Punch 1978

26 APRIL 1978

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Each bo ttl e of A sbach brandy contains the distillatio n of fi ve litres of fme wine.

A di stillati o n ge ntly matured for many yea rs in the cool envi ro nment of Limo usin oak casks.

Resulting in a wam1, smooth brandy.

A brandy altoge ther free from any traces of harshness.

The A sbach fa mily, situated at Ruedesheim-on-the-Rhine, have been absorbed

in thei r task fo r nigh o n o ne hundred yea rs.

A mple rime in which to create a truly great brandy.

A nd, of course, a worldwid e reputati o n for havi ng clo ne so.

sbach Brandy.

Not e1·erythinx that happem in Britain xets into the national press. This feature presents some ofthe news tt•hich ne1•er made it. Readers are ini·ited to contrihute. E2 will he paid for each c/ippinx uud. Send entries to Country life co/umn, Punch, 23 Tudor Street, London EC4 }' OHR.

Sections of pavements are to be ripped up and planted with grass to stop dogs fouling the flag-stones if a Thamesdown Council plan is approved.

R. D. Tomkins ( Swindon Evening Adverxisei- ) A Leyton woman advised at a psychiatrie unit to work her anger and frustration out on paper was jailed at the Old Bailey on Thursday for sending a death message to a policewoman.

M. Crofts ( Waltham Forest Guardian ) Sex and violence came into Jane Morgan's life gradually. Then she became a Christian and matters escalated.

M. Hardy ( Essex County Standard ) The company explain that the message they received contained the words, "Governor of Queensland-twins first son." Being, however, subsequently informed that Sir Arthur Kennedy was unmarried, and that there must be some mistake, a telegraphic repetition was at once demanded. lt shows that the words really telegraphed by Reuter's agent were, "Governor of Queensland turns first sod."

G. Ridgewell ( Herts & Essex Observer ) The Red Lion, Desford . Tel. Desford 2279. We are pleased to announce that due to the popularity of our mid-week specials, we are now extcnding this to cover Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

C.A. Merrill ( L eicester Mercury ) Tonight's TV. BBC-1 9.55 Red Alert-Why disasters happen and how to stop them. No second part to this programme will be shown next week.

W. Markall ( Sheffield Star )

QUALITY DAILY. The Daily Telegraph's first-class coverage of news, business, the arts and sport makes it the first choice for specialists and general readers alike. lt carries more job opportunities than all the other national newspapers combined.

Whatever your interests and whatever your ambitions, The Daily Telegraph supports your quality of lite.

For just 9 pence a day.

The meeting, at which Lady Carrington presided, was told by Mr. Castle that they were anxious that parents should be encouraged to seek help from NSPCC inspectors or social workers before they injured their children.

D. M. Griggs ( Buks H erald ) Problems with traffic lights over Beveers Bridge on the Aire and Calder Canal on the Cowick/Sykehouse road were raised at a recent Sykehouse parish meeting . The lights often showed red in one direction for as long as a fortnight, it was stated, and at rimes the light showed green in both directions.

M . H. Bowling ( Ho wdenshire Gazette ) Few spontaneous holiday-makers picked on Lytham St Annes for their early break this Easter.

D. Piggott ( West Lancs Evening Gazette) A Lancaster man smashed a window at the home of his wife and assaulted the man with whom she was living, because he thought they were mistreating a dog.

K. Turner ( Lancaster Guardian ) Now the Arabs really have got everything. West businessman Mr. John Taylor has designed a machine to milk their camels. lt has its first trial today, in Reading where it has been made. Camels from Longleat will be the guinea pigs .

B. Bigwood ( Western Dai/y Press ) Punc h. Apnl 26 1978

SECOND CLASS POSTAGE PAID AT NEW YORK, N.Y.

Il-IE 9TH BOLLA GUIDE TO ITALIAN RESTAURANTS. Number 9 in a series of guides to help you enjoy Bolla Soave and Bolla Valpolicella in their natural surroundings.

