by Stephen Fry
The story is compelling and the characters absorbing. How likely it really is that any book might be written which could change the world or even raise a brief eyebrow of interest in the 1980s is a moot question (if Crimond was preparing a television series or a pop album then perhaps the Brotherhood would really have something to worry about), but we are prepared to believe, for the purposes of the novel, that the Book is a threat. Crimond, who broods over it all like an obmutescent winged avenger, scaring the living daylights out of his friends, is really successful only when off stage, which he is most of the time. The other characters talk a great deal, and reveal their different histories, but are not sharply defined or ‘rounded’ in that good old-fashioned Forsterian sense. It may seem odd to say that this doesn’t matter in a ‘realistic’ modern novel, but it doesn’t, nor do the occasionally stilted and melodramatic passages of dialogue really concern us. The plot and the ideas and the ‘concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’, as T.E. Hulme sweetly phrased it, propel you into a real world with as much force as any novelistic techniques of realism. As usual, Iris Murdoch writes better men here than any male novelist that I am aware of is capable of writing women. The oddest feature of her Brotherhood is their humourlessness, old friends can set each other laughing at any minute: the Crimondsgesellschaft don’t appear to have laughed together for years.
It is impossible with Iris Murdoch not to suspect, guiltily, that there is some closely structured Platonic argument lurking beneath the contemporary drama and that, in not detecting it, one has somehow missed a point. Certainly this is a wonderfully structured novel, moving through three seasons with pleasing balance and delicate internal patterns and rhythms, but it is not a crossword puzzle, nothing is hidden or archly disguised. The writing is always lucid and poised and fluid. Her prose reminds me of water: always propelled by the gentlest energy, connecting with itself in dozens of different ways, absolutely clear and effortless: resonating not with a boom but a tinkle. That kind of flow can move rock more powerfully than dynamite. Some of the passages of description, Gerard’s childhood grey parrot, skating in a meadow at sunset, are as beautifully written as any prose can be today, linking physical description and personal developments with extraordinary touch. In a novel about the bonds that attach people to ideas, ideas to people and people to each other and about the blood that flows in and between them, such absolute passages serve to bind the ideas and the people of the novel, through art and language and image, to the truth that the life of the mind subserves the life of the soul. Intellectual and political absolutism is defied by the perfection of imperfection. This is a substantial moral and artistic achievement. Oxbridge people with Oxbridge troubles perhaps, but that is Iris Murdoch’s milieu, and need be no more irrelevant than Jane Austen’s Regency parsonages or Chekhov’s decaying Russian estates.
A Television Review
For a short time I was the television reviewer for the Literary Review, a magazine now edited by Auberon Waugh, but previously the responsibility of Emma Soames.
Here is a selection of monthly reviews of television, written – for the large part – for an audience who abominated TV.
A short word about Noel Edmonds: No.
A long word about Noel Edmonds: Unconscionable.
Noel Edmonds is, himself, a fine and good man, kind to furry animals and tidy with litter. His and his producer’s contributions to Comic Relief cannot be overestimated. But – and oh, how it pains me to have to be honest – there is a dark side. He lends his name (the Noel, incidentally, has long puzzled me: ask anyone unfamiliar with the man to look at him and guess his forename and they will – China Street to a Lombard Orange – hazard at Graeme, Bryan or Rodney or, at longer odds, Andy or Mike; never Noel.) to the grisliest entertainment that television currently offers.
