Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  Perhaps this is the reason for the furious dislike of the BBC that is expressed by our masters. A television set, after all, contains buttons that many feel are in danger of transmitting far too much passive, morphinous pleasure. When strange politicians and bears of very little brain froth about the BBC calling the Soviet old guard ‘right wing’ or ‘conservative’ it is, of course, nothing to do with an argument that is already lost: they cannot be that stupid. After all, President Bush himself called the Kremlin coup of last week right wing: American, French, German, Italian and, most importantly, Russian newspapers use the words ‘conservative’ and ‘right wing’ of the reactionary element in Soviet society too. No, this simulated stupidity is actually part of a plot to undermine television itself. Hence the new ITV system, devised specifically to reduce the pleasurability of independent output. The franchise bid system, the most inefficient and disastrous ‘in corporate history’ as the financial house of James Capel put it, the attacks on the BBC and the advent of satellite are all designed to reduce our pleasure and keep us working. It’s puritanical, it’s unkind, it’s unethical and it’s sneaky, but Nanny knows best. This, of course, must also be the reason why arts and sports are massively underfunded. I can think of no other.

  Any white mice who are bothering to wear shirts in this warm late summer weather must be laughing up their sleeves.

  A Game of Monopoly

  Some years ago, when the world was more innocent and anything seemed possible, I remember somebody at a dinner party asking the question, ‘Have you ever been to a party where the conversation didn’t eventually get round to the subject of the property market?’

  For younger readers, this is a reference to a period long ago when Estate Agents still roamed the land, conquering, seeking whom they might devour, jingling keys, revving Peugeot 205 GTI engines and generally making the metropolis unsafe for the citizenry. Then something happened. Nobody quite knows what. How a dominant, confident species could be wiped out in what, geologically speaking, was only a millisecond, seems inexplicable. Were they too successful? Or did, as some believe, their warm fruitful habitat recede before an encroaching economic ice floe and was it this recession that made them extinct? Perhaps their endless recycling of phrases like ‘well-presented’, ‘increasingly desirable’ and ‘realistically priced’ created so much specious methane that the oxygen of credibility was snuffed out and they died. Or were they simply, like Bunbury, ‘quite exploded’? At any event, divers memento mori, the imprints of their existence, are still with us in the shape of disused High Street premises and fossilised To Let signs. Et in Acacia Avenue ego, they seem to say.

  Back to the dinner party. To the question above, another guest offered as a reply, ‘Has anyone been to a dinner party when someone hasn’t asked the question “Have you ever been to a party where the conversation didn’t eventually get round to the subject of the property market?”’ This is how endemic the problem then was. The fact that property was such a pervasive topic was itself a pervasive topic. In more sophisticated circles that fact itself was a pervasive topic too. And so on.

  There was another popular subject, however: science. The publication of provokingly entitled books like A Brief History of Time and The Man Who Had No Endorphins caused subjects like Chaos Physics, Morphic Resonance and Schrödinger’s Cat to compete with property for table-talk attention. One of the most widely read books, perhaps as much for its title as anything, was Dr Oliver Sachs’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. The eccentric behaviour of the dysfunctioning human mind provided pleasing anecdotes and opportunities for speculation that offered a change from discussions about Victorian bathrooms, coving and original ceiling roses – at least until the cheese course.

  The New Yorker magazine last year invited a comparison between one of Doctor Sachs’s patients from his case-book Awakenings and wider international events. Sachs was called out to a household in the 1950s to examine a young girl who was behaving hysterically. It was an unexceptional case, but Sachs couldn’t help noticing an old man who had been sitting quietly in a window seat throughout the examination. Sitting quietly? Sitting entirely without movement or noise of any kind. Intrigued, Sachs examined the man, who had apparently been in that condition for years: he never moved, barely ate, never spoke. His body temperature was astoundingly low, his heart-rate fewer than forty beats a minute. Sachs also noted an insignificantly small stomach tumour, which was not the cause of this almost cryogenic state. Some kind of hormonal shortage was diagnosed and a compensatory serum injected. Within a very short time the man was back on his feet; bouncy, talkative, aware and cured of his Rip van Winkledom.

  Three weeks later he died of stomach cancer. The sleeping tumour had been awoken too.

  The New Yorker suggested that the great Soviet Bear, bound in the ice of inefficient political hegemony, catatonically slowed by bureaucracy, a command economy that didn’t work and channels of distribution that were clogged beyond hope, was in a similar case to this man. The cancers of nationalism had been long frozen with the rest of the system. Once the serum of democracy and freedom had been injected, these malignant growths would awaken with the whole body. That is no reason, of course, the magazine argued, not to make the injection, but my goodness, we had better keep our fingers crossed.

  How apt and prophetic an argument this has transpired to be. In a short time Slovenes and Croatians, Slovaks and Serbs, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Georgians, Siberians and Kamchatkanis, Anatolians, Letts, Pomeranians, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, Russniaks, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and Moldavo-Wallachians will all be competing for space in central London to erect their embassies. The Estate Agents will emerge from the ice to welcome them, house-prices will soar and London dinner party conversation will revert to the subject of Property.

