But what I will remember is the weird experience of waiting across the road for something to happen. Extra police materialized – making us feel more agitated, of course – and we started to grow restive. After all, if there was one thing guaranteed to make us livid, it was the feeling of being ignored by the BBC. I had a nasty moment, I can tell you, when it suddenly struck me that if a riot broke out I might go down in broadcasting history as a member of the Bathroom Two.
Since supermarket shopping is probably the most dismal, routine, mindless, time-wasting and wrist-slitting element in most people’s lives, it was at first glance rather baffling to discover that ITV was planning Supermarket Sweep, a weekday morning game show in which contestants are tested (and rewarded) on their ability to answer simple questions about products and then hurtle down the aisles, lobbing big cartons of washing-powder into overloaded trolleys amid whoops of excitement from a studio audience. ‘Oh heavenly doo-dahs, that the culture should be reduced to this,’ I sighed (in a vague, regretful kind of way): ‘Stop the world, I want to get off; to have seen what I have seen, see what I see.’ Admittedly shopping is a skill (some people are certainly better at it than others), but as an intellectual test, you have to admit, it’s just one small step from asking people to spell their own name, or open their own front door and switch the light on.
QUESTION: It’s eaten from a plastic bowl on the floor, by a pet
that likes to go for walks.
ANSWER (tentatively): Dog? Er, dog? Is it?
Q: Hmm, I’ll let you have it, but the answer I really wanted was dog food.
A: Ah. Yes. I see.
The first Supermarket Sweep was shown yesterday, and yes, the above exchange did take place, no kidding. Of course, the programme’s proceedings bore no relation to supermarket shopping in the real nightmare, universal sense (which would have made it interesting): none of the trolleys were fixed so that they slewed violently sideways into the biscuits; no mad people blocked the aisles muttering over a basket of teabags and kitchen roll. The real skill in supermarket shopping is to get round (and out) without the banality of the experience reducing you to screams or blackouts. But none of this was reflected in Supermarket Sweep, which was the opposite of shopping anyway, because the strategy was to locate only the most expensive stuff, and eschew the bargains. How interesting, moreover, that the climactic ‘checkout’ section was cunningly edited for highlights, so we never found out whether the contestants were obliged to yawn and stare at the ceiling while a clueless overalled youth disappeared with their unmarked tin of beans, and then, once out of view, decided to forsake this humdrum life and catch a plane to Guatemala.
Politically, I get confused by programmes such as this. If the idea is to make uneducated people feel good about themselves, it churns up highly equivocal feelings of, on the one hand, ‘Right on, give them a chance!’ and on the other, ‘Could we please go back to the eighteenth-century notion of improvement and start again?’ In the modern world, careless congratulatory talk has been taken literally, with appalling results. ‘You ought to be on the stage’ was a thoughtless cliché that led straight to karaoke; ‘You ought to be on the telly’ led to Jeremy Beadle; and ultimately, ‘You’re so good at shopping, you ought to go on Mastermind’ led, in the very last tick-tock minutes of civilization, as the hourglass sands drained finally and softly away, to Supermarket Sweep. Personally, I reckon I know the ground-floor layout of John Lewis so intimately I could traverse it blindfold. But it’s odd to think there’s any intrinsic virtue in that. Rather the reverse, really: it’s the shameful sign of a misspent adulthood.
The additionally consoling thing for the Supermarket Sweep contestants, of course, is that they can beat the brainboxes in their own arena. Just think, if you put Eric Korn and Irene Thomas (the legendary Round Britain Quiz London team) in this grab-a-trolley-and-run situation, they would almost certainly be rubbish. Told to collect ‘Tuna and sweetcorn cottage cheese, a litre of bleach, and high-juice lemon squash,’ they would pause and frown, musing, putting two and two together, while the others bolted for the shelves in tracksuit and trainers, and performed heroic wheelies by the fridge. ‘Sweetcorn. Mm. Bleach. Lemons,’ says Irene Thomas with a happy quizzical overtone, indicating that she’s spotted the arcane link between these disparate items already. ‘Would Der Rosenkavalier help us here? Yes, I thought it would …’ Oh dear. And the answer he wanted was dog food. It just goes to show the limits of a classical education.
