Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  Dear ‘Hungry’, There’s more to a relationship than just plain eating you know. Of course for the first few weeks, food and mealtimes will be the most important thing you have between you, and you’ll spend all day at the table together exploring each other’s tastes and range of cooking styles. But if a relationship is to last, it’s important you learn to find interests outside the kitchen. If she can’t satisfy you at the moment, perhaps it’s because you aren’t telling her what you really want and need. Buy a cookery book, there are plenty available, showing a variety of cuisines that may be more to your taste. Happy stuffing!

  Dear Cousin Stephen, To settle a bet, could you tell me whether Norwich City have ever won the Littlewoods Cup? My friend says they haven’t, but I think they won it four or five years ago. Yours, ‘Wanting-To-Know-Whether-Or-Not-Norwich-City-Have-Ever-Won-The-Littlewoods-Cup’

  Dear ‘Wanting-To-Know-Whether-Or-Not-Norwich-City-Have-Ever-Won-The-Littlewoods-Cup’ – Hold on to your hat, you’re both right!!!!!!! Norwich did win the Littlewoods Cup – or League Cup as it then was – but then the next year they didn’t, and they haven’t won it every single year since. Almost a record, rather like ‘Ebony And Ivory’, which was almost a record too.

  Dear Cousin Stephen, Mr Dawlish – he’s our Headmaster – says I have to do a double Maths period every Tuesday morning, but I hate Maths and it clashes with Neighbours the Australian soap on Daytime TV. Can you come round and shoot him in the head so that I can get off having to turn up? Lots of love, Dennis.

  Dear Dennis, I wish I could help you, but you have a duty to go to school. I know you teachers don’t get paid enough but there are lots of children relying on you to help them get through their exams, so buck up and get teaching.

  Dear Cousin Stephen, I’m an unemployed Indoor Bowls Commentator and last week I found an original painting in my attic. It’s signed by Van Gogh and I’ve had it valued at twenty-five million pounds. Do you think I should sell it? The painting goes so well above my mantelpiece that it would be a shame to get rid of it. My wife thinks I am potty. What do you advise? Yours, ‘In a quandary’

  Dear ‘In a quandary’, At your age certain changes take place in your body. New hairs start growing and your voice begins to crack. It’s all perfectly natural and needn’t upset you unduly. I am returning the photograph and yes, it is a strange shape, but then we all come in different shapes and sizes. I have to confess yours is the first one I’ve seen that looks like Esther Rantzen.

  Well, that’s all I’ve got time for this week! Next week I’ll try my hand at negotiating with Gorbachev to try and rid the world of nuclear arms! Who knows, the week after that I might be in your town! Look out!!!!

  Lots of love

  Cousin Stephen

  Lord’s: The Great Lie

  This was commissioned for a book called My Lords!, a compendium of writings on the HQ of cricket.

  Lord’s! The very word is an anagram of ‘sordl’. The Headquarters of Cricket. The acre or so of green velvet nestling in the warm folds of St Johnners Wood. The acre (itself an anagram of ‘hectare’) that is girlfriend, mistress, mother, casual boyfriend, sergeant major, nurse-maid, father-confessor and one-night stand all rolled into one. All rolled into one by the heavy roller of memory, on the square of reminiscence; that square that slopes slightly at one end assisting the deviating swing of recall that causes the ball of thought to cut away from the norm of reality and catch the outside edge of fantasy that is snapped up by the cupped hands of fate.

  Lawks! ‘Each article should be crisp and to the point, elegant without being too elegiac and firmly rooted in first-hand personal experience.’ There’s a thing. I fear that in my opening paragraph I may just have been guilty of overstepping the mark. In these austere times the purple Cardus gets shown the yellow card. Time to crispen up. My first-hand experience of Lord’s began as second-hand experience when, an engaging youngster with important new strains of impetigo and hair that could oil a Harrow-sized Stuart Surridge Special, I picked up Psmith In The City by P.G. Wodehouse. This masterly work, after Ulysses and the invention of the electric under-duvet, quite possibly the most important achievement of the twentieth century, contains a scene in which Mike Jackson, last and greatest of the cricketing Jacksons, is called upon to make up the numbers at a Lord’s cricket match. Keats had a dash at explaining what he felt like when first peeping into Chapman’s Homer, he said that he felt like some watcher of the skies who sees a new planet swimming into his ken: the experience, he went on to relate, wasn’t so very unlike that of fat Cortez standing to the west of the Darien Gap and looking at the Pacific for the first time. I’ve not read Chapman’s Homer. Don’t ask me why: pressure of time; always been meaning to; never quite got round to it; promise it’s first on the list for my next holiday, etc. etc., but I can assure you that Psmith In The City caused feelings in me by no means dissimilar to those which animated the bosom of John Keats.

