Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  As far as the Great Telegraph Palindrome Contest is concerned, I apologise unreservedly for the sleepless nights that this competition has caused; readers have been vigorous in their curses and imprecations on that head, and I cannot blame them. Words and letters spin around the brain in endless cartwheels in the attempt to avoid inelegancies like ‘ ’e did, Nora, wot ’e …’ and so forth. I think it fair to say that the classics ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama’, ‘Sex at noon taxes’, et al., can rest easy. This is not to disparage the colossal resourcefulness and mental muscle that went into the submissions.

  Some of the entries are nonsense: nonsense frankly and cheerfully confessed to: of this category my favourite, because of the extraordinary words it manages to include, is Mr Blackmore’s ludicrous telegram from a Mr Crow. “Worcester Five lose. Pats TUC law on EMI time not new. Desk law defies O. Levi. TUC executive lose if Ed walks. Ed went on EMI time. Now Al cuts tape so Levi frets. E. Crow.’

  Attempts to involve my name include ‘See Fry tot yr fees’, ‘Stephen is not narrow? Oh rot, to row or rant on sin, eh, pets?’ and ‘Oh, sod ’em! Reviled desk-satyr Fry tasks Ed: deliver me dosh-o’ and many other shamelessly crawly ventures.

  The world of sport offers ‘Now did Seles’s “tennis yell” over-awe? Beware volleys in nets: Seles did … won!’, ‘ “Wonder” Everton – not revered now,’ ‘Anne’s dog “Spot” stops “God” Senna’ and, still with motor-racing, ‘Senile distaste begins, as races use cars, as Nige bets at sidelines.’

  A subtle and silly one which appealed to me was ‘Rettebs, I flahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better.’

  Smaller offerings include a description of a perforated eardrum as a ‘noise lesion’ and the Harlem fruiterer’s cry ‘Yo, banana boy’.

  My topical favourite is from T. Evans of Cheltenham. ‘Drat Saddam, a mad dastard’ (what a pity his name isn’t Sabdam …) For Darling Buds of May admirers the dread scenario that the actress Catherine Zeta Jones had backed out of the second series drew this from Rodney Barnett of Budleigh Salterton: ‘Degenerate Zeta Reneged’. Hope for the nineties was offered by B.V. Blomper of Colchester. ‘Are we not drawn onward to a new era?’

  But the palm goes to Mr V. Miles of Bracknell, for his many submissions (which included ‘Marge let Evadne send a VE telegram’) and for the sheer bravura of the name-dropping winning palindrome: ‘It’s Ade, Cilla, Sue, Dame Vita, Edna, Nino, Emo! Come on in and eat; I’ve made us all iced asti.’ The inclusion of a phrase like ‘Come on in and eat’ finally swung me to Mr Miles, but to all of you, to those mentioned and to those criminally ignored, many, many thanks.

  I shan’t mind if I never see the words detartrated, kayak and redivider ever again.

  Taxi!

  While filming an episode of Jeeves and Wooster last year I was idly flicking through, as one does, some of the old magazines that the prop department scatters around the sets to create that authentic period look and feel. I found myself inexplicably entertained by a cartoon printed in a 1934 edition of Punch. It figured a man leaping into a taxi and shouting to the cabbie, ‘The Royal School of Needlework, and drive like hell.’

  The cartoon came into my mind this week when I was driving along the Marylebone Road in London, humming a Cole Porter tune to myself and trying to be stoical about the monstrous queue of traffic in which I was irretrievably wedged. The calm of my reverie was shattered and the notes of that tricky middle section of ‘In the Still of the Night’ froze on my lips, when a rear door opened and a man sat down with a crisp, ‘Pimlico, and don’t dawdle.’

  Rather an embarrassing moment, as you can imagine. As far as I know this kind of social situation is not covered in Debrett’s Handbook of Etiquette. It was entirely my own fault, of course. In London, you see, I drive a black taxi-cab. It has always been an ambition of mine. Hardly an original idea, I know; Nubar Gulbenkian, the financier, had the notion first. ‘It can turn on a sixpence,’ he said proudly of his own cab, ‘whatever that is.’ I am pleased to be able to report that the taxi steering-lock has not deteriorated in any particular since the great Armenian’s day. There have however been, in show-room catalogue jargon, numerous improvements: power steering, automatic transmission and central locking are now fitted as standard. Many versions even have an electric window.