When thinking of l talian food, ail roads don't have to lead to London's West End. True, more Scallopine di Vitello are served within a mile or so of Soho than anywhere else, but a quick look around shows that there are almost as many good Italian restaurants in the suburbs as there are in town.

Here are a few, some of them well off the A-Z, that serve good food and good wine. Bolla wine. Rich red Bolla Valpolicella and crisp dry white Bolla Soave.

They're usually less crowded than those in town, easier to park near and often friendlier. Besicles being nearer home!

SIGNOR BAFFI 195 Shenley Road, Borehamwood, Herts. 01-953 8404 Closed Sundays. Lunch 12.003.00. Dinner 7.00-11.00. Booking essential.

The owners are Piero and Adelia.

Specialities: Funghi alla Piero ( m ushrooms stuffed with Strasburg Pate with Tartare Sauce). Gamberoni di Roccia(TheChefs secret ).N idodi Pollo Primaverile (Fillets of Spring Chicken with cheese and eggs in pastry basket).

Filletto alla Quercia. (Fillet of beef cooked between oak boards flamed with brandy andgarlic). .(12 for two.

chicken cooked in butter with artichokes, wine and cream ). .( 12 for two.

ILFANTINO 14 Tattenham Crescent, Tattenham Corner, Epsom Downs.

Burgh Heath 53044.

15 Coombe Road, New Malden, Surrey.

01-949 2710 Open Monday- Saturday. Lunch, 12.00 - 2.30; dinner, 7.00 - 11.00, 11.30 on Saturdays. Advisable to book.

The owners are Giovanni Broccardo and Leo Colepio.

Specialities: Cocktail alla Gondola (melon, prawns, with red pepper and brandy cocktail sauce). Supreme of chicken with mushrooms and cream sauce, flamed in brandy. Scaloppine di Vitello alla Marsala (Escallop of veal cookcd in Marsala wine). Super Crepes Zizi. .fl2 for two.

Closed Sunday and Monday Lunch.

Last orders 2.30 and 11.30.

The manager is Giuseppe.

Specialities: Trota Bretagna (Trout with mushrooms, wine and prawns).

Pollo Cardinale (Breast of chick:en with wine, aeam, mushrooms and asparagus). .(12 for two.

FIND OUT MORE! For a corn plete li sr~ "" _ of the many ltalian ~ ~ restaurants where you will find Bolla, write to Bolla Wines, Hedges & Butler, Three Mill Lane, London, E3 3DU.

THE ALPINE 135 High Road, Bushey Heath, Herts.

01 -950 2024 Closed Mondays. Lunch 12.003.00. Dinner 6.30-11.00.

The owners are Giacomo and Marisa.

S~ialities : Spiedino di Scampi alla Gnglia (grilled scampi kebab with capers and parsley). Pate dello Chef (Alfredo's secret). Medaglioni di Bue Michelangelo (slices of beef fillet with black pepper, mushrooms and brandy).

Suprema di Pollo ai Carciofini (breast of

Pu nc h. April 26 1978

Contents

26 April 1978 Edited by Alan Coren

678

BILL TIDY: The Road to Argentina

679

ALAN COREN: The King and We

681

HANDELSMAN: Freaky Fables

682

BASIL BOOTHROYD: A Ticket to Sothcby's, Please

683

COLIN PEARSON: Question Timc Farming with Mark

684

A LAN BRIEN: Metropolis

686

MAHOOD: Sitting Pretty

688

PAULJENNINGS: The Plane Man 's Guide to Rumania

690

HEWISON: People

691

GEORGE MELL Y: Mellymobilc

692

MILES KING TON: Six Lovely Nobel Prizes!

695

JONATHAN SALE: Doom with a View

696

ROGER WODDIS: Sour William

697

BEN MARCATO: Short Story-The Wallet

699

R. G. G. PRICE: The Prospect for Whitby

701

KENNETH ROBINSON: H appy Birthday tome

702

Willcome to Britain!

