Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  Brand X

  ‘I love to lose myself in a mystery,’ Sir Thomas Browne confesses in Religio Medici. I know what he means. There are few more enjoyable pastimes than snuggling up with a good murder. But such mysteries are penetrable, they are ‘susceptible of rational explanation’ as Sherlock Holmes might say. Holmes, incidentally, is currently to be seen in a marvellous new incarnation on ITV every week, played by Jeremy Brett, who has overcome the fact that as a young man he was, to use a phrase of Anthony Burgess’s, ‘adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity’ and is now, in his maturity, acting magnificently. In the current series we have been treated to ‘The Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter’, in both of which ‘all of my friend’s remarkable powers were needed’.

  Sir Thomas Browne’s most famous adventures also required considerable thought; ‘The Affair Of The Siren’s Song’ and ‘The Name Achilles Assumed When He Hid Himself Among Women’ (Hilda, as it turned out) prompted him to remark that such cases, though presenting features of some interest, ‘are not beyond all conjecture’. But I know of a problem, a twentieth-century mystery, which would appear to be beyond all hope of unravelling, and which would surely have taxed the Masters themselves. The question is this: What is the name of the substance that sloshes about inside the heads of television programme controllers in this country? It must have a name. It may even have a use yet undiscovered, as an animal feed possibly, or a replacement for glycol in Austrian wine, and I know for a fact that administrators of public swimming baths in this country are looking for a cheap substitute for the chemical that turns red when introduced to urine. Whatever thousand and one valuable things about the home this strange compound may help its owner do, thinking is not one of them. There must be a name for the stuff, or what’s a language for? So until that last dark truth is revealed to us I shall call it Brand x, though there are those cruel enough to suggest that it is Brand y (the Cognac or Armagnac varieties) which is the real cause of the trouble.

  Brand x it is that causes millions of pounds’ worth of ship to be spoiled for veritable ha’p’orths of tar. A good example is the aborted Rates of Exchange, a planned filmed version of the Malcolm Bradbury novel. A script was written (originally an economical script, I might add, made more adventurous and expensive at the insistence of the producer), actors were signed, rehearsal rooms booked and the enterprise was afloat and within sight of the channel (BBC2 in this case) and all bode fair, when the plug was pulled, the rats fled and the vessel was summarily scuppered. The venture was too expensive, therefore it had to be called back. Not, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to reduce the cost’, but simply, ‘you’re fired.’ The result of course (because of money already spent on the commission of the material and the reconnaissance of the locations and the subsequent paying of compensation to the actors who had been contracted) was that the BBC was hundreds of thousands of pounds out of pocket with no saleable or screenable product to show for it. That’s Brand x. A new kind of madness that I never got with my old cerebral tissues.

  Brand x it is that causes the corporation and the independent networks to sit on millions and millions of pounds’ worth of past programmes and resolutely refuse to show them. To be fair, it is partly the fault of unthinking television journalists who snidely refer to ‘repeats’ as if they were a nasty stain on their corduroys. What’s wrong with repeats, for Grade’s sake? If a thing’s worth sitting in front of once, it’s worth sitting in front of twice, No one wants to see a diminution in the number of new programmes on television, but surely everyone wants to see past editions of Monitor, re-runs of Mission Impossible and repeats of Monty Python and The Forsyte Saga? Brand x has already seen to it that some priceless hours of television have already, criminally, been wiped forever, and no longer exist in any form; John Fortune and Eleanor Bron’s brilliant and innovative Where Was Spring, for example, is now nothing but particles of loose magnetised ions floating in the ether. Of course it is true that actors’ repeat-fees revert to a higher percentage after a certain period and repeating consequently becomes more expensive, but not enough to deny us these pleasures. The solution, as my predecessor1 on this column has said before, is to create a Repeats Channel. All it takes is a spare frequency. I am sure obstacles He in the path, but who, at this moment, is bothering to think about clearing them? When comes a glittering Siegfried to wrest the hoard of unseen treasure from these clumsy Fafners?

