The Old Un’s Notes

If you want to be a bestselling writer, get on the GCSE syllabus.

That’s the message from the Bookseller magazine. It reports that the top-selling book on the syllabus is An Inspector Calls (1945) by J B Priestley, selling 123,059 copies this year –that’s £1,040,450 in sales. Over the past 25 years, the book has made £11.7m.

The book benefited from then Education Secretary Michael Gove’s decision to remove American texts from GCSE set texts in 2014. In the last year before John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was dropped by English boards, it sold 150,000 copies. Over the last year, it has sold only 32,000.

Coming up behind J B Priestley on the gilded GCSE list are those reliable favourites A Christmas Carol (112,755 copies last year), Macbeth (98,055 copies) and Animal Farm (68,964).

It brings to mind Roald Dahl’s wise advice to Kingsley Amis.

Dahl told him, ‘What you want to do is write a children’s book. That’s where the money is today, believe me.’

‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Amis. ‘I don’t think I enjoyed children’s books much when I was a child myself. I’ve got no feeling for that kind of thing.’

‘Never mind,’ replied Dahl. ‘The little bastards’d swallow it.’

RIP, Glenda Jackson, aged 87.

When the late great actress made her return to the stage as King Lear in 2016, our theatre critic Paul Bailey was overwhelmed by her brilliance. She was crowned as our Oldie of the Year the following year.

Paul wrote, ‘Within minutes of the production opening, it became clear that she had lost none of her inimitable power to take control of a stage.

‘She had the commanding presence necessary for great classical acting, as well as an ear for the beauty and diversity of Shakespeare’s poetry, which she spoke as if the words were just coming to her, ready to be expressed.

‘Her voice encompassed an astonishing range for a woman so small in stature.’

Paul concluded, ‘She didn’t indulge in charm, but what she did have was something

Among this month’s contributors

Cleo Watson (p18) was Boris Johnson’s Deputy Chief of Staff. She worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 election campaign, and on the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections. She is author of Whips

Nick Newman (p30) works for Private Eye and does cartoons for the Sunday Times. With Ian Hislop, he co-wrote the comedy film A Bunch of Amateurs (2008), starring Burt Reynolds.

Algy Cluff (p34) struck oil in the North Sea over 50 years ago. He owned the Spectator magazine. Tom Stoppard came up with the title of his new memoir, The Importance of Being Algy far more precious: grace. She may have been abrasive but she was gracious. There was absolutely no danger of her ever becoming one of that dread species known as “national treasure”.

Elinor Goodman (p57) was political editor of Channel 4 News from 1988 to 2005. She was one of the panel members on the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking.

‘Oh, it was so good, so very good, to have her back.’

York Membery, a regular Oldie contributor, fell foul of security staff at the Palace of Westminster recently.

He was collared for having had the audacity to take a digital recorder into Westminster’s Portcullis House, when he’d gone to interview Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats.

‘None of the entrance security staff has ever batted an eyelid at my taking a mini-recorder into the building before,’ says the aggrieved hack.

‘Every journalist uses one, and they’ve just put it through the scanner along with my keys and mobile phone and hurried me along.

‘But, this time, they gave me the third degree, asked me why I needed it and impounded it until a parliamentary aide could come to my rescue and vouch for the fact that I was a member of His Majesty’s Press and not an enemy of the state.’

He adds, with a sigh, ‘I could understand if they had confiscated a pair of scissors or a sharp item of some sort, but whenever did a tiny

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Roman Polanski, director of Rosemary’s Baby, turns 90 on 18th August.

He’s gone swiftly from being cinema’s perpetual enfant terrible to its elder statesman, albeit with some significant speed bumps along the way.

Polanski’s own life has the makings of a Hollywood drama, with some deeply dark twists. His mother, then four months pregnant, was killed in the Holocaust, and his father spent three years in a concentration camp.

Car stopped for ‘illegal’ window tints

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Abergavenny Chronicle

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Polanski himself escaped the Nazis, but then spent the rest of his early life under Stalin’s jackboot. He eventually made it to freedom in the West, only for his pregnant wife Sharon Tate to be brutally murdered in the couple’s Los Angeles home in 1969 by the so-called Manson family.

In March 1977, Polanski, who was then 43, took a 13-year-old girl to a house in the Hollywood Hills to take photos of her for a magazine. Once there, he gave her champagne and tranquillisers and had sex with her; then he drove her home and the following week he was arrested.

Polanski absconded from court on the eve of his being sentenced a year later. As a dual Franco-Polish citizen, he was able to settle in Paris, where he remains at liberty to this day.

Whatever you think about the man who’s described himself as an ‘evil dwarf’, he’s at least persistent. Polanski’s 27th and latest film, The Palace, was released earlier this year.

‘I find myself where I am and I’m glad, as I like my life now,’ he recently remarked.

It sounds like a happy ending, although there’s still the matter of an outstanding arrest warrant waiting for him should he ever again set foot in the United States, or any other country willing to send him back to face the court he fled 45 years ago.

An artistic director’s departure from a theatre would once have been an occasion for exquisite self-effacement – a touch of fluttering palm to chest and a dab of glistening eyes amid protestations that ‘Really, you are all too kind’ and ‘I have done nothing.’

These days, it seems, you need to be harder-nosed.

Erica Whyman, leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company after a decade as its deputy supremo and two years in charge, issued a press release, saying that her tenure was marked by ‘courage, honesty and ingenuity’.

Critics and the public did not necessarily agree. Reviews for the RSC’s recent Julius Caesar were terrible, audiences fleeing from it like stampeding cattle.

Good luck to Whyman’s successors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, as they try to rebuild Stratford’s reputation.

It says, ‘If no one in, please leave behind bins’

‘And here we are again, still queuing’

Farewell to Martin Amis, celebrated in this issue on page 48 by his cousin and in the Oldie Review of Books by Dan Franklin, his publisher.

He is also fondly remembered by Simon Collins, an Oldie contributor and writer.

In 2010, impoverished by divorce, Collins lived briefly in a first-floor studio flat in Camden Town, where he wrote his first novel.

A smoker at the time, he would puff away as he typed, his desk positioned beside an open sash window.

Collins recalls, ‘One evening, after typing the words “THE END”, I sat back in my chair, lit a celebratory fag and glanced out of the window as a slim man in a navy two-piece suit and open-necked white shirt emerged from the Portuguese corner store across the street.’

The man paused to light one of the fags he’d obviously just bought – and happened to look up.

Collins says, ‘Our eyes met briefly, and before he turned away I realised it was Martin Amis.’

‘Martin!’ Collins shouted.

Amis stopped and looked up at him again. ‘What?’ he shouted.

‘I’ve just written a novel!’ Collins shouted back, for want of anything better to say.

Amis took a drag of his cigarette and held the smoke in while he seemed to consider this. ‘Is it any good?’ he shouted eventually, after exhaling.

‘I think so,’ Collins shouted back.

‘Well, write another one, then,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll need it.’

‘Caroline, is there any truth in these rumours about you and that reman in the upstairs at?

Then he turned and walked off along Delancey Street.

Collins pondered Amis’s words and concluded that he meant ‘One novel won’t be enough to become a successful writer – even if it’s good.’

‘Two days later, I started writing my second novel,’ says Collins. ‘And he was right, because neither of them has yet been published. But, unlike him, I did stop smoking.’

By chance, Simon Collins had a rather less charming meeting with Martin’s father, Kingsley

Amis, in the same area, in 1985.

Collins walked into the Queens, a pub in Primrose Hill, one lunchtime. There was Kingsley Amis, sitting in a corner reading a book.

Collins said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Kingsley Amis?’

And he said, ‘F**k off.’

So Collins knew it was the great writer.

Seventy years ago, on Saturday 18th July 1953, the BBC screened the first story of a new six-part science-fiction series, The Quatermass Experiment.

The plot concerns Professor Bernard Quatermass of the British Experimental Rocket Group, the scientist behind the world’s first human-crewed space mission. Only one crew member returns.

The programme’s creator, Nigel Kneale, used the working title Bring Me Something Back…! and named the hero of The Quatermass Experiment from a London telephone directory listing.

He recalled writing the last two episodes during

‘It’s not going to work. He’s great, but not as great as I am’ transmission: ‘So nobody really knew what the end was – even the production team.’

The programme’s budget of under £4,000 was low, even by 1953 standards.

But, despite a senior member of the British Interplanetary Society’s complaining that Quatermass was ‘footling’, the impact of the series resulted in the 1955 sequel, Quatermass II

That year, Hammer released a cinematic version of Experiment, their first major horror film, even though Kneale disapproved of the US actor Brian Donlevy in the leading role.

In 1958, the BBC broadcast Quatermass and the Pit, a meditation on good and evil that remains one of Kneale’s finest works.

He found characters and settings ‘far more interesting than sparks flying’, and it is perhaps for those reasons that the Professor’s adventures continue to resonate after seven decades.

‘…and what if you added a funny caption?’

As writer and actor Mark Gatiss once noted, the Quatermass adventures ‘cemented themselves in the psyche of a generation’.