703

SHERIDAN MORLEY: Theatre

704

BARRY TOOK: Cinema

705

WESSUM: Not to be Sneezed at

706

BENNY GREEN: Television

707

E. S. TURNER: Diary of a Courtier

709

CYRIL RA Y: Drink

710

MELVYN BRAGG: Books

711

FAYMASCHLER:Food

712

DAVID TAYLOR: France's Gau! ofFame

714

WILLIAM DA VIS: Money

716

Theatre Guide

717

FilmGuide

Q 漏Punch Publications L111111cd

1978

"8('(// it Bustl'r! C. I. A . 路路

THE ROAD TO ARGENTINA

678

by Bill Tidy

PUNCH , April 261978

bread pudding, deals cards, etc. The court waits. After half an hour, the band and the singer resume: KINCDOM OF THAILAND

NOTICE TO CIVIL EtlGINEBUHG COllTRACTOAS The Govem~nt of tb• Kiotdom of Thalland bu

~~~t%~!n1 0:t th7e': ~!d~f~~~1:!~ ~t!°utr'1t:~C: 0

upected to cost over U.S. ISO million equlvaltnt. Th• constn.iction wtll be dJvfded lnto three contnct.I to ~ 0

~Q~f:nedcJg,c 1 :~tr~~d ol':!n~~ork!? ~;-1:'311~ :'iu:~

metres of asphalt pavin1 arld •lx thousand Une.al metru of bridges.

Construction ftrnu from ("\ember couotrt~ of "be Wortd Bank and Swit7.erland ue ln vlted to ir.l.i1cate their inte~st in Pl'tQUalifyina for bkldinl o~ the abova worka. l\eplit.1, by IQtter or cable, ahould · be adctru.sed to:

DIRECTOR CINIRAL, DIPARTl.41NT 0' HICHWAYS, ~;::1 A YUTHAYA ROAD, B~. NCKOK , THAILAND.

Getting the piers, soon, Getting 'email sent from Tilbury!

Be here by Christmas, Or possibly by Easter Day. Depends on the ...

The King leaps up again, trembling.

King: But this was supposed to be a ring road, I expressly asked for a Bangkok by-pass, the whole point was to save my beautiful capital from ruin, from despoliation, from . . .

Anner: Sorry, squire, I am just carrying out wossnames, I am not responsible for the architect, I only follow the plans, don't I? Werl, that's to say, where possible, know what I mean? Want my opinion, your best course is to have a word with our friend Mister ...

The King snaps hisfingers, the courtier hobbies out again, retuming after some delay with a plump Englishman, a napkin at his neck, half a lobs ter in his hand. H e is whistling.

ALAN COR EN :

The linè

and we

King ( screams ) : YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR DRIVING A SIX-LANE MOTORWAY THROUGH THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN THE WORLD! WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO WHISTLE? Architect ( removes sliver of seafood from bicuspid with gold toothpick, and sings ) : Whenever I cock things up, They're generally cocked up big, So 1 whistle a happy tune, So's nobody will twig What's gone wrong!

While wondering why new fiats Have fallen to the ground, I whistle a happy tune And buy another round.

Cheers! So long! ( Tosses empty lobster aside, pirouettes gai/y)

The throne-room, Bangkok. The King of Siam sils, lopsidedly, on his former/y magnificenl jewelled throne; the eyes are missing from the dragon-head arms, and one leg is propped up on a brick. The King is staring bleakly at what was once thefinest tessellatedfloor in ail Asia: it now has a huge zigzagged crack across its encire width,from which rats pop with unsettling nonchalance. The ninth-century stained glass windows have allfallen out, and been replaced with old plywood doors, a number of which have KIL THE PRODS! and STUF THE POPE! aerosoled across them. Somewhere close by, a compressor starts up and the last remaining chandelier f ails to the floor in a crystal explosion. The King leaps up, and bangs his head on the crumbling wall.

The result of these deceptions, Is: nobody suspects!

And mayors throw big receptions To thank the architects!

Remember my Ml4?

It ended up a wall, And everybody though t ...

The architect is informed chat his soufflé sifflé à la manière de la