Mr Edmonds started life as a disc jockey, his life in the public eye that is. No doubt for years previously he toiled unseen as a disc stable-lad, mucking out the studios and so on – it’s a tough school. But it was as a disc jockey that he first achieved fame. And as a disc jockey he was no more horrific a personality than his job demanded. That’s pretty horrific, certainly, but many others in that line of work exceed the limits of their professional duty with a zeal nothing short of disgusting. From disc jockey to children’s television presenter is a short step. A step forwards intellectually and financially. Noel took it nimbly. The Swap Shop, over which he genially presided, was a great achievement on the part of the BBC. Early Saturday mornings had suddenly, with the cult success of TISWAS, become a furious battleground in the ratings war. The Swap Shop, tidier, more responsible, more acceptable to middle-class parents, in short, more BBC than its rival, was a big hit. Noel projected himself as a friendly older brother, slightly racy, slightly cocky, slightly frivolous, but certainly a Good Thing. Then some nameless poltroon had the idea that those qualities might appeal to an adult audience. What became of Chris Tarrant’s like ascension to the world of grown-ups (OTT, et al.) is a matter of painful broadcasting history. Tarrant is now, Oh how the wheel becomes it! a disc jockey for a local radio station …
Noel’s foray however seems, at first glance, more successful. He has yet to fall from grace. But the programme he presents now, The Noel Edmonds Late, Late Breakfast Show, BBC1, Saturday evenings, is, in the words of Professor Donald Trefusis, ‘puerile, banausic posturing and prankstering’. The evil lies not in its content, sickening as it may be, but in its style. The very qualities that made Edmonds so perfect a children’s entertainer make him a perfectly appalling adult one. The show is a Swap Shop version of all those ghastly ‘people are so interesting’ programmes which LWT inflict upon us in wave after wave, Game For A Laugh, People Do The Funniest Things, Surprise Surprise – there’s a new one every month. The L.L.B.S. has a competition to find ‘Mr Puniverse’, Golden Egg Awards for the funniest blooper, blunder, fluff, corpse or gaffe on television, or even, God save us all, on home videos. Members of the public have jokes played upon them while being watched by hidden cameras, the giggling Noel and a frightful studio audience. The dignity of womankind is set back at every turn by revolting innuendo and nauseating lechery. In the name of populism and jolliness non-conformity is mocked, and contrived eccentricity encouraged. It is as if the world has been taken over by a student bar and its rugby club. Cars, beer, Samantha Fox (whoever she may be), soccer and the Royal Marines, these are the gods of the show. There is no joyous Dionysiac revelry, no antic misrule – just flatulent, graceless slobbery and smirking.
I have just risen, sobbing, wasted and drained, from watching Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Nothing strange about that. Anyone with half a heart will be unable to rise from that film in any other condition. What is strange is that the time is now precisely 5.15 on a Thursday afternoon. When all is said and done, the single most important reason for the invention of television is that it continues to allow generation after generation to get to know films that they would otherwise have little opportunity to see. If you want an explanation of all the nameless horrors of our age you need look no further than to the television stations that can put out It’s A Wonderful Life at half past two in the afternoon and The Noel Edmonds Late, Late Breakfast Show peak time on weekend evenings. If the network companies can be likened to public libraries, and I don’t see why they can’t, then we are dealing with establishments that keep all the good books tucked away in a small, inhospitable garret in an annexe to the main building and fill the main shelves with Robert Ludlums, Barbara Cartlands and tattered comic books. ‘But that’s what the people want.’ Of course it is. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such works are so much easier to find, so clearly marked and catalogued; the librarians are so keen to supply them. Send Noel back to Saturday mornings and present a James Stewart or Gary Cooper film in his place every week until his brutalised audience has some humanity put back into it.
In an Omnibus documentary about Hancock, Patrick Cargill, seated stiffly in an arm chair like Velasquez�
�s Pope Innocent X, told a story of how thrilled Hancock was to be working with ‘real actors’ (after Kenneth Williams and Bill Kerr, I suppose) when he had the privilege of playing opposite Cargill in The Blood Donor. ‘I remember he said to me, “when you play a doctor, Patrick, you really are a doctor”.’ Thus is a dreadful myth propagated, the myth that actors are ‘good at comedy’. If the television companies have a funny script they will, like as not, search for an ‘actor’ to play a part in it Timothy West, Robert Hardy, and Donald Sinden are all actors. Good ones. They have played tragedy and comedy on the legitimate stage and on television with great success. They have also tried light entertainment and succeeded in being about as amusing as a bomb in a primary school. The reason seems to be that as soon as they are in front of a studio audience they stop being actors (the very purpose for which they were hired) and try and become music hall stars. Subtlety flies out of the window, closely followed by timing, control and credibility. Watch John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Tony Hancock, Rik Mayall or Tracy Ullman and, however grotesque their characterisations, however manic their performances, they always retain a grip on reality. Watch Donald Sinden in Never The Twain or Robert Hardy in Hot Metal and all you can see is waggling eyebrows, camp intakes of breath and furious, embarrassing mugging. Patrick Cargill in Father, Dear Father was as guilty as any of them. Hancock to him was Stanislavsky to Vincent Crummles.