  For most people, central locking is at its most useful when leaving a car; one turn of the key or one touch of a button and the car is locked: you can kiss goodbye to the misery of fumbling for rear-window locking studs. In my case, however, central locking is activated by a switch inside the car, thus ensuring that people do not jump in shouting ‘Pimlico, and don’t dawdle’, while I am humming to myself in traffic-jams. It was this locking switch that I had neglected to depress the other day.

  I have gone to some pains to make my taxi look authentic. There are owners who spray their cabs yellow and fit them with ermine seat covers, leatherette head-rests, Wilton carpeting, burr-walnut picnic tables and expensive speaker systems. To me this defeats the purpose of owning a taxi in London, which is to be taken for the real thing. Genuine cabs seem to be allowed to push out into traffic without signalling and they are extended every courtesy of the road by other cabs. I would not, naturally, stoop so low as to use bus lanes or to park in taxi-ranks: heavens, no. Good lord, what do you take me for? Nonetheless I am happy to enjoy the legal benefits.

  All properly licensed cabs have a small white plaque on the back with a number and the words ‘Licensed to carry 4 passengers, Metropolitan Police’ written on it. I went to the trouble of having a special one made up which said ‘Not licensed to carry any passengers. Neapolitan Police’. You would have to inspect it very carefully to tell the difference. Thus equipped, all the excitements of real cabbying are open to me, without the drawbacks of having to interface with irate members of the public or develop bracing views on repatriation and the traitors who stabbed Mrs Thatcher in the back. Until, that is, the other day.

  Now, as it happened, I was going very near Pimlico and knew the street the gentleman sitting in the back required. The embarrassment only began after I had dropped him off.

  ‘Can’t see your meter,’ he said.

  ‘Um,’ I said.

  After a fraught pause I hit upon a happy notion.

  ‘It’s free,’ I said. ‘Today’s the first day of rear seat belts. I promised myself I would drive for free the first person I didn’t have to remind of the new law. You strapped yourself in without prompting, so it’s a free journey.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ he said.

  As he moved away a woman approached and leant in the window.

  ‘Chelsea Arts Club, Old Church Street,’ she yelled above the roar of a very quiet engine and no particular street traffic at all.

  What the hell? It was sort of on my way as well.

  ‘Hop in, love,’ I said.

  Another Question of Attribution

  There is a scene in Ulysses where Stephen Dedalus, working as a junior schoolmaster, sits in the study of Deasy, his headmaster. Deasy, who is somewhat sententious, is handing over Dedalus’s pay and a homily about money. ‘But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.’ Dedalus, unheard by Deasy, murmurs in reply, ‘Iago.’

  It is all too easy to offer up a quotation from Shakespeare as if its provenance is a guarantee of its worth. Dedalus has spotted that it is not necessarily worth trusting the advice of Iago, a malignant manipulating murderer. Every word of Shakespeare, in his plays, is actually said by a character, not by the playwright. Shakespeare the man said absolutely nothing. Well, in one sonnet alone of course, he came up with Summer’s Lease and The Darling Buds Of May, but aside from providing a title service for novelists the world over, Shakespeare personally offers little in the way of proverbs, axioms or mottoes by which we can live our life. He was an artist, after all, not a philosopher or an advertising copywriter.

  This does not stop people wagging fingers at their juniors and intoning, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be�
��, with that smug addition, ‘Shakespeare’, as if to say, ‘so there!’ This rather overlooks the fact that the speaker of that phrase is the comically absurd figure of Polonius, whose understanding of what goes on around him, even the most partial critic would agree, is limited. The advice is being offered to his son: all parents are desperate that their children do not run up debts; it is the parents, after all, who end up paying. In dramatic context it is an amusing line, but it could hardly be said to represent Shakespeare’s own views.

