Ed McLachlan

and recording, which Mackenzie founded in 1923.

Mackenzie was already a worldrenowned author. His two-volume novel Sinister Street had been lauded by Henry James, been surreptitiously enjoyed by a very young George Orwell, and offered inspiration to Scott Fitzgerald, whose own first novel had just appeared.

That was one Mackenzie. Another was the high-flying intelligence officer, whose activities in the eastern Mediterranean during the First World War read like something from the pages of a John Buchan novel.

Music had entranced Mackenzie from birth. Serious knowledge of it, however, had largely passed him by until, shortly after leaving Oxford, he was involved in an OUDS production of Aristophanes’s The Clouds. The music was by Hubert Parry and contained, so a friend told Mackenzie, some terrific parodies of the music of Richard Strauss – apt for a play that lampoons the intellectual fashions of the day.

‘Who’s in goal? Let me guess’ for the Sunday Funday chocolate-fudge bake-offs her dad bought for her birthday? Will she, hell! She’s too busy cage fighting for cash.

‘How does my ass taste, bitch?’ Emma/Dani/Panda asks the GI whose head is clamped between her upper thighs when her dad first encounters her at work.

The relationship between father and daughter, meant to be witty and aggressive, is instead queasily sexual. To alleviate the tension, they are given joint therapy, which we already know is a bad idea. In one session, they are invited to speak in each other’s voices through lookalike, Sesame Street-style glove puppets.

‘I ruined my own marriage,’ says Emma in a singsong German accent, her hand inside the Brunner puppet’s trousers, ‘but I’m the expert on everyone else’s. I have muscles, so that means I know everything. And I’m from Austria, where life is hard and everything costs a nickel.’

FUBAR is army slang for ‘fucked up beyond all repair’, but in this instance it might be an acronym for feeble, unfunny, banal and ridiculous. Unable to come up with something newly implausible, Nick Santora, the showrunner, has rehashed all Arnie’s other roles, including the real-life ones.

Other Hollywood icons have matured with their parts, but Arnie is determined that time has stopped. The effort involved in persuading us that this creaking, limping geriatric was doing his own stunts was so embarrassing that I switched screens and scrolled down Schwarzenegger’s Wikipedia entry instead.

This, I can report, is a staggering 13,000 words long – that’s 12,950 more words than he’s ever spoken. Among the nuggets contained here is his insight on infidelity: ‘You can’t go back – if I could, in reality, be Terminator, of course, I would go back in time and would say, “Arnold … no.” ’

Amen to that.

Music

Richard Osborne

GRAMOPHONE CENTENARY / COMPTON MACKENZIE

It’s interesting what survives from the life of a man such as the writer Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972).

‘Monty’ to his friends, he had an astonishing array of interests and achievements that could have furnished a dozen lives.

He’s been a good deal written about of late: first, in a superb essay, ‘The forgotten genius of Compton Mackenzie’, published on the UnHerd website by writer and comedian Andrew Doyle; and more recently in the pages of the special centenary edition of Gramophone, the monthly magazine devoted to records

Piqued by his inability to appreciate any of the ‘in’ jokes being perpetrated by Parry – a most agreeable fellow, ‘who looked like a boisterous, fox-hunting squire but talked so eloquently about music and literature’ – the 22-year-old Mackenzie resolved to get to know more about the subject.

For most of its 100 years, Gramophone has been a largely family affair. In 1923, Mackenzie was living on the island of Herm in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. It was there that he worked in the company of his literate and musicloving wife, Faith, a piano-playing secretary, a Siamese cat – another Mackenzie speciality – and the 1,200 discs he’d acquired for his own and his new magazine’s benefit for the then astonishingly steep sum of £400.

A mainland office was set up and it was there that Faith’s younger brother, Christopher Stone, was installed as London editor. A man of more middlebrow musical tastes than Monty, he’d long been a huge fan of the gramophone.

‘There is no pet that can be so easily domesticated and so constantly exercised as the homely gramophone,’ he wrote in his memoir, Christopher Stone Speaking.