Ki ng : BRING ME MI STER ANNER! A courtier, white with plaster-dust, shuffles out. After two or three minutes, thunderous concussions shake the throne-room until a large hole appears in the wall f acing the King. Through this, sledgehammer in hand, steps Norman Anner, construction supervisor of the British company which has successfully tendered for the Bangkok Ring Road contract . As he moves away from the new hole, a vista is presented of the former park beyond. A bulldozer race seems to be in progress; trees f ail, navvies cheer, the Ladbroke stand is doing a roaring trade.

King: WHAT IS GOING ON? Anner: Ah. ( Sings, as navvies down tools,file through hole, and set up fifty-piece Irish Show Band ): Getting the ground dug, Getting the holes nice and wossname!

Getting the turfup, Getting to knock down each tree!

Smashing the statues Seems to be going nicelyWerl, that's precisely Our cup oftea!

T JD 3:JIJOq

Jri:-fJe"Cou/d you be a /iule bit more exp/icit , Mr. Murphy 1 "

At these last words, the band immediately knocks off, brews up, unwraps PUNCH. April 26 1978

679

As he does so, the right hand wall of his palace disappears. When the priceless mediaeval dust clears, a sixty-ton mechanical excavator zs revealed. The driver dismounts.

Driver: I s this where the underpass is going?

The King swoons, is revived, and callsfeebly for his Borough Surveyor.

Construction boss Norman Anner is taken aback, but recovers upon recognising the Borough Surveyor, who turns out to be nota Thai but an Englishman imported by the misguided Kingfrorn Camden Council. The Borough Surveyor bows before the rnonarch.

Borough Surveyor: Can I be of assistance, your majesty?

King: Stop them, Wisbeech! Ply them with injunctions, smite them with loca l authority codicils, stay them with ... (faints again ) Borough Surveyor: Ah. ( Sings ) : H ello, young navvies!

You can't move that drain, Without Form 49b.

Besides, ail the bye-laws specificall y state You may not demolish a tree.

"Here's a good one. What do you get 1fyou cross a mountain H'ith an e/ephant ?"

Vicomtesse de Bragalonne is ready, and exits, dancing, lefl, to make way for The March of the Irish Navvies. These endearing /iule folk, resplendent in lraditional donkey jackets, are desperate lo win the ajfection of the King their mas ter by showing him what they have learned during their long training. The routine is a show-stopper: al one time, thirty-six of them are leaning on a single shovel ( is it hypnosis? autosuggestion? f akirism? sheer magic? ) white twenty-four more stand on their heads i11 a firkin of Guinness. The King, however, is a slernfather to his people, and chooses not to show how charmed he is, preferring instead to f ail down andfoam al the mou th.

"Round up three hundred citizens. Then release them as a gesture Io Presiden t Carter."

680

H ello! Gorblimey!

You're joking, of course?

That gully was not on the plans!

And as for them bleeding great overhead pipes, The matter is out of m y hands.

D o you know what it takes To drain thirty-one lakes, As requested in yours of the 1st?

H ave you an y idea?

We got work up to hereNot to mention, er, terrible thirst! ( H e stares hard al Norman Anner,for some seconds. Anner reaches iruo his breast-pocket, al las!. ) A drink? 'Ow civi l!

Weil, I won't say no; I am dealing, I sce here, with gents!

I imagine five hundred would-nudge, nudge, wink, wink!Help to cover our extra expense!

Borough Surveyor pockets plain brown envelope, and exits left. The sixty-1011 mechanical excavator begins to eal the roof. The King wrings his hands, courtiers roll around moaning, concubines pelt the intruders with Carmen rollers, ail to no avait. Final/y, as a dynami1첫1g error brings a sacred belfry cascading into the throne-roorn, the King struggles to his feet and shrieks: King: CAN NOBODY SAVE MY POOR KING DOM? There is an embarrassing silence, punctuated only by some uneasy hemming and hawing, until the Irish navvies, ever sensitive 10 the King's mercurial moods, begin to glance speculatively ai one another across the pi11ful debris. At last, they form themselves into a loose beery phalanx, and sing: Chorus:Shall we strike?

