by Stephen Fry
Others find the spectacle of licensed japery so forced and grisly that they want to hide themselves for the whole twenty-four-hour period, terrified of their attention being drawn to yet another larky figure in a red nose bathing himself in custard or eating roll-mop herrings upside-down in the name of spontaneous jocundity. These things are a matter of taste, of course. But those who ask ‘Why can we not scrap this day of dreary antics and simply sign a large cheque instead?’ rather miss the point. It would be splendid if the day could be scrapped, simply splendid: it would save the BBC a great deal of money, it would leave car radiator grills unsullied by red plastic, it would no doubt please millions; but would it raise millions? If we were all in the habit of writing out large cheques of this nature there would certainly be no need for Red Nose Day or any events like it. Unfortunately, however, things don’t work out quite like that. There are hundreds of domestic charities alone that rather depend upon large fund-raising exercises of this nature to remain in existence.
It would be easy to characterise those who dislike or disapprove of Comic Relief either for aesthetic or political reasons as spoilsports, skinflints or cynics; I am quite sure that is unfair. It is equally easy to brand those involved as exploiters of guilt – moral blackmailers if you will – show-offs or simpletons; that too is unfair. For the moment, the important thing to remember is that it is happening, it is, for this year at least, a fait accompli and there is no point at all in undermining it. If we want a huge debate on the desirability of these events then we should at least wait until the maximum number of pounds have rolled in and gone to the organisations that have asked for them. Then, when the smoke has cleared, it is possible that we may all find that the days of the giant telethon are numbered and that help and funds can be found in other ways, less irksome to those who cannot bear to see a red nose or a funny hat.
Unlike Christmas, Red Nose Day comes but once every two years, and only to one of the four terrestrial television channels. Many people, otherwise staid and sober, actually enjoy wearing soft fruits or dressing as pandas once in a rare while, it gives them enormous pleasure to tap dance on a barrel of dilled pickles or to use the word ‘moist’ as many times as they can during important business meetings. They do it with gusto, verve and quite often with astonishing imagination and wit. I cannot bring myself to believe that it can be so terribly harmful.
Heigh, ho. Looking at my watch, I see that it is time to take myself off to the television centre. As usual I shall be wearing my amusing Bent Nose which, unlike the red plastic kind, can never be removed.
The C Word
I’m going to do something rather dreadful today and write about one of the most loathed and feared aspects of late twentieth-century life, a greater scourge of our times than cellular telephones and cellular underwear put together.
Celebrity.
Even to write the word causes a small flush of embarrassment. Its worst incarnation as a sort of semi-adjectival describer in phrases like ‘celebrity polo match’, ‘celebrity stock car racing’ and ‘surprise celebrity guests’ tells the whole grim story.
The most awful thing for me about the dread world of the celebrity is that I am a part of it. Without consulting Emily Post or Debrett on the subject, I am pretty sure that it is a very far from done thing ever to discuss one’s own level of celebrity; nonetheless I am forced to confess that I do qualify for the term, possibly – and this is the most exquisitely embarrassing of all – even for the deadly phrase ‘minor celebrity’. It would be nicer to be thought of as a bloke whose job involved being on the television from time to time, but as far as organisers of strange charity events are concerned one is unfortunately counted as ‘one of many hundreds of celebrities who have consented to contribute an article of clothing to be auctioned’.
Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, banned the use of the word ‘famous’ as a descriptive adjective in broadcasting. ‘If a man really is famous,’ he barked, ‘the word is redundant. If he is not, it is a lie.’ How he would have reacted to the word ‘celebrity’ the Lord alone knows. I suspect he would have gone into spasm.
No one likes to think of themselves as a celebrity any more than they like to think of themselves as a tourist, but for the purposes of newspaper gossip columns, characters as diverse as Jeremy Beadle, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Russell Grant, Ian Botham, Anthony Burgess, Sir Isaiah Berlin and Felicity Kendall are ‘celebrities’, kick and squirm at the appellation as they might. They have in common only this: members of the public have heard of them; many thrill to learn of their amatory or social exploits and many more would walk a long distance in ill-fitting boots to see them snip the ribbon at a new supermarket or sign copies of their latest book. The fact that millions more people have heard of Jeremy Beadle than of Anthony Burgess or that Sir Isaiah Berlin’s life’s work is likely to have a more lasting impact on the human race than Russell Grant’s is neither here nor there. That is what is so grisly about the whole business. I once heard a man described on television as ‘Mr (Name Withheld Out of Kindness), the famous celebrity.’ Well I mean, what?
I have seen people who hate being famous, detest recognition and slink down alleyways rather than meet a member of the public and I have seen others who absolutely revel in the limelight, adore being spotted and positively glow when stopped in the street. I cannot argue that one position is morally superior to the other. The real drawback with television celebrity as far as my own humble share of it is concerned is that it prevents me from ever showing annoyance at terrible service in a restaurant or from tutting with impatience in a supermarket queue. One has to face life’s irritations with a benign and foolish grin all over one’s face. Otherwise one will be accused of expecting special attention. Gone are the days when one could rap on the counter and demand to see the manager.