  And so the world turns.

  Education is a Wonderful Thing

  When I was young and the world was green and squeaky as an iceberg lettuce, I found myself addressing the question of what to do between school and university. Should I tread in the footsteps of Waugh and Auden and offer myself to a prep school as a junior master, or should I bravely venture forth, like others of my generation, to Australia with only twenty pounds and some sheep shears in my pocket? Perhaps I should tread grapes in Bordeaux or poke such cows in Wisconsin as needed poking? With the fine, brave blood of the Frys coursing in my veins I naturally chose a prep school.

  I found that things had moved on since my own schooldays. Parent Power was rearing its ugly head, and believe me, heads do not come any uglier. The traditional Open Day in which parents would be ushered around form-rooms as suddenly spotless as High Streets on the day of a Royal Visit, forced to admire grotesque artwork on the walls, given tea and wet cucumber sandwiches in the gym and the opportunity to ask masters a few questions, had been replaced by parent governorships, regular PTA meetings and the free run of the place to every parent.

  Today, Parent Power has become an important electoral counter. In a political world which has seen a proliferation of more charters than Heathrow Airport in July, Parents’ Charters are being given much podium space this Conference Season.

  The principle of charters, as I understand it, is to give rights and powers to the consumer, the ‘users’ of any given service. The Patients’ Charter allows you to tell doctors what to do, the Chocolate Charter gives you redress if your Mars Bar causes you indigestion, the Weather Charter grants you the right to sue God if your roof is blown off in a gale. Strangely there is no Charter Charter that allows an elector to mulct a government for pestering us all with ludicrous legislation and replacing common sense and decency with flattering pamphlets and grandiloquent gestures.

  But it is Parents’ Charters that remain the most nonsensical of all the diplomas and twenty-eight-day warranties with which politicians are inviting us enrich our lives. For it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that it is children not parents who are the users of the education system.

 
I have not been blessed with progeny so far, but when in due course my line is propagated I am certain that I would not wish my issue to come home full of the same nonsenses, prejudices and half-baked ideas that clog up my own mind. The idea that children should be trained to respect their God, their country and their political ‘heritage’ seems to me to be repulsive. If you want a system where religious values, patriotism and a respect for law and order are pushed into the young then go and .live in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

  I am not advocating that children should be pumped full of rebellion, dissidence, anarchy and hatred of their country. They should be educated. Being educated does not mean being told what your parents want you to be told, being soaked in your parents’ values or learning a syllabus that your parents approve. You can get all that at home.

  The generation of sixties figures that some despise for their ‘trendiness’ and over-ripe liberal values were educated at grammar schools and secondary moderns along the rigid lines and disciplined paths that are now being sought by so many. The product of their teaching is the old-fashioned, sober and conservative (with both ‘c’s) younger generation of today. If parents really want their children to share their perceptions of the world they should insist on teachers who hold an absolutely opposite point of view. Pupils do not buy their teaching wholesale, they are not empty vessels into which prejudice and attitude can be poured.

  So to those parents who want schools to teach the supremacy of the British way of life, the dates of our Kings and Queens, the glory that was Empire and the superiority of Tennyson over Pound, Turner over Pollock and Mozart over Motorhead, I strongly advise that you do not use whatever powers a Parents’ Charter may grant you to choose a school which reflects your point of view, else your young sprigs will grow up believing in the wickedness of Empire, the splendour of rock and roll and the triumph of trade unionism over capitalism: they will go on to read Sociology and Peace Studies at Essex.

  The Children’s Charter that I am drafting will recognise that in a pluralist society education helps make you singular.

  Role Credits

  I have heard many complaints recently about the increasingly long list of credits that roll at the end of a film. If every tube of Smarties, some argue, were to include the names of the colour-blender, the packer, taster, chocolate-stirrer, conveyor-belt-oiler, lid-affixer and picker-up-and-duster-down-of-the-odd-bean-that’s-fallen-off-the-production-line-and-onto-the-floor, then just where the deuce would we be? Smartie tubes would be seven foot long and small children’s satchels would be even more expensive than they already are.

  Well, I am not prepared to enter that argument. On the one hand, credits where credits are due; on the other, a credits squeeze might be in order.

  Work began last week, you will be distressed to know, on a third series of Jeeves and Wooster, and I thought that for those of you who find credits confusing I would offer a small glossary of film terms.

  Actor insufferable layabout with opinions and a ludicrous faith in horoscopes and crystals. Actors do the least work and the most talking on any film set.

  Armourer responsible for fire-arms and weaponry on set. Disturbingly disordered psyches.

  Best boy second in command after the gaffer.

  Boom operator holds up the large woolly sausage of a microphone. Big biceps.

  Chargehand (aka property master) head of props department.

  Chippy carpenter.

  Clapper/loader operates the clapper-board or ‘slate’, loads the camera with film, checks its batteries, attaches the filters, polishes the lenses and wears the T-shirts.

