Now my friend was much taken with this tin-of-paint idea. When she rang other people for further ethical and practical viewpoints, she found that the irrational Fear of Paint not only entered other people’s neurotic purview, but could easily be brought to dominate it.
But what she didn’t find, apparently, was anyone else who said, ‘No, I wouldn’t wear it because it isn’t mine.’ So she wore the coat, recklessly defied the malign god of magnolia gloss, and eventually decided to write a piece for the Guardian about the whole damn thing.
And my point (at last) is this. She told me she was writing an article in which I would – nameless, of course – appear. She read me her description of my response, and told me precisely when the piece would be published.
Such careful, respectful and scrupulous behaviour put me to shame. Because when it comes to other people’s anecdotes – other people’s ‘stuff’ which might come in handy to illustrate a point in a column or a story – I rip it straight off the hanger without asking, shout ‘Yes! This will do nicely!’, and publish it in a newspaper. Which is the exact equivalent of wearing it to the open day at the Jackson Pollock Primal Hurl Art Therapy Group for Particularly Messy Serial Killers.
Luckily, my friends are more broadminded than me. I parade their best stuff in public and they don’t get all twisted about it. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once said that when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. Equally, when a columnist has bosom friends, they find that they no longer have a thing to call their own.
Every anecdote they utter goes directly into the writer’s mental dressing-up box, and though any single item may not re-emerge for a decade, it will undoubtedly turn up again one day – albeit crumpled, stained, mildewed, or laced with holes – to the owner’s muffled astonished cry of’ But surely that was mine originally, wasn’t it?’
It is no extenuation whatever to claim (as I do, frequently) that so long as I attribute stories to ‘a friend’; so long as I don’t tell the story against the originator – well, then it’s all perfectly OK. In her Great Left-Behind Coat Ethics Research, my friend encountered precisely such casuistical chicanery, and I poured scorn on all of it.
For instance, perhaps it would be a different ethical kettle of fish if the item were not a coat but a frock? Or if the owner were the sort of person who suffers from amnesia? Or if you only allowed yourself to wear the coat outdoors on National No Decorating Day? Bah, I retorted; the matter is simple. If it doesn’t belong to you, leave it in a cupboard. The rest is sophistry.
And so here I am, writing about my friend’s article about borrowing things without asking. And did I ask her? Of course I didn’t.
‘Yes! This will do nicely!’ I yelled excitedly, as I tried it on for size, did a quick twirl, and hacked a few inches off the sleeves with the bread-knife. Such a gigantic fuss about nothing! As the great Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz might have remarked, if they didn’t want me to wear it, they really shouldn’t have left it lying about.
At the cinema these days there is a rather peculiar advert for jeans. It is basically a witty rewriting of Cinderella, but since it appears to have been edited by a madman run wild with a bacon-slicer, the narrative unfolds so precipitately that it takes at least two viewings to get the gist. Anyway, it goes something like this. Clock strikes bong for midnight. Boy rushes off without his jeans. Girl holds jeans to face with funny wistful-but-determined look in her eyes, then hawks jeans around town, getting big fat men to try them on. Finally, she locates her beloved, who buttons up a treat. And that’s it. Allowing for how difficult it is to make trousers even slightly interesting, this ad is a huge success.
The thing about fairy tales, surely, is that they can be used to sell anything; indeed, it is almost their primary function. Anyone who thinks it is radical of the Disney studio to turn the heroine of Beauty and the Beast into a modern-thinking self-determined book-lover (‘There must be more than this provincial life!’ she sings discontentedly, several times) is right in only one respect. Yes, it is radical of the Disney studio. Previously Disney sold other things; now it is selling this. A generation of girls grew up believing that to be a heroine (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) all you required were a decent whistling technique, first-class handiness with a broom, and an ability to sleep for extended periods in a glass box without mussing your make-up or dribbling on your frock. And as values go, these were probably OK for the time.
But my point is this. In the traditional folk tale, women were not these puny types. Big tears did not roll down their pretty faces, and they did not wear rouge. Instead, they rescued princes from enchantment, tipped witches into ovens, all that. The reason we know only of the rescue-me namby-pambies is that we inherit our knowledge of folk tales from the Victorians, whose respect for divergent viewpoints, especially in the realm of sexual politics, was notoriously meagre. Funny how The Sleeping Prince got dropped from the canon, wasn’t it? I wonder why.
But as Alison Lurie points out in her marvellous book on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups, even the Grimm brothers tidied up the tales to reflect the mores. ‘In each subsequent edition of the tales,’ writes Lurie, ‘women were given less to say and do.’ At issue, of course, is whether it is cynical and outrageous to impose modern values on traditional stories. When George Cruikshank, the Victorian illustrator, rewrote four of his favourite fairy stories as temperance tracts, Charles Dickens countered with a brilliant essay, ‘Frauds on the Fairies’ (1853), denouncing the practice. But what is odd now is to see how certain Dickens was that the versions he remembered from childhood were necessarily the originals. Cruikshank, thundered Dickens, ‘has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.’
Dickens boiled with sarcasm (‘Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in’); and then embarked on a thoroughly sardonic rewrite of Cinderella incorporating absurdly modish references to tax reform, vegetarianism and, interestingly, the rights of women. Cinderella, in this version, was a moral swot and reviler of meat, who on becoming queen did all sorts of absurdly fashionable things. She ‘threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices, and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and whom nobody dared to love’. It is the mark of a great writer that he allows his own imagination to scare him like this. Come to think of it, this must have been the version that was read to the infant Neil Lyndon in his cot.
Where does it all stop? Well, it won’t stop at all, of course. Walt Disney is supposed to have said, ‘People don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. In the end they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.’ But now Linda Woolverton, the scriptwriter of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, has started saying she would like to remake ‘the old Disneys’, so it turns out that nothing is sacred after all. Cinderella, she says, needs to stand up to the ugly sisters, stop hanging around with mice, and not necessarily marry the prince. Hmm. Snow White should not stay at home all day but work with her chums in the mines and marry one of the vertically challenged men with pickaxes. And lastly, Sleeping Beauty – the most famously inert character of them all – should ‘track down and personally punish’ her wicked stepmother immediately she wakes up in the glass box. Whether she will punish her stepmother by making her watch the new version of Cinderella is not made clear.
I promise I didn’t make any of this up. I just wonder how serious Linda Woolverton was when she said it. Currently she has been let loose by Disney on a remake of the famous animal adventure film The Incredible Journey, which seems at first glance to have fewer opportunities for political correctness, although the cat could have
a wooden leg. Meanwhile, it ought to be said that Belle may indeed be a book-reader, who swoons at the sight of the Beast’s enormous library, yet she is a traditional heroine in most other respects. She is kind, friendly, chats with cockney teapots, and has enormous eyes. And of course she is everso, everso pretty. But then ‘Passable Looking and the Beast’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it somehow.
Anyone watching the BBC news on Sunday night, with its edited highlights of the Remembrance Day ceremony, will have noted a very curious thing. The newsmen cut out the two minutes’ silence. Thus, the clock went ‘Bong’, the distant cannon went ‘Bang’, and the next thing you knew, they were playing the Last Post and laying wreaths. Since the annual two minutes’ reflective silence is about the most moving thing on television, it is possible that the edit was intended to protect the already raw feelings of the grief-stricken. But I doubt it. What we witnessed here was the consequence of fear, of a feeble failure of nerve. You see, silence on the television is about as unthinkable (Oh no!) as blank lines in a newspaper, thus:
In fact, the chances of this gaping white wound not being panic-sutured by someone in the course of the paper’s production (‘What the hell is this? There’s a space on page 18!’) are very slim indeed, and I am thoroughly foolhardy even to attempt it.
Gaps are great, however. I firmly believe we should have more gaps, especially in broadcasting. ‘And now on BBC2, er, Nothing. Over on BBC1, in just over ten minutes, good grief, Nothing there, as well.’ Personally, I would embrace the return of the potter’s wheel, the interval bell, the test card, and the inventive use of ‘Normal Programmes Will be Resumed Shortly’, but arguably Nothing could be finer. Don’t other people’s brains get overloaded? Or is it only mine? Has no one else noticed that new books are published every week, without let-up, over and over, till the end of creation? Why don’t they stop sometimes? Why don’t they admit they have run out of ideas? Am I run mad, or just in desperate need of a holiday? Asked recently in a published questionnaire to compose a headline for the event that I would most like to cover, I’m afraid I gave myself away completely. ‘Airwaves eerily silent,’ I wrote, ‘as all networks simultaneously run out of programmes.’
Clearly this is an unusual attitude to our splendiferous burgeoning culture, especially in a television critic, but on the other hand, for God’s sake somebody, help! While others famously ‘surf’ through the television channels – presumably humming ‘Catch a Wave’ by the Beach Boys as they paddle back out, letting their fingertips stiffen from prolonged immersion – I find I can only cope by taking short exhilarating dips, then towelling off vigorously and getting fully dressed again. Sharing a sofa (and a remote control) with someone who uses commercial breaks in cop shows as an opportunity to surf over and ‘see what’s happening in the snooker’ is guaranteed, in fact, to drive me to violence.
‘Shouldn’t we switch back now?’ I say, after a minute has passed.
‘Not yet, this is interesting.’ Pause.
‘Let’s switch back, go on.’
‘Not yet.’ A longer pause, more charged with tension. There is an irritating click of balls.
‘Give me that thing!’ I shout, suddenly. ‘I want to go back to Columbo!’
At which point a grabbing-and-kicking scuffle breaks out, and the remote control is somehow hurled out of the window, where it lands with a plop in a rain-butt.
Recently on Radio 4 the wonderfully repugnant Alan Partridge (spoof Pringle-wearing radio personality chat-show host) attempted a one-minute silence, when an interviewee supposedly suffered a fatal heart attack in the chair opposite. ‘And now, the one minute’s silence,’ said Partridge (or something similar). ‘Yes, ah-ha, here we go … very respectful, this … in case you’re wondering, anyone who’s just tuned in … this is a One Minute Silence … about half-way through, I should think … it’s very moving, actually … perhaps I could use this opportunity to tell you about next week’s show … or perhaps not … can’t be long now … that’s it! Minute’s up! Lovely.’ Well, I’d just like to say I genuinely appreciated what he was trying to do. So here’s another gap:
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Once, when I was still a literary editor, I was instructed by an ebullient boss to commission a piece from Norman Mailer. ‘Try Norman Mailer,’ he said. ‘If our usual fee isn’t high enough, tell him we can add an extra fifty quid.’ I dropped the tray of cups I was holding. ‘Something wrong?’ he said. Fighting back tears, I forced out the words, ‘Isseny nnuff.’ ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Isseny NNUFF.’ ‘Oh, you never know,’ said my cheery editor, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Tell you what: you can add a hundred. That ought to do it.’ And he went off home.
The trouble with having low self-esteem is that you recognize immediately when you are out of your depth. I was out of mine from the moment the Manhattan switchboard-operator took my call. ‘You’re calling from where?’ she asked, making me repeat myself more loudly, so that she could hold up the receiver for everyone else to have a good laugh, too. As I felt myself sinking, I realized I was like a character in an American short story, hazarding everything on the tiny chance that someone had once saved Mailer’s life by staunching a gunshot wound with a copy of The Listener.
Mailer’s agent was clearly a very busy man, with little time to mess around with small fry like me. When he at last spoke to me, I was convinced he was having a haircut and manicure at the same time. He started with the bottom line: ‘You ought to know,’ he declared equably, ‘that Norman’s alimony commitments are so titanic that if he writes for anything below his bottom rate he actually ends up in court for defaulting. Now, I’ll tell you that the last time Norman wrote for a magazine, he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Tell me what you are offering and I’ll run it past him.’
I did a rapid calculation on a scrap-pad, and figured we were roughly forty-nine and a half thousand dollars short. Did I have sufficient cojones to pledge the magazine into bankruptcy? No I did not. I added an extra hundred to our top fee (‘I can always sell the car,’ I thought), but my effort elicited no cheers or huzzahs from the agent. As he said goodbye, I heard myself say, ‘Don’t you want to know what we’d like him to write about?’ but it was too late. I hung up and went home. I never found out whether he ran it past Norman or not, but I have often envisaged it bowling past Mailer at top speed, just as he was bending down to tie his shoelaces.
I have dwelt on this conversation ever since. None of it need be true, of course: the agent may just have been trying to let me down gently. But what a terrible fix for poor Norman. It struck me that we might turn the evidence to our advantage, by printing a slogan across the mast-head: ‘The magazine Norman Mailer can’t afford to write for’. But though I ran this idea past the editor, he didn’t attempt to flag it down.
Contrary to popular preconception, you can meet all sorts on a march to save Radio 4 Long Wave. Oh yes. On Saturday, as our happy band of orderly middle-class protesters set off from Speakers’ Corner and headed for Broadcasting House, I actually found myself demonstrating alongside a woman who reads the Guardian. Hey! Right! So let us, once and for all, forget this slur that the Long Wave Campaign is about fuddy-duddy types who think ‘grass roots’ is something to do with Gardeners’ Question Time. What Saturday’s protest showed was that it is possible to feel very strongly about an issue yet remain polite, that’s all. ‘What do we want?’ yelled our cheerleader. ‘Radio 4!’ we responded, slightly heady at our own daring. ‘Where do we want it?’ ‘Long Wave!’ ‘How do we ask?’ ‘Please!’
It was a small march, admittedly, but the hell with it, we carried lots of balloons. Efforts to recruit bystanders from Oxford Street (‘Come and join us!’) were slightly optimistic, I thought – the bewildered looks of shoppers telling us what we knew in our hearts already: that the cause of ‘R 4 LW’ is not an instantly emotive one, and that the joke about Duke Hussey being able to pick up FM reception on his leg is a trifle arcane.
&n
bsp; ‘What are you protesting about?’ a young woman asked the contingent from Belgium. ‘The BBC wants to put Radio 4 on FM only, which means we won’t get it on the Continent any more.’ The woman walked alongside us while she considered this information, in all its many aspects. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said at last, as she nevertheless noticeably slowed her pace and dropped out. ‘Hey, listen, I hope you get what you want.’ And then, as an afterthought, she called after us, ‘This Radio 4, can you get it here?’
There were contingents from all over the place – all of northern Europe, and lots of areas in Britain where trying to get an FM signal is almost as fruitless and frustrating as trying to get a straight answer from the BBC. Embarrassed that personally I did not live in a far-flung outpost of the Long Wave Diaspora, I admitted sotto voce to my exotic Guardian-reading friend that my FM reception is actually OK so long as I don’t attempt to move the radio, or stand more than three feet away from it in leather-soled shoes. She seemed relieved. She admitted likewise that hers was also OK, so long as everyone in the kitchen made only limited lateral movements with their upper bodies, and the fridge door was left open.
Neither of us, however, could get FM in our bathrooms, so we formed an instant bond and became the Bathroom Contingent, marching on behalf of Long Wave bathrooms throughout the land. Meanwhile I couldn’t help inwardly pondering the health consequences of repeatedly opening the fridge for the sake of good bits on Pick of the Week. John Birt’s BBC no doubt has many things on its conscience, but the potential for dealing bacteriological food-poisoning to a nation of Guardian readers has surely escaped its purview until now.
When we arrived at Broadcasting House, our reception – appropriately enough – was a bit fuzzy, and depended on where you were standing. Suddenly mob-like once we stopped moving, we assembled outside the Langham Hotel and raised our educated voices against those unresponsive grey stone walls, waggling our balloons in an aggressive manner, until eventually a bloke in a suit (Phil Harding) came out to meet us and shoved through the crowd, filmed by BBC news. And that was it; the balloons were collected; we all drifted off to John Lewis for a bit of light shopping. According to reports in the Sunday papers, Mr Harding said, ‘I’m listening; I’m listening,’ but I didn’t hear him. Perhaps I was wearing the wrong shoes.