I realised that something was psychically wrong with this whole business of celebrity when I first noticed, some years ago, that the hands of an autograph hunter waiting for me at a stage door shook like a blancmange as she handed over her book to be signed. Talking to people who had been longer in the public eye I discovered that this is very, very common. It sounds insane, I know, but there are people who quiver and tremble from head to foot simply because they are in my presence. This is wildly disturbing and disquieting. That the fame which adventitiously accompanies certain professions can have such an effect must be unhealthy. If it were a reaction confined to teenage girls I suppose one could draw bracing and obvious conclusions, but it is not. Our whole culture seems to have gone fame crazy.
In the end quality will out, of course. Fifty years ago Dornford Yates was almost certainly better known than W.B. Yeats; now the reverse is true and it is (rather maddeningly) difficult to get hold of a full set of Dornford Yates anywhere.
Christopher Fry the poet and playwright will be read and admired years after Stephen Fry’s last videotape has crumbled in a museum of television curios, and quite right too. The maddening thing is that Christopher Fry, having wisely kept his face off the screen, also gets the benefit of being allowed to lose his temper in Sainsbury’s. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.
Don’t Thank Your Lucky Stars
I have mentioned once before in this space the great Canadian magician, James (‘The Amazing’) Randi. Randi’s renown as a conjuror is only exceeded by his reputation as an investigator of alleged ‘paranormal’ phenomena. He has just completed a series for Granada television in Manchester in which he concentrates each week on a different field of supernatural endeavour – psychic surgery, dowsing, ESP, astrology, the spirit world, psychometry, graphology and so on. Randi has always claimed that he would be delighted to find himself confronted by evidence of any phenomenon that could not be explained by reason, existing science or the laws of probability. He has never yet, in a long lifetime dedicated to exposing fraud, misapprehension or credulousness, seen a scintilla of evidence that suggests that there is any truth behind any of the claims made for the existence of ghosts, telekinetic
powers, clairvoyance through palmistry, the tarot or tea-leaves, mediumship, horoscopy or any of the other fantastic systems the hungry human imagination can devise. The human mind, after all, is remarkable enough in its ability to write symphonies, build suspension bridges, invent a thousand types of cork-screw, predict to the minute the appearance of comets in the sky and devise new daytime TV game-show formats, without us having to pretend it has unprovable, unknowable and untestable powers to receive spirit messages from Red Indians or read character from birth-dates as well.
As a conjuror, Randi is perfectly placed to see how the practitioners of these dubious mysteries achieve their effects. He shares, after all, the same techniques. I do not mean by this that all who claim powers of prophecy or insight are deliberate shysters and frauds, although many are (Randi has shown, for instance, how it is that a spoon may be bent by what appears to be only the gentlest stroking), I mean that conjurors and paranormalists alike rely on human nature to do their work for them. I have often seen someone describe a magic trick in these terms: ‘He gave me a sealed envelope, got me to shuffle a deck, choose a card, remember it and shuffle it back into the deck. I opened the envelope and it contained my chosen card which was then discovered not to be in the pack.’ Almost no card trick works like this, but that is how the audience remembers them. What is left out is that the conjuror actually put the sealed envelope under a book, for example; he shuffled the deck too, before and after the selection of the card, he then gave the envelope to the subject to open after the card had been selected and looked at. These crucial details are forgotten and only the effect is remembered. Conjurors absolutely bank on this selectivity in human memory, this preference of ours for recollecting the miracle itself, not its set-up.
In the same way I have heard tarot readers and palmists saying something along these lines: ‘There is evidence here of a hobby, I think it is collecting … an enthusiasm? Something beautiful, china … coins … furniture … second-hand books … something … paintings, drawings … prints, is it? … yes, prints.’ The subject will then babble on enthusiastically to anyone who cares to listen that this extraordinarily gifted reader volunteered out of nowhere the information that they collected prints, ignoring the six boss-shots that preceded the right answer.
There are many books available on the subject of ‘mentalism’, the branch of magic that deals with apparent mind-reading. They always start with the advice that these effects rely on an understanding of human nature and an ability to read social class and character type quickly and easily. You could try it yourself at a party. You can judge fairly instantly from meeting someone whether they are the kind who collects things, who skis or fishes or hunts or watches sport or reads slim volumes of poetry. You won’t always be right, of course, but nine times out of ten one can estimate basic characteristics and likely pursuits with some accuracy. If you have the sheer nerve then to pretend to an understanding of a mystic art and can create the kind of atmosphere in which a stranger will listen to you, you will be able to amaze him. It will never work, however, if you give your ‘reading’ just like that; people want to believe that there is some system behind your amazing gifts. Take their palm, demand a sample of their hand-writing, ask their birthdate, go into a trance, anything that might lend the bogus authority of a tradition. No one wants to believe that their character or nature is readable from their clothes, accent, linguistic mannerisms or gait, that would seem like impertinence and presumption; people love the idea, however, that those same truths are written in their palm or in the way they cross their ‘t’s.
