preamble after. But it didn’t work, did it? Sigh. Baz fared better in a later programme, telling his own stuff: ‘A voice calls out in a train corridor, “Is there a Catholic priest on board this train? Is there an Anglican vicar? Is there a rabbi?” Finally, a voice pipes up: “I’m a Methodist minister, if I can help…” “Nah, you’re no use to us – we’re looking for a corkscrew.” ’ Kate Clanchy broke down in tears on PM, talking about her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. A dedicated teacher, she salvages her immigrant pupils from their trapped lives, using poetry. Her publishers, bullied by social media into appointing sensitivity readers, ended by cancelling her. Luckily Swift Press swooped – so we can all still read her. Clanchy writes brilliantly. It’s a revelatory book, even more so than Lucy Kellaway’s Re-educated, about switching to be a teacher. You can’t help asking, how many of us could do this? As for censorship by subliterates – just dip into Dickens and put the Fatboy or Fagin to the test. Literate readers love ‘offensiveness’. In another radio tribute, to Bamber Gascoigne, the children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce said he’d loved University Challenge ever since he still believed the teams sat on top of each other. (A line that was repeated by a dozen commentators.) Boyce also gleaned that ‘Unless you study science, you will end up knowing nothing about science.’ And that, however the brain works, ‘It is still miraculous.’ On Last Word, real warmth suffused every memory of the amiable Bamber – who once told me the trick question he pulled out whenever a team was struggling: ‘If A is for Aardvark and B is for Because, C is for Cabbage and D for Dog, what is E for?’ (Answer: Elephant. Or any word beginning with E.) Then P J O’Rourke died. (It’s been a sad season.) The most-quoted living writer in the Penguin Book of Quotations was even funnier to meet, and not a line he uttered would get past a sensitivity reader. His was the humor (sic) of New Yorker cartoons – not the more laboured humour (sic) of Punch. (As Wordle players should know, there is a difference between the two.) But then Barry Cryer said that analysing what makes things funny – which, thanks to the ghastly Jimmy Carr, there’s been far too much of lately – is ‘like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies’. Oh dear. The BBC has become ‘our BBC’, like ‘our NHS’: ‘The BBC is something that belongs to all of us’ – and, 62 The Oldie April 2022
doubly oh dear, ‘It only exists if we really believe it matters.’ Well, we do believe in Desert Island Discs alchemy. Lately celebrated: Leslie Caron (our Oldie of the Year), full of laughter at 90; and brave Lyse Doucet, poised against the wire of a new war zone. Then I relistened to what the late illustrator Jan Pienkowski (he, too!) had chosen: a Just William audiobook by Martin Jarvis; plus a perfect eight discs, ending with a Nunc Dimittis from Quarr Abbey. You can listen again, for ever.
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON My screen life has turned into Groundhog Day. Last month, I reviewed The Gilded Age, in which Bertha Russell, aspirational wife of a robber baron, tries to break into the inner sanctum of Manhattan high society. This month, I’m reviewing Inventing Anna (Netflix), which is about the exact same thing. Except that, while Bertha is being shunned by the Daughters of the Revolution, Anna Sorokin, AKA Anna Delvey, achieved her goal in a few laughably easy moves and is now doing time for grand larceny. Based on an article for New York magazine by Jessica Pressler, Inventing Anna begins with the disclaimer ‘This story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are completely made up.’ The joke is, of course, that everything about Anna Delvey, a penniless 25-yearold Russian posing as a German heiress, is completely made up. But why, when the material was so good to begin with, did Shonda Rhimes, the creator and producer, need to invent anything more than what Anna invented herself? From what I can gather, most of Inventing Anna is invention, including the character of her boyfriend, Chase, and the existence of her friends Val and Nora, while sticking the knife
Queen of cons: Sorokin (Julia Garner)
into her former friend Rachel Williams, who wrote a rival account of Anna for Vanity Fair. What might have been a timely analysis of Instagram culture, imposture syndrome and fake news is blown into a blowsy nine-hour (nine-hour) shopping trip, a porn show of product placement, a cutesy, pseudo-feminist comedy of manners, in which Sorokin is a folk heroine in oversize Celine glasses and a baby-doll dress. I realise that everyone in New York is on the take, but it is hard to punch the air in support of a creature as utterly alien to the human race as Anna Sorokin – at least as she is played by Julia Garner who gives her, for some reason, an Afrikaans accent. Sorokin’s creepiness is pitched against the high-fiving chutzpah of Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), the pint-size, pregnant journalist based on Jessica Pressler, who pursues Sorokin’s story against the express wishes of her editor. Visiting the prisoner on Rikers Island while contending with Braxton Hicks contractions, the intrepid Viv then chases up fraudulent bank statements when she should be constructing her baby’s crib. What is she like! Because more time is spent admiring Anna’s handbag collection than exploring her motivation or her apparently hypnotic effect on those she robbed, we are left with questions rather than answers. Why, for example, did none of the Internet-obsessed entrepreneurs who encountered Sorokin during her onewoman raid on New York’s hotels, banks, estate agents, lawyers, restaurants and designer outlets think to Google the father who was apparently controlling her purse strings? I celebrated the end of Inventing Anna by watching The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Netflix), about another young American female conartist, Elizabeth Holmes. Would that Anna Sorokin had been given a no-frills documentary like this. Holmes’s appeal, we learn from those who invested in her fake multibilliondollar health-care industry, consisted in blonde hair and an ability to speak for a full hour without blinking. She also adapted her vocal cords in order to sound baritone, which means that we should never invest in young women with weird voices. Dramatising true stories needn’t detract from the truth. Despite the fact that Norman Scott complained that he came across, in his portrayal by Ben Wishaw, as ‘a weakling’, A Very English
