by Stephen Fry
Caveat emptor is a noble maxim, but here is another: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall protect us from consumer protectors? How is it that Which? magazine, one of the pioneers of the noble movement we have been discussing, is more guilty, perhaps even than Reader’s Digest, of that very brand of junk ‘you may have won £200,000 pounds in our prize draw Mr Stippen Pry’ mailing, and tacky, huckstering paper-wasting from which consumerism was surely invented to protect us? A nasty case of gamekeeper turned poacher if ever there was one. I shall be forming an independent production company that will produce Them and Theirs the watchdog of the watchdogs. A panel of testers will be examining Which? magazine and organs like it. If I find that it uses nasty old metal staples to bind its pages together, well, they had better look out, that’s all.
Christmas Cheer
Something festive, they said. Something a thousand words long and festive. It’s Christmas, you see, and the cry is for something … well, not to put too fine a point on it … something festive.
Christmas is a time for saying that Christmas is a time for doing things that one should, frankly, be doing anyway. ‘Christmas is a time for considering people less fortunate than ourselves.’ Oh, and July and April aren’t, is that it? ‘Christmas is a time for forgiveness.’ We should be vindictive and beastly for the rest of the year? ‘Christmas is a time for peace on earth and good will towards men.’ Let us therefore for goodness’ sake concentrate during the rest of the year on bellicose malevolence. Piffle-bibble.
I would hate to be considered an old Scroogey-trousers, the spirit of Christmas courses through my veins, softens my heart and hardens my arteries in as full an Imperial measure as those of any man of my age and weight in the country, I hope. So how, merry pink-nosed reader, shall we be Christmassy together, you and I? I like to think of this little column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts. And the oldest chestnut of all must be the adage that Christmas is a time for children.
Grrrr! That’s what I used to think of Christmas as a child. Likewise, Waaah! The intolerable, aching suspense of it, the terrible monstrous disappointment of it! (You see I’m even succumbing to a Dickensian rash of exclamation marks! A Merry Eczemas rash of explanation marks, I suppose.) Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive. It is impossible in adulthood to recapture the same kind of wriggling excitement, clammy anticipation and fidgeting desperation that one felt as the little cardboard doors of the Advent calendar swung open. I am told by the diminishing members of my acquaintance who still indulge in sexual intercourse and other corporeal rummagings and pokings that to watch a partner undress or to climb stairs towards a carnal assignation can invoke approximate sensations of tingling thrill, but I beg leave to doubt such claims and shout ‘humbug, hooey and humgudgeon’ at them. Only Christmas to a child can do this. Again, much like sex, the event ends with a sad, flatulent realisation that these things are better imagined than enacted, better anticipated than performed. A realisation that is brought fully home when the final horror of Christmas comes screaming hot from hell. The Thank-You Letter.
As a child you grasp Christmas to your bosom with joyous wonder and then ask, puzzled and crest-fallen: ‘Well here it is, what do I do with it? This is Christmas Day, but what’s different? Everything out of the window is normal, I feel the same, I look the same. Where’s Christmas? Where’s it gone?’ Where indeed? It was never there, but in the mind.
Part of the problem, of course, is that spirituality keeps creeping into the festivities. Indeed it seems to be getting more and more religious every year. One yearns for a return to commercial values, to put a bit of the materialism back into the season.
There is a story that St Augustine persuaded an English king to turn Christian when sitting with him in a great hall having a Christmas feast – it wouldn’t have been called a Christmas feast, it would have been called a Yuletide wassail, I expect – it was a big winter do, that’s the point. As was common in those days before Magnet and Southern sliding patio doors, the party was going with a swing. A great fire crackled in the log, a great log crackled in the fire, and a log fire crackled in the grate. All was glee and revel. The only ventilation provided took the form of two holes high up on either end of the roof.
Of a sudden, or ‘suddenly’ as we say in England, a bird flew in through one of the holes in the wall, fluttered about for a bit and flew out through the other. The King, we shall call him Boddlerick, because I have no idea of his real name and have not the faintest intention of hauling my great corse up the stairs to look it up, who was accounted something of a philosopher, turned to Augustine, his strangely berobed and behaloed guest, and said unto him these words, in this wise: ‘Behold, strangely berobed and behaloed guest! Is not our life like that of this poor bird. From the dark and howling void we came, cast suddenly into a world of colour and warmth and light, of music and mirth and merriment, briefly to flutter our baffled wings in alarm, only to be pitched back into the eternal cold and dark again?’
A good analogy, you’d have thought. Worthy of Jonathan Miller himself. But Augustine was having none of it. ‘No, no, sire, majesty, liege,’ he countered, ‘you have it entirely the wrong way round. Our lives are dark passages in the stream of light that is God’s love. To those who know God, through the window is Paradise.’
Instead of telling Augustine not to be such a silly old ninny and to get another skinful of rude mead and another eyeful of rude dancer, this fat-headed king liked what he heard and fell bell, book and candle for the whole funky Christian groove thing. This country and its Christmases have been damned ever since. Because, from that wretched day on, the world and its colour and music and light are things which we have had to write crawling thank-you letters to God for until we die. As little children sprawled before the lap of Father Christmas Almighty we cannot even enjoy the gifts of the world without guilt, shame, terror and gibbering gratitude.
