by Stephen Fry
There is nothing shocking about the word ‘fuck’: what shocks is that we find it shocking. That’s a coitus of a worry. In fact, it scares the fæcal solids out of me.
Worse – By Design
We live, as did Lady Bracknell, in an age of surfaces. Our problem is compounded by the sorry fact that surfaces are not what they were. Is it formica, or is it false formica? Is that a real mask? How true is that lie? Is this a genuine nose? I suppose it is partly the fault of our age’s entrapment within two modes, the visual and the literary, both of which need, for their effect, to keep a firm grip on fantasy. Take The Listener and its pretty new costume. Does the design reflect the real identity of the magazine, or does it create a new identity that the readership and contributors, given a fair following wind, will eventually catch up with? I don’t think you have to be vastly cynical to believe that the latter case fits. The image is the fact. The literary mode that infects us may be considered to be on a higher plane, but is equally false, and therefore equally true. A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.
In railing against the spectacular as extruded by television, film and this new world of ‘design’ that threatens to engulf us, the literary-minded elevate the book and the written word to a degree of aboriginal reality that is as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television. Writing and books are technology: they happen to be older than sit-com, that’s all. They are as responsible for creating styles and reflexes of thought and expression as any commercial or Hollywood blockbuster. Don’t get me wrong: books are great and good, but a thoughtless snobbery that respects them as totems and pathways to enlightenment, truth and Vedic happiness in themselves is dangerous and deluded. There is a technology, younger than books perhaps, but older than television, that gives us access to a much more genuine form of human intercourse than reading a false literary language or watching spectacular images. I’m talking about the technology that gave this very magazine its name. Wireless telegraphy, the radio broadcast.
At a time when the spoken word is forgotten in the rush to design a new masthead for a magazine or devise a new video technique for a young person’s TV show it is worth considering the proposition that radio, to paraphrase Forster rather horribly, is the deepest of the media and deep beneath the media. I’m talking about speaking radio of course, not music stations.
Radio suffers from one tragic defect, however. It isn’t cool, or sexy, or whatever quality it is that gets people in brasseries excited. Design is sexy, books and magazines are cool, music is both those things. But a human voice in intimate contact with a listener is considered as cool and sexy as a barn owl.
I don’t know what it will take to interest the Groucho Club, Blitz magazine and logo designers in radio. For all the above-mentioned reasons it is necessary for them to be interested in it before the public will be, for design and style comes first. Radio 4 can’t change its masthead and typeface to make itself appear suddenly more interesting: its independence from that kind of design manoeuvre is, after all, what makes it so interesting in the first place.
My fear is that some fearful gink from a place calling itself The Logo Factory or something equally foul will approach the controller of Radio 4 and persuade him that there is some way he can smarten up the ‘image’ of the station and before we know where we are it will be a Network 7 of the airwaves. By their own terms anything as styleless as the Home Service falls into a category entirely of their own devising which is variously called Old Fogey, Young Fogey or Institutional Dreary. If you accept that lie, then you have to accept the greater lie that something needs to be done about it. If you are persuaded to believe that the silver birch is insipid and ‘bad design’ (whatever that much bandied phrase may mean) then you can soon become persuaded that the time has come to spray it gold.
Oh dear, I do sound appallingly old fashioned, don’t I? But of course I don’t sound anything, this is a written article, not a spoken. So it’s a lie. I’ve hidden behind phrases and words that delude and ensnare. If I was talking you could tell exactly what I meant. Perhaps The Listener should redesign itself again. As a tape cassette. I can see the sleeve. The word ‘the’ in ITC Bookman Bold oblique, the word ‘listener’ in a sort of Stack Helvetica with torn paper effect. Could work, Marcus what do you think? I’ll get Cyprian and Zak onto it and fax something over to you …
Christ
I’m not much of a theologian, but I know my St Ignatius from my Ian Paisley – my Loyolists from my Loyalists as you might say – and can spot the difference between a Pelagian and a gnostic at fifty paces. I am puzzled however, I must confess, by this problem of offence. I am referring of course, as who isn’t these days, to Martin Scorsese’s new film The Last Temptation of Christ. I would like fully to understand the objections to it. As I am not a Christian it may be held that it is not my business to understand or comment on the doctrines of the faithful, but I do not believe that it is excessively perverse to ask why the opportunity to watch the latest film of one of the most important and obsessively moral film makers of the last twenty years might be denied me.
