Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  Dominic: And I always remember we’re three-quarters way when we get to Acme Motors, don’t I, Daddy?

  Mother: I wish you two would stop your silly pestering. I don’t know why we bring you out in the car to Granny’s.

  Father: It’s good for them to travel, Eileen. They see new things. They get something fresh to talk about.

  Dominic: There’s the factory with the rusty bike on the roof!

  Nicolette: There’s the advertisement for Viriloids Rejuvenating Pills!

  Dominic: There’s the Tigers!

  Mother: The what?

  Dominic: The Tigers! That’s what we always call the Lyons there, don’t we, Daddy?

  Father: We certainly do, son. And there’s the brewery where they brew the Adam’s ale.

  Nicolette: Daddy always says that now when we pass the Wemblemore waterworks, doesn’t he, Dominic? He never used to, did he?

  Father: What’s this place on the right, children?

  Dominic: I know! I know! It’s the site for the new eye hospital.

  Nicolette: Say your joke, Daddy, say your joke!

  Father: It’s a proper site for sore eyes.

  Nicolette: Did you hear Daddy say his joke, Mummy?

  Mother: Are we in Sudstow yet, John?

  Dominic: Mummy, you never know where this is. You always ask Daddy if we’re in Sudstow when we get to the site for sore eyes.

  Father: Where are we then, Mr Knowall?

  Dominic: We’re just coming to the place where we saw the drunk men fighting –

  Nicolette: – where Daddy always says: ‘Can you imagine a more godforsaken hole than this?’

  Dominic: And Mummy says she can’t.

  Father: We’re just coming into Surley, Eileen.

  Dominic: And you’re not sure, are you, Daddy, but you think Wemblemore ends and Surley begins just after Wile-U-Wate Footwear Repairs, don’t you?

  Father: Look at it, Eileen. Scruffy people, cheapjack stores, rundown cinemas. I wonder how many pubs there are in this street alone?

  Dominic: There are nine, Daddy.

  Nicolette: We always count them for you.

  Father: Can you imagine a more godforsaken hole?

  Nicolette: Daddy said it, Dominic.

  Dominic: Now say you can’t, Mummy.

  Mother: Oh, do stop pestering. Can’t you think of some game to play as we go along?

  Dominic: We are playing a game, Mummy. But you’re not playing it properly.

  Nicolette: You haven’t said you can’t imagine such a godforsaken hole, has she, Dominic?

  Mother: Those children! They’re enough to try the patience of a saint!

  Father: There’s Acme Motors, anyway – we’re three-quarters of the way there now.

  Dominic: Daddy! That’s what I say! I’m the one who sees Acme Motors and says we’re three-quarters of the way there!

  Nicolette: Yes, Daddy, that’s Dominic’s thing to say!

  Father: Well, I’ve said it now.

  Nicolette: But that’s not fair, Daddy! You say: ‘I hope to God there’s not going to be a holdup in Sudstow High Street.’

  Dominic: You’ve spoilt it, Daddy, you’ve spoilt it! You’ve said my thing!

  Nicolette: Now you’ve made Dominic cry.

  Father: Calm down, Dominic. Be your age.

  Dominic: How would you like it if I said your things? How would you like it if I said ‘A site for sore eyes’?

  Mother: Don’t be disrespectful to your father, Dominic.

  Dominic: I don’t care! A site for sore eyes! A site for sore eyes! A site for sore eyes!

  Mother: If you don’t stop this instant, Dominic, I’m going to …

  Nicolette: Daddy, Daddy! We’ve gone past Cook and Cook (Wholesale Tobacconists) and you haven’t said your joke about spoiling the breath!

  Father: Oh, dry up.

  Mother: Now they’re both howling. It’s all your fault, John. They just copy you.

  Father: That’s what you always say.

  Mother: And that’s what you always say!

  Father: Well, all I can say is, I hope to God there’s not going to be a holdup in Sudstow High Street.

  (1963)

  The bar sinister

  According to usually reliable gossip columns, considerable efforts are being made to clean up the Hotel Petersberg, outside Bonn, where the Queen will stay on her visit to Germany. Apparently they’re taking down ‘all the usual hotel signs, such as bar and toilet’.