  ‘Lor!’ I said to myself. From that day to this Lord’s Cricket has exerted the most powerful influence over my being. But there’s many a slip ’twixt wicket-keeper and gully. The influence has been, let us be quite clear about this, an entirely fantastic one. Let me attempt, in my fumbling way, to explain. Imagination, Iris Murdoch once remarked, in that way she has, is a creative force that comes from the individual soul: fantasy, she went sternly on to asseverate, is a non-creative force, it comes from the imagination of others. My fascination with Lord’s is a result entirely of the fascination of others. There is a literature, a lore and a pre-selected attitude to Lord’s already in place. That is what I have been seduced by.

  Lore! That is what has done it. Let’s be honest. It’s a cricket ground less beautiful than many – Worcester and Adelaide spring to mind as more charming venues – whose place as an English cultural icon owes much to the eccentricity and absurdity of its foundation, the weirdness of the cricketing Lords who determine the laws and direction of cricket from its Long Rooms and Galleries and the heraldic peculiarities that surround the institution, Old Father Time, the irrelevant ‘Marylebone’ appellation of the society that uses the ground as its club room, the grotesque flame-like colourings of that club, the preposterous jacket-and-tie rules, the necessary spectre of spotted dick and starched nannies that is raised by the ground’s ‘Nursery’, oh a hundred other wild and wonderful details that serve to create a flavouring and an atmosphere that is consonant with our Law Courts, our Constitution, our Royalty, our great Universities, public schools, gentlemen’s clubs and other dotty splendours. ‘What is your idea of heaven?’ ‘The Saturday afternoon of an Ashes match at Lord’s.’ ‘What is your idea of hell?’ ‘The M25 on a Tuesday in February.’ Lord’s proffers an attainable paradise whose joy is entirely tribal. We are told that Lord’s is heaven, it’s our Heaven, a British heaven. If you can’t accommodate this view of the place then you are seven kinds of stinker. Those are the laws.

  Laws! Cricket has laws, not rules, and I’m prepared to obey them all. I’ll be subversive, imaginative and independent three hundred and sixty days of the year, creating my paradise and my own sodalities; but when it comes to cricket I join in the common fantasy. I sit watching the white Druids waving their ju-ju sticks and I worship at the common shrine. For five days I belong to this silly country with its silly vanities, injustices, bigotries and cruelties. The whole crowd of spectators are my friends and we share a common secret, a common advantage over everyone else on the globe. I say to myself ‘I’m here! To my left there’s the famous clock, to my right the famous score-board, on the famous field are the famous players and I am part of the famous crowd on this famous first day of what will be this famous match.’ I’m playing the game and I like it. Like Mike Jackson I’m playing at Lord’s. I’m playing at being English. It’s ludicrous, but then that’s what ludicrous means: playing the game. I once sat next to Mick Jagger watching David Gower make a hundred against Australia. Can’t get no greater satisfaction than that, now can you?

 
; Lords! It isn’t in London, it’s in the mind, the collective unconscious of the British, like the Old Course at St Andrews and the village fête. Lord’s isn’t cricket, it has little to do with the multiplicity of physical talents and tactical thinking that make up the game, a game better expressed on a beach in Barbados or coconut-matting in Colombo. Lord’s is an opportunity for a certain kind of Englishman to leave the world of edge-of-town shopping and Trust House Forte Conference Suites and dive head first into a beautiful, shameless, disgraceful, delightful and ludicrous lie.