I am not overstating the case when I describe Scorsese in that fashion. I remember an interview he gave to Melvyn Bragg, years ago now, during which he was asked what he thought his films were mostly about. Sitting there, low in a preview-cinema seat and blinking like a timid curé, he replied, without hesitation, that they were about sin and redemption. I thought of Boxcar Bertha, of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, as remarkable and serious an oeuvre (as we cineasts like to call them) as any director could lay claim to and I sort of understood his point. Whatever else these films may be, they are not populist, commercial trash. They are as close as Hollywood ever gets to ‘serious cinema’ these days.
What upsets those who, like me, have not seen the film but have only heard tell of it, is, I believe, a scene in which Christ has some kind of erotic fantasy. I gather that the picture does not make light of his suffering, mock him, underplay his achievements or present him as anything other than the impassioned Son of God that Christians believe him to be. It does that which art does best: it shows a human being to us, just as Shakespeare showed us Antony and Cleopatra, with more regard for human truth than for historical.
This is particularly appropriate in the case of Jesus Christ for, as I understand it, his triumph on earth rests on the fact that he was fully a man. God, the argument runs, abdicated all his divinity and made himself one hundred per cent flesh. He ate food therefore, he wept, suffered, slept, went to the lavatory and in all other ways sustained the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to. Christians have no right, if they accept this story, to rail at God and say ‘you don’t know what it’s like, being a human’, the Christian story is all about God showing that he did find out precisely what it was like, and thereby offering us an opportunity of salvation. I think it is a magnificent story: humane, profound, fascinating and complex. That I don’t happen to believe it is essentially my problem, it’s not something I’m proud of or ashamed of. That the Church that grew from it has so signally failed to live up to its promise is no reflection on Jesus. As Cranmer said, there was not anything by the wit of man devised that was not in part or in whole corrupted. But the point, the whole point, of the story is the remarkable paradox of a divine humanity. If Christ was not in real pain when on the cross then the story is meaningless. Any God could pretend to be in pain, this one apparently paid us the supreme compliment of really suffering.
But now he is in heaven, on the right hand of God the Father and moving about us as the Holy Spirit. He looks down on cruelty, on savagery, on murder, tyranny and pain. These things cannot occasion him pleasure – nor can they his children. Then how can it be, by dint of what measure of tragic insecurity and doubt can it be true, that so many of his followers and worshippers make more fuss about a film t
hat attempts honestly to examine the fullest human dimension of his life on earth than they do about the daily pain and viciousness that goes on around them? If God genuinely believes that an attempt to portray him on screen as a full human being is a greater sin than the million other injustices that pervade our globe then we’re in real trouble. If he doesn’t, then why is it that the only time Christians band together as a force to be reckoned with is when they wish to censor and condemn?
I repeat, I am not a Christian, and when journalists of the shining human qualities of Paul Johnson attack this film on behalf of the ‘one and a half billion Christians’ on earth, as he did recently in the Daily Mail, I beg to be excused from that number. It may then be said that this denies me the right to comment on Christian feelings. That may be true, but if we are going to return to a theocracy which proscribes certain productions of art and writing I would ask Christians to become as exercised by injustice and cruelty as they are by heterodoxy. That’s all.
I am saddened by the full knowledge, which any writer or broadcaster will understand, that this article which I have been at pains to make as inoffensive as possible (God will forgive, I hope, my disinclination to join in the twee convention of spelling his personal pronoun with capital aitches) is bound to provoke from professors of Christianity personal letters to me of a ferocity and bile that those who have never dared to write about religion in public would scarcely believe. Why the adherents of the gentle and extraordinary Christ who died on the cross two thousand years ago should be so intolerant of those unfortunate enough not to have embraced his doctrines I do not know, but if Martin Scorsese has offended God then I am sorry, and I am sure Mr Scorsese is sorry too.
