolteacher ever did, it also entertained me better than anyone I ever knew: it seamlessly graduated me from Uncle Mac and Toytown and Just William and Norman and Henry Bones – subtitled The Boy Detectives, despite the fact that Norman was queenie old Charles Hawtrey and Henry was matronly old Marjorie Westbury, a weekly Radio Times revelation that not only never bothered me at all, but probably did much to explain the infinitely elastic unbigotry for which I am a byword today – to Take It From Here and The Goon Show and Ray’s A Laugh and Hancock’s Half-Hour and all the myriad other comic masterpieces from the Golden Age of Ears.
I look at the Ferguson now, and I hear it then. See these three dials? Clock not only all the poignantly yesteryear Anglophone stations, Hilversum and Daventry, Allouis and Athlone, and, yes, Valetta and Cairo – there is a map of the world on the back of the set, faded now but still half pink where once it was half red – but also Oslo and Ankara and Prague and Paris and Breslau and many a polyglottal dozen more. Oft in the stilly night, I used to creep past the door rattling in concert with my old man’s nostrils, and pad downstairs, and switch the Ferguson on, and wait while the dials began slowly to glow and the valves to hum and the speaker to whistle as I spun the dial in search of microphones a thousand crackling miles across the night. I learnt a lot of French that way, and doubtless no small smattering, now sadly lost, of Lapp and Urdu.
It was, of course, only mine exclusively in the wee small hours: in the huge large ones, it served all three of us. Sometimes in pairs: since it took two people to move it so that my mother would have room to put up the ironing-board, I would occasionally hang around to listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary; tricky for her, because, though she enjoyed having me there, the script would from time to time daringly offer a mildly gynaecological moment, and my mother dreaded questions. Care for another pairing? Me sitting with my old man as the football results came in and he checked his pools coupon, not because I chose to but because my mother knew if I was there he wouldn’t swear.
But the proper pairing for today is one I didn’t join. It was just them. You know why today is a really big day? Because it is Neville Chamberlain’s birthday. If he were alive today he’d be 134, and people would pay good money to look at him, but when he was 70, what people did was listen to him. And it was on this Ferguson that he told my parents that no such undertaking had been received and in consequence this country was at war. Which is why I have fettled it. I rather fear it is time to switch it on again.
76
Not My Bag
Had you, last week, been taking a sundown stroll through the rolling Bucks verdure, you might have spotted a strange misshapen silhouette blemishing the evening horizon, rooted to a hummock. A stunted oak? A Saxon rood? An extravagant horse-dropping, piled and eroded by the summer wind? Or even, perhaps, a statue of Charles Laughton, raised by the Gerrards Cross Victor Hugo Society? That fearsome hump, those twisted legs, the shoulder dropping to the wonky knee as the agonised head wrenches unnaturally upward, poking its pitiful eye at the uncaring heavens – what could it be but the great hunchback himself, frozen forever by the sculptor’s art?
It could be a wag practising his golf-swing, is what. That the figure displayed not a tremor of movement is explained by its having been swinging for three hours and finally come to a paralysed halt. Had some Samaritan not karted by, I might have been there yet, a topographical conundrum fit to rank with Stonehenge and the White Horse of Uffington. For the world would not know that the reason I was there was only because a malign joker had bought me, for my birthday, golf lessons. And I had just learnt them all.
Here is the first: if God had wanted man to play golf, He would have given him an elbowless left arm, short asymmetrical legs with side-hinged knees, and a trapezoid rib-cage from which diagonally jutted a two-foot neck topped by a three-eyed head. Here is the second: since the game can be played only by grotesquely distorting the body God did give us, golf was patently invented by manufacturers. For the natural way to play golf would be to throw the ball down the fairway, walk after it, pick it up and throw it again, and, having reached the green, throw it down the hole. However, in some distant eon, a chippie of fortuitous ineptitude whittled a cabriole leg a foot longer than the rest and, rather than write it off as a tax loss, decided to concoct a use for it. He then drew up a list of things you could not do, such as throw the ball, and an industry was born, with the game as a sideline, where the profit was limitless, provided you made the game constantly trickier. That is why 17 more holes were added, all so different as to require the industry to sell you as many different clubs, and when even these yielded inadequate profits, go out with shovels and dig bunkers, which led to a whole new species of club, and even more painful and humiliating contortion. No surprise that Hitler committed suicide in one.
With all these clubs and a body misshapen by their demands, man was clearly in no state to drag the stuff around, allowing a caring industry to ply him not only with bags, trolleys and karts, but with special shoes to tether him to the ground while swinging his ruins about, and special gloves to stop the clubs blistering his hands, and distinctively garish trousers to offset (inadequately) the risk of other golfers felling him, and 189 books called Improve Your Swing, which don’t, because the industry wants you to buy the 190th.
