by Stephen Fry
History, fortunately, will forget these banausic and irrelevant gnats, but not before thousands more die screaming in South Africa under the premiership of a man who is freedom’s friend as much as Margaret Thatcher is Dorothy’s.
For those of you who do not know what a friend of Dorothy is: ask a policeman or one in five Tory MPs.
Thatcher on TV
Margaret Thatcher – and let’s face it, there are no two finer words available with which to begin a sentence, their power to draw the reader in is matchless – demonstrates a weird human paradox which charmingly exemplifies the hopeless chiasmal symmetry of polar oppositions. For in the case of M.H. Thatcher, the right-wing press make much mention, in her defence and towards her glory, of the circumstance that she is, in their belief, the most detested and vilified politician in living memory, this they say proves her worth and significance. The left-wing press, or at least, such of it as there is, makes quite as much of the fact that she is the most lauded and deified leader of modern times, a fact, they are convinced, which clearly highlights her evil. Each wishes to prove, by pointing up the extreme reaction of the other, the supreme importance of the woman: in the one case her importance as a force for good, in the other as a force for ill.
With my own views on the chintzy, lacquered creature who governs our state, I do not wish to burden you. Of Lady Bracknell, Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest, remarks ‘she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair’. Our Prime Minister is probably a myth without being a monster, which is unfairer by far. I dare say she is socially and privately as charming a person as ever one could meet, but the myth is as monstrous as can be. If only it were the other way around.
Well that’s what I would have said, before I heard a rather disturbing story about her, since confirmed by other sources. It concerns an occasion when a television crew came to record an interview with her, quite early on in her premiership. An interview with someone like her is designated, by documentary production teams, a ‘Grade A Priority Assignment’. On such assignments certain personnel are doubled: electricians, sound recordists and so on. On the day of this interview Mrs Thatcher, taking a look at the large number of people around her, asked in what I am assured (by a Tory as it happens) was a far from friendly voice, whether or not it was really necessary for there to be so many people employed on a single interview. This government’s publicly expressed wish to ‘do something’ about overmanning in the television industry, tells us what was in her mind when she asked this question. Aside from the sheer arrogance and impoliteness of all but stating outright in their presence that you suspect fellow citizens of being sponging passengers, hitching a free ride on the back of luxurious union- enforced regulations, her petulant question shows a great lack of imagination.
Anyone who has ever had any dealings with film or television crews, especially on location, will know that the key element is time. Lighting takes a great deal of it. Film and video cameras are vastly inferior to the human eye and, if subjects are not carefully and skilfully lit, the resulting picture is inferior. I can well imagine the outcry in the press and Tory Central Office (if there is any difference between those two charitable foundations) were Mrs Thatcher to be shown underlit, overlit, or lit so as to make her look sinister, fat, dirty, ill-nourished, mad-eyed, apoplectic or any of the other deceptive conditions bad lighting can impose. Within a television studio where purpose-built lights can more rapidly be controlled, it is a fairly simple matter to light for an interview. But Thatcher is Prime Minister, her time is, one must assume, reasonably valuable. As far as television interviews are concerned the mountain is usually willing to come to Mohammed. Ten-kilowatt lamps do not hang in vast numbers from the ceiling in Downing Street. Hence the larger than average crews assigned. But apparently, at least on this occasion, the Prime Minister was quite unable to see any of this, all she saw was an opportunity to make a waspish remark about overmanning, so alienating a large group of people who were excited to be in her presence and keen to take up as little of her time as necessary.
I don’t want to make too much of this event, we all have bad days, naggy, catty days, and I am not arguing that this event proves once and for all that the woman is a shrieking Medusa, but I would say on the general subject of staffing levels, that those who use the phrase ‘overmanning’ seem mostly to prefer money to people. A Chinese restaurant that employs forty waiters doesn’t make us angry – the profits are lower but they get by, they provide for their family and serve the customer all the more quickly. But when it comes to public service industries, just ‘getting by’ becomes inadequate, and providing for our wider family at the cost of lower profits, unthinkable. And so we remain hard-pressed, over-worked, and – socially – underlit.
