by Stephen Fry
Glambidge and I arrived in good time to miss the first act. I shan’t blame Glambidge, he drove that Wolseley to the limit. Unfortunately its limit appears to be nineteen miles an hour. Howsomever, we had five minutes to pass before the interval, minutes I filled inspecting the grounds and wondering at the particularly penetrating quality of fine cold driving summer rain. In due course the act ended and the audience filed out of the – well, the auditorium.
Ladies and gentlemen, mother, friends: imagine my mortification, picture my distress, conceive of my chagrin. That audience of opera-goers was dressed, each man jack or woman jill of them, in what I can only describe as the most appalling collection of day wear. The only black ties to be seen were those about the necks of the Front of House staff. My old pupil hastened up to me. ‘Why, Professor,’ he shrieked. ‘Whatever are you dressed up like that for? This is the dress rehearsal – I thought you knew.’
I had come for the public dress rehearsal in evening dress.
Words, thousands of them, spin into my mind, some of them English, many of them culled from alien tongues; none of them, not a one, is capable of describing a scintilla of an iota of a shadow of a suspicion of an atom of a fraction of a ghost of a tithe of a particle of my horror, shame and pitiable distress. Of all the solecisms, gaffes, floaters, blunders and bowel-shatteringly frightful bloomers possible to make, I am fully persuaded that overdressing heads the field by a comfortable furlong.
Ichabod, ohimé, eheu, aïee! I dived like a kingfisher into the lavatory, slammed the door behind me and sat sobbing there for the ensuing two and a half hours. Every half-pitying, half-scornful look that had been cast me as I had flown into this sanctuary replayed itself in my tortured mind. They had all stared as upon some parvenu Armenian millionaire who wears bought medals at a British Legion dinner, or some arriviste mayor who sits even in his bath chained in aldermanic splendour. If only I hadn’t told Glambidge he might drive on into Lewes to look up his wife who lives in a lunatic asylum just outside the town, I might have been able to sneak home even then. As it is I writhed in a lather of shame for the duration.
But now, in the cold light of reason, I am wondering if it is not possible that I over-reacted a little. Might a calmer man not have passed the whole misunderstanding off with a light laugh? Was I not being myself a little bit of a snob in attributing to others my own contempt for myself? If anyone was there, and saw me, perhaps they could write to me and relieve my mind.
Meanwhile, you have been patient. Many of you will wonder at my unhappiness and its irrelevance to real and earnest life outside, but the more intelligent will, knowing that there is an embargo on political talk at this electoral time, understand the subtext of my little reminiscence, and read the clear signals of its underlying allegory and know what to do about it. Onward and upward, heigh ho: if you have been, sit down.
Sidney Gross
Another extract from Colour Supplement.
ANNOUNCER: SIDNEY GROSS, tour operator for Sad People’s Holidays, talks openly about his crime.
I think one of the great things about the kind of holiday that my company can offer is that it gives the chance for people whose IQ is between eighteen and thirty to have a really good time. Most of our holiday-makers are based out of Milton Keynes, Telford, Wales, Peterborough, Warrington-Runcorn – the kind of UK environment that has to advertise to get anyone to live there. We figure that the kind of person who thinks it would be nice if all towns were like Milton Keynes is the kind of person who is going to enjoy one of our packages.
We’re interested in young, bright, attractive, good-time people, but they’re never interested in us, so we have to make do with sad, old, desperate alcoholics and lechers who book themselves on one of our holidays in the vain hope that they might be able to go to bed with someone before they’re fifty.
On our brochures you’ve probably seen the photographs of topless girls, hunky wind-surfing men and good-time couples playing beach games, and in fact it is perfectly usual for our holiday-makers to have exactly that kind of activity available for them to watch. On our islands, we arrange coach parties to the more expensive and fashionable beaches where they can spend all day watching young people having a good time from inside the coach.
I get absolutely fed up when people accuse Club Med IQ 18–30 of being a kind of licensed pimp. We have absolutely no kind of licence whatever. We don’t need one. To those critics who claim our kind of holiday panders to the more revolting sides of human behaviour, that our holiday-makers are giving Britons abroad a bad name, I say look at our return-rate, look how many pleasure-seekers come back on our holidays again and again, looking for a good time. And who knows, on their third or fourth or fifth trip they might find one. We’re in the miracle business.
APOLOGY:
Since that young, scabrous, wicked and irreverent piece was recorded the BBC has heard that Club Med IQ 18–30 has completely transformed the nature of the holidays it offers and people with IQs well over thirty are now admitted. We would like to apologise for any offence caused. We would also like to apologise for the use of the word ‘squalor’ and the phrase ‘lowest common denominator’ which have just occurred in this apology. Thank you.
Trefusis on Education
This one single broadcast for some reason attracted more correspondence than any other: I sent over a hundred copies out to people who wrote in asking to see the thing in print. Some nerve was touched, I suppose.