  Talking of shining heroes, the final contest for the Ashes at the Oval raised another difficult problem. How is it that Peter West, one of the most experienced men in television, is still so indescribably incompetent and uncomfortable in front of a camera? How can it be? People come into television every year from other walks of life: take Bob Willis, Bob Wilson, James Hunt and Richie Benaud, In these sportsmen-turned-commentators we might expect a stilted delivery and a nervous manner, but within a month these men and many like them become a hundred times more coherent, relaxed and at home when facing the lens than dear old Peter West, who has been on our screens now for over twenty years, over thirty in all probability. How come? Goodness knows I wouldn’t have it any other way, but – purely out of interest – how is this? He gulps and swallows and brays, he splutters and dips his head and blinks; in interview he leaves embarrassing pauses between questions and interrupts with embarrassing remarks during the answers. It’s incredible. Take my own case: I am incapable of producing a tuneful note from my throat – it is a source of almost inconsolable grief to me, but I live with it and I remember never to appear on television in concert singing with Placido Domingo. But if, and I say this with all due humility, some crackpotted producer did insist on employing me in such a capacity, I dare swear that after twenty-five years I would by now be known as the Norfolk Nightingale and have hospital wards and express trains named after me and plaster casts of my tonsils in every museum in the land. Ubung macht den Meister, as they say in Germany, and Arbeit macht Fry ein Meistersinger. But twenty-five years seems to have left poor Peter West as hopelessly, blissfully, thrillingly inadequate as when he started. A real blow for the opsimath.

  But, to return to the question of repeats, some things do improve with age. BBC2 is re-running Star Trek, a programme of remarkable quality. To introduce the series, they screened an American programme called Memories of Star Trek, in which Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock in real life, showed how he personally was responsible for thinking up all the character traits and mannerisms that made Spock one of the great fictional creations of our times. It appears that the Vulcan salute derives from a rabbinical gesture that worshippers at synagogue are forbidden to watch. The celebrated Vulcan neck-pinch allows Leonard Nimoy to incapacitate foes without running about and rehearsing complicated fight sequences.

  At its best Star Trek says remarkable things about civilisation: the object of the quest of the Enterprise is to discover what civilisation means. A typical adventure will examine the problem of being an intelligent creature, a creature of advanced understanding and knowledge (not a problem likely to beset television controllers as we know), and of being at the same time a creature of passion, of dark, turbulent desires. We are constantly being shown the fight between Apollo and Dionysus that Nietzsche saw as being at the centre of Greek tragedy.

  One Star Trek episode culminated with Jim turning to McCoy and gesturing to the flight screen: ‘You know, Bones, out there someone is saying the three most beautiful words in the Universe.’ Do you know what those words are? You might think that they would be, revoltingly, ‘I love you’, and in nine out of ten television programmes they would be, but not in Star Trek.

  CUT to McCoy looking quizzical and raising one eyebrow. CUT back to Captain Kirk, still looking out of the window, an almost wistful expression on his lovely face. He tells us the words. They are, simply, ‘Please. Help me.’ MUSIC. END CREDITS.

  That’s television.

  1Richard Curtis, co-writer of Blackadder, Not The Nine O’Clock News, The Tall Guy and creator of Comic Rel
ief and Red Nose Day.

  Don’t Knock Masturbation

  A character in Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist once urged: ‘Don’t knock masturbation. Masturbation is the thinking man’s television.’ So now we know what you thinking men who don’t watch television are up to. And indeed we know what you are. It is to you that I address myself this week. Why don’t you watch television? You really should, you know. I have devoted this week to providing you with a starter’s course in television which I urgently recommend you follow.

  Firstly a few words of exhortation. I cannot pretend to know your reasons for not watching television, but I hope I can persuade you that they are insufficient. If you haven’t got a colour set, a monochrome will do, and if you haven’t got a monochrome, then God bless you.