  The World Service

  Another article written for Arena magazine.

  This is London. Ta diddy dah, di tah diddy dah, dah diddy dah, ti dah diddy tah. Yum tum tum-tum, tah tiddy tum tum, tum tiddy tah tum, tiddy dum dum, di diddy dum dum-dum, diddy dum dum-dum, diddy tum dum, tum tiddy dum dum. Dip. Dip. Dip. Dip. Dip. Deeeeep. BBC World Service. The News, read by Roger Collinge …

  The warm brown tones trickle out of Bush House like honey from a jar: rich and resonant on the Long and Medium Waves for domestic listeners or bright and sibilant on the Short Wave for a hundred million Anglophone citizens of the world for whose benefit the precious signal is bounced off the ionosphere from relay station to relay station, through ionospheric storms and the rude jostling traffic of a hundred thousand intrusive foreign transmissions, to arrive fresh and crackling on the veranda table. Oh, to be in England, now that England’s gone. This World Service, this little bakelite gateway into the world of Sidney Box, Charters and Caldecott, Mazawattee tea, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and dark, glistening streets. An England that never was, conjured into the air by nothing more than accents, march tunes and a meiotic, self-deprecating style that in its dishonesty is brassier and brasher than Disneyland. A Mary Poppins service, glamorous in its drab severity, merry in its stern routine and inexhaustible resource: a twinkling authoritarian that fulfils our deepest fantasy by simply staying, even though the wind changed long ago.

  Ooh, I love it. It is my guide, philosopher and friend, the plaything of an idle hour and the study of an earnest; it is the cat on the lap of my days. Since I was twelve the wireless in my bedroom has been permanently tuned to 648 on the Medium Wave. If we are to believe the monstrous wicked nonsenses who make their money out of detecting trends and writing banal and obvious books about them, then listening to the World Service makes me a Young Fogey as surely as if I wore an eyeglass, joined The Travellers’ and pretended never to have heard of Mick Jagger. They’re wrong of course, these Creeps Unveiling New Trends and Images Every Season (there must be a simple acronym for them somewhere), there is nothing fogeyish about the World Service or those who listen to it. It is true that, to the casual listener, the news readers and announcers sound as if they are wearing dinner-jackets, but that is more a function of the need to speak slowly and clearly through unreliable frequencies and into the ears of non-native English-speakers, than an indication of its nature and style. The World Service is much more important than the quaint vestige of a vanished world that the Facile Analysts of Recent Trends In Eighties Society would like it to be.

  So what is it, this World Service? Well, it is the chief English-speaking product of the BBC’s External Services, which weekly broadcast thousands of hours of programming around the globe in scores of different languages.

  Cripes, that must cost quite a wad. As is well known, the External Services are funded, not by the licence-payer, but by the Foreign Office.

  Lawks. Yes indeed. The English-language World Service provides a continuous stream of broadcasting, something akin to our own Radio 4, and it is to this service, just one of so many, that we refer when we say BBC World Service.

  Well, thank you. Not at all, anything else you want to know?

  Don’t think so. Fine, I’ll —

  Oh yes, is it all spoken word broadcasting then, this BBC World Service? By no means. Edward Greenfield presents a Classical Record Review, Paul Burnett a weekly top twenty chart programme, Bob Holness, Central TV’s cult Blockbuster super-presenter, offers an MOR dedications slot called Anything Goes, Richard Baker presents his Half-Dozen once a week and there are lots of small features on opera, the musical, ballet, and choral music. In addition there are regular programmes on Country Music and Folk, Tom Robinson fronts a new music feature —

  Yes, yes, I’ve got the idea, you don’t have to go on about it. I dare say I find out the rest in the Radio Times. Ah, well, that’s just where you are wrong, my proud young beauty. There is a strange conspiracy afoot which goes out of its way to make it as difficult as can be to find out programming. It used to be almost impossible for a resident Briton to get hold of a copy of London Calling, the World Service listings magazine. The service was for the World, not for Britain. If one managed to pick up the signal at all, it was good fortune, not design, and it is still difficult to get good reception west or north of London upstream of the waves as they flow to Europe.