POM! POM! POM! Shall we put down our shove ls and walk out?

POM! POM! POM! Shall we strike?

POM! POM! POM! Shall we knock off and open up the stout?

POM! POM! POM! Weil, begob!

Wc have been here since Thursday, after ail!

POM! POM! POM! And the plain simple fact is 1t is now accepted practice That we do what we bleeding likeOn the clear understanding That this kind ofthing can happen, Shall we strike? Shall we strike? Shall we strike?

They strike. The navvies troop out, the excavator backs away, Norman Anner rolls up his plans, the architect f ails asleep in his mousse, and a greal soft silence descends on Bangkok .

When, a day or so later, the Khmer R ouge forces pour over the Cambodian border, they are, 10 their considerable surprise, welcomed by the King with what, 10 the casual eye, looks remarkably likegratitude.

PUNCH. April 261978

FREAKY FABLES 01\JCE UPON A TIME A LI TfLE SEA COW PLAYED HAPPILV WITH HER BROTHERS AND S/STERS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE KATTEGAT.· :

by HANDELSMAN

AT NIGHT, SEA COWS WHO HAVE REACHEP PUBERTY SURFACE IN THE 0REGUNl> (SEE 1N5ET).

SEA COW GAZING THROUGH THE WIN DOW OF A FERRYBOAT, SHE EŒHELD THE MOST

l?EAUTIFUL TOURIST SHE HAD EVER SHN.

ALAS! THE FERRY STRUCK

BUT THE LITTLE SEA coW WOULD NOT L.ET HER BEAUTIFUL TOURIST DROWN.

A TANKER AND SANK ALL HAN.DS.

SHE RETURNED TO HER BROTHERS

AND SISTERS/ BUT HER BROKEN HEART WAS NOT IN THEIR GAMES.

FINALLY, GHE CONSULTED A WISE OLD DUGONG. 0

~o

THE LlîTL.E SEA COW SWAM A SHORE AND CONCENTRATED

VERY HARD.

But. the loony doe<»n't give

~

box number.

MORAL : You m'o/ be Whll\t you (i ke/ o.nd sti// not get who.t you wo.nt.

PUNCH , April 261978

681

BASIL BOOTHROYD:

cneap Day Return to sotheby's, Please Headquarters of the British Rail Pension Fund. ln a room hung with old masters and the occasional Hockney, members of the Arts Purchasing Sub-Committee sit round a fine Krieger table, Louis XVI design. ln its centre is the agenda, a Vincennes porcelain rococo group, coloured Naiad on rockwork base supporting an urn f rom which water spouts, the whole mounted in ormolu as a clock. A sticker on ils base reads "This Side Up," deleted, and the figure l87,448 in a fiowing railway hand.

Chairman: If Mrs Geraldine Norman is right, we shall have to unload this smartly, gentlemen. lst Engine-Driver: l'm for that. Too fancy. 1 used to like the gold watch, myself.

Chairman: If Mrs Norman-A passing goods train drowns him out, while the ormolu clock strikes twenty-six.

2nd Engine-Driver: Me, too. Kept better time. Give it a bang with your clippers, Arthur.

A owck ticket-inspector complies, peering close/y at the Naiad .

Inspector: Who do dame wid de jug?

Chairman: Arthur.

Inspector: Yeah, boss?

Chairman: Let's eut the comical coloured-boy talk, right?

Inspector: Sorry, Mr Parker. 1 get into the habit. Amuses the first-class passengers.

Chairman: lt won't have amused them to read in The Times that we paid twice what this thing was worth. Let's get on.

He raps table with a seventeenth century

682

Tehua blanc-de-chine ivory gav e/, carv ed lO represent Kuan Yin as Miao-Shou.

Sid Weighell: On a point of or der, should you bang the table with that? What did wc give for it?

Chairman: ( /ooking at gave/ ) Next to nothing. Couple of thousand. 1 forget.

Weighell: The table. Didn't we get it in Florence? My membership won't want it knocked about.

Ray Buckton: Mine, neither.