So bog off St Gussie and roll on Boddlerick, say I. It’s cold and dark and loveless outside, and this is as good as it ever gets. So let’s feed the poor now, because their reward is not in heaven, let’s drop ash on the carpet, slob around in our dressing gowns, mull wine all day long, watch television lying on our tummies, forget our thank-you letters to granny and God and have a ripping good time.
But let’s not do it on Christmas day. Let’s do it every damned day, for ever and ever Amen.
Predictions for the Year 1989
Welcome to what I hope will be a very engaging year. It’s obviously a little too early to let you know exactly what’s going to be happening in the world over the next twelve months, but I can tell you that it will be very much the mixture of old and new that you have come to expect from the prestigious and stylish eighties, blending traditional appeal with modern convenience. The only hint I will give you is not to throw away those back-issues of The Listener. Kindling is going to be pretty rare next winter: I know December ’89 seems a long way off, but it’s best not to take risks with one’s body warmth. Otherwise Fauvism, as predicted, is set to make a come-back, the career of Anita Harris is going to be radically reassessed and Derek Jameson will suffer from a slight head cold in mid-August. The only particularly dark cloud on the horizon will be Tony Meo’s continued run of bad form at the snooker table. But don’t worry Tony! September looks like a winner as you take a fresh look at your stance and re-examine the rhythm of your cuing arm – the left arm in your case, of course. On the pop front, House music will continue to lose ground to the more fashionable Garage sound, which in turn will give way, in mid-June, to the Patio beat and thence, by October, to Garden music which will be followed, with any luck, by Down The Drive music and, eventually, A Very Long Way Away Indeed music.
Well, don’t blame me, I have a column to fill. And if a columnist has a single solemn duty, it is t
o make predictions for the New Year. The problem with this sacred charge is that, in my experience, the only consistent and predictable thing in the world is randomness and weirdness. All I can bank on is that the coming year will yield fresh conflicts and calamities that will transform previously obscure peoples and nations into household names, produce novel bacilli and viruses that, like herpes, will be on everyone’s lips by this time next year, and precipitate new catastrophes and disasters that will keep yet budding more bereavement counsellors in work well into the nineties. In short, we will continue to be astonished by the future.
If there is anything remarkable about the world and us race of humans, if there is a single marvellous and extraordinary fact in the universe it is this: we find existence remarkable, marvellous and extraordinary, despite its being the only condition we have ever known. Let me try and explain. If you brought up a baby in such a way that everyone around it took their clothes off in the dining-room, thrust soft fruits down their trousers in the kitchen, licked the walls in the sitting-room and jumped up and down screaming the word ‘fwink’ in the bathroom, that baby would grow up without ever finding such procedures in any way peculiar, until, that is, said infant discovered that these were far from normal practices in other households. As far as hearth and home go, we accept what we are given.
But when it comes to what Douglas Adams so rightly designated Life, the Universe and Everything we can do nothing but boggle. If we had all originated in a cosmos where things were ordered differently our amazement would make sense, but what we have and all we have ever had is the given state of things, what Wittgenstein, when relaxing, liked to call The Case. We have experienced no other possibility, yet we find it surprising (for all the world as if we had just arrived from Zegron 5 where time travels backwards, traffic jams are unknown and matter can be created at will) that music exists, that there are orchids which smell of rotting meat just to attract flies and that ewes are delivered every spring of frisky little lambs. Why are we gobsmacked by a state of affairs that is all we have ever known? Why are we so like Noël Coward’s Alice, who, on observing the beasts of the field, remarked ‘Things could have been organised better’?
The capacity to imagine other worlds and universes beyond our experience, the ability to question the cruelty and inanity of God and the feeling that we can enrich our lives just by taking a stick and sharpening it without having to wait for evolution to give us horns, claws or quills, these characteristics underlie every improvement we have made over nature and every harm we have inflicted upon it.
1989 will, I am sure, be a year in which the wise will continue to question our value, as climatic and environmental disasters accelerate and the affluent West becomes ever more desensitised to the suffering of the struggling two billion whose lives are most whirled into chaos by the wind that we are sowing. The January columns of future years will open by assessing our species’ chances of surviving the year.
Nevertheless I am optimistic. For while we and we alone are primarily responsible for the critical state the world finds itself in, we and we alone are aware of it. And as long as we wonder, as long as we hold images of better organised universes in our heads we cannot perish.
So a Happy New Year to All Our Readers. It’s a wonderful life.