  I suppose it paints a pretty rosy picture of Britain, being funded by the FO? I have tried as hard as I could over the years to detect any hint of overt or covert pro-British or anti-communist propaganda, bias or slant in the output of the World Service and failed. It really does seem to be as dispassionate and disinterested as it is possible to be. Indeed the grimmest portrait of Britain I have ever been offered outside Duty Free was I think that presented by a recent World Service programme on the now celebrated North–South Divide. Bitter interviews with Sunderland schoolchildren and South Eastern politicians pulled no punches whatsoever. Goodness knows what kind of picture of Britain the liverish ex-pat in India, the Canadian businessman, the Indian farmer, the Colombian coca-leaf exporter or the Australian corporate raider would have got: a truthful one, I suppose. Perhaps the only programme one could call remotely partisan is a funny little feature called New Ideas, the notion of which seems to be to plug new British inventions.

  You said, rather pompously I thought, that it was akin to Radio 4. How akin? The similarity to our own Radio 4 is apparent the first time you listen. A large number of broadcasting staff from the BBC’s domestic services is employed to present regular World Service programmes. Malcolm Billings, Margaret Howard, Chris Kelly, Benny Green, John Tidmarsh, Dave Lee Travis, Renton Laidlaw, these will all be familiar names to the audiophile. Actual Radio 4 programmes and plays can be heard: Just A Minute, The Goon Show, My Music, Brain of Britain, Letter From America and hundreds of others have all been given a global airing. But there is plenty of original programming too: Meridian the daily arts magazine, Outlook, the daily news and features programme, Letterbox, Margaret Howard’s look at listeners’ letters, Radio Newsreel, Sports Roundup, Book Choice, Network UK, Europa, Short Story, The Merchant Navy Programme. These and many others, including prestige dramas, are special World Service programmes, designed exclusively for the overseas listener.

  Prestige Dramas? What do you mean ‘prestige’? Oh I don’t know. It means dramas that have got Michael Hordern in them, I suppose.

  Lumme. Er, can I go now? Yes, yes. Off you trot.

  You see the glory of the World Service is that, like Radio 4, it provides the last great outlet for the Spoken Word. The dominance of literary people and ‘literariness’ in the world of communication leads us to forget that radio is a more ‘natural’ way of communicating than print. Poetry and story-telling were the invention of non-literate societies. Printing effectively processed, packaged, distanced, controlled and modified the message. The oral tradition, the practice of using our voice and our language to do more than simply ask the way to the lavatory or complain at the loudness of the music, is under threat. Throughout the world, radio is simply a way of broadcasting news and music; television is fatally concerned with images, actions and spectacle; books have retreated into a ghastly world of awards and snobbery, and the drama – well, the drama has for some years been the preserve of the middle-brow, middle-class, middle-aged ironising articulately around a book-lined set.

  But, by some freak of history, we happen to
have a blooming domestic and external broadcasting station whose business is to talk to us. All we have to do is listen. The Good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth, my dear white-headed mother used to say, before I got rid of her and acquired a younger one, more in keeping with my own tender age.

  Am I being unpleasantly racist when I observe that Americans, who have no proper spoken word radio station, have virtually no auditory faculties either? In the past an American’s ears were used to keep his spectacles on; with the universal adoption of the contact lens, it is probable that evolution may well phase out his ears completely over the next hundred years or so.

  Who is telling the world stories, communicating ideas, fantasies and impressions? Who is instructing, entertaining, alarming and soothing us with the spoken word? Only Radio 4 in this country (and that at the price of having to soak up the toxic waste of mad listeners’ letters and telephone calls) and only the World Service of the BBC across the globe. I do not believe that this is any cause for jingoistical rejoicing, however. If it were the Voice of America, the United States external service, that was of high quality instead of the World Service, then I would listen to that instead. As it happens, the Voice sets new standards in dreary propagandist nonsense. And so we are fortunate that, by historical accident, it is this country that holds the torch – and the great advantage of that is that no matter what part of the world we are in we can always get the Test scores.

  Section Three

  The Listener

  There follows a selection of articles written for The Listener: