scribe,’ as if setting the words on paper were the least necessary element in the creation of a novel. Rachel Cooke, the Observer’s shining literary critic, called it an interview ‘of quite unparalleled inanity’. Front Row sent a statement citing ‘significant public interest’. (Yes, it is indeed of interest that ghost-written celebrity books are still allowed a place in bookshops at all.) And the interviewer Nick Ahad, as Cooke said, was ‘buttock-clenchingly credulous and obsequious’. Take this example: Ahad: ‘Is this a feminist story, do you think?’ Fergie: ‘Someone asked me the other day about feminism – and I wondered what they meant.’ But narcissism propelled her blithely onward. Might there be a film? ‘Cinematography is my middle name! I love Young Victoria!’ Fergie continued. ‘I made that movie – you’ll see my name on it, as producer!’ This stuff is of no consequence, you will think, compared with the news bulletins by Lyse Doucet and others from Kabul, starkly exposing the Afghans’ deprivation and destitution. We take such news, which we trust, for granted. Meanwhile I make angry notes when someone (even the Rev Richard Coles) says, ‘Her mother and her were having lunch…’ or a vox pop delivers an unendurable monologue full of ‘I was like’ or ‘so I’m like’. As a result, I make gratified notes when alerted to a good programme I’ve missed: ‘Did you hear the history of the digestive biscuit?’ or ‘Did you hear Vanessa Redgrave on A Good Read, ticking off Dame Eileen Atkins about Sylvia Pankhurst?’ ‘Darling heart, forgive me,’ said Vanessa, croaky with emotion, ‘but she was so much more than an activist − she was a campaigner.’ Then someone I admire told me to listen to the Fortunately… podcast, with Jane Garvey and Fi Glover. ‘We weep with laughter,’ she promised. I tried it. It was ho-hum: unedited, milquetoast musings. Where’s the waspish gossip? Oh for an Alice Roosevelt Longworth figure, with her cushion famously embroidered ‘If you have nothing good to say of anyone, come and sit by me’. I take refuge in Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. In 1961, my pa brought home from Fleet Street the very first edition. In March 1962 I took the eight-page Eye number 7 to school, to impress the economics master, J M Oliver, on whom I had a crush. He said disapprovingly, ‘Oh, poor Mr Gaitskell!’, as the cover showed Hugh looking ill. The guying of politicians has been a 66 The Oldie October 2021
consistent feature ever since. On Page 94, Ian Hislop and Adam Macqueen, compiler of the 60thanniversary book, reminisced. It’s been a remarkably homogeneous six decades, despite the losses of Auberon Waugh, Willie Rushton, John Wells, Peter Cook and Footy. Glenda Slagg, who arrived in 1969, endures. The prime-ministerial diaries, including the ‘fantastically racist’ Dear Bill, have all been brilliant and so have Sylvie Krin’s royal stories. ‘The Royal Family really is the joke that keeps on giving,’ said Hislop. And thank God for Paul Foot’s scandal-digging, making the Eye the top grass, for which the nation must be grateful. Roll on, tales of tax evasion and dodgy contracts to Tory donors. Happy 60th anniversary, Lord Gnome.
TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS What I’d commission were I in charge – Freddie Fox starring in his dad’s old role in a six-part serial of The Day of the Jackal, set in 1963, recreating a France since lost underneath the unrestricted immigration of British expatriates. I’d want to find the new Jack Hargreaves, who can impart pearls of wisdom from his potting shed on how to eradicate seagulls. There’d be a classic series based on my own Seasonal Suicide Notes, destined to be funnier and more beloved by audiences than Fawlty Towers, and starring Simon Russell Beale and Rosamund Pike. Perhaps this has been done and I missed it – but Miranda Hart was surely born to play Aroon, the gawky daughter of a decaying big house, in an adaptation of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. A tragicomedy set in Ireland after the Great War, the novel will make classic television – the heroine who longs
for love and approval and ‘to make a good impression’, and who has no idea what is going on; everybody’s manners, discretion and silences concealing alcoholism, homosexuality, adultery and murder. Anyway, instead of my proposed schedules, what do we have? Cheaply and unimaginatively made travelogues, with all these minor celebrities out and about – Paul Merton in a camper van, Pam Ayres gasping when she catches sight of Blenheim Palace, even though she’s from Oxfordshire and will have seen it before, and Fern Britton in a static caravan in My Cornwall. What I did sit through, as I hail from thereabouts, was four hours of chubbycheeked Michael Ball tooling around Wonderful Wales. ‘Wales. From coastline to castles. Majestic mountaintops to vast valleys. Join me, Michael Ball, as I receive a welcome in the hillside.’ Tranquillising narration like that hasn’t been heard since the fifties, when archaic little colour films were made about touring Devon in a motorcoach. ‘I do feel Welsh,’ said Ball, whose mother was born in Mountain Ash. We met his aunties, still found in the vicinity, who baked coronary-inducing fairy cakes. Ball went to the Welsh Mining Experience Heritage Centre in Merthyr – the shaft goes 1,400 feet straight down to New Zealand and there are miles of tunnels. Wales earned a black mark here, however, as it was Welsh coal that powered the Empire, allowing the British merchant fleet and Royal Navy to rule the waves. We are meant to feel guilty about that, though I don’t myself. Ball then went cockle-hunting in the Gower – the cockles go to Spain. We saw a lot of filthy wildlife, gulls, falcons, dogfish and bison – all apparently these days indigenous. And, of course, the ebullient – ever jolly – Ball, with arms
Classic TV: Jack Hargreaves (1911-94), presenter of How, pictured in 1975
