by Stephen Fry
Naked Children
As I was sweating away over the weekend with planks of wood and chisels trying to recall the principles of school carpentry, a friend called in and asked me just what the hell I thought I was doing. ‘I have a hi-fi and nowhere to put it,’ I said, ‘and there comes a time when you have got to make a stand.’
And how right I was. There is a psychological crisis facing humankind which seems to have gone largely unnoticed: it is a crisis that strikes at the heart of what we are and what relationship we establish with our own souls.
When I was young, really very young indeed, absurdly young, quite tiny in fact, my doting parents used to photograph me. On summer days, in the exuberant simplicity of my youth, I would slip out of my clothes like a salmon and sport brightly and nudely on the green. In my confiding innocence I would wave at the lens, turn somersaults and delight in the fresh, unspoilt loveliness of life. Like most master criminals, my parents were then content to wait. The years passed and I entered that gangling, shuffling, blushing age which any day now I hope to leave. I began to bring friends home for inspection and to drink wine and talk languidly about neo-plasticism and the national characteristics of the Germans with a blend of informed tolerance and modest percipience that would have made Socrates sound like John Selwyn Gummer. Just as it would begin to emerge that I was clearly the most fascinating and urbane figure of my age and weight in the county, the air would suddenly be thick with photographs whose obscene frankness and intimate detail would cause even the most hardened child pornographer to clutch the table for support. When you’ve seen in detail a nude infant doing a backward somersault you know why clothing exists.
As friends stared glassily at photographs of me and the strange little barnacle that in those days passed for my organ of generation I tried to explain that the child they were scrutinising was not me. This was the biological as well as the psychological truth. Every cell in my body had by that time been replaced. P.G. Wodehouse’s typewriter comes to mind as a model of this important phenomenon. He bought his Royal in the 1910s and used it right up to his death. But by then every part of it had been renewed: the chassis, the platen, the roller, the keys – everything. Was it still the same typewriter? Am I the same person? The philosopher’s axe is sharper than Occam’s Razor.
I was at least spared that new dimension of humiliation suffered by those whose parents used movie cameras and now squeeze their video camera triggers at anything that pops its head up. The BBC have decided that ‘Attic Archives’, as it calls the records of these crimes, are suitable matter for broadcast. Aside from the aesthetic horror of having to sit through those saturated Ectochrome blues and greens and experience the cheap melancholy of the sun and smiles that lit young flesh now long corrupted I am worried about the psychic dislocation that photography engenders. For thousands of years the only way a human being had of inspecting himself was to stand in front of a glass of some kind. This had the advantage of being ‘live action’, as it were. Go in front of a mirror and raise your right hand. Your reflection will do the same (always excepting that you are Groucho Marx, of course). We are masters of our own bodies, we control them. The one who looks out is the same as the one who looks in. But since the cine camera we have had this independence taken away from us. This is one of the many horrors of watching yourself on television. You see yourself with an odd expression on your face but try as you might you cannot remove it. This is a problem, by definition, only suffered by those born into the moving-camera age. The subject on the screen is not the one watching. You have been de-centred. You are capable of a self which can move, think, speak and affect others and over which you have yourself no control. This is a profoundly disrupting nightmare and goes a long way towards explaining some of the neurotic crises of identity that characterise our century.
For a few men and women, in Anthony Burgess’s handsome phrase, ‘adventitiously endowed with irrelevant photogeneity’ to make a career out of being seen on screens is one thing. They’re good at it and well paid for the howling insanity such a process inevitably provokes. But to encourage all mankind to split the atom of self is foolhardy in the extreme. Besides, as an Equity member, I’m not sure I like the idea of everybody getting in on the act.