Highbrow opinion still rather despised the gramophone, as did Reith’s fledgling BBC. This didn’t prevent Stone from joining the corporation in 1927 as its first disc jockey – becoming, more or less overnight, an early ‘national treasure’.

Like many start-ups, The Gramophone (as it was first titled) was an instant editorial success but financially a bit of a basket case. Three years in, a young accountant, Cecil Pollard, offered to give up his job and look after the paper’s finances – something he, and later his son and grandson, would do for the next 73 years.

These days, Gramophone is owned by the Mark Allen Group, which has proved the happiest of landings. Not that the Pollards are out of the picture. Cecil’s son, Tony, now in his 95th year, gave advice and read proofs for the special centenary edition (available to Oldiereaders with discount code OLDIE23 from magsubscriptions.com/ gramophone-centenary-issue).

Every issue since 1923 is now online, and a few plums have been picked for the celebratory edition. These include Pablo Casals describing how, aged 12, he first encountered Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello in an ‘old and musty music shop pervaded by a faint smell of the sea’, overlooking the harbour in Barcelona. And a superb memoir by pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch about his friend and fellow Russian exile Sergei Rachmaninov, published in May 1943, shortly after the great man’s death.

The centenary was also marked by an evening of live music-making at London’s Wigmore Hall, featuring a number of distinguished recipients of the annual Gramophone awards.

Several of the performers were French, which would have delighted Mackenzie. It was while he was finishing his 1955 memoir My Record of Music – as absorbing as his ten-volume autobiography but shorter – that a telegram arrived from the French Prime Minister Edgar Faure. It announced that ‘la plus grande revue du monde’ specialising in music and the gramophone was being honoured by the French state.

Mackenzie was thrilled. He’d published some wonders in his long life – Sinister Street, Whisky Galore and that most brazenly spectacular breach of the Official Secrets Act in our nation’s history, Greek Memories.

But none, I suspect, was closer to his heart than his beloved Gramophone

Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson Return To Oz

In Ten Pound Poms, the series followed the lives of Brits who took the tenner to go Down Under after the Second World War.

Then we had Howard Jacobson on the great Aussies who made their way to our damp and less fatal shores: Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes and Barry Humphries. RIP, Dame Edna.

It was nice, I thought, to see them all again– but, I thought, what about Kylie?

Surely the pocket rocket with the best ass in showbiz (gasp at the impossibly pert globes bobbing in gold lamé hotpants in the 2000 video of her hit Spinning Around before you complain to the editor) is the biggest cultural export the Antipodes have ever bestowed upon a grateful world.

It took me a while to ‘get’ Miss Minogue. First there was the fact that my grandparents had a vicious sheepdog called Kylie. It once bit Boris. ‘He turned around and bit me – quite properly – when I tried to ride him like a horse,’ my brother recalls. There was permed Kylie in Neighbours and then she was Jason Donovan’s moll for a while. Next came Sex Kylie, when she was Michael Hutchence’s girlfriend. When she became a gay icon, she hooked me in.

The hot-pants video, yes, but it was also the shallow catchiness of her tunes that you can’t get out of your head. Now, somehow, here she still is, spinning around at the top of the charts with a new single after five decades in pop, almost as long – in dog years – as this issue’s octogenarian cover stars, Mick and Keef.

The new hit is a tribute to an Edith Piaf 1951 chanson, Padam Padam – the sound the beating heart makes when gripped by hopeless passion, I am told.

Kylie’s Padam Padam is a TikTok sensation (ask a grandchild to show you) and the dance moves have gone viral, like Macarena or The Chicken Song

Unlike Kylie, who is top of the pops aged 55, La Piaf died aged 47. O tempora etc, but it does cheer me to think that the non-binary Kylie fans out there on TikTok or Snapchat (even I am getting out of my depth here) may be curious to know the genesis of the hit.

They might even type the words ‘Padam Padam’ and ‘Edith Piaf’ into their smartphones and be taken by algorithms unknown to that wonderful world of pain and loss and torch songs, if only to return to the writhing, tinny disco beats of the Pop Princess from Oz.