by Stephen Fry
For a politician, of all people, to accuse such a diversely constituted group of self-advancement at the expense of others demonstrates a special kind of weirdness. Let us trust that the new Prime Minister, whose mind Mr Clark praises as ‘cool and rational’, has a rather more mature concept of what a democracy can be.
Game Show Heaven
Today marks the last day of the filming of Jeeves and Wooster II on which I and some seventy others have been engaged for the last thirteen weeks. The happy routine of being jerked from one’s slumbers at six each morning and deposited back at home more or less in time for bed ends today. I am not complaining at the hours; actors like to make a great thing of calling their profession ‘work’, but it is, thank heavens, nothing more than play. We are players and, as a man who likes nothing more than games, I find no shame in thinking of what I do as ludic, if not ludicrous.
I have had the great good fortune to catch, over the weeks, a great deal of that curious phenomenon, Daytime Television. While film sets are being lit and the furniture and props prepared, technicians prefer that actors, with their cigarettes, their atrocious eating habits and their irritating voices and conversations, are kept in their dressing rooms out of the way, and who shall blame them? In my dressing room there is a television. This has meant that I have been able to satisfy my voracious appetite for trivial and idiotic television game shows, a greater proliferation of which this country has never known. Daily Telegraph readers, as important and thrusting men and women of affairs, have, I know, little time for these fripperies. I doubt if one in a thousand of you has ever pulled up a chair for a Four Square. Indeed it is probable that you do not know the origin of that inestimable phrase. This is a pity. I am not sure that one can ever understand this country and its citizens (stroke subjects) unless one knows that there are enough people living in it not only to watch these extraordinary programmes but also (and this is the truly remarkable fact) to participate in them as studio audiences and contestants. That the supply of egregious emeritus disc jockeys prepared to host these games has not given out is one thing, but that the stock of members of the public willing and able to sit in a studio and applaud them seems inexhaustible, I find simply awe-inspiring.
On an average day there are at least five quiz-style game shows on offer throughout the day on British terrestrial broadcasting channels. I cannot speak for satellite but I am sure they have much to offer in that direction too. The current season that is about to come to an end as Christmas approaches, includes Brainwave, Keynotes, Going for Gold, Talkabout, Catchword, Fifteen To One and the perennial Blockbusters. Each one is broadcast daily on weekdays between 9.00 in the morning and 6.00 in the evening, each one has its own studio audience, and each one runs through a large number of contestants. The prizes on offer range from a modest number of pounds to a safari holiday in Kenya. There is another, even sillier show which takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3.15 hosted by a highly entertaining man in a full-bottomed wig; the catchphrases here are ‘I refer the Honourable Member to the reply I gave some moments ago’ and ‘Order! Order!’ The prize for this one is a square red attaché case stamped with the show’s distinctive portcullis logo and a chance to go forward into the grand final chaired by Peter Sissons on Thursday nights.
It would be easy to savage these entertainments as anodyne drivel dreamt up to keep lonely sherry-swigging housewives from going mad, but in fact they characterise the continuing development of one of mankind’s best and most distinctive instincts: games playing. It was homo ludens who first rose to take his place above the other creatures, not homo sapiens.
If you go into a toy shop these days you will find that where once Monopoly had a Scrabble – or is it the other way round? – the shelves now are stuffed with ever more new and remarkable games. Trivial Pursuit, which has given rise to an explosion in pub and club quiz teams, has been joined by hundreds of specialised word games, board games, strategy games and very silly games without purpose or character. It may be that more real pleasure may still be derived from a simple pack of playing cards or a set of dice, but the fact is that playing, as a pastime, is taking more and more precedence over solitary and unsocial pursuits.
If you are sitting at home all alone, then watching others play on television at least keeps the instincts sharp and satisfies, albeit vicariously, one’s gamesome instincts.