The Family Curse
I don’t want to waste your time by devoting this precious page, which is after all a fair-sized sliver of Canadian tree, to a discussion of Clause 28 or 29 or 30 or whatever number it might now be. You’re a decent human being: you are as embarrassed to be living in a country which can have stained its statute books with so spiteful, repulsive and nauseating a collection of bigotries and lies as I am. The horror of it all should not be ignored or forgotten, but I prefer to move away from a specific lament to remind you that the tenor and thrust of the Legislation (if such a slimy smear swabbed from the epicentre of Satan’s anal ring can be dignified with the name) is to criminalise the promotion of homosexuality as an acceptable equivalent of family life. Family life, family values, decent normal family, family fun, family shopping, family leisure. The word is used these days much as the word ‘Aryan’ was used in Germany during the 1930s. Anything that isn’t Family is ‘unfamily’, and anything that is unfamily is unrepresentative of the joyful majority. The ruthless condemnation of unfamily values is therefore a populist democratic imperative.
Family schmamily, I say. What is it with us at the moment that this word should be transmogrified into a shining banner borne ’mid snow and ice that will lead us into a new golden age? It can hardly be a defence against the rise in the crime rate. After all, something like eighty per cent of murders are domestic in origin, child molestation and physical abuse are almost entirely family crimes and I believe there is only one recorded case of incest being practised outside a family and that turned out not to be incest after all.
It seems to me that if we are going to control thought in this country, and that would appear to be the intention of our wise, loving and humane masters, then some sort of Bill to forbid the promotion of family life would be timely and appropriate.
There is a programme on BBC2 called Weekend, the foulness of which is hard to communicate. Like any ‘family’ programme, whether hosted by Noel Edmonds or Frank Bough, it seems at first to be nothing more offensive than a celebration of Pringle knitwear, with elements of a Fred Perry sports-shirt parade. If only it were so innocent. It is in fact an apotheosis of the Family. The idea of the programme – harmless, indeed laudable, at first glance – is to provide information about weekend events around the country, or UK as they call it. The grisly side of the whole undertaking is that a ‘typical family’ is selected to try out some ‘leisure activity’ at one of the hundreds of ‘heritage amusement happy parks’, ‘family fun centres’ or ‘activity theme happy fun, fun happy leisure happies’ that are using up valuable space that could otherwise be devoted to less noxious enterprises, like the construction of fast-breeder reactors or Union Carbide factories. This ‘typical family’ spends a day at the Gehenna of the programme’s choice and comes back to give ‘points out of ten’. Safety of course is a prime consideration: is the activity theme play area adequately supervised? Does the netting of the wild-life and environment habitat centre, or ‘zoo’ as we call them in this country, have little pointy bits that might snag Jason’s ‘LA Rams’ sweatshirt? All these things must be taken into consideration.
I cannot convey to you the sense of overwhelming misery that sweeps over me when I watch this and other horrors unfold. Marks & Spencer, for instance, are going ‘edge-of-town hypermarket’ because, according to a spokesman, ‘family shopping’ is where the future lies. Fond of my family as I am, and none could be fonder, I know for a fact that had any such procedure been regularly practised during my childhood I should have become a ‘Family Massacre At Sainsbury’s Checkout’ headline before my tenth birthday.
Children want privacy from their parents, parents from their children. Independent and alternative interests, often parricidal in their
nature or meaning, are essential. Parents shouldn’t like their children’s taste in music, clothes, television or friends and vice versa. At least they shouldn’t have to, or be expected to. Nor should we be expected to like our government’s taste in values, moral outlook and foreign policy. You won’t huddle me into a great Christian national family that doesn’t talk to queers, expects the sick and disabled to receive charity and gives a good thrashing to anyone who dares to cheek our policemen and soldiers or asks too many impertinent questions.
Obedience, compulsion, tyranny and repression are family words as much as love, compassion and mutual trust. It rather depends on the family. I wonder which sort of ‘family values’ we most readily associate with our government? Well, I don’t really wonder: it’s all too plain.
A Glimpse of The Future
TWENTY YEARS’ TIME
Continuing our occasional selection of extracts from The Listener as they appeared twenty years ahead. This week an article from The Listener in June 2008.