VOICE: Donald Trefusis is still on his lecture tour of the universities and women’s institutes of England. This week has seen him in Newcastle, Exeter, Norwich, Lincoln and tonight, Nottingham. On his way between Norwich and Lincoln he had time to talk to his old pupil, Stephen Fry, whose parallel comedic tour has attracted widespread concern.
Hugely so to you all. Firstly I would like to thank the obliging undergraduate of the School of Mauritian Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who so kindly retrieved my valise last night. I am sorry he had to look into it in order to discover its rightful owner, and I assure him the sum required in used banknotes will be left at the assigned place. I look forward to the safe return of the appliances.
Now, I’m particularly glad I caught you just now because I wanted very much to have a word about this business of education. I have visited so many schools, universities and polytechnics in this last week, listened to the tearful wails of so many pupils, students and teachers, that I feel I should speak out. As one who has spent his entire life, man, boy and raving old dotard, in and out of educational establishments I am the last person to offer any useful advice about them. Better leave that to politicians with no education, sense or commitment. They at least can bring an empty mind to the problem. However I would like to alienate you as much as possible at this time by offering this little canapé from the savoury tray of my experience. If you would like to kill me (and you would not be alone in that ambition) forget poison, expunge strangulation from your mind, and entirely fail to consider the possibility of sawing through the brake cables of my Wolseley, there is a much simpler course open to you. Simply creep upon me when I am least expecting it and whisper the phrase ‘Parent Power’ into my ear. Stand back and admire the effect. Clubbing cardiac arrest.
Parent power: schmarent power, I say. Don’t misunderstand me, oh good heavens remove yourselves as far as possible from the position of not understanding me. Democracy and I have no quarrel. But on this head if on no other believe me, parent power and democracy are as closely related as Mike Gatting and the Queen Mother, and unless someone has been keeping a very fruity scandal from me, that is not very closely at all. Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. The customer is always right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or
eighteen.
Because of course education is not the issue. ‘Heaven preserve us from educated people,’ is the cry. Ask Norman Tebbit, for whom a leering naked teenager in a newspaper is no different from a Titian nude,1 ask him what education means. Ask the illiterate ghouls of Fleet Street or Wapping Street, or whatever unfortunate thoroughfare they now infest, what education is. A poem with swear words has to be banned from television or they will squeal for weeks.2 They’ve dealt with the socialists in the town halls, now they want to turn on those clever people who mock them in their plays and books.
This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today’s legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change. Heavens no.
The day a child of mine comes home from school and reveals that he or she has been taught something that I agree with is the day I take that child away from school.
‘Teach Victorian values, teach the values of decency and valour and patriotism and religion,’ is the cry. Those are the very values that led to this foul century of war, oppression, cruelty, tyranny, slaughter and hypocrisy. It was the permissive society it is so horribly fashionable to denounce that forced America to back out of the Vietnam War, it is this new hideously impermissive society that is threatening to engulf us in another. I choose the word ‘engulf’ with great care.3 Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all. Heaven help us, when will we realise that we know nothing, nothing. We are ignorant, savagely, hopelessly ignorant – what we think we know is palpable nonsense. How can we dare to presume to teach our children the very same half-baked, bigoted trash that litters our own imperfect minds? At least give them a chance, a faint, feeble glimmering chance of being better than us. Is that so very much to ask? Apparently it is.
Well, I’m old and smelly and peculiar and I’ve no doubt everything I said is nonsense. Let’s burn all those novels with naughty ideas and naughty words in them, let’s teach children that Churchill won the Second World War, that the Empire was a good thing, that simple words for simple physical acts are wicked and that teenage girls pointing their breasts at you out of newspapers are harmless fun. Let’s run down the arts departments of universities, let’s string criminals up, let’s do it all now, for the sooner we all go up in a ball of flame, the better.
Oh dear, listening back I can’t help feeling that some of you may have got the impression that … well, it’s only because I care. I do care so very much. And when I’m away from home and see how poor and ignorant a people we are, well it upsets me. I think I should take one of my slow-release capsules and perhaps snuggle up with an Elmore Leonard and a warming posset. If you have been, I wonder why.
1Tebbit had been reported as having made some such lovely remark that week.
2‘V’ by Tony Harrison had caused something of a storm at the time.
3Surprisingly percipient for once …
Trefusis and Redatt
I gaze grumpily from my window this morning and my heart straightway melts at the sight below: I see along the river banks those harbingers of spring, tossing their heads in sprightly dance, decked out in their bright oranges and yellows, dancing and bobbing and waving – the tourists. It’s not in me to be miserable when I know that I am sharing the planet with creatures who wear fluorescing nylon anoraks and Argyll check knitwear.
At this time of the year it has become something of a ritual with me to devote a day to sorting out my papers: I file my correspondence, bring my scrap-book and commonplace books up to date and hire a skip to take away all the letters I have received during the past year from credit card companies. I deal with what is prettily called junk mail yearly rather than as the occasion arises because instead of simply throwing it away I like to return it direct to the companies who sent it me in the first place. What Mr Visa or the Messrs Diners Club think about receiving a large consignment of shiny paper from me every year I have no idea, they haven’t done me the favour of communicating their opinions on the subject. If their feelings in any way correspond with mine then I suspect that they are wildly irritated by the proceeding. I cannot imagine that a credit card employee would be any more interested in buying an ear-ring caddy or onyx wine cooler than I am, for all that there may be space for up to three of his or her initials upon the lovingly crafted surfaces of those objects.