  Experts have long known about the suggestiveness of the word ‘toilet’, of course. Which of us, indeed, has not crept past the sign in some lewd five-star hotel, his eyes averted, a crimson blush mantling his cheek for very shame?

  The obscene connotations of the word ‘bar’ for the moment elude me, I must admit. Bar … BAR … No, I don’t quite get the full lascivious frisson. I see the objections to ‘public bar’, of course; the L might drop out of ‘public’ just as the Queen walked by. There’s something vaguely indecent about ‘saloon bar’, too – I think it’s the combination of the sal of ‘salacious’ with the oon of ‘spittoon’.

  I’m sure there’s no need to mention what the ‘private’ parts of ‘private bar’ call to mind for a person of sensitivity. As for ‘c-cktail bar’, I’m astonished that it has ever been allowed, even in places where only commoners would see it. How many perfectly common folk must have staggered back in astonishment and disgust from the ‘c-tktail bar’ sign, only to find themselves among the tasteless liberties of the Off Licence?

  I’ve just seen what’s wrong with ‘BAR’. Heh, heh, heh! Hnuh, hnuh, hnuh! Got it? No? Boys, there’s a feller here who can’t see anything dirty in the word ‘BAR’! Shnuh, shnuh, shnuh!

  No? All right, I’ll take pity on your simplicity. Stand well back from the page. Close one eye, and screw up the other until everything begins to look fuzzy. Now, look at the word ‘BAR’. Got it? The A and the R appear to change places, so that the word seems to read ‘BRA’! If that’s not an indecent announcement I don’t know what is. Some member of the royal party, returning after a hard day’s hand-shaking, screwing up their eyes in the sudden twinkle of lights behind the Campari bottles, might easily get it smack across their consciousness.

  Did I say C-mpari bottles? Correction; all the alleged C-mpari bottles will have been hidden in the cellars. On display in the bar there’ll be nothing but a lot of Bols. Sorry – a lot of B-ls is just what there won’t be. I mean brandy. What? Brandy spelt b. randy? Curaçao and curaçao! They’ll be shouting for large highballs next.

  Now, wait a moment. You may think it doesn’t matter all that much what the Queen sees or doesn’t see. Do you know the story about the Labouchère Amendment, which first made male homosexual behaviour a criminal offence? According to the reforming journals I read, it was originally drafted to include female homosexuality as well. But when they showed it to Queen Victoria she objected on the grounds that female homosexuality was impossible, and since no one had the courage to enlighten her, the amendment became only half as brutal as had been intended.

  Now had the Queen enjoyed a really pure upbringing, and not been allowed to catch glimpses of signs saying ‘Public Conveniences’ as she forayed forth among her people, she wouldn’t have known that male homosexuality was on the cards, either, and the whole amendment would have been frustrated.

  But back to the Hotel Petersberg. Did I tell you that the word ‘service’ is being deleted from the Queen’s bill, in view of its connotation in the field of animal husbandry?

  They’re taking all the numbers off the doors, too. They started with the sixes, since ‘six’ in German is sechs (they’re much more outspoken about these things on the Continent). Afterwards the Palace said they weren’t too happy about elf, zwölf, or zwanzig, either. Just a feeling that there might be something a bit off-colour here if they’d known more German.

  Then they admitted frankly that they weren’t entirely easy in their minds about fünf, acht and neun. And then th
ey thought, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound – why have naked figures prancing about the corridors at all? By the time the royal party arrives the whole hotel will be in a very decent state. All through the livelong night gentlemen will be stealing along the passages trying the anonymous doors, searching for the t--l-t, and bursting instead by mistake into the rooms of unchaperoned single ladies.

  The unchaperoned single ladies, I trust, will scream in discreet tones about their h-n--r, and flee in their delectable diaphanous nightgowns to seek sanctuary in the M-n-g-r’s Office. By a pardonable error in the circumstances, they will almost certainly rush headlong into the G-ntl-m-n’s L-v-t-ry, where a merry party will be in occupation already, leaning their elbows on the wash-basins and knocking back glass after glass of water, shouting ‘Set ’em up again, b-rm-n!’ and selling each other potash concessions in Eastern Bohemia.

