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Reissued in 2004 by Arrow Books
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Copyright © Stephen Fry 1992
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First published in the United Kingdom in 1992 by William Heinemann First published in paperback in the United Kingdom in 1993 by Mandarin
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ISBN 9780099457022
About the Book
Also by Stephen Fry
Title Page
Introduction
Section One: Radio
Donald Trefusis
Rosina, Lady Madding
Trefusis’s Christmas Quiz
Jeremy Creep
Trefusis Overdresses
Sidney Gross
Trefusis on Education
Trefusis and Redatt
Sir John Raving: Cricket & Golf
Trefusis on Exams
Trefusis is Unwell
Trefusis on Boredom
Trefusis on Hating Oxford
Trefusis on Old Age
Trefusis’s Obituary
Trefusis Nibbles
Trefusis and Rosina
Trefusis Accepts an Award
Trefusis and the Monocled Mutineer
Trefusis Blasphemes
Trefusis on Any Questions
Trefusis Goes North
Lady Madding Again
Trefusis’s Postcard From America
Postcard Number Two
Postcard Number Three
Postcard Number Four
Section Two: Reviews & Oddments
The Tatler and Sex
Books Do Furnish A Room
The Annotated Father Brown
Arena
The Book and the Brotherhood
A Television Review
Adolf Forster
Brand X
Don’t Knock Masturbation
Cricket, Lovely Cricket …
Bernard Levin
The Satire Boo
Child of Change
Agony Cousin
Lord’s: The Great Lie
The World Service
Section Three: The Listener
Naked Children
The Family Curse
A Glimpse of The Future
Friends of Dorothy
Thatcher on TV
Sock Fury
Wimbledon Horror
Saying Fuck
Worse – By Design
Christ
Bikes, Leather and After Shave
Your and Your Toffee
Christmas Cheer
Predictions for the Year 1989
The Talker in The Listener
Ad Break
Absolutely Nothing At All
The Young
Me & A Stapler Of My Own
Give Us Back Our Obfuscation
Compliant Complaint
How I Wrote This Article
Tear Him for his Bad Verses
The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey
Section Four: The Telegraph
Extra Sensory Deception
This Sporting Life
A Question of Attribution
Carefree Panty-Shields and Intimate Wipes
The Stuff of Dreams
Answers to The Stuff of Dreams
Piles
A Friendly Voice in the Polo Lounge
Drawing up a Hate List
Blithe & Bonny & Good & Gay
God Bless Worcestershire
Back on the Road
Zoo Time
Trefusis Returns!
A Bang on the Head
Dear Sid
As Mad As Mad Can Be
The Appearance of Reality
What Are We Fighting For?
Making the Right Moves
Licked By the Mother Tongue
Let the People Speak
Playing the Political Game
My Leonardo
A Chatterer Chatters
Game Show Heaven
A Drug on the Market
The Moustaches From Hell
She Was Only the President’s Daughter
The Sin of the Wheel
Patriot Missive
Oops
Comic Belief
The C Word
Don’t Thank Your Lucky Stars
Good Ole Country Boys
Grammar’s Footsteps
Careering All Over the Place
Tolerance to Disease
A Strange Man
Fun With Dolphins
My Sainted Aunt
A Simple Backwardsman
Goodbye, Fat Owl
And the Winner is
Taxi!
Another Question of Attribution
The Tracks of my Tears
The Mouse that Purred
A Game of Monopoly
Education is a Wonderful Thing
Role Credits
The Analogizer®
A Signing of the Times
Good Egg
Mad as an Actress
Motor Literacy
Vim and Vigour
A Critical Condition
Heartbreak Hotels
Mercury, Messenger of the Gods
Thar’s Gold In Them Thar Films
Valete
A Matter of Emphasis
Section Five: Latín!
Programme note
Latin! or Tobacco and Boys
Act One
Act Two
Copyright Page
Over the years, when not wearing his acting, television or novelist trousers, Stephen Fry has written many articles and itemries for magazines, newspapers and radio. Collected together in this excellent volume the reader will find the print debut of Professor Donald Trefusis, a previously undiscovered Sherlock Holmes mystery, discourses on the subjects of piles and critics and many more witty and incisive articles from the pages of the Listener and the Daily Telegraph.
As the title suggests, Paperweight will make a handy desk-top accessory as well as a friendly literary guacamole into which the tired and hungry reader might happily dip the tortilla chip of his curiosity whenever the fancy takes him.