In America there are 2000 professional astronomers to 20,000 professional astrologers; in Britain quondam sports commentators wear turquoise and babble about resonating streams of Lucifer energy.
Superstition is just not harmless fun. It is in fact bad luck to be superstitious, for the simple reason that in this world it is bad luck to be foolish.
Good Ole Country Boys
‘I believe in America.’ The opening words of that unrivalled masterpiece of modern cinema, The Godfather, will serve as the opening words of this article. I do believe in America; the kitsch phrasing of its constitution, its institutionalised sentimentalism, its madness, squalor and opulence; all that is fanatical and fantastical about the United States appeals, appals and mesmerises. I know only the thin slices of rye at each seaboard; the great stuffing of pastrami in the middle, the ‘real’ America that voted in Reagan, believed that Nicaragua posed a violent threat to security and reckoned Senator McCarthy talked a barrel of good sense – that America I do not know at all. Its influence, however, we all feel.
I had the pleasure of entertaining my seven-year-old nephew this week and found myself staggered by the depth to which American popular culture had penetrated his language and outlook. An over-generous helping of baked beans was labelled ‘gross’; the prospect of four Bernard Matthews Golden Drummers was regarded as ‘mega’ and a heap of American oven-chips as nothing less than ‘neat’, ‘wild’, ‘cool’ and ‘bad’. Nothing surprising or new in that; the ever-rising level of American influence on our culture this century can be compared to the ever-rising tide of the middle classes this millennium. The popularity of Bart Simpson, the Turtles, American football and baseball caps is not necessarily greater than the 1920s adoration of the Charleston, gaspers, shingled hair, ragtime and Lillian Gish. The great success of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the sixties lay not in their home-grown musical originality, but in their submersion in American culture, in Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll.
However, what is new today, I think, is the penetration of America into the countryside. Urban excitement with America is comprehensible: the United States all but invented post-Dickensian urban life. The discos and cinemas that replaced the dance and music halls were American, the fast-food chains and supermarkets that took over from ABC tea-shops and Home and Colonial Stores were American in origin too. Rural England however, that part of our homeland which, despite the industrial revolution, still defined and characterised us as a nation, appeared to be immune. Our cities may have lost their distinctive Englishness but our countryside was still unlike that of any nation on earth.
Look, stranger, on this island now. I grew up in Norfolk, helped in harvests, served in communions, croaked in the choir and bicycled around the hedgerows. Throughout the sixties and early seventies I was a country-boy, a swain, a Corydon. I live in Norfolk again now, when I can get away from the lure of the metropolis, and what a change has been wrought.
The rural youth of today takes as his model the heroes of that American television show The Dukes of Hazard. He customises his car with wide Firestone tires (that, naturally, is how he spells ‘tyres’), he paints the Confederate flag on the hood and he goes hot-rodding and drag racing, like any American small-town hick. The fact that there is no pot-bellied, Ray-Ban-wearing, baccy-chewing county sheriff to whip his ass into shape when he gets outa line and starts buzzing the neighborhood, must be a source of great and mystifying disappointment to him and the other good ol’ boys of rural East Anglia.
The stores that fringe the highways stick up multi-signed totem poles for the garden-centers, gas stations and road-houses that huddle in mini-mart fashion in the lay-bys. Norwich has a drive-in McDonald’s these days, there are drive-in movies available too.
If this description sounds bitter, snobbish or resentful, I do not mean it to. Rural East Anglia, within the meaning of the act, exists only in those pretty villages which are part of manorial demesnes or on those parts of the North Norfolk or Suffolk coast that can effectively be called Kensingtons-by-the-Sea, kept villagey and nice by the Londoners who get up there ‘as often as they can’: Londoners, I suppose, like me. The cultural vacuum left behind by the industrialisation of agriculture and the destruction of village life has been filled by the American small-town. To paraphrase Cassius – the fault, quite brutally, lies not in the stars and stripes, but in ourselves that we are undermined.
Those b
orn in country villages cannot be blamed for seeking role models, archetypes and heroes that justify and empower them. These are not to be found in English rural lore, but can be observed daily in the films and television that sweep over to us from across the Atlantic. If I were a tractor-driver’s son from Swaffham I would rather emulate a wild Southern rebel in an old Mustang than a deferential hayseed in a tight-fitting Norfolk jacket.
We want desperately to preserve what we call rural England, just as we want to preserve rural churches. A church, however, is a congregation and services, just as a school is pupils and a curriculum and a nation is people and practices. If the barn has yielded to the aluminium silo (the second ‘i’ in aluminium is optional these days) and the barn-dance to the hoe-down in just twenty years, what will have happened in another twenty? Morris dancing and preservation orders cannot save it now.
‘Ichabod’, as the good book says: the glory is departed.
Grammar’s Footsteps