The return of Joan Hickson as Miss Marple to our screens is exultantly to be welcomed. I have seen no performance lately so exquisite in its subtlety and detail. Every bird-like inclination of the head, every little exclamation and every gentle inspection of an interlocutor’s face is a revelation. More episodes are being made even as we speak. Forget the creaking plots and self-conscious Englishness of the settings. That magical performance is all.
I have no doubt that everyone who watched Jonathan Miller’s production of Così Fan Tutte late in March will agree with me that special television productions of opera are greatly to be encouraged. That magnificent French production of Le Nozze di Figaro some years ago with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and ‘Kiwi’ Te Kanawa paved the way. Close-ups and closed-lipped singing bring opera alive in a way that can more than compensate for the loss of live excitement. The only drawback with this Così for me was the singing in English. Call me old-fashioned, purblind, hidebound, reactionary and out of touch if you will, but I believe that one of the great advantages of being born English is that one can hear the world’s greatest opera in a language other than that in which one asks strangers the way to the lavatory and orders deliveries of coal. However literate or musical the translation, opera in English always sounds like Gilbert and Sullivan. Most libretti are horribly commonplace and I feel very sorry for Italians and Germans who listen to Da Ponte and Wagner and cannot hear the pretty rhythms and alliterations of their two beautiful languages for the banal meaning they also convey.
You might be interested to know that there is a lawyer currently operating powerfully within LWT whose job has been to censor material from the programme Saturday Live. Here is a list of some of his decisions:
You can say the word ‘erection’, but not the word ‘dick’. You can refer to a character’s sexual prowess by describing him as being able ‘to come in pints’, but you cannot say the word ‘bastard’ (‘basket’ is sufficient).
Genitals and breasts can be blown up live, but pig’s intestines are not allowed to be seen.
You can point your bottom at the screen and break wind, but you cannot pretend that a prop motor car belongs to Jeremy Isaacs (‘a Channel 4 Executive’ is acceptable).
You cannot mention the disease thrush or the issue of advertising ‘female hygiene’ equipment on television but you can crack a joke about the Space Shuttle disaster.
You can show a man putting his fingers into a liquidiser which fills with blood, but you cannot say the word ‘Horlicks’ (‘malted milk’ will do).
You can say the word ‘turd’ but not the word ‘sodding’.
Well now, it is possible that you can find a rationale behind those decisions, but I’m blowed if I can. I had thought that the law was a parliamentary and practical codification of notions of right and wrong. Either someone somewhere has some very strange notions about right or wrong which this lawyer is faithfully representing, or the man has personally taken it into his head to dictate his own peculiar (and if I may say so, very, very peculiar) ideas upon the television-watching public. Either way, I think we should be told. I understand the same man has something to do with LWT deciding to withhold a report on the Hell’s Angel who ‘died’ in police custody, a case for which the new and startling legal precedent of a coroner’s inquest being considered sub judice was created. If lawyers start taking over executive and artistic decisions in television because of management’s fear of men of the stamp of Winston Churchill MP then we might as well all go to bed and pull the sheets over our heads.
Adolf Forster
‘Music is the deepest of the Arts and deep beneath the Arts,’ someone once said. Forster, I think, though it may have been Hitler. I read Mein Kampf and Two Cheers For Democracy in the same week and I still keep muddling them up. Whatever. Music is certainly deep beneath what the universities call the televisual arts, or what a man on Question Time (now greatly diminished by the return of Robin Day) called ‘the most immediate media’. The Handbook Of Rhetorical Terms calls that an oxycretin.