‘Huge, crammed, wise, hilarious and utterly captivating’ Literary Review
‘Moving effortlessly from odd socks and coffee granules to the meaning of life, there is punch behind every punchline . . . Engaging and witty’ Mail on Sunday
‘Achingly funny’ The Times
‘[Fry’s] particular enjoyment of the English language is what makes his writing so funny: he stretches out the syllables of a word to get at least six innuendoes across, and the glory of having seen him so often on the screen is that he comes alive in your imagination to deliver the lines he has written’ Daily Mail
Also by Stephen Fry
FICTION
The Liar
The Hippopotamus
Making History
The Stars’ Tennis Balls
NON-FICTION
Moab is My Washpot
Rescuing the Spectacled Bear
The Ode Less Travelled
with Hugh Laurie
A Bit of Fry and Laurie
A Bit More Fry and Laurie
Three Bits of Fry and Laurie
Welcome to Paperweight. My first act must be to warn that it would be a madness in you to read this book straight through at one sitting, as though it were some gripping novel or ennobling biography. In the banquet of literature Paperweight aspires to be thought of as no more than a kind of literary guacamole into which the tired and hungry reader may from time to time wish to dip the tortilla chip of his or her curiosity. I will not be held responsible for the mental indigestion that is sure to be provoked by any attempt to bolt the thing whole. Snack books may not be the last word in style, but for those sated and blown by the truffles and quenelles of the master chefs in one kitchen, or flatulent with Whoppers and Super Supremes from the short-order cooks in the other, it may just be that Paperweight will find a place.
Perhaps, however, it will be the other end of the alimentary canal that furnishes us with a clue as to how to manage this book: its natural home may well turn out to be the lavatory, alongside The Best of the Far Side, an old Harpic-stained copy of The Sloane Ranger Handbook and everyone’s cloacal favourite, The Collected Letters of Rupert Hart-Davies. It may be that each article of the book should have been flagged with a number or symbol indicating the length of time the article would take to read, that number or symbol corresponding with the health of a reader’s bowel. In this way the reader could determine which sections to read according to his or her diet and general enteric condition. The whole book could then be got through without ever impinging on the customer’s quality time. But whatever use you find for Paperweight, whether you do follow a lavatorial regime, whether you take the hint of its title and press it into service as a desk accessory, or whether you merely wish to deface the photograph of that disgusting man on the front cover, I wish you years of trouble-free, stain-resistant use.
To collect together the swarf of six or seven years of occasional toiling in the workshops of journalism and radio (an absurd metaphor and of a kind that belle lettristes do not seem to be able to avoid … how is writing articles even remotely like toiling in a workshop? Get to the bloody point) might seem like an act of insupportable arrogance. My only answer to that is to say that the publishing atrocity you hold in your hands is, in fact, an act of supported arrogance. It exists because over the years I have received many letters from readers and listeners asking if there might be made available to them some permanent record of the articles and broadcasts which I have so pitilessly inflicted upon an incredulous public – presumably with a view to threatening their children or using the resultant book as an accessory in some satanic ritual. Paperweight is, anyway, the consequence of such entreaties, I trust those responsible will profit from the lesson.
(What’s all this ‘there might be made available to them some permanent record’ and ‘the consequence of such entreaties’? Why do you have to descend to this greasy style traditional in Forewords? And where do you get off with all this mock humility? ‘this publishing atrocity … I have so pitilessly inflicted’. Repulsive.)
My first forays into the kind of writing represented in this book (Forays? forays? What kind of word is that? Get a grip.) began in 1985 when Ian Gardhouse, a BBC radio producer of previously unspotted character, asked me to contribute to a programme of his called Colour Supplement. One or two of the broadcasts I made for this short-lived venture are contained in the ‘Radio’ section of this book.
Colour Supplement gave way to Loose Ends, on the first programme of which I introduced a character called Professor Trefusis. It was Ian Gardhouse’s idea. The week before our first transmission, a real-life academic, it seems, had been appointed by the government to inquire into sex and violence on television. Gardhouse thought it would be appropriate for me to broadcast as that academic, delivering opinions on a medium with which a cloistered don would be completely unfamiliar. I came up with an ageing Cambridge philologist of amiable but sometimes vituperative character called Donald Trefusis.
I liked Trefusis. His advanced years and further advanced eccentricity allowed me to get away with spiked comments and straight rudery that would have been unthinkable if uttered in the normal voice of an aspiring comic in his twenties. Over the next two or three years I continued to perform Trefusis and his ‘wireless essays’, on Loose Ends. A generous, some might say over-generous (cloying mock humility again … though you’d call it fausse humilité, I bet), selection is included here. I also dragged up from time to time in the guise of Rosina Lady Madding, faded Society Beauty, until pressure of work forced me to retrench on so giddy an expenditure of time. (oh, give it a rest, will you?)
Apart from anything else, such spare hours as I had when not prancing about on stages or in TV studios were being taken up with writing a weekly column for the now defunct Listener magazine. Its new editor, the peerless Alan Coren (well, ‘peerless’ is all right I suppose … at least you didn’t say ‘that consummate good egg, Alan Coren’) had hoicked me over from the books pages where I had been contributing occasional reviews for the literary editor, Lynne Truss. Some of those book reviews and a selection from the column itself are here reproduced in the section marked ‘The Listener’. For the Christmas issue of 1987 I contributed a Sherlock Holmes story which I have taken the liberty of including too (what do you mean ‘taken the liberty’? It’s your bleeding book isn’t it? Where’s the liberty? Really). A brace of articles (you mean ‘two’) written for Arena magazine are collected in a Reviews and Oddments section, together with a couple of pieces I wrote for the Tatler under the editorship of that supreme figure, since sadly gathered, Mark Boxer. I have also included a few articles I wrote as television critic of the Literary Review.