Sock Fury
I am angry. I am really angry. I am so angry I can barely go to the lavatory. I am fuming. I don’t think I’ve ever been crosser. If you poured boiling jam down the back of my neck, set fire to my trousers, defecated on the back seat of my car and forced me to stare without blinking at the cartoon of myself that accompanies this article I couldn’t be more furious. Hopping mad about sums it up. The reason for my ungovernable fury is simple to relate. I’ve lost my sock. The one I had intended to put on this morning. Its twin languishes alone on the floor of my bedroom, denied the awesome privilege of sheathing my right foot because of the immortal cheek of its wayward brother. I’ve had to find another pair. To put the lid on the whole sorry business I spilt coffee granules all over the kitchen floor. These two appalling catastrophes have combined to push my blood-pressure up so high that there is some danger of my sustaining a severe nose-bleed.
Now, I’d be the first to concede that in the cool, clear light of logic there is nothing bowel-shatteringly significant about these two incidents. I dare swear that in a day or two I will have forgotten all about them. Well, give it a week. What is so infuriating is the fact that I am incensed by two such nugatory, not to say trivial, hiccoughs in the life of one who generally speaking doesn’t have too much to kvetch about. You see, a human being has only a certain amount of choler to expend and I have a horrid feeling that I could never, ever, in my life be more angry about anything than I was fifteen minutes ago when I ransacked my room in search of this blasted benighted god-forsaken bloody sock, which even as I write is probably laughing itself sick behind the wainscotting or wherever it is that the foul thing has chosen to hide. And it won’t do. Whatever strange moral, ethical or evolutionary purpose anger was designed to serve, getting batey about errant footwear can’t be said to come anywhere near the top of the list. Yet I swear that if you were to attach an irometer or crossness sensor to my brain its needle would shoot straight to the red line where the dial reads ‘Danger. Extreme Overload. Evacuate’ quicker than a rabbi from a gnu.
The same is true of happiness, of course. If I were left a billion pounds by an eccentric tycoon, asked to open the bowling for England, given a new cartoon for my Listener column, offered the chance to perform the topping-off ceremony on a new multi-storey car park built in Nicholas Ridley’s back garden, I should of course be madly, deliriously, absurdly happy. But not any happier than I was when, at the age of eleven, I discovered a ten-shilling note in the pocket of an old pair of shorts. Certainly no more ecstatic than when I was taken by mother, aged six (me, that is, not my mother: she was significantly older), to see A Hard Day’s Night. I simply do not possess the capacity to feel any greater joy than that which lit me from within when Rolf Harris gave me his autograph backstage at the Britannia Pier, Yarmouth. Any simple felicity gauge would back up my claims.
So what price the world? If I tremble with rage at a mislaid gentleman’s half-hose or wriggle with pleasure when a bearded Australian writes his name on a ticket stub, what have I left in the emotion-bank for genocidal injustice or universal peace? It’s no good trying to imagine that those who suffer torture and cruelty and poverty feel exactly as if they’ve lost a sock, only it happens to be a very beautiful
sock, with wonderful clocks and an attractive heel-panel, because it simply won’t wash. Well, with a modern powder at today’s lower temperatures and a little liquid fabric conditioner it’ll come up lovely as a matter of fact … what I mean is that the argument doesn’t cut any ice.
Am I then to assume that my life is so empty, my existence so vapid and barren, my mind so shallow, facile and unsympathetic, that the only event capable of engendering wrath in me is the loss of a small, foot-shaped tube of cotton? That really is a ghastly notion. If I thought it was true I would have to end it all. But what kind of a suicide note could one leave? ‘Realised that my anger about the sock was unjustified and proved me valueless. If it is found amongst my effects please have it stuffed and mounted and presented to the nation as a warning to others.’ Not much of an epitaph is it?
