by Stephen Fry
Inside Private Eye by Peter McKay. Fourth Estate. Hardback. £9.95
If there is one cow more sacred, one tradition more revered, one taboo more respected than another in this country it is that of The Great British Satirist. From Chaucer to Ingrams by way of Dryden, Swift, Dickens and two world Waughs we are proud of those dirty, snarling and untameable dogs who will as readily tear the throat out of the innocent as the guilty. But this is the age of T-shirts, video cassettes, international residuals, coffee-table books and spin-off merchandising. The fatuous categorisations of today determine that ‘satire’ means no more and no less than ‘topical comedy’. In this quarter of the twentieth century, therefore, satire is respectably big business and strictly defined. Satire is a comforting reminder of what a tolerant, democratically self-scourging nation we are. For this reason sackings and crises within Private Eye are considered as newsworthy as Asian earthquakes, and a victim’s opinion of his or her Spitting Image puppet as fit for the tabloids as a pop star’s heroin habit. The satirists rapidly become the establishment and their organs pillars of it.
This is reflected by the publication of two books that ‘take the lid off’ our two most prominent and revered satirical productions, the above-mentioned Spitting Image and Private Eye. Enough words have been processed on the nature of the Eye for any feeble analysis of mine to add greatly to the store of diskettes on the subject piling up in editors’ offices up and down the land. We know that it is public school, prurient, prudish, homophobic, anti-Semitic and cruel. They know it better than anyone. The Great Bores Of Today cartoon in their 500th anniversary addition showed a Bore reciting just such a list of dreadful vices. Whether the Eye is really, as Sir James Goldsmith claimed, ‘the pus leaking from the wounds of a sick society’ or, in Quentin Crewe’s words, ‘a healthy pimple on the skin of an exuberant nation’ probably depends upon whether, like Sir James Goldsmith, you are a pompous litigant being made a fool of in public by men cleverer and wittier than yourself, or whether, like Quentin Crewe, you are a well-paid writer and artist happily relishing the spectacle. Peter McKay’s book Inside Private Eye, written from the point of view of a long-term contributor and professional hack, claims to provide an insider’s view of, to quote the blurb, ‘what goes on in those writ-strewn offices where the imperious Lord Gnome presides over the unruly band of wags who pen his organ’. As such it will unquestionably be of interest to a percentage of the Eye’s alleged one million readers.
The book contains an immensely useful glossary of ‘Eyespeak’. At last I know why Alec Douglas Home is always referred to as Baillie Vass, why Victor Matthews is called Lord Whelks and who the Beast of Bouverie Street is. Having mentioned the gossip content and this valuable glossary, I suspect I have mentioned the only things of value in the book. That it is written in the kind of prose journalists especially reserve for this kind of work, you will naturally expect. It is a kind of Dick Francis style: ‘Dempster then made what was generally believed afterwards to have been a crucial mistake’, ‘His face now white with anger, Hislop rose to speak’, that kind of dreary piffle. The book is also awash with repetition; we are twice told who ‘Beachcomber’ was and within a couple of pages there are two reminders that the Earl of Arran’s weekly Evening News column was ‘eccentric’; P.G. Wodehouse is twice rendered as P.J. Wodehouse, which can only lead one to believe that McKay dictated the book and has a not uncommon oral ‘J’, ‘G’ problem, or that he is devastatingly illiterate. I think we should be told.
But these are minor carpings. My essential problem with the book is that it seems to me totally to misunderstand the reason for the Eye’s popularity. McKay says of the readership, ‘they read it because it strays over the border of what is permissible and tasteful in its attempts to peer beneath the public face of the rich and famous.’ Drivel. They read it for one reason and one reason only: because it is funny. When it stops being funny they will stop reading it. Journalists may read it because it strays over borders, takes off lids and peers into things, the public reads it because it is the only regular funny periodical readily available in Britain. Punch, described by Forster over sixty years ago as mere ‘suburban sniggerings’, has changed only to the degree that suburbia has changed. Whether Ingrams has stepped aside to make way for young Ian Hislop, his successor to the editor’s chair, in order to carve out a new readership less interested in the affairs of the Anglican church and the wicked deeds of industry and press barons, or whether, as McKay believes, he has not really stepped down at all, but set up a puppet, time will tell.