Yet, having worked all this out as I stood rooted on my very first round, it struck me that I could have got it all wrong. Might God have wanted man to play golf, after all? Did He, sitting back on the seventh day, say: I’ll call it Sunday, and I’ll give them golf. They will all start imperfect, and I shall send them out with their imperfections, and I shall give them all manner of hazards along the way, and if improving touches them with pride, I shall make them worse; they will have days of joy, and days of despair, and each will test them after its own fashion, and from time to time I shall people the earth with saints like Hogan and Nicklaus and Woods, to set examples and to point the way of Truth, and the authorised version of My laws shall be constantly revised, to keep them on the hop, so that Man, and Woman that is born of Man, shall trudge the courses of the earth in fair weather and in foul, and be tested at every tree and rough and
bog and bit that lies a foot outside the railings, and – just when things are looking up – dumb caddies shall poke an illegal 15th club into their bags to drive them nuts, and though they can never be perfect, it is in their striving that they shall become good.
More yet: even as Mrs Coren lowered me into the tub that night and went off giggling to broach the liniment, it occurred to me that perhaps Elysium might be nothing but a wondrous golf course, where the eternal day was free alike of hail or crosswind, and where we shall all be reborn with short rubber legs and straight left arms and all the other boons divinely withheld from us on Earth, and our swings shall all be perfect and all our putts plumb-straight. Either that, or you won’t stand an earthly, or rather, a heavenly, of getting in if you’re anything less than scratch; and, even then, you’ll have to know Somebody. In which case, I may have left it a bit late, on both counts.
77
Queening It
Since today is HM the Queen’s unofficial birthday, I know that you will want me not only to wish her many happy unofficial returns on all our behalfs, but also to take this opportunity to reply to those countless thousands of you who wrote to me regarding the recent Buckingham Palace statement that the Queen was exempt, ‘by reason of her special position’, from the law requiring her subjects to wear a rear seatbelt. Were there, you clamoured to learn, any other special dispensations which Her Majesty alone enjoyed?
The reason that I have not replied earlier is because, not surprisingly, there turned out to be a huge amount of painstaking research involved; but I’m delighted to tell you that I am now, at last, in a position to publish in the national interest what I hope with all my heart is a usefully informative – if by no means comprehensive – list.
When not travelling by car, for example, Her Majesty is uniquely entitled to stand upstairs on buses. Should she spit, however, she is liable to the same fine as anyone else, although she would, of course, be given time to pay. On trains, she is allowed to smoke in the lavatories, but not cigars or pipes. She may also lean out of the window without penalty, except on InterCity routes. On the London Underground, she may not go up a down escalator, or vice versa, but she is allowed to jump over the barrier if she hears her Tube train coming, provided she has a valid ticket for the journey. When flying, she is not permitted to get up before the plane has come to a complete halt, but she does not have to take care when opening the overhead lockers. She is, of course, allowed to lean her bicycle against shop windows.
Sport, as you might expect, is a somewhat more complex juridical area for Her Majesty. When bowling, she is permitted to deliver more than one bouncer per over – except in one-day matches – but she is nevertheless required to observe current ECB dress codes and not wear a headscarf when batting or fielding. She can be given out lbw, but never stumped, and in the unfortunate event of a run out, it is her partner who must surrender his wicket, irrespective of fault. As to football, the Queen is allowed, when playing in goal, to move before a penalty is struck, and would not normally be sent off for bad language, unless violence were involved. In rugger, she does not need to call for a mark or leave the field when bleeding, and in tennis she may abuse her racket as much as she likes. In athletic competition, she is allowed four attempts at the high jump and, when throwing the hammer, to put one foot, but not both, outside the circle. The Queen is also uniquely permitted to carry a spare baton in the 4 x 400 relay, in case she drops one. In snooker, she is permitted to pot the six remaining colours in any order she chooses. Should her opponent go down during a boxing match, Her Majesty is not required to walk to a neutral corner.
She is allowed to busk on her highway, but not in public houses which do not have a music licence. In zoos (with the exception of Whipsnade), Her Majesty is permitted to feed the animals.
When it comes to shopping, the Queen is allowed to go through the checkout marked ‘6 items or less’ with 7 items or more, but no special dispensation applies in regard to taking the trolley from the premises. In Post Offices, staff may not ask her to go to the next counter, and in petrol stations she does not have to switch off the engine while filling up, though she must take the cigarette out of her mouth. She is allowed to bring her dog into foodshops, but if it widdles against anything, she is not exempt from prosecution, provided a notice to that effect is prominently displayed.
Should, however, a notice be prominently displayed in any public place stating that bill stickers will be prosecuted, Her Majesty may safely ignore this, just as she may with impunity disregard any injunction to leave these premises as she would wish to find them. She is not, mind, exempt from the law in the matter of spraying graffiti, and if told to use the footbath before entering a public swimming pool, she is legally obliged to comply. She is allowed to drop litter only in the royal parks, but may walk on the grass wherever she takes a fancy to do so.