  Meanwhile, sitting round the extraordinary vast green table with six pockets in what they erroneously take to be the R-st--r-nt, the royal party waits patiently for dinner to appear …

  (1965)

  The battle of the books

  The literary quiz game on BBC2 ‘Take It or Leave It,’ is driving me into the depressives’ ward.

  They read extracts from well-known books to a panel of four, some of them apparently ordinary people much like you and me, who try to identify the extracts and then discuss them. So far, since I’ve been watching, it’s turned out that almost all the panel have read almost every book which has come up, not to mention all the author’s other works as well.

  But I haven’t read a single one of them. Not a solitary book that’s been mentioned on the programme since I’ve been watching have I read.

  I sit in front of the darkened set long after the programme has finished, sunk into a melancholic trance, waiting for my wife to talk me back to a state of reason.

  ‘You may not have read the books,’ she says, ‘but you guessed some of them. Or at any rate, you almost guessed some of them. Now that really is an achievement, almost guessing a book you haven’t read.’

  I groan faintly.

  ‘That bit of Kafka that none of them knew – as soon as the word “Kafka” came up on the screen you shouted “Christ! I was going to say Capek! I got the right country!”

  ‘I shouted that, did I?’

  ‘Certainly you did, I’m sure you’d have got a lot more right if you hadn’t had to jump up and shout it out so hurriedly before the title came up on the screen.’

  ‘What about the time I shouted “Charlotte Brontë” and it turned out to be Rider Haggard?’

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes. But what about the time you shouted 1984 and it turned out to be Brave New World? That was very close.’

  ‘I meant to shout “Brave New World,” as a matter of fact.’

  ‘So you kept shouting afterwards.’

  ‘I got over-excited. Shouted the wrong word.’

  ‘Exactly. You were terribly good. And even if you hadn’t read any of the books, you’d read reviews of some of them.’

  ‘Oh, I’d read reviews of some of them.’

  ‘Anyway, there’s reading and reading. I expect this lot just skim through books at great speed, without really taking them in at all. Now when you read you really read. You frown. You breathe hard. You take an extremely long time to get through a page.’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘It took you nine months to read War and Peace,’

  ‘I was an old man by the time I’d finished.’

  ‘And six months of travelling back and forth between London and Manchester, with sleepless nights on the sleeper and interminable hours waiting for delayed planes, to get through Ulysses. Now that’s what I call reading.’

  ‘Have I read Ulysses?’

  ‘Certainly you have.’

  ‘Ah. That’s one that might well come up on the programme.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘About a man in Dublin, is it? Kind of stream of consciousness?’

  ‘That’s right – with a green cover. That’s what I mean. All that lot tore through Ulysses one wet games afternoon in the fourth form. But when you read a book it really gets right down into your subconscious like some infantile trauma. You can’t remember a word of it.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Anyway, you know all about all sorts of things they don’t. You know about Wittgenstein, and – well – Wittgenstein …’

  ‘Oh God, so do they!’

  ‘That lot? Know about Wittgenstein? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘You really think they don’t?’

  ‘They don’t know the first thing about him.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘No, they know about Wittgenstein all right. You can’t get away from it – I simply don’t read enough books.’

  ‘You’ve read at least four this year.’

  ‘They were only paperback.’

  ‘They were the paperbacks of the hardbacks everyone said were the best books of the year.’

  ‘Yes – of the year before last.’

  ‘You’re only two years behind.’

  ‘I’m slipping further back all the time. At this rate I won’t be reading this year’s books until 1970.’

  ‘Why don’t you miss out a year or two? Otherwise you’re only going to be getting round to books just as everyone realises how bad they are after all. You know how that depresses you.’

  ‘But what about the backlog from earlier years?’

  ‘You mean Defoe and Smollett and Richardson?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Carlyle’s essay on Boswell, and Froude’s Life of Carlyle …?’