Even though, as I said, my profession is largely that of a player, nothing will satiate my desire for games. I shall be that tiresome one over Christmas who – as the others clamour to settle back, surrounded by tangerine peel and nutshells, to watch ET or the Queen – insists on marshalling the company for games. Long-term studies have shown, as liars always like to preface their arguments, that games players live longer. ‘But what sort of life is it?’ the quibblers cry. I would echo the response of the WOPR computer in the film War Games when asked if what he was doing was real or a game: What’s the difference?
A Drug on the Market
At a Conservative Party Conference some years ago there was available to members of the press, the Tory Party and the public the peculiar sight of a man marching up and down in front of the main entrance to the conference hall bearing a placard. On one side of his banner were written the charming and gracious words ‘Repatriate all immigrants NOW’.
‘Ah,’ you might think, ‘I’ve got his number. The unacceptable face of unacceptability.’ I wonder, though, if you can guess what motto was emblazoned on the obverse of his pennant? If you know something of the weird logic of right-wing libertarianism you might be able to make a stab at it. Put down the paper and have a think for a few moments.
Time’s up. If you divined this correctly you either share this man’s political outlook or you are a sophisticated and knowledgeable social observer, for what was written on the other side of the conference-goer’s banner was this: ‘Legalise cannabis NOW’.
The legalisation of cannabis has long been an interesting cause. The report compiled by Baroness Wootton of Abinger at least twenty years ago found nothing wrong with the drug and seemed to recommend its decriminalisation. Speaking as one who grew up bombarded by anti-drug literature, films and homilies, I have long felt that the strategies used by those who wish to discourage the use of prohibited narcotics have been hopelessly misguided. If drug-users are consistently shown to the impressionable young as spotty, vomiting, reeling and incoherent there is, I concede, no doubt that the idea of drugs loses its appeal. The truth however is so much less straightforward. Any young person nowadays is bound to bump into a drug-user of some kind during their life. I can well remember the first time I met someone who, I was told in an excited whisper, was a genuine junky and had been for years. Imagine my surprise when I saw that his skin tissues were clear, his hair glossy, his eyes bright, his speech well modulated and unslurred and his behaviour irreproachable. All those warning films, those stern lectures from visiting policemen and those frightening pamphlets that had been from prep school onwards thrust at one, they had been no more than sensational and hysterical propaganda. The feeling of having been conspired against by a kill-joy older generation was very strong indeed and tended, if anything, to turn one towards the forbidden fruit of the poppy, now that it was clear that it was not as grotesque as we had been warned.
There is a famous story of a television documentary made only a few years ago about a group of heroin addicts. They were in middle age, prosperous and successful. They had been junkies for twenty-two years. Their behaviour, appearance and mode of life was utterly normal, irreproachable and unexciting. The documentary was never broadcast for fear of seeming to show that drug addiction need not be the nightmare that we spend so much money and time assuring our younger generations that it is.
The truth is this: if you want to witness blotchy skin, yellowing eyes, incoherent mumbling, uncoordinated staggering, stumbling and retching then don’t look for a junky, look for a drinker. One of the great unspoken secrets of our age and ages previous is the prevalenc
e of alcoholism in public and private life. We allow a few joke drunks to stand as our butts: Oliver Reed, George Brown, George Best and so on, but we ignore the fact that a very large percentage of journalists, politicians, writers, jurists, judges, financiers and civil servants drink to an extent that would lead any doctor to describe them as functional alcoholics. Alcohol is a much more dangerous drug than many that are proscribed. Rich alcoholics, like rich junkies, can last for years on fairly good quality stuff, it is the poor and ill-educated drinkers and drug addicts who stumble down the streets, pick fights, steal, vandalise and decline to vagrancy and degradation.