The Listener changed publishers in 1989 and Alan Coren left, as did I. A little later the magazine folded entirely. (We’re supposed to make a connection there, are we?)
A few months after this, Max Hastings, the amiable and modest editor of the Daily Telegraph (you like simply everyone don’t you?) sent me a note one afternoon, care of the stage door of the Aldwych Theatre, where I was performing in one of the most significant flops of the season, a play called Look Look. He asked if I would consider a column for his newspaper. It so happens that a few months earlier I had changed, as a reader, from the Independent to the Telegraph. Although no Conservative, I found and continue to find myself more at home in the pages of that newspaper than in any other, so I agreed readily and happily (ooh, this is exciting).
For two years I wrote a column under the heading ‘Fry on Friday’, relinquishing the post in late 1991, under pressure of filming and writing work. It was an immensely enjoyable discipline, that of having to find the weekly topic, although there were times when I was writing ten times as many words a week, answering the huge number of letters that were flooding in from Telegraph readers, than it took to write the articles themselves. I dare say the great columnists of our age, the Waterhouses, Levins and Waughs would find my post-bag laughably thin, but for me the challenging, intelligent, friendly and sometimes not so friendly letters from readers proved one of the great surprises and delights of that period of my life. I may say that towards the end, my time crisis having grown to such frightening proportions, I found myself unable to answer a great many of the letters and take this opportunity to apologise for the perfunctory nature of any replies with which correspondents were forced to be content (what a creep).
The final part of Paperweight is the complete text of a play of mine called Latin! or Tobacco and Boys. I have included the programme note for its performance at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, which should explain the background to the piece. Latin! is I suppose the reason for my doing what I do. I wrote it during my second year at Cambridge. As a result, Hugh Laurie, who saw it at Edinburgh, asked Emma Thompson to introduce me to him in the hope that I might write with him for a Footlights revue. I have been writing with him, on and off, for the last eleven years and I hope to do so for many more yet.
I should like to record my thanks therefore to him, to Emma Thompson, to Alan Coren, Max Hastings, Ian Gardhouse, Ned Sherrin, Lynne Truss, Nick Logan of Arena, Emma Soames (quondam editrix of the Literary Review) and the late Mark Boxer. Thanks too to Lisa Glass of Mandarin Books for her patience and to Jo Foster for helping me to track down the disjecta membra of so many years. (You had to do it, didn’t you? You had to end with a bloody Latin tag. What a git. And where do you get off with ‘quondam editrix’? Jesus.)
Stephen Fry
Norfolk, 1992
This is the first Trefusis broadcast, from Loose Ends. As explained in the introduction, it makes reference to a governmental decision to invite an academic to view a year’s television and pronounce on whether or not the violence shown on our screens was harmful to the public and most especially, of course, the dear children of this country.
VOICE: Dr Donald Trefusis, Senior Tutor of St Matthew’s College, Cambridge, and Carnegie Professor of Philology, was asked by the government last year to monitor a large part of the BBC’s television output, paying particular attention to scenes of violence that might disturb or influence young children. Here, he reports on his findings.
My brief, to inspect the rediffusion of violence in the BBC’s television programming, was on the one hand appalling to an inveterate lover of the wireless, and on the other appealing to an avid student and chronicler of modern society, and on the other flattering to one who is – oh dear, I seem to have three hands here, never mind, suffice it to say that I approached the task with a glad, if palpitating, heart.
My predecessor on the Queen Anne Chair of Applied Moral Sciences1 here always held that television, already an etymological hybrid compounded, as it is, of the Greek ‘tele’ and the Latin ‘vision’, was also a social hybrid, a chimera that awaited some modern crusading Bellerophon, athwart a twentieth-century Pegasus, to slay it before it devoured our culture whole in its filthy, putrescent, purulent maw.
I, however, essentially a man of the people, a man with his alert and keen young fingers very much on the thrusting, vibrant pulse of our times, incline to no such intemperate view. For me television represents a challenge, a hope, an opportunity – or, in the words of T.E. Hulme, ‘a concrete flux of interpenetrating intensities’. And it was with this high heart that I approached the duty my government had called me to do. In fact, when young Peter from the Home Office approached me for the task in the smoking library of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, I had to confess to him that I hadn’t actually ever watched any television before. One is so busy. But Peter, whom I am proud to say I taught for the Classical Tripos in 1947, took the view that a fresh mind was what the problem needed: it was, therefore, with the confidence of ignorance and the blithe cheer of inexperience that I sat down to my brand new Sony Trinitron to sample the broadcast offerings of the corporation.
