by Stephen Fry
Big Blue, as IBM are called, has slowly caught up: their biggest software developer has brought out an operating system for the IBM which apes the Apple style closely. As the speed and capacity of computers increases and the cost comes down, even the astonishingly friendly and productive Macintoshes will seem cumbersome and primitive before long. Voice recognition, which depends on huge memory and processing speed, will be with us in a few years. Dedicated computing machines in offices or homes will be as unnecessary as single electronic motors.
All this will leave those who revel in their technophobia and computer illiteracy with the problem of what aspect of modern life to worry about next. The correct level for the PSBR in the current cycle, possibly. ‘I just can’t get this dratted new-fangled economy to work … you don’t happen to have a five-year-old son, do you?’
Vim and Vigour
In my family, as in millions of households throughout the land, we made use of the scouring powder Vim. This was a result of no politically or socially significant purchasing strategy on our part, Vim was simply the brand we used. If, visiting another family, I discovered a different powder there, every feeling would be revolted.
‘Mummy!’ I would hiss, ‘they use Ajax here!’
As far as I was concerned, whatever we used in our house was proper; variations were inferior and faintly embarrassing; I accepted no substitute: if other households used Omo rather than Persil, took Quaker Oats instead of Scott’s, or brushed with Colgate not Gibbs, they were beyond the pale and pity was the only emotion I could muster.
So it was with politics. For years I tried to imagine how it was that anyone could be so lost to shame as to be able to vote Labour without blushing. It was almost as frightful as buying Dixcel rather than Andrex.
The year I turned from a disgusting twelve-year-old into a repellent thirteener there was held a general election. This was a source of great excitement in North Norfolk, as you might imagine. While our domicile could not in truth be compared to the great political households of the past, there were certainly plenty of comings and goings at home during that giddy and exciting time, of a kind to put one in mind of Cliveden in its heyday. Why, on any given Tuesday the Conservative Party agent for North Norfolk himself could be found deep in conversation with the treasurer of the Aylsham (incorporating Cawston and Yaxham) branch, discussing matters that touched the highest in the county. Sometimes the Member himself would be there. On such occasions, let me tell you, the Vim flowed pretty damned freely. Many was the time I would be sent down to the cellar for a fresh supply. I would enter the dining-room, brush the cobwebs from my hair, plank the canister down on the table and listen, round-eyed with awe, to the matters of state being settled in that room. How many telegraph poles on the Cromer road would have blue posters attached to them, whether the public address system on the electoral Morris van was loud enough to wake up the inhabitants of North Walsham and who would undertake to ferry the elderly to the Booton and District polling booth.
It is a matter of record that the issues decided around that table by the men and women of the North Norfolk Conservative Association, giddy with good Vim as they may have been, flushed with Scott’s Porage Oats and maddened by Andrex as they undoubtedly were, swung the destiny of this nation. As a result of our efforts, Edward Heath was summoned to Buckingham Palace and we good East Anglians and true bumpered his health with fine Gibbs SR into the still watches of the night.
Next came a referendum on Europe, what today we would no doubt call a Euroferendum. It was around that time, for some reason that I still cannot fully understand, that I decided on open mutiny. While still loyal to the Party, I came to the conclusion that I was fanatically anti-European.
It was, no doubt, a foolish teenage pose; an effort to show independence, to set, as we would say now, my own agenda.
My heroes became Barbara Castle and, of course, Enoch Powell, whom I forgave for making every schoolboy’s life a misery with his edition of Thucydides: I even went so far as to write him an incoherently adoring letter of support.
Twenty years on, while I may no longer care what lavatory paper I employ or toothpaste I eat and my political affiliations have swung to the Labour Party, on the question of Europe I change my mind daily, running, like an hotel-room shower, alternately too hot and too cold. Sometimes I worry about faceless Eurocrats and then I realise that when you come down to it there’s nothing notably facey about our masters in Whitehall. Government by diktat can emanate as easily from Westminster as from Brussels, I think. It’s not as if there are no European elections. And, if the current recession is part of a world downturn, how can the concept of economic sovereignty have any meaning? But then I consider the possibility, acutely highlighted by Martyn Harris in the Telegraph last week, that Brussels will bar children from making newspaper delivery rounds and I come over all ridley.
In the end, the clannishness that begins with judging by scouring powders and ends with the bombarding of Dubrovnik is not an energy with which one can happily ally oneself. Other people’s houses have good qualities too.
A Critical Condition
A few days ago a reasonably well-known dramatic critic retired, to the jubilation of all those who work in and love theatre. His fame was a result more, I suspect, of longevity than anything else, for his paper was a London evening sheet, and those of you who live outside the capital will not be familiar with or interested in the career of a local journalist.
Why this jubilation? You may fear that I am about to use my column inches as a whetstone on which to grind a very private axe, but I can assure you that, so far as I can remember, I have no personal reason to dislike this ludicrous figure, who is as much ‘a man of the theatre’ as Attila the Hun was a federalist, nor any other particular member of his ghastly profession.