In times of stress, I firmly believe, you must reach for the family Bible, close your eyes tight, allow the book to drop open, and stab the page forcefully with a compass point wielded in a random arc. The idea is not just that the violence of the act will make you feel better (although it does), but that fortune will somehow guide you to a relevant helpful passage, while at the same time miraculously preventing you from impaling your other hand to the desk.
Superstitious? Certainly, and especially the last bit. But I am sure I have seen evidence of its efficacy, if only in the movies. You know: gangsters staring agape in shock when the book falls open at ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ (Numbers xxxii, 23) just seconds before a curtained window is suddenly blown to smithereens a couple of feet behind them.
Anyway, spending a lot of time on my own, I sometimes devote the odd couple of hours to testing the theory of Bible-dropping, rather as if I were an infinite number of monkeys bent on disproving the notion of dramatic genius. The happy sound of ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ sometimes emanates from my flat all day long. Where other people might, as a matter of course, consult Patric Walker or the I Ching (or Spillikins) before applying for a job or taking a trip abroad, there are days when I scarcely plan a journey to the post box without first securing some random canonical go-ahead from Deuteronomy in the Authorized Version.
I don’t take it seriously, not really. But on the other hand I have had some pretty startling results. Take the other day. I had been experimenting in the kitchen again, had concocted a rather interesting Lentil and Pink Marshmallow Bolognese in a saucepan. Obviously I now required guidance: should I take a picture of it before slinging it in the bin? I shut my eyes, flipped open the Good Book, poked it with the bread knife, and what do you think it said? It said: ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ (Genesis iii, 13). Blimey. How spooky. I tried it again. ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ And this time I got II Kings iv, 40: ‘There is death in the pot.’
Sometimes the messages are a bit mysterious. Once, when I had been drawing losers for hours – ‘Go up, thou bald head’ (?); ‘And they spoiled the Egyptians’ (?) – and wumping and slashing like an early agricultural machine in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I suddenly got a rather grumpy-sounding ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’ (Proverbs xxvi, 11), which drew me up short for a minute. Some significance here, perhaps? Naturally, I decided to have another go. And this time I got ‘The dog is turned to his vomit again’ (II Peter ii, 22). Weird, eh? But completely unfathomable, alas.
Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that I recently discovered a potential application for this unusual hobby of mine. Browsing in a religious bookshop one rainy afternoon, and flicking through Bibles (‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ met my gaze immediately, so I knew things were running to form), I discovered a rack of biblical posters. And much as I dislike slander in matters of taste, these posters were truly horrid – in the classical sense of making all your hair stick out like spines on a hedgehog. Who could be responsible for these ghastly things, I wondered. I could only suppose that the infinite number of monkeys had been up to their usual tricks.
Imagine, if you will, two large fluffy ducklings waddling away down a country lane at sunset, with underneath the legend ‘Can two walk together, except they be agreed?’ I mean, is this sick, or what? A pair of cute kids hold hands in a lush pasture, bathed in summer light, and one holds out a daisy-chain to the other. ‘God loveth a cheerful giver,’ it says. Two tiger cubs embrace
roughly, evidently mindful of the injunction of ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ I ask you, what a paltry use of the imagination. I nearly produced some new vomit to come back to later on.
But on the other hand, I did rush home with a whole new sense of purpose. My idea was simple: take this ghastly notion to its natural bathetic extreme. A man could be shown reprimanding a cat that has unaccountably stalked out of the room halfway through the EastEnders omnibus: ‘What,’ he says, in a speech bubble, ‘could ye not watch with me one hour?’ Good, eh? A woman, evidently frazzled from shopping, could be shown consulting a list in a dusty foreign market, and looking jolly peeved. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ could be written underneath.
I hope my posters will give pleasure somewhere. Meanwhile I shall cheerfully continue with my Bible-bashing. I got ‘We have as it were brought forth wind’ the other day (Isaiah xxvi, 18), and I can’t say it hasn’t given me lots to think about. An acquaintance has gently suggested to me that any big book – telephone directory, Argos Catalogue – will work equally well for my purposes, but I suspect this is a fallacy. Faced with a dilemma, surely nobody wants to know that the answer is an automatic pet-feeder at £12.99, or ‘Mr H. MacGuire, 26 Fulwell Gardens, W6’. Unless of course (by some remote probability) you are Mrs MacGuire, suffering from amnesia. Or you have suddenly acquired an infinite number of monkeys, all demanding meals at funny intervals.