Violence, I need hardly remind a wireless audience, derives from the Latin word vis and its cognates, meaning strength. The violence I was briefed to hunt down, however, was a horse of a very different kidney. I shall keep you guessing no longer and reveal that what I saw shocked me to the very core of my being and disturbed me in a fashion that it is beyond my power to describe. Programme after programme violent, harrowing and potentially ruinous to the soft, impressionable minds of the young.
The first programme I chanced upon was entitled The Late, Late Breakfast Show presented by a – no, it is no part of my function here to descend to personalities and abuse – presented by a personage, let us say, that I would rather never see again in this or any other world. In this programme, violence was done to all the canons of decency, respectability, gentleness, courtesy, taste, humanity and dignity that I have striven all my life to uphold and promote. All were violated in ways too savage, too grotesque, too degraded to delineate. Such an obscene orgy of vulgarity, baseness and ignorance I hope never to witness again. The young mind is being brought up on the idea that self-advertising, huckstering loutishness is admirable; crude, unlettered bawdy at the expense of female dignity amusing; and puerile, banausic posturing and prankstering entertaining. Under the motto ‘It’s only a laugh’ waves a banner of such shameful, irredeemable crudity that the imagination sickens. If this, I felt, is television, then the violence it is doing to the sensibilities of our young must be instantly halted before it is too late. A subsequent stream of futile and insulting games programmes followed hard on the heels of this abomination: all week I was bombarded by violent filth. One programme consisting entirely of cut-up pieces of letters that viewers had had the impertinence to send up did such violence to this country’s good name for literacy, intelligence, spelling, calligraphy, discernment and modesty that I feared I should faint clean away.
However, amongst this mire of violation, ruin and despair, some redeeming pearls did shine forth. From America, and from here, there were many programmes in which actors dressed up and pretended to be policemen or criminals and gave entertaining representations of fights and shoot-outs. Many a car exploded in a jolly and exciting fashion as part of this make-believe. I became particularly fond of a pair called Starsky and Hutch, who were forever simulating gun-fights and beatings-up. These merry, silly, romping fictional diversions were, as fiction always has been, and always will be, harmless, instructive and charming. I shall recommend they be left alone, as should be all drama and fiction. But the violence, the violence that attacks our young in the monstrous shapes I have already tried to describe, that I shall spare no effort to uproot, extirpate, decimate, annihilate and destroy.
Good morning.
1For some reason I seem to have introduced Trefusis as a Moral Scientist. It is later affirmed that he is a philologist.
The first of three monologues from Rosina, Lady Madding, which appeared on Loose Ends. Imagine a voice not unlike that made by someone who speaks while inhaling.
VOICE: Rosina, Lady Madding, at home at Eastwold House.
I live here alone in what, when I was a girl, was used to be called the Dower House. I suppose I am technically a dowager, though my son Rufus, the fourth earl, is not yet married. I love the country, it’s very peaceful here. I am surrounded by photographs of my past. On the piano I have a photograph of myself dancing with David, the Prince of Wales – later of course Edward the Eighth and subsequent Duke of Windsor. David was a very bad dancer, always trod on one’s toes, and I remember he once crushed the metatarsal bones in the foot of a girl-friend of mine – discreet lesbianism was fashionable at the time.
Here’s a photograph of Noël Coward – darling Noël as we always called him. He was a very witty man, you know – it’s a side of him not many people are aware of. I recall an occasion when I came onto the dance-floor of Mario’s in Greek Street wearing a very daring frock, a frock that revealed more of my décolletage than was then considered proper – now of course I dare say it would raise nothing more than an eyebrow – but at the time it was very wicked. I came onto the floor and darling Noël came up to me and said ‘Rosina’ – he always used to call me Rosina – it is my name, you must understand. ‘Rosina,’ he said in that voice of his, ‘Rosina, where did you find such an alluringly low-cut torso?’ This was Noël’s little way, you see.
The portrait above the fireplace was made when I was in Paris – Claude my husband was Ambassador in the late twenties. I used to hold very literary parties at the embassy – Plum and Duff Cooper, Scott and Garrett Fitzgerald, darling Geoffrey Chaucer of course, Adolf Hitler and Unity Mitford, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Topless, Radclyffe Hall and Angela Brazil – they could always be relied upon to attend. And of course O. Henry James Joyce Cary Grant. I remember F.E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead of course, that’s his picture there, just below the dartboard, F.E. used to say ‘All the world and his live-in lover go to Rosina’s parties’ which pleased me very much.
Later when Claude and I went to India to take up the Vice-regency I met Gandhi with whom I used to play French cricket – he was awfully good at cricket, as a matter of fact: Claude always used to say, ‘what the loin-cloth industry gained, the wicket-keeping industry lost.’ Pandit Nehru was very impressive too, though if Edwina Mountbatten is to be believed his length was too variable for him ever to enter the ranks of Indian leg-spin immortals.