  I think it was Rilke, and I have to confess that I am far too lazy and far too low on the correct works of reference to be able to check (perhaps you could let me know), anyway if it wasn’t Rilke it was Kraus (Karl, I would think, not Alfredo), and if it wasn’t either of them it was somebody else, who said: ‘A book is like a mirror, if an ass peers in, you can’t expect an Apostle to peep out.’ So let it be with television. If an ass watches television he will watch good television in an asinine way and bad television in an asinine way (I can never remember which emperor it was that built the Asinine Way, I rather think it was Heliogabolus). I happen to know that none of you is an ass and am sure that after reading this and following my course you will be watching television with the same keen, intelligent ardour with which you already pursue the thinking man’s alternative.

  So, television is like a mirror in one respect, but in its active function it has often been described as a window: a window on the world. In some ways it resembles the old bow window of White’s Club, St James’s, during the Regency. Sitting elegantly and looking through that funny dimpled glass, the wise Beau could find out all he needed to know about who was in town, with whom and why. The latest fashions would be paraded before his eyes, the latest town-whispers and society on-dits confirmed under the scrutiny of his disbelieving quizzing-glass. The special properties of that particular window afforded an excellent all round view. But, glass being what it is, he was not only the watcher: he soon became the watched. For the window fast became famous and all manner of people, some of them quite definitely not of the Upper Ten Thousand, would take long detours to go and see who that day was sitting in the window looking out. It became impossible to decide if the world looked out of the window or if the world looked into the window. On which side of the glass was this world of which the window afforded such a good view? Or was the glass itself the world? Those on each side thought that what they were looking at constituted the spectacle. Only the window knew which was which, and it wasn’t telling. To add to the confusion, from some angles the glass reflected the viewer back on himself, and from others the funny dimples and the wide convex angle of the bow gave such a distorted view that it was impossible to believe any of it was real at all.

  Television is the same. Of technological necessity, the only thing the world can watch on a television screen is the world that has been watched by television cameras. Which is the real eye, the camera that watches the world or the eye of the world that watches the television? How very sophistical it all is. As they used to say on a television programme that used hidden cameras a great deal: ‘We’re watching you, watching us, watching you.’ It’s also true that we’re watching them watching us watching them. You’ll need to say those sentences aloud a few times to make any sense of them, but it’s worth it because it says a great deal about how active a thing television watching is and how reflexive the communication that takes place.

  The first programme I would recommend to you, bearing this quality of television’s in mind, is The Marriage, a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ scrutiny of a young couple’s betrothal and early wedded life. But we don’t watch it because we are interested in this particular couple: that is the last reason anyone could choose, unless they were in some way related to them. We watch it, with strange fascination, because we want to see how people behave when they are being watched. Ghoulish? Possibly. Voyeuristic? Obviously. We want to see what happens to two people (as normal as rice-pudding when the series started), ardent volunteers as they were, when their private life is minutely and impertinently probed by a television producer and his crew and 12 million ordinary people like themselves. More importantly we watch it because we want to know what happens to us when we participate in so gruesome a spectacle, which is what we do when we tune in. If we watch it actively and honestly, haughty disdain for such revolting proceedings will not be the reaction, nor will be snobbery at the poverty of the taste, imagination and mental life of the ordinary people of this country … although it would be hard for those feelings to be too far away. I watched The Marriage at first because I knew millions were watching it and finally because I knew I liked watching it and I wanted to find out why. I still don’t know.

  Know thyself. Don’t watch television because it’s ‘well done’ or ‘well produced’ or ‘interesting’. The Marriage certainly has no more merit than any other programme as ‘Television’ in the telejournalist’s sense of the word. Watch it because you are interesting, well produced and well done.

  All in all, it is necessary to watch for no other reason than that most people do. As a reader of the Literary Review you are, of course, a student of the human heart and a researcher into the human mind. If you were a student of Shakespeare you would study what his audience read, watched and spent their days doing. The people in the world around you are living their lives with the Colbys and with Nick Ross and Terry Wogan, with Grange Hill, Blockbusters and The Tube, with Captain Furillo, Vorsprung Durch Technik and David Icke, and you don’t know what a single one of those things really means to us. A massive frame of reference, a whole universe of discourse is utterly closed to you and I believe that you are the poorer for it.

  And aside, quite aside and apart from television as a social phenomenon, an historical text to be read, there is – there really is – television as an (albeit infrequent) creator of works of art and a frequent transmitter of works of art from other media: music, painting and, predominantly, cinema: television as a teacher, traveller, biologist, doctor, natural historian, contemporary historian and repository of knowledge, trivial and quadrivial.

  So, your list of things to watch. Begin one weekday morning, with BBC’s Breakfast Time. It may be a wrench to leave John Timpson and Brian Redhead, but do it anyway, just for one morning. Change channels frequently to TVAM and note the superiority of the BBC’s lighting and design. But note also the smugness and cosiness of the BBC, a Daily Mail next to the Sun or Mirror of ITV. Imagine millions of people also watching with you and picture what their reaction to these horrific programmes might be. You needn’t watch breakfast television again, unless there is another Brighton bombing or similar sensational early morning news story.

  We will leave the afternoon alone, I’m assuming you work for a living, although I do know that there are some poets amongst the readership. Afternoon television is about to have big money spent on it, but for the moment it consists largely of Australian soap operas and women’s magazines which certainly repay close investigation, but only when you are more familiar with your new toy.

  But do watch Blockbusters on ITV, 5.15 weekdays. Yes, every weekday. Bob Holness chairs this quiz programme for adolescents and it is simply compulsive. It has created a whole new hotly contested scheduling time: the pre-evening-news slot, as they call it. It will tell you a great deal about how our adolescents are being educated, just as University Challenge (some ITV regions, various times) will tell you about our undergraduates. Blockbusters is exciting and enthralling – it also ends in media res, sometimes in the middle of a question, which is too thrilling for words.

  You must watch Wogan, terrifying as the prospect sounds. The man is a hopeless interviewer and appears to be a ridiculous egotist, but you will find
out who is doing what and who is popular and interesting in this world that you have finally decided to inspect.

  Yes Prime Minister is middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow. It is held up to be the acme of current situation comedy, where The Young Ones was the acne. Give me spots any day. Of course Yes Prime Minister is clever and witty and well-performed and written, and of course I would hate to miss a single episode, but it will never be seen as a landmark in the history of television comedy, as Fawlty Towers was, or The Young Ones or TW3; it will never really be remembered. I am aware that my view is treasonable.

  I, Clavdivs, luckily for you, is being repeated. You’ve read the Graves novels, now see how television can adapt and adopt, adeptly. Magnificent writing from Jack Pulman, brilliant acting from nearly every single person in the huge cast. This is one to watch simply for satisfaction.

  The last recommendation is for you to watch the Channel 4 News at 8.00 p.m. They broadcast at the best time and in the best fashion, you’ll find yourself watching regularly.

  That’s it. Just try all those programmes in one week, that’s all I’m asking. The following week, take ten evening programmes at random from the TV magazines, I mean at random. And watch them from the beginning: it’s no good starting to watch half way through. You wouldn’t read a novel starting at chapter nine. If it’s been on for five minutes, you’ve missed it. If you give them that chance, I guarantee you will find excitement, filth, pathos, amusement (horrified and enchanted), nonsense, brilliance and absurdity in abundance. In short you will see and share in humanity to an extent that is not possible in any other way, because you will see all humanity, not just your friends and coequals, but those you hate and those who hate you, those you find beautiful and those you find disgusting, people cleverer than you, and people who never knew what you forgot when you were twelve: people, events, possibilities and fictions that make up and are made up by an institution, an organism, a public event that until now you have always shunned. Come on down!