The ancient Greeks used to say that wine is the mirror of the soul. Only a fool blames a mirror if the image it offers is not to their liking. To prohibit alcohol simply because some can’t cope with it would strike most of us as ludicrous and intolerable; to do the same to certain narcotics might be regarded as just as foolish and oppressive. We know that the arguments for decriminalisation are growing amongst doctors and members of the governmental and non-governmental organisations responsible for fighting the vast bandit organisations that profit, like bootleggers, from the illegality of heroin, cocaine and marijuana.
Sobriety is a chemically induced state of mind that many find bearable for only short periods of the day. In heaven, I suspect, they drink well and wisely. On earth we must face up, not to alcohol abuse, but to the abuse of people’s lives that leads them to drink badly. To the educated drinker the prohibition of a good Islay malt or a Château Margaux would be a crime against nature’s bounty and man’s artistry; the same may be said, by the connoisseur, of best Andean Flake Cocaine or Moroccan Gold Cannabis. You don’t, unless you are mad, solve the problems of burglary by outlawing possessions.
1991 approaches and I must dash to the shops, as I am sure must you, to get hold of a few hundred units of alcohol with which properly to welcome it in. Your very good health.
The Moustaches From Hell
Eight or so years ago, when I was younger and greener behind the ears, I used to do a weekly five-minute slot on a radio programme called B15 which was broadcast on Sundays on BBC Radio One. All Telegraph readers, I know, are absolute Radio One junkies, never listen to anything else, so you hardly need me to remind you that Radio One’s news coverage used to call itself Newsbeat. My job each week on B15 was to do a parody of Newsbeat called, boldly and imaginatively, Beatnews. About five weeks into this assignment came the invasion of the Falkland Islands. In response to this I hastily assembled a ‘character’ called Bevis Marchant who was one of those flak-jacket-wearing reporters who like to know all the latest military jargon ten seconds before their colleagues. He always signed off his despatches ‘… Bevis Marchant, Port Stanley? No thanks, Ollie.’ A pretty crummy joke by any standards, I admit. Came the day, however, that the letters and telephone calls started rolling in. ‘Doesn’t this man realise that there is likely to be conflict? That people are going to be killed? How can he make jokes about it?’ I naturally dropped the assignment like a hot brick.
The whole question of the role of comedy during wartime remains a thorny one. I know of no comedians at the moment who are interested in laughing at pain and sacrifice; equally, I know of no comedians who are particularly interested in confining their jokes to making fairly obvious, line-toeing fun of Saddam Hussein.
During World War Two it is notable that the memorable comedy of the time did not centre around laughing at Hitler, but on mocking British bureaucracy, the ration, ARP Wardens, staff officers and the whole panoply of total warfare. Perhaps if this Gulf War drags on, which please God it doesn’t, a comedy approach to it will develop. At the moment, however, life is stern and earnest.
I correspond with a number of officers and men of the 7th Armoured Brigade who are out in the desert and they were all frankly amazed to hear that Allo, Allo has been taken off the air. It is easy to forget that the most important aspect of comedy, after all, its great saving grace, is its ambiguity. You can simultaneously laugh at a situation, and take it seriously. Making jokes is not necessarily a sign of frivolity and insensitivity.
There are those who react very strongly against any joke made at all during a crisis. Their monumentally false assumption is that a comedian who finds things to laugh at in a war is somehow laughing at death and destruction. Those of us who were involved in the last Blackadder series, which was set in the trenches, were occasionally sent letters asking us if we did not know how grim and ghastly the First World War was. But we felt that it was possible to realise that the Great War was an appalling catastrophe, filled with horror, degradation, slaughter and sacrifice and at the same time laugh at it. The one does not cancel out the other.