The large bronze statue of the nude male which stands on top of the synthesiser is of Herbert Morrison the Cabinet Minister. I use it to hang my bracelets on when I’m playing at the keyboard now. I spend a lot of time here in this room, remembering the past. Silly Poles Hartley, L.P. Hartley, you know, once said that the past is a foreign country, but I don’t agree. The food was better for a start, and the people didn’t smell. People often tell me I was one of a spoilt generation, rich, beautiful, idle, parasitical. It is true that I had every conceivable luxury lavished upon me during my life, met many famous and influential people, saw many exciting places and never did anything more taxing than organise large house-parties. But you know, despite that, if I had my time over again I wouldn’t change a thing. Regrets? A few. I shouldn’t have let dear T.E. Lawrence borrow my motor-bicycle. I’m tired now. Let me eat.
VOICE: Donald Trefusis, Professor of Philology at the University of Cambridge, sets his famous Christmas quiz. Have pencil, paper or tape-recorder ready.
Human beings, who I must suppose make up a fair proportion of my audience today, are often immensely competitive in their ways. This is usually a quality much to be deplored and discouraged; clearly it is deleterious to the industrial and economic health of our country to have a large number of aggressive, competitive persons vying with each other for money or markets or whatever footling thing industrial figures do vie for when not taking up valuable compartment space in trains.
The competitive spirit is an ethos which it is the business of universities such as the one in which I have the honour to move and work, to subdue and neutralise. We talk often about our national malaise, which is not, as often assumed, in reference to our welcome immigrants from Malaya, but a description of the appalling and continuing trend of intelligent young men and women coming to universities and being encouraged to go into industry. Natural scholars, classicists and linguists are, from an early age, introduced to technology, management (whatever that is to be taken to signify) and commerce. We need look no further than that dismal circumstance if we are searching for reasons that may explain the decline of this country. How can this nation stand on its feet in the cut and thrust international sphere if it is unable to decline the middle mood of λυω or rehearse the argument of Endymion? A generation of citizens who buy red leather combination locked attaché cases and heated trouser presses while remaining ignorant of the metrical constitution of The Faerie Queen is not one ready to lead the world. However that is not the main text of my disquisition this day. I wished merely to wash the background of my canvas with the foregoing colours from my palette of complaints before limning the foreground with the shapes and rhythms of my main composition.
For all that I rightly discourage adversarial attitudes amongst my students, at Christmas it is customary for me to set a small quiz. It is open to any member of the University who has, at any time during the previous twelvemonth, invited me to a Madeira and Biscuit party. Quite enormous international pressure has been put upon me to open this traditional little catechism to my listening public. The undergraduate prize, a chased filigree-work étui from the Second Republic, engraved with the winner’s name and containing a small quantity of high-grade cocaine, has already been won, so I am afraid that I cannot offer the winner amongst you anything more than a signed copy of your choice of any of my published works together with a personally autographed edition of Mr Sherrin’s latest amusing collection of humorous theatre anecdotes entitled Larry’s Such A Name-Dropper.
The quiz is divided into two categories which I have named, rather aptly I think, Section A and Section Five. Section Five first, I fancy, for neatness. Prepare implements of scripture or instruments of magnetic sound registration.
Question 1: What, please, have the following words in common: almost, biopsy, chintz? That’s almost, biopsy, and chintz.
Question 2: What have the Prime Ministers Lord Pelham and Lord Grenville to do with Lord Ickenham and Lord Sidcup? That’s Lords Pelham and Grenville, Lords Ickenham and Sidcup.
Question 3: What association does BBC correspondent Martin Bell have with the Times Crossword Puzzle?
Question 4: What have poets Andrew Marvell, Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith in common, aside from their demises?
Question 5: What have Poles and Staples to do with Shrimps and Wardrobes?
That was Section Five. Section A is the tie-breaker, and requires more creative effort from the competitor.
Question A: In twelve words devise a telegram to an imaginary Duchess whose couchée you are compelled to miss. It should be composed in a manner that leaves no doubt that you are skipping the engagement simply because you find her and her friends repellent, abhorrent and absurd.
Question B: Lean forward and touch each knee with the tip of your nose.
Question C: Wear bright, cheerful colours and adopt a sweet nature.
Question D: Where practicable, use a condom.
Question E: Be respectful to your seniors and courteous, charming and considerate to your juniors.
Question F: If you like popular music go out and buy five classical records and listen to them five times a day for a week.
Question G: If you like classical music go out and buy five popular music records and listen to them five times a day for a week and let’s have no more nonsense.
Question H: Imagine that you are the defence counsel for Robert Maxwell. Try and persuade a jury that your client is not megalomaniacally insane.1
Question I: Write a poem in ottava rima on the subject of Halitosis.
There you are. This should present no problems for keen competitors. By way of encouragement I might say that four-fifths of my students achieved 98 per cent or higher in this quiz. The names of all successful candidates will be put into my crushed velvet smoking cap and one lucky name will be drawn out on Christmas Eve by the Provost-General In Ordinary of St Matthew’s College, Sir Neville Soviet Mole.