The infamous spy Simon Mulbarton speaks from his cell in Wellington, New Zealand.
Yes, I had gone up to Cambridge in ’79, and it was there that I became a Thatcherite. I know it sounds extraordinary now, but you see it was very much the fashion. There was a tremendous amount of unemployment, recession, racial tension in those days, and a lot of us undergraduates were naturally ardently cynical and passionately realistic, and so we drifted into monetarism, Friedmanism, and some of us into outright Thatcherite/Reaganism. Remember, too, we had the great cause of the Falklands War to rally behind: a lot of older undergraduates flocked to join up, it was like an ideological battle-cry for us to defend the overdog. You have to understand the atmosphere of the times, you see. There were a lot of very influential unintellectual dons there, Casey, Cowling, Roger Scruton, pillars of the establishment and columns in the Salisbury Review – Thatcherism was very much in the air amongst us more unthinking students. We read a lot of Paul Johnson and Ferdinand Mount, and their new ideas of grabbing what you can for yourself, letting the market control things, squashing the trades unions and so forth, had very great appeal to a new generation of selfish young people frightened at the prospect of not getting a job. Some of us had even visited America, under Reagan, who had been elected earlier, and we were inspired by what we found there – you have to understand that this was before it became apparent that the man had completely lost control of his senses – it all seemed so simple and appealing.
I was first approached by someone from the CIA in 1980, I remember, during my second year up, at a meeting of the Disciples Club, an élite gathering of top right-wing students. We took it in turns to read the others a paper: the Mail, the Express, Sun – whatever: some of the more extreme members were of course quite unable to read. Anyway, I was approached by a don from Peterhouse who had been a Washington man for some years and he asked me if I’d be prepared to work for the CIA. I agreed readily.
I had never made any secret of my right-wing allegiance, and when after Cambridge I was accepted into the Foreign Office, I think they were perfectly well aware where my sympathies lay. I began feeding my various Washington contacts with information straight away. I never thought of myself as a traitor. After all, the Americans had fought on our side during two world wars. They had been our allies. We owed them that. We owed the same thing to the Russians, of course, but that isn’t how we looked at it. America was the great white hope of greedy capitalism, and we believed in it. I thought that in being pro-American I was serving Britain’s best interests.
Obviously it’s very easy to see now, with hindsight, that I was completely misguided, but remember that it wasn’t until the early 1990s that we began to grow disillusioned with Thatcher and Reagan and saw what really lay behind their appealing façade. By then, of course, it was too late for those of us in deep cover. There were many of us, some very highly placed members of key establishments: the BBC was riddled with right-wing anti-intellectuals, we’d had one man working for years on staff selection. Fleet Street was seamed and honeycombed with us, and as for MI5 …
They worked to try and persuade the public that the Soviet Union was a wicked enemy and America a benign friend. You’d think we might have had difficulty explaining away the invasion of Grenada, the propping up of El Salvador, the attacks on Nicaragua, and some of us did find all that hard to swallow, but people still flocked to our cause. America was pumping Britain full of cultural propaganda, you have to understand. Our moles in the media helped convince the British public that wanting to get rid of nuclear weapons was naïve, whereas the belief that possessing them would somehow permanently guarantee freedom from destruction was not naïve, and on the whole they managed it. Ironic as things turned out.1 Of course they are all dead now, so they can’t answer for what happened.
I was in New Zealand, ostensibly for the Foreign Office, in fact trying, on behalf of the CIA, to destabilise an absurdly naïve anti-nuclear government, when it all happened, so I was rather lucky. In a thousand years or so, when it’s safe to go back to the Northern hemisphere, the records of those years will be intact. As I say, we really did believe that we were doing the right thing. And after all, that’s what matters, isn’t it?
1Doesn’t seem that impressive a prediction in the light of What’s Happened In Eastern Europe, does it?
Friends of Dorothy
I have recently had the honour to be involved in two rather colossal and heart-warming events both of which, for one reason or another, have been more or less ignored or patronised by the squalid lobsters who scuttle on the floor of our society, which is to say the press.