The book wastes too many pages telling us things we already knew from Patrick Marnham’s The Private Eye Story or Ingrams’s own Goldenballs and too few telling us how an edition is really produced or what goes on in the rooms where the jokes are thought up. McKay has clearly never been present in those rooms; we hear of the laughter bellowing out of them and can only picture poor McKay sucking his pen in an outer room wishing that he too was funny like Ingrams and Waugh. He might also wish that he had their gift for prose.
Lewis Chester, author of Tooth & Claw: The inside story of Spitting Image, is also a journalist, with books on Onassis, Jeremy Thorpe and Beaverbrook to his credit. This is an outsider’s view of the four or five years that have led up to Spitting Image becoming an established success.
You might be tempted to ask why such a book has been written so soon. Certainly Spitting Image is very successful, but who is going to want to read 150 pages telling us how it got that way? Fluck met Law, you will say, they worked on magazines and things for a bit and then they thought (or someone else thought) they should make a television programme with their models brought to life by puppeteers. Script writers and impressionists were hired, a pilot was made and the series began, very shakily at first, but gradually improving in quality until it all became very popular and much loved. The programme was sufficiently naughty to get a lot of publicity because of the outrageous way it portrayed the Royal Family, but now it is so respected an institution that a member of the Royal Family attacking it today would scarcely seem less outrageous. End of story. That’s what you think. In fact nothing was that simple. The book heaves and shivers with tales of back-biting and bitching. Since the idea was first floated the entire project seems to have been an extremely grubby affair: the in-fighting, sackings and lust for financial stakes in the enterprise have, I am reliably informed, been if anything understated. This takes some believing.
It seems that before a joke had been written or a puppet made, the various protagonists were already arguing about who should have what slice of the notional pie. There is certainly a great deal too much financial detail in the book to interest me, whenever I see words like ‘equity’ and ‘share-holding’ I fall fast asleep, but these words seem to have meant everything to the half dozen or so producers and managers of Spitting Image and Chester goes deeply into the business.
A television company, as anyone who has ever gone near one can testify, is an enormous contrivance designed specifically to cock things up. Television executives are never really happy unless they can go home to their wives or husbands in the evening and tell them that they have successfully obstructed or fouled up a project. This aspect of the Spitting Image venture comes across nicely. For the first series the producers and director were forced to edit a £3 million programme from a van in a car park. The first programme had to run short because all Royal Family material was ordered to be excised for fear of offending Prince Philip, who was due to open Central TV’s Nottingham studios the week of transmission.
Tooth & Claw has been published as a paperback by Faber & Faber and will appeal more to those interested in deals, arrangements, financial bickerings and political bitchery than those interested in the creation of a funny programme. There is a table of contents listing chapters whose headings are ludicrously unhelpful: ‘The Bad-Mannered God’, ‘The Naughty Mandarin’, ‘A Nasty Passage’, ‘The Lunch Break’ and ‘Getting it on the Stick’ are five examples out of twenty-four. There is, annoy
ingly, no index. I would hardly describe the book as an ideal stocking-filler for the average Spitting Image viewer, but I would heartily recommend it to anyone foolish enough to be thinking of embarking upon a large television project.
Child of Change
A review of the autobiography of a remarkable man. So much Gorbachev’s man that it will be interesting to see how he develops in the new Russia. He, of course, is not Russian. Kasparov’s real name, Weinstein, betrays his Jewish origins, while his home town, Baku, is now part of an independent republic struggling with huge ethnic problems.