  ‘That’s enough. Don’t run on about it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you skip, like everybody else?’

  ‘Skip? Me? With my completion neurosis?’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you possibly start reading now, instead of just talking about it?’

  ‘What? With my depression syndrome?’

  ‘Oh well, never mind. One of these days they’ll do a book you’ve read.’

  (1964)

  Black whimsy

  The Fabulous

  £EARN-TO-RITE

  Postal Course

  £earn now, then earn £s!

  Lesson 7 – £EARN-TO-RITE

  BLACK COMEDY!

  So-called ‘black’ comedy is much in demand these days, and anyone who has the knowhow to provide the right sort of goods has a first-rate chance of hitting the jackpot. Of course, as any seasoned writer will tell you, there’s nothing new under the sun. For many, many years now West End comedies have touched humorously upon such subjects as death, senility, insanity, prostitution, and sexual assault. But in the old days plays of this sort were known as ‘saucy comedies,’ ‘whimsical comedies,’ and ‘comedy-thrillers.’ To serve these subjects up in their modern guise as ‘black’ comedy a few simple rules must be learned.

  But first – a word of warning. We are on dangerous ground here. One wrong step, and we shall find ourselves guilty of the sort of tasteless work which could appeal only to a perverted sense of humour, and which could be put on only at private theatre clubs of the less desirable sort.

  Be daring, yes. Be shocking, by all means. But never, never, never be disgusting. The line is a fine one. Your job is to get as close to it as you can, without once crossing it. Be naughty – but don’t be nasty!

  Remember what we learnt in Lesson 4, £EARN-TO-RITE COLOUR NUDIES!, and Lesson 5, £EARN-TO-RITE GOLDEN-HEARTED WHORE PLAYS! The audience are paying to be teased, not to be shown anything indecent, or to be read a lecture on the sociology of prostitution. Remember, teasing demands a £IGHT TOUCH!

  All right? All right, then. The key to black comedy is our old friend

  PARADOX!

  Remember PARADOX? We came across it in Lesson 3, £EARN-TO-RITE A SHAFTESBURY AVENUE PLAY! We decided that once you’d
got the knack, there was no easier way of filling three acts than a generous supply of paradoxes. We used them in comedies (‘You can’t imagine how hard it is to be a woman of easy virtue!’ ‘Oh, this life will be the death, of me!’). We used them in Shaftesbury Avenue serious plays (Paul: But don’t you see! Only by living in the world can we withdraw from the world! Only by rising above ourselves can we truly be ourselves! Only by stating the self-evidently false can we tell the truth! Leonie: Oh, Paul, we belong to each other, utterly! Now I shall go and tell Xavier I will marry him).

  But in modern black comedy verbal paradox is unfortunately more or less ruled out. Among the lower and lower-middle classes, where black comedy takes place, people do not, alas, have the education to talk in paradoxes. Instead we use character paradox and action paradox. At first sight these may seem strange and difficult. But as we look at some examples, you will see that they are knacks which anyone can quickly pick up. The trick is to think of the stereotype – to think of the cliché character, the cliché action – and then

  WRITE EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE!

  You have a father and. son in the play? All right, then, how do stereotype sons behave? They respect their fathers, right? So you make your son devastatingly rude to his father! The father’s a widower? Stereotype widowers speak tenderly of their dead wives, so make yours refer to his as a bitch! Got used to the idea of his calling her a bitch? Make him start calling her an angel!

  Get the idea? Try this one.

  Favourite son returns home after six years in America to introduce his charming young wife to his old father. What’s the father’s reaction? Obviously, tears of joy, speeches of welcome. So put a minus sign in front of it! Have Dad launch into a blistering tirade, telling his son to get himself and his filthy whore out of the house!

  Easy enough for you? There’s easier to come.

  Suppose one of the characters suddenly, without warning, drops dead (and why not?). Do the other characters show astonishment or concern? They do not. Do they show relief or malicious pleasure, then? Certainly not – this is black comedy, not ‘The Curse of the Vampire.’ Their reaction is the £EARN-TO-RITE Black Comedy Special –