And finally, when driving – in addition to the seatbelt dispensation with which we began all this – Her Majesty is also allowed to hoot after 11 pm, and overtake in the Blackwall Tunnel. If she were to park on a double-yellow line, however, her car would be liable to be towed away, but only by a peer of the realm, with a silken rope.
78
Domestic Drama
In common with all who figured (or rather, didn’t) in last week’s news about plummeting audiences, I don’t go to the theatre much, these days. I cannot handle it as once I could. Theatre drains me, now. Theatregoers will maintain that that is precisely what it is supposed to do, it is why man first put on a crude bark mask, painted his feet blue, and began hitting himself on the head with a pig’s bladder to the atonal accompaniment of a three-holed bullrush; and I have no argument with that. It is simply that, as I grow older, I find that the emotional sturdiness of my earlier years daily grows feebler. An evening of theatre leaves me wrecked.
Especially when it is a long evening of theatre, like the one I recently experienced. Major, in every sense: an eight-hour performance of such extraordinary dramatic breadth, variety, and intensity that the dreamt recollection of it, several days on, can still hinge me upright on my midnight mattress, sweating and jabbering.
The performance began at 6 p.m., with a bourgeois bonne-bouche of an opening scene that had a touch of Coward about it, a smidgeon of Rattigan, a whiff of Ayckbourn. Set in a London bedroom, it features a woman who cannot find her other earring and a man who cannot find his other cufflink shouting increasingly barbed questions at one another about state of clothes, choice of restaurant, means of transport, location of tickets, future of marriage, and so on. They are about to phone lawyers when the doorbell rings. It is an Estonian asylum-seeker with a clapped-out Vauxhall, saying he was booked to take them to the Garlic Theatre in Leicester, he has looked in map, is long way, everyone must go quick quick. The husband explains, not without hand signals, about the Garrick Theatre off Leicester Square and the Estonian trudges off to sit in the Vauxhall for an hour, swearing. The next scene, which owes much to Beckett, is set in what seems to be a skip. It is in fact a Vauxhall, stuck in a contraflow outside Lewisham. The three occupants are screaming at one another. None of them knows why they are outside Lewisham. After a while, an old man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Harold Pinter punches out the windscreen, pokes his head through, and gives them complex instructions about how to get from Lewisham to Leicester Square.
Act II opens in the foyer of the Garrick Theatre, half an hour after the opening of Feelgood, with the couple trying to discover the secret of why people take £32 a seat off you and will not allow you to take the seat itself just because you have been in Lewisham, stuck in a play that has been going on while the play you have come to see has already started. The answer seems to be that Tom Stoppard has a lot to answer for, although there is some question about whether the question was Michael Frayn’s. The husband goes to the stalls bar at this point and shouts at a lot of staff who aren’t there. Eventually someone turns up and sells him two large whiskies for a sum which would have allowed him, in the
days when he started going to the theatre, to buy his own pub.
We next see the couple (in an engaging little trompe de théâtre which invites comparison with Jean Cocteau) passing from the stage of their play into the auditorium to watch Feelgood, a piece in which a lot of actors shout at one another to scant purpose, as far as the husband can see an hour later, when he re-emerges into the foyer, carrying his wife, who always falls asleep. Both are starving, but (qv. Act I) neither has booked anywhere, because each had, of course, assumed that the other had done it. The wife says never mind, The Ivy is just around the corner.
Act III opens outside The Ivy. It might have opened inside, but for the fact that the next free table is on 3 March 2004, provided there is a cancellation. Since they cannot wait that long, the couple spend the next hour wandering through theatreland in a scene offering more than a passing nod to Edward Bond, looking no longer for a restaurant but for an all-night chemist to deal with the sprain of the husband’s ankle caused by being shoved off the pavement by a mob of several hundred theatregoers with tattoos and stapled noses. Eventually they find a chemist, but it is so full of theatregoers waiting for midnight to transform their prescriptions into something to stuff into their stapled noses that the couple decide to hail a cab home.
But there is, of course, nothing to hail; so, poignantly redolent both of Father Courage and his Swollen Bloody Ankle and Long Day’s Journey Into North West London, the play ends with the couple limping home at 2 a.m. to wonder aloud whether they should go to the theatre much, these days.
79
Road Rage
Last night, at the Camden Odeon, bang in the middle of Bridget Jones’s Diary, I got my old trouble back. I hadn’t had my old trouble for nearly 40 years. I last got it at the Swiss Cottage Odeon, bang in the middle of Dr No. You will say, aha, his old trouble clearly has something to do with Ursula Andress wriggling out of her rubber bikini, that would explain why it came back last night, it was on account of Renée Zellweger wriggling out of her rubber knickers, I rather think we have the measure of Mr Coren’s old trouble, do we not – but you are wrong. While it is true that my old trouble is about cinema distraction, when some minor feature suddenly lurches the mind away from the major feature and strands it in an obsessional limbo while the major feature spools on unnoticed, it has nothing to do with snappy latex, or even snappy women. What it has everything to do with is snappy cars.