Yet there are personal feelings at stake. As a child I saw on television a film starring Alastair Sim called The Green Man. Like almost any picture featuring that incomparable genius it contains moments of as absolute a joy as one is ever permitted on this sublunary plane. There is one scene, in which he attempts to bustle a female palm court trio out of a room that he needs to be vacated, which remains as funny as anything ever committed to celluloid. Watching that made me wriggle with delight, but more than that, it made me want to have something, anything, to do with a world where such pleasures were possible. The film was shown again recently on television. In the listings column of a Sunday newspaper the other week it was described as ‘a thin, ultimately unsatisfactory vehicle for Sim’. Now, I would never claim that my liking for the film is definitive, de gustibus and all that, but look at the style of this remark. How typical it is of everything that must displease and revolt about critics. The vile, possessive impertinence of this jumped-up hack referring to the man by his surname, the ex cathedra dismissal, the cold contempt, the complete absence of anything approaching enthusiasm or love; not a hint of fondness for the medium, of pleasure, of any of the emotions that are so recognisable in those who love film, who love comedy, drama, performance or narrative in any form.
It is a truism that if these absurd people could actually do any of the things they spend their days judging, then they would.1 That posterity has the last laugh is obvious too. Who will ever remember or be inspired by the trashy bile of such as Martin Cropper, Michael Coveney and Lewis Jones? ‘Steady on, Stephen,’ you may say here, ‘no need to be gratuitously offensive.’ Well quite. My point exactly. But even the pain critics inflict is perhaps irrelevant. Yes, people are wounded by their barbs; certainly, people cry. Sir John Mills told me a story this weekend of how he sat in front of a dressing-room mirror and burst into tears when he recalled one remark by a critic whose name he has now completely forgotten.
‘Ah, diddums,’ you will perhaps exclaim, ‘and did the nasty man make him all upset, then? Actors are paid enough, aren’t they? If they can’t take the bitching why don’t they get out of the heat?’ This may well be true. It may be true also that critics perform a
service, that actors and writers and artists need their egos deflating, that the public needs to be advised about how, where and when to spend their money on artistic activities, that ‘standards’ must be maintained.
All the foregoing may be fine and convincing reasons for the existence of critics. The point is that no one would volunteer for this dreadful trade but the kind of worthless and embittered offal we do, by and large, get. What decent person would want to spend a life picking and cavilling? How would they sleep at nights?
Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven.
‘And what did you do?’ asks Saint Peter. ‘Well,’ says the dead soul. ‘I criticised things.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, “thin and unconvincing,” “turgid and uninspired,” “competent and serviceable,”… you know.’
I think we can guess Saint Peter’s reaction.
Criticism is like corporal punishment: it may be considered good for the victim, but the prospect of encouraging the kind of person prepared to beat children is more appalling than a world full of unflogged youngsters. ‘Standards’ in the arts may be considered low today, but as low as standards of criticism?
1Oddly, when Milton Shulman, the critic referred to in the opening paragraph, wrote about my article in the Standard, this paragraph was the only one he quoted. He gave his small band of readers the impression that I had set great store by the observation that critics can’t do what they talk about, neglecting to tell them that I had only mentioned it in passing as a truism. He then went on to list great writers who had been critics. A false syllogism, of course. I never imply that great writers can’t be critics. It’s professional critics who can’t write that I am talking about. The rest of my argument he conveniently ignored.
Heartbreak Hotels
I am feeling like a hydra with several sore heads this morning. This is not the result of a hangover. A hangover would be welcome. As Frank Sinatra liked to say, ‘I feel sorry for people who don’t drink: when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel for the rest of the day.’ A hangover, frankly, is a good, clean, healthy pain compared to the mournful discomfort I am suffering today.
As we approach the final weeks of filming on Jeeves and Wooster 3 (‘they’re back … and this time they’re angry’) our days are getting longer and longer. This has meant overnights. Last night I stayed in a hotel which was once a coaching inn, a proud caravanserai that offered beers, wines, spirits, freshly aired sheets, shoulders of mutton, stuffed capons and as able a team of ostlers as ever ostled in the county of Buckinghamshire. It is now, naturally, part of a chain and serves as a tragic emblem of this unhappy land. It might as well be called the Albion Hotel and exist between the covers of an allegorical satire.
It is almost possible to detect in the sad demeanours of its mostly young employees, under the woundingly foul polyester liveries in which they are costumed, under the layers of false and greasy group management training and staff protocols that cake them like cheap make-up, under the heavy burden of drudgery and dull adherence to company rules which prescribe their every move, traces of the features of once cheerful, rude, bouncy and hopeful school-leavers: the echoes of the playground must still ring in the ears of these unfortunates who have, like Leonard Bast in Howards End, ‘given up the glory of the animal for a tail-coat and a set of ideas’.