  Director of Photography (aka cinematographer or lighting cameraman) like a cricket umpire, a man who stands around with a meter and consults about the light. His lamps are called brutes, pups, misars, zaps, blondes, redheads and kittens and have attachments like barn-doors, scrims, trace, gel, flags, egg-crates, snoots and Charlie bars.

  Director wears a woolly scarf. No other discernible function.

  Dolly a large trolley on which the camera sits, sometimes on railway tracks (hence ‘tracking shot’). The dolly is looked after, polished and protected by the …

  Dolly grip a man, necessarily of much muscle, who pushes and pulls the camera and operator backwards and forwards, lays tracks with the riggers and bends down, like a roadmender, to reveal posterior cleavage.

  Dressing props dresses the set with furniture and props.

  Featured artist acceptable name for what Americans call a ‘super’. Never use the word ‘extra’.

  First assistant director known as The First. The lynchpin of the whole enterprise. Sort of sergeant-major, adjutant and aide-de-camp all rolled into one. Does most of the shouting and all of the work.

  Focus puller responsible for operating the focus and zoom on the camera. Hopes one day to be an operator. Secretly plays with the camera during lunch-breaks.

  Foley artist responsible for post-production sound effects like footsteps and explosions.

  Gaffer capo di tutti capi in the world of sparks

  Grip one who totes or ‘grips’ the camera or related equipment, erects tripods and takes on the main burden of jean wearing.

  Jenny driver drives and operates the generator lorry.

  Key Grip (Amer.) chief grip.

  Make-up hides the bags under actors’ eyes, but thoughtfully returns them at the end of the day.

  Operator operates the camera. The only member of the crew who actually sees what the audience will see.

  Producer one who visits the set round about lunchtime.

  Riggers erectors of scaffolding and layers of track

  Runner gambols about; ferries cups of tea and coffee hither and thither.

  Script supervisor (aka ‘continuity girl’) checks continuity between shots so that cigarettes don’t suddenly jump from one hand to the other and hats don’t disappear off heads between shots.

  Second assistant director looks after the featured artists, helps with holding up traffic. Only capable of speaking through the medium of a walkie-talkie.

  Sound recordist holds up filming by pretending to hear aircraft overhead.

  Sparks electricians responsible for the powering, operation and installation of the lights. Frequently burn themselves.

  Stand-in doubles for an actor (who is relaxing in his caravan or writing foolish articles) while the scene is being lit. Assists with crowd control and lays actors’ table for lunch.

  Stand-out a stand-in who has wandered off and can’t be found.

  Standby props responsible for the care of props used in the action of the film.

  Stuntman drafted in to double for actors in love scenes, nude scenes and other dangerous work.

  Third assistant director mufti traffic policeman. Has the unenviable task of asking motorists if they would mind waiting while a shot is completed.

  Wardrobe responsible for costume. With so many socks to wash and shirts to iron, they get up the earliest and go to bed the latest. Flick invisible specks of dust from the actor’s cuff two seconds before a scene begins.

  Writer see producer.

  The Analogizer®

  Three years ago the world was a very different place. We were young and everything seemed possible. Our absurd, youthful ideals had not yet been hammered against the anvil of experience, nor been muddied in the lake of circumstance, nor yet had they had a hole torn in them by the CFCs of disappointment and the exhaust fumes of compromise … oh lor, I’m afraid I am being got the better of by ‘Analogizer™’ the new on-line metaphor-generator (‘Spruce up your similes and reanimate your metonyms’), compatible with all popular makes of word-processor.

  Three years ago, computer-enhanced figures of speech notwithstanding, we stood hopefully on the brink of a new era. Did we really wear shirts with collars like that? Was our hair gelled quite so smarmily? Did we honestly imagine that Rik Astley was going to change the face of pop music? It is easy to mock the Class of ’89, no doubt … the hair, the taste in sushi,
the designer trousers, that credulous belief in the free market, but this was BF, let us not forget. To Aldous Huxley, B.F. meant Before Ford, to us those initials stand for something quite different.

  For, holding that image of a hopeful, innocent 1989 BF for a few seconds, let us dissolve to this September. We are in the Sultan of Brunei’s sumptuous new-look Dorchester Hotel. A dinner is being held by the Writers Guild of Great Britain. Lord ‘Ted’ Willis is about to introduce the winner in the category ‘Best Children’s Book’. He makes a graceful, apposite and very funny speech. The paparazzi allow smiles to wreathe their bored countenances; they still feel they would have been better off attending Mel Brooks’s party down the road, but this speech has at least perked them up a little.

  Finally Lord Willis comes to the envelope bearing the winner’s name. ‘I think it unlikely that this man will be present,’ he says, ‘for the winner is Salman Rushdie, for his book Haroun and the Sea of Stories.,

  Suddenly a Roman Tortoise of grey Special Branch suits starts to roll towards the podium. From within the worsted carapace of this formation emerges a man, pale as manuscript paper. It is Year 2.7 After Fatwah and so the paparazzi flutter like the butterflies they were named after and the whole assembly rises uncertainly to its feet.