The very best of luck to you all, and if you have been, I’m glad you’ve stopped.
Really most gratifying and extraordinary response to my quiz. The answers were as follows: almost, biopsy and chintz are the only six-lettered words in the language whose letters occur without repetition in alphabetical order. Lords Sidcup and Ickenham have this in common with the quondam Prime Ministers Lords Pelham and Grenville – they were both creations of P.G. Wodehouse, whose given names were, of course, Pelham and Grenville. Martin Bell’s connection with the Times Crossword is that his father Adrian, the writer and journalist, compiled the first ever Times puzzle. Andrew Marvell, Philip Larkin and Stevie Smith all have the city of Hull in common. Lastly I asked you for the connection between Poles and Staples and Shrimps and Wardrobes. L.P. Hartley wrote of course The Shrimp and the Anemone and his middle name was Poles, while Clive Staples Lewis was the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There we are. I am happy to say that fourteen thousand of you sent in answers correct in every detail. The winner was a Mr J. Archer, of the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
1Had some trouble getting this past the BBC censor. Unusually for me, as you will see, this remark proved accurate and, if not prophetic exactly, at least resonant.
Also broadcast on Colour Supplement.
VOICE: This week Men At Work talks to Sir Jeremy Creep, Principal of the London College of Architects in Rohan Point, Putney.
Architecture offers quite extraordinary opportunities to serve the community, to enhance the landscape, refresh the environment and to advance mankind – the successful architect needs training to overcome these pitfalls however, and start earning some serious money. I get all kinds of people from the schools and universities and my job is manifold and various. Firstly of course, it’s visual. Young people use their eyes – to be a good architect in Britain today you need to do more than use your eyes, you must have them surgically removed. But you don’t just have to be blind to be a modern architect, you must develop a lively sense of contempt for your fellow man, so early meetings with borough planners and council administrators are essential.
Next a carefully planned system of mind-direction seminars, as we like to call them. In these we show our students film of old buildings, old village communities, interviews with noted conservationists such as the late John Betjeman and His Royal Highness Prince Charles. By disseminating toxic gases and introducing mild electric shocks we induce a feeling of nausea, sickness and acute physical pain, which in time is associated with those images. Next we show film of large glass boxes, rough concrete towers and enormous steel girders, all the time stimulating the students with underseat vibromassage and soothing selections of Mozart, while they drink venerable clarets and smoke jazz cigarettes. By this means an aversion to old forms of architecture and a loving acceptance of the new can be effectively inculcated.
The observant amongst you will have noticed that earlier I have said that we remove our trainees’ eyes and then show them films. I should of course have mentioned that an architect must be able to lie. He (or she) must be adept at lying in public fluently and easily. ‘This building will stand for ten years’, ‘St Paul’s Cathedral is ugly and needs to be surrounded with objects of beauty’, ‘This block of flats is built around human dimensions and needs’, ‘Architecture is first and foremost about people’. I doubt if even the most sophisticated detector would have challenged one of those statements, outrageous tissues of litanies of catalogues of farragoes of lies that they were.
A disturbing trend towards neo-Mannerism that has crept into 1980s office and council architecture has caused us to stiffen up our re-education programme lately and now it is common policy on presenting our diploma to the successful graduate to suck his brains out with a straw before allowing him to leave.
Le Corbusier, that most magnificent of architects (you see, not even a flicker on the polygram’s needle there), once said ‘A human being is a machine for living in one of my houses’ and if Britain is to have a thriving, prosperous, happy, well-fed, well-paid, well-housed community of architects then those are the principles we must embrace.
Let me quote again, Sir Niklaus Pevsner this time, ‘Building is the enclosure of space; architecture is the aesthetic enclosure of space.’ In the library of my converted Georgian water-mill out here in Hampshire, I reach for the Architect’s Dictionary, Volume One ‘Asbestos to Balsa wood girders’, and look up the word ‘aesthetic’. I find this entry: ‘aesthetic, obs. vulg. orig. unknown.’ That could describe a modern architect couldn’t it? Obs. vulg. orig. unknown. Obscene, vulgar bastard. Goodnight.