I suppose I’ll have to fill in my credit card mail-order catalogue and send away for … The Sock Caddy, available in executive green or boardroom burgundy and personalised with up to one of your initials. Two tough, weather-resistant, distressed leather trays that provide twenty-four hour, round the clock protection for your socks. We call it the Bedroom Friend.’
But imagine waking up to the sight of such a thing. I’d be livid.
Wimbledon Horror
Somewhere in England there lives the git whose aural graffiti (unless some philanthropic dubbing mixer decides otherwise) will permanently mar the taped record of this year’s men’s singles finals at Wimbledon. He is the vandal who never tired of bellowing ‘Come on Stefan’ at precisely the least appropriate moment during the stormy, unpredictable course of that excellent match. His verbal daubs incited contrasting screams of ‘Come on Boris’ which provoked yet more variations upon the original theme until it sounded as if a million macaws had been let loose in one part of the Centre Court and meant to have it out with the four million assorted kookaburras and cockatoos who were being horribly raped in the other. The giggling, prating, graceless home-counties hooligans responsible for making these vile, barbarian ululations are horribly mistaken if they imagine either that a) Edberg is in any way edified or Becker becalmed by the erotomaniac squeals and pithecanthropoid bellows of their brain-damaged supporters, or that b) viewers across the world separate these acts of yelling barbarism from the less physically destructive but more publicly cursed rampages of British fans across Europe that the yelling tennis fans no doubt join in smugly condemning as disgracefully injurious to our reputation abroad.
It is a bizarre fact that the more widespread and accepted the cliché the less basis in truth it is likely to have. The prime example of this is the hoary old lie that most clichés have a basis in truth. It seems to me that clichés are a despairing attempt to create a truth by insisting upon one, rather like the bar-room braggart’s boasts of Don Juanism which reveal nothing more than bedroom inadequacy. Take for instance clichés about the British. ‘The British are tolerant.’ Pooh. What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth. The much vaunted British love of the countryside? What price the green belt in the acid-rain-inducing dustbin of Europe? Where be your hedgerows now? Your pimpernels and water meadows that were used to set the poets in a roar? Those who speak of the great British breakfast would perhaps be surprised that bacon and eggs with toast or tea have been consumed for ages in other countries too, without any sense from the partakers of those collations that they were doing anything other than tucking into the great Danish breakfast or the great Rwandan breakfast or the great New Zealand breakfast. If our history of bear-baiting, pit ponies and ejected Christmas puppies can honestly be called a great British love affair with animals then the average praying mantis and her husband are Darby and Joan. And those hideous, screeching, baying howls from hell that yearly destroy Wimbledon argue that the British are imbued with a sense of justice and fair-play about as much as Hitler was full of a spirit of coy playfulness. The best legal system in the world? Do us a favour.
Quoting Doctor Johnson is the last refuge of the scoundrel, so I will desist. I am no hater of Britain or the British, but as someone somewhere once said, ‘a patriot loves his country: a nationalist hates everyone else’s.’ We would have so much more cause to love this place if those much bandied clichés really did hold water.
But I do love this country, as Cordelia loved Lear. All the Gonerils and Regans who protest such a vast, sweeping, unthinking love seem to be doing the least to make it a place worth living in. Shouting that we are tolerant does not make us so: claiming without the slightest knowledge of other countries that this institution or that tradition within Britain is ‘the best in the world’ only serves to make us look ridiculous. Yelling and screaming at tennis players while they try to play seems to me to make Wimbledon even more miserable than the one clichaic fact about Britain that really does, as it were, hold water – the weather.