  The inconsistencies of those who use Shakespeare to support an argument when in reality they are using Macbeth, Iago, Oberon or Polonius are nothing to the peculiarities of those who offer select quotations from the Bible. There are, for instance, a couple of passages from Leviticus where it is explicitly stated that it is ‘an abomination’ for a man to lie with another, as with a woman. This is eagerly seized upon by those who wish to demonstrate the wickedness of homosexuality. Neighbouring passages which state, with equal fervour, that thou shalt not wear a garment made of two different kinds of stuff, nor round off thine hair at the temples, nor mar the edges of thy beard, nor make any tattoos upon thyself, nor breed one kind of cattle with another, these are cheerfully ignored. Yet Leviticus states that all the statutes must be obeyed, from kosher food to the sacrifices of a lamb (or two turtle doves if you cannot afford a lamb) made by a woman who has purified herself after giving birth. In the case of bearing a male child, of course, a mother is unclean for seven days; if the baby is female she is defiled for two whole weeks. One is not given the option of picking and choosing between these eccentric commands.

  For sure, quotation is a dangerous business. Nonetheless I found myself saying, the other day, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.’ I was standing on a pair of bathroom scales and resolving that I had to take myself in hand before it was too late. As someone who was described at school as ‘skinny’ it has taken me a long time to rid from my mind an image of myself as a scrawny, lanky, gawky individual. The odd interview I have done of late has started to refer to me as ‘substantial’, ‘generously girthed’ and, in one memorable article, ‘squashy’. My stomach’s journey from concave to convex has been beastly quick. My body now resembles, in sight and sound, a bin-liner full of yoghurt and it is time to do something about it. Some of you will be reaching for your Bibles and that passage about vanity and the preacher and I suppose I cannot deny that you have a point. I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent save only vaulting ambition. The ambition for people not to shout ‘fatty!’ at me in the street.

  I am about to embark on five weeks of rehearsals and recordings of a television programme, so I shall be relinquishing this column for that time. When I return I hope to be slimmer, trimmer and not so very like a whale, as Polonius might say. No one could describe my will power as awesome however, so please – don’t quote me.

  The Tracks of my Tears

  Peter Cook, one of the funniest men ever to bite a biscuit, once considered founding a self-help group for comedians which would be called Melancholics Anonymous.

  From Roscius to Roscoe Arbuckle and beyond, the image of the dismal comic has persisted throughout history. Coloured-chalk drawings on black velvet of clowns with big tears falling down their cheeks and splashing off their ruffs can be seen for sale every Sunday along the park-side railings of the Bayswater Road. The aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ from I Pagliacci still runs ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ as a close second as a Desert Island Discs favourite year after year. The comedian’s red nose, we like to think, is red from weeping or from whisky, never from joie de vivre.

  Why? What right have comedians got to be miserable, you might be excused for asking? A large number of them are overpaid, overadulated, overexposed and overcourted. They are seen in the first circles these days; they mill about in the Stewards’ Enclosure at Henley and are allowed to roam unmolested in the Long Room at Lord’s; they count crowned heads and world statesmen as their intimates – why, some are even given weekly platforms in reputable newspapers. Charlie Chaplin in his day was more famous than Lloyd George or the Tsar; Bill Cosby is one of the richest men in America; Leslie Crowther has perhaps the second finest collection of enamelled snuff-box lids in the Home Counties. Fact.

  So again I ask, why the whining and kvetching? It is not simply a baseless myth. I am forced to admit that a great many comedians of my acquaintance really do conform to this ‘heartache and tears behind the laughter’ nonsense. In a foolish, syllogistic sort of way I used to worry that my general cheerfulness and optimism were enduring proof that I would never truly cut the mustard as a comedian. For a time I considered alcoholism; perhaps the misery of hangovers, gin-blossoms and vomit-flecked trousers would lend me the authentic blue-note accidie and Weltschmerz that marks out the true funnyman and thus pole-vault me effortlessly across the gulf that divides the reasonably entertaining from the pricelessly, hysterically amusing. It didn’t really work: I just used to fall over a lot and giggle.

  One explanation for the universal glumness of comics may well be their frustration at having to explain to interested parties that British television does not use canned laughter. A large number of people, what is called a vocal minority, likes to make a fuss about ‘background appreciation’ on comedy programmes. Canned laughter, it should be explained, is a specific and rather dubious technique whereby off-the-shelf tapes of general audience laughter are dubbed onto soi-disant amusing programmes. This is at its most peculiar in American cartoons where it is perfectly obvious to the meanest intelligence that Scooby-Doo and Fred Flintstone cannot perform in front of live audiences.