Now, I hope I have as tolerable an ear in music as the next man. You can give me the tongs and the bones any time, and I’ll be as happy as Larry the sandboy and as right as a rainy trivet. Any time, but not all the time: I like a good cose too. Unhappily, the art of the spoken word on the wireless is now confined to a rapidly deteriorating Radio 4 and a newly self-conscious BBC World Service, with the odd illuminating talk on Minoan Clitoris Cults still sandwiched between concerts on Radio 3. And we’re lucky. In America and Europe broadcast conversation has been extinct for years. Television is going the same way. I’m not just talking about the All Music Channels that have sprung up in Europe and America, nor the proliferation of music (especially pop) programmes on television, nor ghastly Euro-aberrations like the incompetent and vulgar Night of a Thousand Satellites that so outrageously deprived us of an episode of The Human Jungle on 21 June this year. I’m talking too about the great sickly wash of music that is poured over every drama, every entertainment, every documentary now broadcast. It is more than a little vexing to see an otherwise splendid documentary such as Letters From A Bomber Pilot (Thames) marred by an over-emphasis on Glenn Miller, or, to look at it from the other end, to hear motif after motif of Wagner’s Ring being vulgarised and abused by inappropriate association with E.M. Hitler and the Nazis. Specially commissioned film and television music, however, is quite unexceptionable: no one can mind associating the Miss Marple theme with Miss Marple, or ‘Tum, di dum, ti tum diddy-tum tum’ with Dallas, but I’m damned if I’m going to associate ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ with Barry Took, or Mozart’s ‘Musical Joke’ with show-jumping from Hickstead: it may not be a very funny joke, but it deserves better than that. Television advertising, of course, is an even worse offender: who can hear ‘O Sole Mio’ without thinking of a Cornetto? Bach’s Suite No. 3 in D without thinking of Hamlet cigars? The Largo from Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony without conjuring up a picture of Hovis being baked in a cobbled Northern town plum spang in the middle of the Old World? Great testaments to the Art of Persuasion, as advertising now calls itself, but a bit of a bummer for the composers in question.
I’ve been stuck in what Adolf Forster would call my ‘lebensraum’ all summer, watching the fight for the Ashes. There is no doubt that Ian Botham, ‘the Both.’ as Mike Brearley used to call him (to rhyme with ‘cloth’, not ‘sloth’), has provided the best and most exciting television this country has seen since the Clee made Fawlty Towers all those years ago. But the Both. is the despair of Tom, Richie, Jim and Ted in the commentary box. Pavilioned in splendour and girded with praise
, he spits great strings of spittle all over the pitch, he chews gum, he laughs when he fails, he PUTS HIS HANDS ON HIS KNEES when he stands in the slips, if you please, he streaks his hair with gold highlights and he is well on his way to becoming cricket’s first millionaire. For poor old Tom and Ted and Trevor and Fred – the Grave, the Dex, the Bail and the True – who played, if one is to believe them, in the days when you were lucky if you emerged so much as a thousandaire at the end of your career, it’s all a bit much. They may not have earned big money, but really speaking, as Tom Graveney would say, they did play the game properly, classically, intelligently. And now, watching Gower’s XI, they just cannot help themselves. They carp, they cavil: they pick, they niggle. Only Big Bob Willis, who has just joined the commentary team, is indulgent. He knows, none better, what it’s like having these frightful old wiseacres whingeing on while one is trying to play. I hope he watches when the BBC show old test matches from the Trueman, Graveney, Dexter, Benaud, Bailey era during intervals for tea or rain. For what do we see? HORRIBLE CHEST-ON BOWLING ACTIONS! BADLY SET FIELDS! DROPPED CATCHES! BATSMEN PLAYING ACROSS THE LINE AND BEING BOWLED ALL OVER THE PLACE! LEG SIDE LONG-HOPS BOWLED TO OFF-SIDE FIELDS! FANS INVADING THE PITCH! It’s all there in black and white. Damn these silly men! Damn their impudence! Damn their vain, crabby, resenting spite! Is this what comes with age? Please God may I never be old like that.
But cheer up. No one could be less petulant, crabby or resentful than Don Henderson’s retired policeman, who can be seen on Wednesdays on ITV in Bulman (Granada). He has been joined by the wonderful and cheerful Siobhan Redmond. Together they roam the streets of Manchester and Chorlton, pretending that they are in London. They are helped by one recurring London bus, some cunningly placed Evening Standard news stands and talk of ‘blags’, ‘manors’ and ‘liberties’. Still, as Noel Dyson said in Ronald Frame’s Paris (filmed in Glasgow), one of the new season of plays on BBC2, ‘If you don’t have imagination, what do you have?’