Good hello to you all. I must state at the outset of this little talk, with frank, manly directness, that I am not a snob. Never have been, don’t want to be. Robbie Burns and I, as so often these days, are in agreement, when we carol that rank is but the guinea-stamp and that a man is a man for a’ that. Kind hearts, I am often heard to murmur to myself, when strolling about the ballroom at some omnium gatherum of the crested families of the realm, kind hearts are more than coronets and simple faith than Norman Tebbit. For all that, I am an old man with few fleshly pleasures left me, unless having my corns filed may be counted as sensuous and sybaritic, and it does give me pleasure, as the Season commences, to gad about the flesh pots of Society, cheering on the Varsity in the Diamond Skulls at Henley here, escorting a lissom sprig of the nobility to the Queen Charlotte Ball there. It is, I must own, hard to square my delight in these festivities with my Proudhonite-syndicalism on the one hand and my almost universal contempt for the generality of the upper classes on the other. The beauty of the events eux-mêmes is vitiated by the almost total foulness and self-esteem of those in attendance. It is hard to toss the contents of a half-pint mug of Pimms in the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley, for instance, without soaking one who is in total ignorance of the art of rowing. Unslip a rat in the members’ stands at Lord’s and you will start a score of individuals who couldn’t tell you the first thing about cricket. But quite my favourite event of the Season is and shall remain Glyndebourne. Its preciosity and privilege notwithstanding, the smugness of those present aside, the awful luxury of the whole event discounted, this is a fine place to be. Imagine therefore my pleasure when, earlier this week, an old pupil of mine, now an international spy of growing reputation, invited me to meet him there to witness a new production of La Traviata directed by Sir Peter, Sir Peter, Sir Peter whatever it is.
I could barely stand still and let Glambidge, my gyp, tie my tie, stud my studs and brace my braces, so excited was I on the day appointed. I love to wear the full festive fig; an American girl once told me that it made me look kinda sexy and these things linger in the memory. My particular nightmare is overdressing, and Glyndebourne has at least the advantage of particular rules of dress. Black tie or nothing. Though I suspect nothing would be frowned upon, if not barred outright.
Glambidge and I arrived in good time to miss the first act. I shan’t blame Glambidge, he drove that Wolseley to the limit. Unfortunately its limit appears to be nineteen miles an hour. Howsomever, we had five minutes to pass before the interval, minutes I filled inspecting the grounds and wondering at the particularly penetrating quality of fine cold driving summer rain. In due course the act ended and the audience filed out of the – well, the auditorium.
Ladies and gentlemen, mother, friends: imagine my mortification, picture my distress, conceive of my chagrin. That audience of opera-goers was dressed, each man jack or woman jill of them, in what I can only describe as the most appalling collection of day wear. The only black ties to be seen were those about the necks of the Front of House staff. My old pupil hastened up to me. ‘Why, Professor,’ he shrieked. ‘Whatever are you dressed up like that for? This is the dress rehearsal – I thought you knew.’
I had come for the public dress rehearsal in evening dress.
Words, thousands of them, spin into my mind, some of them English, many of them culled from alien tongues; none of them, not a one, is capable of describing a scintilla of an iota of a shadow of a suspicion of an atom of a fraction of a ghost of a tithe of a particle of my horror, shame and pitiable distress. Of all the solecisms, gaffes, floaters, blunders and bowel-shatteringly frightful bloomers possible to make, I am fully persuaded that overdressing heads the field by a comfortable furlong.
Ichabod, ohimé, eheu, aïee! I dived like a kingfisher into the lavatory, slammed the door behind me and sat sobbing there for the ensuing two and a half hours. Every half-pitying, half-scornful look that had been cast me as I had flown into this sanctuary replayed itself in my tortured mind. They had all stared as upon some parvenu Armenian millionaire who wears bought medals at a British Legion dinner, or some arriviste mayor who sits even in his bath chained in aldermanic splendour. If only I hadn’t told Glambidge he might drive on into Lewes to look up his wife who lives in a lunatic asylum just outside the town, I might have been able to sneak home even then. As it is I writhed in a lather of shame for the duration.
But now, in the cold light of reason, I am wondering if it is not possible that I over-reacted a little. Might a calmer man not have passed the whole misunderstanding off with a light laugh? Was I not being myself a little bit of a snob in attributing to others my own contempt for myself? If anyone was there, and saw me, perhaps they could write to me and relieve my mind.
Meanwhile, you have been patient. Many of you will wonder at my unhappiness and its irrelevance to real and earnest life outside, but the more intelligent will, knowing that there is an embargo on political talk at this electoral time, understand the subtext of my little reminiscence, and read the clear signals of its underlying allegory and know what to do about it. Onward and upward, heigh ho: if you have been, sit down.
Another extract from Colour Supplement.
ANNOUNCER: SIDNEY GROSS, tour operator for Sad People’s Holidays, talks openly about his crime.
I think one of the great things about the kind of holiday that my company can offer is that it gives the chance for people whose IQ is between eighteen and thirty to have a really good time. Most of our holiday-makers are based out of Milton Keynes, Telford, Wales, Peterborough, Warrington-Runcorn – the kind of UK environment that has to advertise to get anyone to live there. We figure that the kind of person who thinks it would be nice if all towns were like Milton Keynes is the kind of person who is going to enjoy one of our packages.
We’re interested in young, bright, attractive, good-time people, but they’re never interested in us, so we have to make do with sad, old, desperate alcoholics and lechers who book themselves on one of our holidays in the vain hope that they might be able to go to bed with someone before they’re fifty.
On our brochures you’ve probably seen the photographs of topless girls, hunky wind-surfing men and good-time couples playing beach games, and in fact it is perfectly usual for our holiday-makers to have exactly that kind of activity available for them to watch. On our islands, we arrange coach parties to the more expensive and fashionable beaches where they can spend all day watching young people having a good time from inside the coach.