Child of Change: by Garry Kasparov & Donald Trelford
From the time homo ludens crawled from the primeval slime of spillikins and strip checkers and first stood and called himself a man, the sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces that define the limits of chess have exerted a powerful fascination over the species. There are, as chess players and George Steiner are fond of remarking, more possible positions in chess than there are atoms in the universe. The chances of dropping a tray full of ball-bearings on the floor and their falling in such a way as to spell the phrase ‘Little Scrotely welcomes careful drivers’ are greater by far than those of two identical games ever being played. And what skills does the game require? The average master is easily capable of playing a game blindfold. Grandmasters have been known to play fifty games simultaneously without a sight of one of the boards. All decent players can remember any one of their serious games and many of their hundreds of ten-minutes blitzes. Such prodigious feats of memory argue that to do well at chess does not demand the usual intellectual faculties, unusually developed, but instead a special freakish facility that may as well be called an abnormality. Only music and mathematics share with chess the phenomenon of the child prodigy: Mozart’s famous trick of remembering an entire requiem, various mathematicians’ ability to calculate cube roots in their head are all of a piece with the weird gifts of the grandmaster. It is traditional for the public to satisfy themselves that such gifts must result in deficiencies in other areas: in order to keep in a single head tens of thousands of games, positions, openings and tactical ploys, in order to analyse twenty or thirty moves ahead in dozens of permutations, in order to close out a vast auditorium and the noise of the world and involve oneself purely in the fields of force that pulsate between the wooden men on the board, in order to do all that, surely it must be necessary to relinquish little humanity? We remember that at school the chess team was largely composed of bum-fluffed, spotty, be-anoraked creatures with the social grace and wit of Nicholas Ridley on a bad day and console ourselves with the thought that chess is a game for wimps and weird brain-boxes.
I have to disappoint you if you believe that this is really true of chess. All those exhausted clichés about ‘winning’ and ‘going for it’ and ‘psychological preparation’ that sportsmen of all kinds inflict upon us are as much a part of the grandmaster’s vocabulary as the sprinter’s. Chess world champions are distinguished by a terrifyingly powerful will to win. The photograph on the front of Garry Kasparov and Donald Trelford’s semi-autobiography of the current world champion, shows the awesome sight that meets the man who dares to sit down and challenge Kasparov’s mastery in chess. Huge, thunderous brows, a stubbled face whose shadows point to five o’clock by half past nine in the morning, shoulders hunched forward in murderous anticipation. How clear the mind of an opponent must be, how strongly the forces of will and purpose must flow in him not to lose to this horrifically virile and energetic mental athlete before the first pawn is pushed.
It is deeply satisfying to know that chess is not somehow ‘played out’. The great Capablanca thought he had mastered all its mysteries when he suddenly faced Alekhine in 1927 and lost. New ideas will always refresh the game. By objective Elo ratings Kasparov is the strongest player who has ever lived. ‘Strong’ is the word chess players use, not ‘clever’ or ‘cunning’ or ‘brilliant’ or ‘gifted’. Although those qualities may be necessary, it is the strongest man who wins. Perhaps that is why, despite 100 years of organised tournament play for women, men still dominate chess. Over and above the advanced sense of spatial dynamics and transformational geometry which is revealed by scientific experiment to be better developed in men than women, chess calls for supernatural qualities of competitiveness and aggression – it was men, after all, who invented the game. All the tactical, analytical skill in the world will not help you if, when sitting at the board, your nerves and your killer instinct are weaker than your opponent’s. Chess is an art, not a technique: like a batsman or an actor, a player may inexplicably lose form one day. Despite all his mental gifts, all his knowledge, the player may be deprived of that blend of concentration and confidence that alone can allow the creative impulse to flow. An artisan or a technician can master their material, the artist and the athlete cannot.
Garry Kasparov emerged in the late 1970s as one of the most gifted chess prodigies in human history. The story of Child of Change, which I have to say straight away is the best chess biography I have ever read, and I’ve ploughed through a few, is not really the story of Kasparov’s chess development; in fact the nuts and bolts of chess itself, his mastery of tactical and positional theory and his education in the praxis of the game are rarely attended to, although key games are usefully recorded in an appendix for the enthusiast. This is more the tale of how Kasparov single-handedly took on the Soviet and world chess establishment in order to earn what he and most chess observers saw as his natural due, the right to face his fellow-countryman and arch-rival Anatoly Karpov in single combat. Kasparov’s constant claim is that if it were not for Gorbachev and glasnost, he would not be world champion today.