Such hotels survive, in the classic paradox of the enterprise economy with its watchwords of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’, by buying up small independent hotels and even medium-sized or large rival groups and by observing and replicating to the minutest detail the style and customs of their competitors, thus ensuring that all their ‘outlets’ offer identical ‘product’. They are residential supermarkets now of course: breakfast is largely a help-yourself ceremony which no amount of lighting or descriptive copy can elevate to a country house breakfast. Coffee-making apparatus is supplied ‘for your convenience’ (not, banish the thought, for the hotel’s) complete with non-dairy creamers and coffee-whiteners; small fridges contain stocks of drink and peanuts: there is even a form which one has to fill in oneself detailing the raids made on this fridge. In America the system has led to minibars being called ‘honor bars’. I look forward to the first sighting of such a nomenclature in this country … extra points if American spelling is used.
Service, therefore, is reduced to an absolute minimum, largely provided by the client himself who is paying eighty-five pounds for the privilege of spending a night in one of these gehennas, with its preposterous carpeting, decor and fitments. What the hotel provides is limited to a standardised horror of ‘detailing’: some grotesque bounder in the senior management of the Forte Group decides it would be just ace to fold the leading edge of the lavatory paper into a coy and provocative peak and a fortnight later this lunatic practice is repeated by the Crest Group and the de Vere group and every other in the land. One night a small bar of soap, misleadingly labelled ‘goodnight chocolate’, appeared on pillows in a hotel in Newport Pagnell: a fortnight later the practice was universal.
A recent custom, and the one which has caused such a welling tide of misery to sweep over me this morning, is that of placing the guest’s morning newspaper in a small plastic bag on which is printed ‘Your morning paper’ and hanging it on the door knob. Is it less likely to be stolen than a paper folded and left in the corridor? Or one pushed under the door? No. This is simply another grisly attempt at a personal touch. Another phenomenal waste of money and world resources, another grotesque smirk from the leering and dishonoured prostitute that is the international hotel trade.
It is not that the American hotel style is impossible to achieve with some degree of salubriousness: Holiday Inns (ironically British owned these days) continue to do the thing rather well in largely purpose built premises. But the sight of cheap bright carpet overlaying and deadening good varnished oak floorboards, and cheap bright management orthodoxy overlaying and deadening good British spontaneity, stabs the heart.
Better Fawlty than Forte, I think.
Mercury, Messenger of the Gods
Some things in this world make me want to tear my clothes off and jump up and down, ululating wildly. Lavatory seat covers, corn dollies, ceramic plates by ‘leading and internationally renowned British artists’ depicting woodland voles snouting for blackberries in our native heritage woodlands in an heirloom edition you’ll want to keep for ever, Gardener’s Question Time, people who say ‘would you like an eggy?’, ribbons on Yorkshire terriers, tea towels with the Desideratum printed on them, gift ideas connected with golf and school choirs singing ‘Lord of the Dance’: these are a few of my favourite things. A desire to pollute the air with industrial strength obscenities when confronted by such itemries sweeps over me like a simoom.
This is as nothing to the wild, giddy and Bacchic storm that engulfs my whole being when I stumble across letters like those published on the subject of Freddie Mercury in last week’s Telegraph. One woman described the late rock star as a ‘monster’ whose ‘lifestyle’ was ‘disgusting’. Suddenly, on reading this and other articles and letters condemning the man’s life, I was gripped by an overwhelming urge to behave disgustingly myself: all at once I wanted to be a monster. I realised that the real divide in Britain is not between rich and poor, between Labour and Conservative, between male and female, between North and South, but between the merciful and the unmerciful. In the name of ‘protecting our children’ any unchristian condemnation, any greasy judgment, any canting anathema is permissible.
The deep cruel corruption of a Frank Beck in leafy suburbia is the real threat to children, not the Dionysiac licence and liberating excess of a rock concert. Murder, abuse, suffocating oppression and mindless cruelty are preponderantly found, as any newspaper will show you, in the home, nestling deep in the welcoming bosom of the Great British Family.
Those who sent half an acre of flowers to carpe
t the road outside Mercury’s house; the girls who travelled halfway across the world to bid him farewell; the quarter of a million South Americans who attended one single Queen concert a few years ago in Rio; the millions upon millions for whom he was the Judy Garland, Pagliacci, Falstaff, Don Giovanni and Dionysos de nos jours … were they depraved by him? Did he lead them astray? Did he lecture them? Tell them how to live? Urge them to narcotic riot and anal impropriety? Incite them to rebellion, degradation or crime? Of course not. He entertained them. He did so wittily, stylishly, outrageously and with a gigantic Grand Guignol spirit that may as well be called genius.
‘A billion flies eat excrement,’ you may say; ‘that does not ennoble the practice.’ Perhaps. In as much as it does not rally the masses, a revolutionary might call rock music a capitalist bread and circuses sop; in as much as it is ‘wild and warm and free’ a latter-day puritan might call it sinful. But for millions it is their music, their world, their answer to the panic and emptiness of traffic jams and mortgages.
What a phrase is ‘family values’: yet what does it mean? What are the virtues it offers? It has nothing to do with Christianity, certainly. Would Christ confuse bourgeois smugness with moral strength or judgmental bigotry with neighbourly love?