I get absolutely fed up when people accuse Club Med IQ 18–30 of being a kind of licensed pimp. We have absolutely no kind of licence whatever. We don’t need one. To those critics who claim our kind of holiday panders to the more revolting sides of human behaviour, that our holiday-makers are giving Britons abroad a bad name, I say look at our return-rate, look how many pleasure-seekers come back on our holidays again and again, looking for a good time. And who knows, on their third or fourth or fifth trip they might find one. We’re in the miracle business.
APOLOGY:
Since that young, scabrous, wicked and irreverent piece was recorded the BBC has heard that Club Med IQ 18–30 has completely transformed the nature of the holidays it offers and people with IQs well over thirty are now admitted. We would like to apologise for any offence caused. We would also like to apologise for the use of the word ‘squalor’ and the phrase ‘lowest common denominator’ which have just occurred in this apology. Thank you.
This one single broadcast for some reason attracted more correspondence than any other: I sent over a hundred copies out to people who wrote in asking to see the thing in print. Some nerve was touched, I suppose.
VOICE: Donald Trefusis is still on his lecture tour of the universities and women’s institutes of England. This week has seen him in Newcastle, Exeter, Norwich, Lincoln and tonight, Nottingham. On his way between Norwich and Lincoln he had time to talk to his old pupil, Stephen Fry, whose parallel comedic tour has attracted widespread concern.
Hugely so to you all. Firstly I would like to thank the obliging undergraduate of the School of Mauritian Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich who so kindly retrieved my valise last night. I am sorry he had to look into it in order to discover its rightful owner, and I assure him the sum required in used banknotes will be left at the assigned place. I look forward to the safe return of the appliances.
Now, I’m particularly glad I caught you just now because I wanted very much to have a word about this business of education. I have visited so many schools, universities and polytechnics in this last week, listened to the tearful wails of so many pupils, students and teachers, that I feel I should speak out. As one who has spent his entire life, man, boy and raving old dotard, in and out of educational establishments I am the last person to offer any useful advice about them. Better leave that to politicians with no education, sense or commitment. They at least can bring an empty mind to the problem. However I would like to alienate you as much as possible at this time by offering this little canapé from the savoury tray of my experience. If you would like to kill me (and you would not be alone in that ambition) forget poison, expunge strangulation from your mind, and entirely fail to consider the possibility of sawing through the brake cables of my Wolseley, there is a much simpler course open to you. Simply creep upon me when I am least expecting it and whisper the phrase ‘Parent Power’ into my ear. Stand back and admire the effect. Clubbing cardiac arrest.
Parent power: schmarent power, I say. Don’t misunderstand me, oh good heavens remove yourselves as far as possible from the position of not understanding me. Democracy and I have no quarrel. But on this head if on no other believe me, parent power and democracy are as closely related as Mike Gatting and the Queen Mother, and unless someone has been keeping a very fruity scandal from me, that is not very closely at all. Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. The customer is always right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.
Because of course education is not the issue. ‘Heaven preserve us from educated people,’ is the cry. Ask Norman Tebbit, for whom a leering naked teenager in a newspaper is no different from a Titian nude,1 ask him what education means. Ask the illiterate ghouls of Fleet Street or Wapping Street, or whatever unfortunate thoroughfare they now infest, what education is. A poem with swear words has to be banned from television or they will squeal for weeks.2 They’ve dealt with the socialists in the town halls, now they want to turn on those clever people who mock them in their plays and books.
This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today’s legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change. Heavens no.
The day a child of mine comes home from school and reveals that he or she has been taught something that I agree with is the day I take that child away from school.
‘Teach Victorian values, teach the values of decency and valour and patriotism and religion,’ is the cry. Those are the very values that led to this foul century of war, oppression, cruelty, tyranny, slaughter and hypocrisy. It was the permissive society it is so horribly fashionable to denounce that forced America to back out of the Vietnam War, it is this new hideously impermissive society that is threatening to engulf us in another. I choose the word ‘engulf’ with great care.3 Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all. Heaven help us, when will we realise that we know nothing, nothing. We are ignorant, savagely, hopelessly ignorant – what we think we know is palpable nonsense. How can we dare to presume to teach our children the very same half-baked, bigoted trash that litters our own imperfect minds? At least give them a chance, a faint, feeble glimmering chance of being better than us. Is that so very much to ask? Apparently it is.
Well, I’m old and smelly and peculiar and I’ve no doubt everything I said is nonsense. Let’s burn all those novels with naughty ideas and naughty words in them, let’s teach children that Churchill won the Second World War, that the Empire was a good thing, that simple words for simple physical acts are wicked and that teenage girls pointing their breasts at you out of newspapers are harmless fun. Let’s run down the arts departments of universities, let’s string criminals up, let’s do it all now, for the sooner we all go up in a ball of flame, the better.