All I ask is that I be allowed to see this film. If it makes a mockery of Christ then I will condemn it. If it makes a mockery of bigots I will praise it. To the heavens.
Bikes, Leather and After Shave
I don’t know what has happened to me recently – some kind of hormonal change perhaps – but there is no doubt that I have altered quite significantly over the past few months. I am a changed man. Perhaps Virgo has once more been rising in the fifth house from the left, not counting the tobacconist. I don’t think it can be the male menopause, not at thirty-one years old, and it can’t be my mid-life crisis, I had that at twenty-seven. Well, let me unload the facts and you can judge for yourselves. There are three key alterations, three hiccoughs in the epiglottis of my life to which I would draw your attention.
Item: on or about the middle of February this year I started wearing leather jackets. Nothing strange about that, you might think. But if I tell you that on or about the beginning of February this year I would have been the first to lay substantial bets against my ever being seen dead in a rubbish skip wearing any such thing, you might give pause. I have never, ever, in all my born daze even considered myself to be anything remotely resembling a simulacrum of a thought of a shade of an approximation of a suggestion of a suspicion of a leather jacket kind of person. I never held anything against those who did wear them, you must understand, but I knew Golden Bear bomber jackets in distressed goat and Harringtons of supple calf were simply not me. I was Mr Dunn & Co., barely able to walk past Simpsons of Piccadilly without a Daks floor-walker rushing out and trying to hire me as a mannequin. Tweed and cords and stout walking brogues for me and if they were called the ‘Balmoral’ or the ‘Blenheim thornproof’, then so much the better. But suddenly it’s chinos, Bass Weejun loafers and creaking leather jackets. Peculiar.
Item: on or about the end of February this year I walked into a shop in the Euston Road and rode out of it half an hour later on a motor-bike. Again this may not strike you as worthy fodder for an episode of The Twilight Zone but once more I have to assure you that nothing can have been further from my mind a fortnight earlier. Cars I love, can’t have too many of the things, but motor-bikes? I had never stood astride one in my life until that afternoon and there I was wobbling out of the shop and into one of the busiest roads in Europe while the salesmen held their breaths. Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous, but then I never would have known what I know now had I not. What Hardy would have called one of life’s little ironies. The kind of little irony that can lead to you being scraped off the road with a spoon. A cousin of mine who was a casualty surgeon in Manhattan tells me that he and his colleagues had a one-word nickname for bikers: Donors. Rather chilling.
The astute connecting thinkers amongst you will believe that there is some connection between the twin purchases of leather jacket and motor-bike. Perhaps you are right, but it was all subconscious, I had no idea when I bought the jacket that I would shortly be buying a bike, and it only occurred to me when I was on my bike that it was a good thing that I was wearing a leather jacket, because the ‘Blenheim’ may well be thorn-proof but it is a lot less sliding-across-rough-tarmac-at-3omph-proof than good leather.
Item: on or about the middle of April this year I bought from a chemist a bottle of after shave and a bottle of eau de cologne. Again hardly fit material for Ripley, but the fact is of the three events I still find this the weirdest. I mean, after shave? Me? I could more readily have pictured myself dabbing pig’s urine on my cheeks than Le Vétiver de Paul Guerlain.
So there you are. I throw myself on your judgment, like an adolescent, with the question – What is happening inside me? What do these changes mean?
The most obvious answer, I suppose, is fear or lack of confidence. When I was young I went round looking as old and tweedy as possible because I wasn’t happy with my youth and now that I am crawling lumpenly to the grave I act and dress like a Romford teenager. Fine, I can take that. But given a fine education and all the advantages attendant upon my upbringing and good fortune in life, I am forced to ask the questions: what access to universal truth do Romford teenagers have that I do not that enables them to act young when they are young and put away childish things as they attain man’s estate? Where do I obtain this secret, is it in the Next Directory, is it available in eau de nil and can it be delivered straight away? Because if I carry on at this rate my friends in ten years’ time, such as I will then have, will have to get used to the sight of me in a sailor-suit rattling down the street on a tricycle.
