erupted into the Today studio to make some comment about changing society: out rang the clear vowels and consonants, the cogent sentences – such a relief. The same can be said for Andrew Marr: it’s sad to lose him on Start the Week. There’s a bookplate that reads ‘I like everything that’s old: old books, old wines, old songs, old houses, old friends…’ will it ever include old podcasts? Even the keen young podcast reviewer on the Times has confessed to being bored. And when Observer critic Miranda Seymour found Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart brilliant, she allowed that this was because it was originally programmed for broadcasting – so it was planned, crafted and edited. True. Poor diction, though. You should get it on Sounds, anyway. Caitlin Moran on This Cultural Life told John Wilson at top speed how she got to be such a prolific columnist, top-selling author and screenwriter, whose very tweets became an A-level question. She kindly name-checked me as the Times interviewer who advised her, when she was 16, ‘You gotta be a journalist, babe.’ Really? I love the idea that I’d ever call anyone ‘babe’. The actual story is more interesting. In 1988, Caitlin – then calling herself Tatty – entered a ‘Why I love reading’ essay contest for schoolchildren, which I judged. Her essay opened arrestingly: ‘Basenji! Slartibartfast! Mint Julep, Jolly Super, Necrotelecomnicom, WonkaVite and VitaWonk.’ Tatty – home educated, eldest of eight in a Wolverhampton council house – was the standout winner, aged 13. When she came to get her prize, it was her first visit to London and her first time on a train. She chattered non-stop, full of zest and spirit. As she has been ever since. The Cartoon Museum is conducting a survey, for Oxford University, into why people laugh at cartoons. Most pointless survey ever? Naturally Today gave it airtime. Martin Rowson (of the Guardian) said he’d seen many editorial committees discussing whether a joke is funny, thus ‘wringing every drop of humour out of the gag’. ‘It’s like riding a bike – if you think about it too much you fall off.’ He defined laughter as ‘our survival mechanism to stop us going mad with existential terror’. Just as idiotic was Broadcasting House’s story about male novelists losing out to women writers. They set listeners a task: find a novel by a bloke that Barry Cryer, who said he’d given up fiction, might enjoy. They came up with Jonathan Coe’s Me and Mr Wilder. I Kindled it at once, and love it. 68 The Oldie January 2022
The approach of Christmas once again brings a refreshing dose of timeless radio, stuffed with favourites including Martin Jarvis, reprising his characters from Just William and Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth (with Patricia Hodge as his sister Constance). John Cleese gets quite emotional on Private Passions on Radio 3. On Christmas Eve’s With Great Pleasure, Barry Humphries welcomes Miriam Margolyes and Rob Brydon to his home, to read from Dickens, Wilde and Richard Burton. Joanna Lumley and Roger Allam bicker again in their Conversations from a Long Marriage. Apart from young Brydon (b 1965), this is a seasonal triumph for oldie voices – happy New Year to them.
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON When I was at university, we studied something called ‘narratology’. It was a tricky discipline, born of French structuralism and Russian formalism. Those arid autumn lectures came back to me when I was watching the two parts of The Princes and the Press (BBC1). ‘The House of Windsor and the Bri’ish press,’ began Amol Rajan, wearing a tight black shirt, a diamond earring, chunky gold rings and a heavy chain. ‘A complica’ed relationship. And a presentday battle to control the narrative.’ The narrative, offered a gleeful Rachel Johnson, ‘is not controllable’, at which point the nation settled down to its favourite bedtime story. The peerless Samantha Markle explained that she helped stage the paparazzi photos of her dad reading Images of Britain in a café and being measured for his wedding suit for reasons of ‘reality and sincerity’. It was, explained Meghan’s in-house biographer, Omid Scobie, ‘to make him believe that he could take control of his narrative … and who can blame him? They all want to take control of their own narrative.’
But, we are warned by another interviewee, ‘The example of Thomas Markle shows that, however much Royal households want to control a narrative, they can’t.’ Several minutes later, Rajan is talking to Meghan’s lawyer. ‘This narrative that no one can work with the Duchess is not true,’ she says. So what we’ve got here, Rajan darkly concludes, is ‘a megawatt couple refusin’ to play the game with Bri’ain’s expectant press’. ‘How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?’ Oprah asks Meghan in a clip from the famous interview that we are shown in Part 2. We now learn that it was Kate who made Meghan cry rather than Meghan who made Kate cry. My expertise in narratology has not helped me to distinguish Meghan’s truth from Kate’s truth or the truth sought by the Daily Mail. So I’d like to offer another theory to get us through the final hour of The Princes and the Press. The psychologist Stephen Karpman devised a model called the drama triangle, composed of victim, rescuer and persecutor, to describe conflict situations. Whoever controls the narrative invariably sees themselves as the victim. So, in Meghan’s ‘truth’, she is the victim, Harry is the rescuer and the Windsors are the persecutors. In Harry’s narrative, he is the victim, Meghan is the rescuer and the Windsors are the persecutor. And, in the Windsors’ narrative, they are the victim of Meghan’s persecution, and Harry has at some point to get on his white charger and rescue them. In every version of the drama triangle, the press is the persecutor because, as the private investigator who tapped into Chelsy Davy’s phone explains, the press is immoral. But then, as a former courtier also reveals, the palace is a nest of vipers. One question the BBC has left unanswered is what on earth the Sussexes did to Frogmore Cottage that could have cost £2.4 million? Given that
Sussex vs Cambridge: Harry, Meghan and Kate