  Comedy shows in this country, from ITMA to Yes, Prime Minister, have been and continue to be recorded in front of studio audiences. Most comedians will tell you that imponderables like confidence and timing are best served by having live spectators: scientific studies have shown that it is easier to be romantic in the car-park of an edge-of-town Do-It-All than it is to be even faintly amusing in an empty television studio.

  In the case of an acknowledged masterpiece like Fawlty Towers, the viewer at home doesn’t mind laughter at all – he is probably too busy laughing himself even to notice. I once had a contretemps with someone who claimed there was no laughter track at all on Fawlty Towers; an argument settled only by entering a shop and buying the video. Even then this person didn’t believe me and insisted that the laughter had been added on for the cassette version.

  In the case of a more run-of-the-mill situation comedy or sketch show, the sound of a sycophantic audience is, no doubt, infuriating to a degree. I can assure you, however, for what it is worth, that such laughter is not canned, it is as fresh and dew-picked as the jokes may be rotten and stale.

  A difficulty, perhaps, arises from the fact that those individuals who comprise studio audiences are, perhaps properly, determined to make an impression. They have developed a habit, therefore, of screeching with laughter at improbable moments so that when, weeks after the recording, the programme is broadcast, they can nudge their spouses and friends and say, ‘Hear that weird scream? That was me!’

  Nonetheless, I still favour studio laughter. It would be fairer on comics, however, if their serious counterparts reciprocated. To that end I am lobbying for weeping tracks on news programmes.

  The Mouse that Purred

  Working with white mice must be enormously rewarding. Scientists proved recently that white mice, like humans, are devoted to pleasure. It is possible to implant a small electrode in a mouse’s brain which the mouse himself can activate by pressing a button with his or her nose. This electrode releases large quantities of enkephalins into the bloodstream of the rodent. These enkephalins, or endorphins, give pleasure – great washing streams of pure, thrilling joy. Endorphins are loosed into us when we eat, when we follow the instructions carefully set out in magazines like Cosmopolitan and manage to achieve orgasm, when we look into a baby’s eyes, when we are tickled or groomed by a f
riend. They are the complement of pain and spur us on to eat the right food, mate with appropriate partners, protect vulnerable infants and be nit-picked in Nature’s approved wholesome fashion.

  Alcoholics feel a rush of endorphins when they sip their first gin of the day; I expect Lord Hanson gets a decent buzz when he buys his opening 15 per cent of a vulnerable corporation and no doubt editors of tabloid newspapers hit huge endorphin highs when they see spread out on their desks photographic evidence proving that a test cricketer’s wife has turned to prostitution. Others of us are afforded similar tidal waves of delight attending Motley Crue concerts at the Castle Donnington Monsters of Rock festival, beholding Brancusi sculptures, watching Alastair Sim’s eyebrows in full flight or, my particular poison, listening to Wagner.

  The only true equivalent to these euphoric peptides that mankind has been able to devise is extracted from the poppy. Opiates have an identical capacity to give pleasure and the same ability to suppress pain – they bind, as doctors put it, to the same receptors in the brain. Scientists have been working for years on a means of synthesising our own endorphins chemically to produce a drug which avoids the frankly undesirable side-effects, or ‘contra-indications’ as medical men prefer to euphemise, of heroin and morphine. The white mice, however, teach us that this may be a bootless line of research.

  For, given a choice between a button that releases endorphins on demand and a bowl of nutritious food, the white mice will opt for the button every time. They will sit there triggering their electrodes, dreaming, wriggling and frothing with pure pleasure until they quite literally starve to death.

  Puritans might interpret this as proof that man’s ability to create new pleasurable entities like wine, art, drugs, sport and position number 42 from the Kama Sutra is a perversion of Nature’s pleasure reflex that is so far removed from its function as a survival mechanism as to constitute Devil’s Work. The day will come, they warn us, their brows beetling under highly conical and highly comical Puritan hats, when we will make buttons not for white mice, but for ourselves, and we will be the creatures frothing about with pleasure at the expense of toiling, spinning, praising the Lord and eating potatoes. The white mice meanwhile, our arching and purring backs being turned, will make good their escape and get on with the business of running the world, which the writer Douglas Adams always maintained they did anyway.