But for the moment it can at least be said that I smell quite nice.
You and Your Toffee
I was listening the other day to You and Yours, Radio 4’s answer to a question that no one has yet bothered to ask. I am sure that Consumer Programming, into which category You and Yours proudly falls and sprains its ankle, provides a useful service and I have no doubt that the world is full of enough sharks, cowboys and pirates to satisfy almost every genre of Hollywood film, and yet whenever I do focus my ears on that extraordinary twenty-five minutes of unleavened dough I find it harder and harder to smother a scream.
The edition I found myself listening to had uncovered a scandal which centred around a new kind of toffee, an appetite suppressant as it happens, but for all that nothing more nor less than an ordinary toffee. It appears that when one or two of ‘our researchers’ ate this toffee – and I do recommend that you sit down before I go on, what I have to unfold is a tale of commercial cynicism and criminal negligence the like of which you will never have imagined, it will shock you to the very core of your being – they found that the toffee consistently STUCK TO THEIR TEETH AND WAS REALLY JOLLY HARD TO CHEW! It’s quite true. In one case it even removed a filling. Can you imagine it?
It seemed to me monstrous that they could only allow this fascinating story of skulduggery and exploitation on an international scale a nugatory ten minutes of air time. I wanted to know more. Could it be that there had been no clear warnings written on the side of each toffee explaining that excessive mastication could cause a not-to-be-desiderated adhesion to the surface of the molars? It may be that the toffees have sharp edges which could easily cause Baby to bump into them, sustain a sharp contusion, go into an infant frenzy and set fire to the house? What
about the wrappings? I have an awful feeling that Baby could tie them together into a primitive noose, throw them over a beam and hang himself. And that, as we know, could easily have someone’s eye out and come up in a very nasty bruise indeed. Do the toffees have a safe, wipe-clean surface, in case Baby decides to play with them in the vicinity of a dog-mess? And on a more sinister note, is it possible that although they retail at 36 of your earth pence each, they only cost something closer to 35 pence to make, and that the manufacturer is actually making a profit out of them? At the very least I think we should all be demanding a full and open enquiry. Some kind of legislation is surely in order too.
I mean, what is it all about? Are we now a nation of such dozy, helpless incompetents that we have to be warned about a blasted toffee? I have tried one of these ruddy confections: fairly tasty, reasonably good at dulling the edge of the appetite and available in a convenient hand-bag size. Otherwise the thing is basically, mutatis mutandis, a toffee. Fewer calories perhaps, but nonetheless one of God’s honest toffees. I have eaten chewier, have wrecked my snappers on tougher. Do we really need an earnest journalist to imply in his tones of suppressed excitement and outraged propriety that somehow the thing is a cross between thalidomide and an unshielded Stanley knife? I beg leave to doubt it.
A category of broadcasting journalism is invented: Consumer Affairs it calls itself. There is valuable work to be done. If the world is being flooded with teddy-bears whose eyes are held in place by rusty spikes then I suppose we should know about it. In the sixties Braden and Rantzen and others performed a valuable service. Ministries were set up, British Standards devised, consciousnesses raised. The tragedy is that it all made such wonderful television and excellent radio. For wicked as humanity is, in all kinds of subtle and horrifying ways, its wickedness in the field of manufacture and purveyance of substandard or hazardous itemries does not extend far enough to fill up the dozens of dedicated Consumer Programmes that now cram the airwaves. A juicy story of iniquity and shoddy practice will be snapped up by Roger Cook or Esther Rantzen months before poor old You and Yours will get a sniff of it. So they are left with toffees that actually have the temerity to stick to your teeth and kettles which might scald you if, when they are full of boiling water, you hold them upside down over your head. Consumer Programming has practically legislated itself out of business.