Saying Fuck
I am not sure whether Norris McWhirter would care to add to his Guinness Book of Records, after due verification and controlled testing by Roy Castle, the improbable claim for an all-comers British Record that I am about to make. I believe, and am open to refutation from those who know better, that I have said the word ‘fuck’ on television more times in one sitting than anyone of my age and fighting weight in the kingdom. It may be that McWhirter in his capacity as leading light of the libertarian organisation into which he pours his splendid energies will find this a frivolous and disgraceful record. It would make a semantic nonsense of the British Freedom Association (if that is its correct style and title) should he actually disapprove of people saying the word ‘fuck’ on television, but then people more wicked than he have made a nonsense of meaning in the name of freedom, so I wouldn’t be particularly surprised.
The details of the meeting which saw the lowering of Kenneth Tynan’s old record are important. The conditions were ideal for such a bold attempt: a live, late-night discussion programme hosted by, if memory doesn’t betray, Roger Cook and Susan Jay, familiar to viewers everywhere. The venue was the Central TV studio complex in Nottingham. The studio audience was composed of students and pensioners. Fellow discussioners included Michael Bentine, Ben Elton, John Lloyd (the TV producer, not the tennis player – nor indeed the ex-editor), Hugh Lloyd, self, Barry Cryer and scriptwriter Neil Shand. The subject under advisement was comedy.
The producers presented the thing as a vicious war of words in which old and new comedy were to tear polemical strips off each other. ‘The battle lines are drawn up for the war of the comics’ bugled the introductory script, much to our surprise. If it weren’t bad enough that Ben Elton should reveal a genuine love and admiration for Eric Morecambe, Laurel and Hardy and Tommy Cooper, what should happen but that Barry Cryer should lavish praise on Rik Mayall, Rowan Atkinson and Elton himself? This was as adversarial as Stars on Sunday.
The subject of shocking language arose. A few comments were made on either side and then I was asked to comment. I tried to remember from my reading of a transcript of the famous trial, and crediting him duly, what Richard Hoggart’s argument had been when defending the language of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We have simple, direct words which describe human functions like eating and sleeping, the argument ran, but when it came to reproduction, we only allow ourselves to use on the one hand cumbersomely medical and latinate phrases like coition, copulation and coitus or, on the other, hideously twee and periphrastic euphemisms like ‘intimacy’, ‘love-making’, ‘carnal knowledge’ and the rest of it. The same applies to our inability to find a simple word to describe the act of expelling waste solids through our bottoms: evacuating, passing stools, doing number ones, defecating and excreting all rather hedge around the business, as it were. The word ‘shit’ doesn’t. This circum
locution and sanitisation argues a guilt and an embarrassment about these physical processes which is surely unhealthy. If we came upon a culture that felt a sense of shame about breathing or yawning and insisted upon using alternatives like ‘inhale’ and ‘pandiculate’, I think we should believe it odd. How much odder that we should find sex dirty and wish linguistically to disinfect it?
If television and radio and the magazines all used the word ‘fuck’ as a matter of course, expressly not as an expletive or expression of abuse or frustration, but in its real sense, I really would not be surprised if we did not end up a healthier nation for it. If school teachers describing animals talked about the way in which they fucked rather than ‘the mating process’, if barristers and judges used ‘fuck’ in court cases where penetration is an issue, instead of relying on those strange forensic phrases ‘intimate contact’ and ‘physical relationship’, if parents used it when explaining reproduction to their children, then a generation would grow up for whom the word held no more mysterious guilty terrors and strange dirty thrills than the word ‘omelette’. What would that do to the sex crime statistics? Were we to have taboos about the word ‘kill’ or the words ‘maim’ and ‘torture’, however, it might perhaps be healthy: cruelty and homicide are things we really should be ashamed of.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, I found myself using this word ‘fuck’ and its many cognates about eighteen times in three minutes, smashing all known records out of sight. Susan Jay’s eyes glazed over slightly and her left knee wobbled a little, but all in all she withstood the blast like a game professional. What proves the thesis, for which I take no credit, is the fact that Central TV logged no complaints about that edition of the programme.