The Talker in The Listener
I have always been rather curious about the titles of newspapers and periodicals. This is because I have a strange and mildly diseased mind. If, that is, I have a mind at all. When I was at University the man whose proud duty it was to direct my studies, inspire my soul and fine me for vomiting in chapel without a chit from the Senior Tutor, used to say that I had no mind whatever, or at least that my mind was nugatory. ‘Your mind, Mr Fry,’ he would say, ‘is nugatory.’ For a long time I was too proud to look the word up in a dictionary and believed he meant that my mind had the consistency of Montelimar, that chewy sweetmeat which takes its name from a southern French town famous otherwise for its manufacture of cigarette papers. What he did mean, as most of you will know, was that my mind was negligible: which, to save others amongst you a tiresome consultation with Chambers, did not mean that my mind was capable of transforming itself into a piece of female nightwear, it meant that there simply wasn’t that much of it. You will readily understand that I was not best pleased by this intelligence and the aspersions it cast upon mine.
Came a garden party during the course of my second year when, maddened by cider, vodka, lemonade, Benylin and triple sec, I asked the man why he thought me so stupid.
‘I do not think you stupid,’ he said, ‘at the moment you are certainly stupid: stupid with wine and jazz cigarettes, but usually I find you more than ordinarily alert and nimble-witted – for an undergraduate, at any rate.’
‘B-but, Dr Name-Withheld-For-Legal-Reasons,’ I yipped, ‘you said that my mind was nugatory.’
‘And so it is, you crapulent young fool. You have a terrible mind, really quite terrible, I don’t know when I ever encountered one so bad. But you have a very reasonable brain. Most capable. I, on the other hand and for what it may be worth, have a most excellent mind and an atrocious brain. Only a fine mind, after all, could appreciate such a distinction. The Name-Withheld-For-Legal-Reasons’s have always had fine minds, the Yorkshire branch of the family excepted.’
I thanked him briefly for his explanation and, having rushed to the Senior Tutor to obtain the relevant docket, was soon puking happily in the choirstalls with renewed confidence in my noddle.
So there you have it: someone mindless is addressing you this day. I have no doubt that the regular gang of old muckers who heave themselves to my stall every week will have reached that conclusion long since, but newcomers have every right to be warned. However, the shadows grow long and I must return to the gravamen of my text. I said earlier that I find newspaper titles interesting: it seems like an age ago doesn’t it? We’ve been through so much together since then. But we can pick up from where we began, I hope.
These titles: how appropriate are they? Does the Observer observe to a greater extent than the Spectator spectates? In what manner does the Sun shine that distinguishes it from the Star? Is it precisely the effulgent rays from both these organs that the Mirror busies itself reflecting? And over what does the Guardian stand such jealous guard? Is it better to be a Listener than a Clarion or a Bugle? And was there something in the very titles of the Morning Post, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Graphic and the Herald which contributed to their decline? These are not such vapid musings as, at first and probably second and third glance, they appear. The title must, presumably, denote some kind of intention. Are we no longer interested in graphic sketches and trumpeting heralds and buglers? What would you call the national newspapers and magazines?
The Times is perhaps the most appropriate: it has a quite eerie knack of tagging along with the Zeitgeist, though whether this will continue under present management when current Toryism has its day, remains to be seen. The Telegraph, under its old editorship, was rightly named: there was indeed the smell about it of the kind of commercial stationery which used to include in its heading the ‘Telegraphic Address’. Now, however, the new broom, with its faintly embarrassing sponsorship of American Football and its Student pull-outs and young people’s cut-out-and-keeps, inclines one to believe that it should change its name to the Fax. The Sun’s lunacy must qualify it for a deed-poll change to the Moon and the Spectator’s strange and violent espousal of right-wingery everywhere leads me to feel that it has succumbed to the same disease that afflicts spectators in other spheres of activity, giving it the right to call itself now the Hooligan.
But these are idle rambles on the strand of time (four titles there, you note) and your own musings will be apter and brighter. I shall leave before I start to bore, I would hate you to think that the soft, voluminous folds of this periodical should now go under the name the Talker.
Ad Break
I always feel that I’m skating pretty close to the wind when I talk abo
ut advertising. I am no stranger to the world of radio and television commercials. It was with some amusement that two weeks ago I read an article by Robert Robinson in which the glabrous sage remarked: ‘It is extremely unlikely that anyone reading this has ever been asked to do a voice-over for lavatory paper.’ And would you believe it, on the facing page stood a grey wall of turgid piffle written by someone, viz myself, who had been asked to do just that very thing! What the odds are on periodical next-door neighbours both being hired for their ability to talk about the length, softness, absorbency and strength of a bog-roll are, I wouldn’t know. They are probably similar to the odds against someone of complete ineptitude and absurdity making it to cabinet rank in a great democracy. And yet, as we see in the case of, say, Paul Channon, these things do happen. And while on the subject of botty-tissues and the hawking of them, I have always wanted someone to have the courage to do a sparse, spare, stark commercial for them, of the ‘Kills all known germs – dead’ kind. ‘Andrex: for wiping your bottom with.’ Or, ‘Dixcel: it wipes your bottom – guaranteed.’ But perhaps the world isn’t ready for that.
On my involvement with the world of advertising I blow hot, cold and luke-warm. Sometimes I feel like a naughty old whore who’s no better than she should be and at other times I think to myself, as Orson Welles did: ‘Well, Toulouse-Lautrec did posters: Auden wrote copy for the Post Office – it’s a noble tradition.’