The first was a fairly gigantic stage show at the Piccadilly Theatre which aimed to laugh contemptuously at the vicious little squirts behind the infamous Section (quondam Clause) 28. The Standard which, for those fortunate enough to live outside London, is as grotesquely partisan a newspaper as is permissible without actually dropping pretence and coming out as a Tory party broadsheet, and which was as responsible as any other organ for the very piece of legislation under advisement by consistently overplaying the infinitesimally small sums of money laid out by Labour councils and the GLC to unhappily named ‘Lesbian Theatre Co-operatives’ and the like, contrived studiously to ignore the evening, managing to find on the following day only a story about some deranged Tory who thought the Clause needed to be ‘strengthened’. The show was designed specifically to ‘promote’ homosexuality within the (doubtful) meaning of the Act by having works performed which were exclusively by gay writers, playwrights and composers. Obvious names like Auden, Shakespeare, Wilde, Tchaikovsky, Orton, Britten and Marlowe and perhaps more surprising names (to some) like Edward Lear, Saint-Saëns, Noël Coward and A.E. Housman contributed the material. The performers included many ‘straight’ artists and musicians, like Dames Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Peggy Ashcroft and names like Tom Stoppard, Simon Rattle and Paul Eddington whom it vastly annoys members of the raving right to see associate themselves with such causes. Surely that nice man from Yes Minister can’t want nuclear disarmament or sexual tolerance? It is a short step from that kind of annoyance, the kind of ‘why are all the clever people on the left?’ whine, to statements like ‘actors should stick to acting’. This – coming from illiterate Yahoos and slobbering drunkard hacks who can barely thread a piece of paper through a typewriter, let alone stop to be charming, humane and friendly to their fellow citizens, yet daily imagine themselves qualified to mouth off any piece of bile that occurs to their dulled senses – seems a bit rich.
The second entertainment with which I was involved was altogether a vaster and more trumpeted affair. This was the great Wembley birthday party for Nelson Mandela. My own reaction to this centres chiefly around the acute embarrassment felt at the fact that my microphone didn’t work properly for the first minute or so of my ‘set’, as we rock and rollers call an act. One can add to that the curious circumstance that while even Margaret Thatcher has been resolute in her calls for Mandela to be
released and for apartheid to be dismantled, the preponderance of the press continued to present the thing as some kind of anarcho-Stalinist rally.
The question as to when P.W. Botha, whom the whole world recognises to have no mandate to rule the peoples of his unhappy republic, agrees to renounce violence and his control over an aggressive army and police force, seems irrelevant to feature writers in that same Standard whose television reviewer seems to be the only journalist on the paper with both sides of the brain connected. A feature headlined ‘The Biased Broadcasting Corporation’ seems to me to cast doubt on the sanity of the entire sub-editorial staff.
Cromwell, Éamon de Valera, Menachem Begin, Nasser, Ortega, De Gaulle, Mugabe, Shamir, Castro, Kenyatta – these are just a few names of statesmen (not all of them first choices for a cosy bedmate, I grant you) who began life as ‘terrorists’, as ‘men of evil with whom we will not talk’. The tyrants they supplanted were in all cases, I contentiously claim, worse rulers of their people than their successors and are rightly represented now as ‘terrorists’ themselves.
But those who choose, even in a celebratory act, to believe in the democratic spirit, are denounced as ‘naïve’ at best and ‘sinister’ at worst. The Times, whose only intellectual accomplishment aside from its crossword and parliamentary sketch-writer is the bewildering variety of ways it manages to dispraise the BBC in a manner that promotes its proprietor’s wretched satellite system, attempts a lofty condemnation of these galas. The events are ‘trivialisations’ of ‘affairs too complex for pop-singers’ minds to grasp’. What complexities these are and how a Times leader-writer’s mind is capable of grasping anything other than the fact that broadcasting in Britain must be ‘opened up’ we are not privileged to know.