It is only when one watches several weeks of ‘Crime and Punishment’ television that one realizes how little real-life contact one has with the police. It is rather odd. As a viewer, I feel I am so well acquainted with police procedure I could confidently head a murder enquiry; but at the same time, in real life, I have only twice been inside a police station. Talking recently to the producer of a ‘Cops on the Box’ documentary, I was relieved to find he shared this wildly discrepant experience. In making his programme, he said, he hired two actors in uniform to sit in an old white Zephyr (in homage to Z Cars) and walk shoulder-to-shoulder down whitewashed corridors. At one point, he momentarily forgot where he was, turned round to see these two coppers bearing down on him, and jumped aloft with shock.
Perhaps this explains why it has stuck in my mind, the time long ago when a real-life local CID bloke, taking a statement from me about a bag-snatching, conformed to his image as portrayed by left-wing television playwrights and thereby delivered a bit of a jolt. He had asked what my job was, to which I truthfully replied I was a literary editor on a magazine (The Listener). He looked interested, so I elaborated. Publishers sent me their new books, I said, and I commissioned reviews; then I edited them, wrote headlines, laid out pages and corrected proofs. ‘It’s a dog’s life,’ I added cheerfully, in case he thought I was showing off. He thought about it, as if he were going to volunteer for a spot of reviewing (people often did), and then pronounced the words that have niggled me ever since: ‘I expect there’s room for corruption in that.’ I remember how my mind went blank. I said how d’you mean, corruption? You’ve got something people want, he said; it stands to reason they’ll pay for it.
Well naturally I went back to the office next day and shook all the books to see if any fivers fell out, but with no success. I rang up Chatto & Windus and asked for the bribe department, but they denied all knowledge. My detective was evidently wrong in his suspicions. But what alarmed me, obviously, was that this friendly backhander insinuation was the first conversational angle he thought of. While normal people might have said, ‘Do you read all the books?’, ‘What’s Stephen Fry like?’ or ‘So that’s why you smell of book dust and Xerox toner!’, this policeman evidently saw the world as one huge greasy palm, and assumed that everyone else did, too. In retrospect I wish I had countered more effectively. ‘Detective sergeant, are you?’ I might have said, ‘Gosh, I expect there’s room for reading a novel with a pencil in your hand in that.’
So it took me aback, this encounter, the way corruption came up in the first five minutes I ever spent with a policeman. Especially when, merely out of politeness, I turned the conversation round to him (‘But I expect there’s room for corruption in your job?’) and he fobbed me off with a ludicrous story involving a motorist and a ten-bob note. ‘You seem to have left this money in your driving-licence, sir; we must be more careful,’ he had said, apparently, handing it back confused.
In my more paranoid moments I still wonder, though, whether I missed out on something. Whether other literary editors were taking delivery of string bags stuffed with notes in the gents at Waterloo while I was miserably sticking galleys on to layout sheets and getting cow-gum in my eyebrows. The idea of the lit. ed. as wide-boy certainly has its attractions; any gathering of the downtrodden, stoop-gaited chaps (it’s mostly chaps) tells you at a glance that sniffing the bindings is the nearest they get to an illicit activity. So what we obviously require is a culture in which literary editing, not police work, is the theme of tough, uncompromising television shows. ‘I told you,’ the hard-boiled lit. ed. snarls down the phone, while admiring his manicured nails, ‘I want a pony for the Brookner, or the deal’s off.’ The viewing nation would be held in thrall. He’s tough; he’s mean; he edits book reviews. And then, whenever the public chanced to meet a real literary editor in the flesh, they would get the same frisson of second-hand recognition that we currently reserve for the cops.
At the end of last year, when the terrific Radio 4 dramatization of Little Women was underway on Thursday mornings (tough luck for people with jobs), a man wrote to Woman’s Hour with an interesting point. Listeners had been challenged to vote on which of Louisa May Alcott’s four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, they identified with – which possibly doesn’t sound very interesting, but actually was. For example, some women curiously opted for Meg (sweet, placid, forgettable), and a few even fancied themselves as the vain affected Amy or the timid moribund Beth. However, the majority opted for the splendid heroine Jo – tomboy, literary genius, portrait of the author as a stormy petrel – perhaps because she seems quite modern, but more likely because identification with Jo is what the author so clearly intends. Like a fool, I hadn’t realized this before. I thought I was the only reader who secretly admired Jo March. But it turns out that the adult female world is crammed with undercover Jo fans, all wishing we could scribble up a storm, scorch our frocks, and exclaim ‘Christopher Columbus!’ despite its not being ladylike.
If these names and characters mean nothing to you, I can only say you must blame your classical education. These are female archetypes, mate. How can you possibly understand feminism if you don’t personally recollect the quietly touching scene in which good, wise Mrs March (known as ‘Marmee’) advises her justly furious daughter ‘Never let the sun go down on your anger’? Generations of young female readers have felt so exasperated at this point that they immediately chained themselves to railings or resolved to set fire to something. It all goes very deep. ‘Moral pap for the young’ was how Louisa May Alcott once startlingly described her own books, and the suggestion of a soft, absorbent foodstuff shovelled into girl infants is alarmingly close to the truth as one recalls it. Radio 4’s decision to present Little Women and then its sequel Good Wives (which finished last week, amid sobs in my house, with Jo’s marriage to the penniless Professor Bhaer) was a brilliant one, if only as a kind of catharsis therapy. All those forgotten, repressed episodes somehow fundamental to one’s own childhood were dug up publicly and found not to be so ghastly after all.
But what did this chap write in his letter to Woman’s Hour, you want to know. Well, he said that having read Little Women at an early age, not only had he found it useful in understanding women, but he had honestly needed to enquire no further. As far as female taxonomy went, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy covered the lot. If an occasional hybrid crossed his path (a Meg-Beth, an Amy-Jo-Marmee), it was the work of an instant to sort it into its constituent parts. He spoke as someone who had known multitudes of women – but each of them for a shortish period, presumably, the acquaintance alw
ays mysteriously ceasing at the precise moment when she discovered his heavily annotated copy of Little Women wedged behind the lavatory-cistern, sussed his creepy game at once and scarpered via the back gate into the sunshine. No woman should stick around with a man who thinks she’s Beth, it’s obvious. When I was twelve years old and chronically ill, my older sister cheerfully said that she saw me as a little Beth, and in my innocence I thought she was being nice. But I realize now the sad, sad truth of the matter, that actually she wanted me to croak.
Four seems to be the standard number for female types: four sisters in What Katy Did; four Marys in the famous Bunty comic strip; four Golden Girls. When a pilot for a British version of The Golden Girls was broadcast recently, the makers obviously couldn’t think of any new female comic humours to depict, so they adhered to the American originals – vain, dim, sardonic, outrageous – so endorsing the unfortunate impression that this is the full range available. Perhaps the number four gives the illusion of all-round choice; I mean, it always worked for Opal Fruits. For the moment, however, I am far too worried about this long-buried identification with Jo March to give it much thought. Good grief, it may even explain why I am disastrously attracted to old foreign blokes with no money.
If I were Barbie, I would be rather hurt by the general reception given to my new dance work-out video. Amid all the hoots of derision, nobody bothers to see its significance from Barbie’s own point of view – her amazing courage, after those years in a creative desert, to ‘pick up the pieces’ and ‘go out on a limb’. It’s not easy being Barbie, you know. For one thing, how would you like it if your boy-friend (Ken) slept in a shoe-box, and melted on contact with radiators? You would feel pretty humiliated, obviously. But remember the publishing disaster of Fear of Bending, Barbie’s teensy-weensy, reveal-all autobiography? Remember her public miniature fury when Claire Bloom snatched the lead in A Doll’s House? Those drunken pavement cat-fights with Tressy outside a small-scale model of the Limelight Club? Those whispers about the itsy-bitsy Betty Ford Clinic? Ah yes, it all comes back to you now, when it’s too late, the damage done.