In this sad Gulf business there must, I feel, be more to laugh at than David Dimbleby’s ridiculous determination to continue his personal round-the-clock commentary on the war despite a bout of laryngitis and flu that would have laid an elephant low, and more to giggle at than Saddam’s moustache. It is incidentally fascinating, isn’t it, how so many of the wicked characters of this century have been comically moustached? The Kaiser had a perfectly priceless pair of nonsenses that looked as if they were melting. Stalin’s moustache, of course, grew bigger every time you turned away from it and gave the appearance, as P.G. Wodehouse used to say, of having been grown under glass. Hitler’s becomes especially amusing when you picture him shaving every morning. The point about facial topiary, after all, is that it is deliberate and therefore screams the owner’s vanity. Each a.m. Hitler must have got his razor and delicately reaffirmed the boundaries of that silly black thumb-print of bristle with two careful downstrokes. Had his moustache been a freak of nature, like Gorbachev’s gravy-stained pate, we would have felt sorry for him, but it was in fact absolutely deliberate.
Saddam, for some reason known only to himself, favours the Silent Comedy Barman style. Every time he appears on television I feel certain he is about to cross his eyes, haul up his apron, spit on his hands and throw Laurel and Hardy into the street for non payment of a bill.
Well, it may be that the time is not right to start looking for comic angles in this conflict. But when the dust has settled everyone, not just comedians, will start calling to account the simply unjustifiable expenditure that has been going on over the last ten or twenty years stockpiling professors of Strategic Studies, lecturers in Defence Strategy, Middle-East experts and lecturers in Scudology. These people have On Air Superiority, I wouldn’t say they have quite achieved On Air Supremacy, but it’s getting close. Surely the money that pays their salaries could have been spent on something that would assure peace for all time? Like the manufacture of billions of effective razors and a massive programme of enforced shaving of upper lips worldwide.
She Was Only the President’s Daughter
Ladies and gentlemen, I was there. Right in the heart of it. It was the strangest thing. Let me explain.
I don’t know if there is a generic term for a group of British actors; a mannerism of actors, a twitter of actors, something like that. Whatever the correct form of words – a mince, possibly – I was part of such an assembly in America this week. There is a remarkable institution in America called Masterpiece Theatre. The fact that this is the usual spelling should give you some clue as to its very English nature. It is a television programme that goes out on the public, non-commercial, broadcasting network, PBS, every Sunday evening at nine o’clock. It transmits exclusively British dramas like The Jewel in the Crown, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Bleak House, I, Claudius, Edward and Mrs Simpson and perhaps most famously to the Americans, Upstairs, Downstairs.
Masterpiece Theatre was twenty years old this week and the ‘mother station’ WGBH Boston, with the help of the long-term sponsor Mobil Oil, flew out a howling of actors associated with the series to join in celebrations of this anniversary. Hugh Laurie and I were invited as representatives of Jeeves and Wooster which is the most recent series to have ‘aired in the slot’ as broadcasters like to say. With us were a great
quantity of fellow screamers: Diana Rigg, Sîan Philips, Keith Michell, Ian Richardson (whose delicious Francis Urquhart in House of Cards they are about to enjoy), Jeremy Brett, Geraldine James, Simon Williams, John Hurt … shoulders of fine honeyroast hams in whose company Hugh and I were not fit to be seen.
The celebrations took place in two cities; firstly there was a press conference and dinner in Los Angeles, with a speech made by the figure most associated with Masterpiece Theatre in American eyes, Alistair Cooke. The only begetter of the series, a British producer in America called Christopher Sarson, had approached Cooke and asked him to give a small introductory talk before each programme, setting it in context, explaining any unusual references and so on. Initially, I believe, this was because many of the programmes shown came from the British ITV network and would not run to a natural time without commercials. Alistair Cooke’s talk would fill up the advertising gaps and make the shows take a proper hour. The sight of Mr Cooke in a large green hide wing chair saying ‘Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre’ became as familiar an American TV spectacle as Richard Nixon’s sweating upper lip or the Walton family wishing each other goodnight.
This Los Angeles dinner went well, especially because of a splendid show at the end put on by the company of the satirical revue Forbidden Broadway which they had written especially for the occasion. The second dinner was in Washington DC and this is where life became very exciting.