The real joy of my spring clear out, however, is the letters. I enjoy a wide and varied correspondence. I am currently engaged in an epistolary war of attrition with philologists and structural linguists all over the world. There is a certain Professor of Melanesian languages in Penang with whom I have been arguing by letter for thirty years about the root of the simple Papuan word redatt
which, as some of you may know, means ‘unlikely to take part in evening games’. A useful word and one that reflects the greatest credit on the Papuan people. As a person who is very far from being redatt, delighting in all manner of parlour entertainments, I have found that the simple explanation of the word to members of a houseparty will make them all much less likely to refuse to participate in whatever diversion I may wish to set up towards the end of the day. This is an important point about language. Most people who do not like to engage in after-dinner games and sports in some measure hold themselves aloof and consider, with a distressing hauteur, that they are somehow above the sportive frivolities of other men. To be told that their measure has been taken by a race thousands of miles away, whose life style might be imagined to be far less sophisticated than their own, is somehow galling to such persons. That a simple people has dared to distil a dislike of evening games into a word, that is too much for them. The unsporting persons are not after all fascinating or alluringly enigmatic – they are simply redatt, unlikely to take part in evening games.
And so at Easter time I would like to take it upon me to. unburden myself of another word. Rather rare, it comes from an old Urgic dialect of the tundra, used in the fourth century by the Lappish community that settled near Helsinki after the great Herffteld thaw of AD 342. The word is Hevelspending, it is a noun and it means ‘the gasp made by one who, walking in the morning, smells spring in the air for the first time after a long winter’. We in Britain have a word ‘mugger’ that means exclusively ‘one whose profession is to stop others in the street and forcibly to relieve them of their possessions’ and the Lapps have a word meaning ‘the gasp made by one who, walking in the morning, smells spring in the air for the first time after a long winter’. Hevelspending. Do you know sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, it may just be the wild anarch in me, but I can’t help wondering whether perhaps – oh, I don’t know. Still, that’s just the contemplative mystic in me, I suppose.
As the bright sunlight pushes spring through the coloured panes of my old window as I talk to you now, I note that there are tears running down my silly shining old face, flowing through the channels of flesh and dripping from the chin onto the waxed wood of the table at which I sit. We have words for this weakness too, senile lability it is called, the tendency, on contemplating ideas like Spring and Home and Friendship, to weep like a child. Oh dear, I’m so old, so silly. Shallow persons talk of staying young, but they miss the terrible beauty and awful splendour of being old at heart. Heigh ho, if you have been, well there you are.
Sir John Raving: Cricket & Golf
Sir John Raving, Sports Editor of the New Spectator, talks again.
I want if I may, and since I’ve paid good money for this air time, I don’t see why I mayn’t, to take you back in time, ooh, four hundred or so years. I want you to imagine two shepherds, one of them is English and we shall call him, because we are imaginative and interesting, Thomas Burgess. The other is a Scot, and his name shall be Ian MacAllister. So, Thomas Burgess and Ian MacAllister. Shepherds twain, with good flocks to superintend and hundreds of miles separating them. They both have that rare gift, a sense of fun. Other shepherds, friends of theirs, are too dull ever to feel boredom. They are able to stand there with a glassy look in their eyes watching their sheep till the cows come home … oh, well, you know what I mean. But Thomas and Ian need entertainment to brighten their lives. Let’s take Thomas first.
One day, a sunny day in mid-summer on the rolling Hampshire downs which are his home, Thomas takes the leather ball it has ever been the solace of an idle hour for him to play catch with and tosses it to Gregory, his rather stupid son. ‘Gregory,’ he says, ‘I’ll stand in front of this ’ere wicket-gate and I want you to throw the ball at me.’ So saying he strides to the gate and flourishes his shepherd’s crook, or ‘crooket’ as they called them in those parts. Gregory flings the ball at his father. Whang! Thomas swings the crooket and strikes the ball lustily, sending it flying over Gregory’s head. Gregory trots off in pursuit. Thomas meanwhile gets some straw from a bail and twists it into smaller little bails which he places on top of the gate. ‘Right,’ says Burgess, when his son has retrieved the ball, ‘have you another go, my lad. Try and hit the wicket-gate. If you hit the gate and knock off them bails a straw, I’ll give thee the crooket and thou canst have a go at the gate thyself.’ All afternoon Burgess defended that wicket-gate with his crooket. Such was the depth of his mind and his skill at games, that by evenfall, in the pub at Hambleton, he was already arguing with Gregory about whether or not being struck on the legs in front of the wicket counted the same as the ball actually hitting the gate and dislodging the bails and whether the leg-glide was as pretty a stroke as the cover-drive. The first, and perhaps greatest, innings in cricketing history had been played. The great game was born.