Bobby Fischer the author of ‘modern’ modern chess is effectively author of the whole saga. His refusal to defend his world title against Karpov in 1975 gave Karpov the championship without ever having to fight for it. Karpov’s position restored to some extent wounded Soviet prestige and, in the last days of Brezhnev, Karpov, the ‘good boy’ of Russian chess, party member and line-toer, created an inner clique who clung to him like barnacles to a rock. He guaranteed them money, cars, foreign travel and they were not about to let anyone take that away from them. Kasparov’s emergence like a bolt from the blue threatened their security: he wasn’t supposed to have come on so fast. Indeed, Kasparov first learned that his compatriots weren’t keen on encouraging him when he was directly told: ‘We have one world champion, we don’t need another.’ But Kasparov wasn’t interested in that, he was interested in chess. If he was the best, then he should win. Obstacle after obstacle was placed in his path, but he learnt how to use politics too, playing the pride of his home town politicians in their local boy’s achievements against the Karpov lobby in Moscow.
The peculiar satisfaction in all this to chess enthusiasts is that Karpov’s style of play reflects the wider historic elements of the story, he is cautious, positional, classically pure. Kasparov, as befits the child of glasnost, the pioneer of the new Russia, is dashing, daring, cavalier, complex and surprising. The two greatest living players are seen to play for the future of Russia itself.
I will not spoil the story for you by re-telling the central drama of Karpov and Kasparov’s first world championship match and the shameful part played in it by Campomanes, the General Secretary of FIDE, the international controlling body of chess, it is as extraordinary as any sporting crisis from Bodyline to the boycott of the Moscow Olympics and deserves to be read in context.
It may be that Child of Change is a little ungallant about Karpov, who is surely a chess genius; perhaps Kasparov’s outrage at the treatment dealt him is a little too self-righteous, but I am convinced by the whole book. For the observer the battle lines are clearly drawn and Kasparov emerges from this excellently written and structured autobiography as a solid gold, genuine hero. His endearing fondness for Lermontov and Vissotsky (new to me, but extensively quoted), his passion for chess, the high doctrine of the game he preaches and his extraordinarily well-bala
nced approach to it suggest that only success can spoil him. He is rich, handsome, young, fantastically popular and terrifyingly talented. He is a good sportsman and a literate and intelligent observer of life and society. He loves his homeland and seems to be playing as active a part in its reconstruction as any citizen within it. Only a contract to sponsor Adidas turbo chess-sneakers or the Sony 3-D Low-Fat Chessman could prevent him from becoming one of the most significant Russians of the age. The Child of Change may well grow up to be the Man of the Moment.
Agony Cousin
A short bash writing a column for the Daily Mirror is represented by this foolish article.
Stephen Fry in his restless search to undergo every experience on your behalf became an Agony Cousin for a week. Here are his answers to letters on topics as far ranging as subjects that are about one thing and other subjects that are about something completely different:
Hello! In this life, it is well known, you should try everything once, except incest and country dancing. This week I’m having a stab at being what I like to call an Agony Cousin. I had a full postbag this week, all the more so for being stuffed with letters. But this experiment only lasts for this week, so please don’t send me your problems!!! Okay? Great! Thanks! Oh, and bless you. Much appreciated. That’s the way! Mm, I should say so. Blimey, yes!
Dear Cousin Stephen, What’s happening to my body? I am thirteen and a half and I have begun to notice changes in me and in my feelings to others. What does it mean? Yours, Slightly Puzzled
Dear Slightly Puzzled, Pull the other one. You know perfectly well what’s happening inside you, you just want me to write a reply that includes the word ‘genitals’ so you can have a good dirty giggle over it. I only deal with genuine problems here, if you want smut turn to Marje Proops.
Dear Cousin Stephen, My girlfriend, whom I love very much, is unable to satisfy my appetites, and I have started going to restaurants behind her back. I am terrified that if she sees me eating in a strange place she will end our relationship. Should I tell her before she finds out? Yours, ‘Hungry’