Weighell: Yours? Huh! What's your ASLEF card vote, twenty-eight thousand?

NUR, we're six rimes that.

Buckton: Who drives the trains?

Chairman: Gentlemen, gentlemen!

Inspector: Hear de Chair, boys. The Chair, I mean, sorry.

1st Engine-Driver rises and drags across a Napoleon III jardinière with verre eg/0111ise panels. lst Engine-Driver : Bang on that, Mr C hairman. lt's a bit knocked about already.

Not to /ose his authority, Chairman moves a coffee mug off a nearby George I walnut commode, and bangs on that.

Chairman: Order, please. Sorne of us have to be at the National Gallery in six hours, trying to flog those suspect Fragonards.

2nd Engine-Driver: It's only twenty minutes by cab.

Inspector: And quicker by Rolls.

Ali laugh but the Chairman.

Chairman: I'm talking about the National Gallery, Washington.Soif you please.

Gav els the commode. Replaces a splincer of veneer.

The question is whether we should try unloading this piece of Vincennes at the same rime, before the Amcricans get on to the Norman story about the l87,448 we gave for it in Monte Carlo. lst Engine-Driver: Weil, 1 was surprised at the time, quite honestly, when you authorised me to bid up to l90,000. Weren't you,

"/must admil 10 a feeling of disappoi111111e111. l t's thefirsl lime /"1•e seen you oui ofyour skaleboard gear."

Les lie?

2nd Engine-Driver: 1 wasn't there. 1 was on the Kings Cross-Aberdeen, remember? lst Engine-Driver: You're right. lt was Charlie Wassname. Lime Street, Liverpool, used to be Watford . And two booking clerks from Euston. Made a nice day out, except we didn't do too well on the casino fruit machines.

Chairman: The point is, the Sale Room Correspondent of The Times, who has caused us trouble beforeInspector: Right. Know who you're talking about now. She was the one who exposed our Sam Keatings as Tom Palmers, just when we'd been buying nothing else.

Buckton: Tom Palmers as Sam Keatings.

Weighell: Shut up. On a point of order, Mr Chairman, these Regency lacquered Trafalgar dining chairs aren't half hard.

What happened to those nice little padded Victorian rosewoods?

Buckton: Last I saw, they were chucked in a corner of No. 3 engine shed, Derby, as it used to be.

Weighell: Not No. 3. That's ail sculpture, post-imprcssionists, tapestries. Few dozen carpets, Kashan silk, Persian, Feraghan.

Buckton: Oh, yes, Sid would know. Who paid three and a half thousand for a goatskin rug signed Houndsditch Warehouse?

Chairman: Now, now, you two. The situation islst Engine-Driver: Ali right if we adjourn for lunch, Mr Chairman?

Chairman: No, it isn't. lst Engine-Driver: I don't mean leave the meeting. l've brought mine.

Chairman: If Mrs Norman is correct, and we've been donc to the tune of l43,724 over this objet de décorationWeighell: When you say we, you mean my membership. Shut up, Ray. Chairman: And indirectly the travelling public. lst Engine-Driver: Wednesday today. Be cheese and pickle.

Turns and takes sandwich packet f rom the drawer of a Sheraton satinwood bow-front table.

Some shouting, off. Porter enters carrying some Battice/lis, Chardins, Géricaults, erc.

Porter: Ali right in here for these, gents? ( Calls ) In here, Lofty!

Second porter enters, with various Cézannes, Watteaus, Picassos, etc.

Chairman: Oh, it's the Paris lot. Stick them down anywhere, will you. No, just a minute. Let's see that one. Looks like a Leonardo. Prop it on the Grinling Gibbons, or something, overmantel.

Porter does so. Boih parlers exeunt. Ali subcommittee members stare al the Mona Lisa.

Gentlemen, I think this solves our problems. Good. 1 think we can forger any little slip over the Vincennes. Any other business?

They leave, stepping over Japanese si/ver tea services. lst Engine-Driver: ( eating as he goes ) I liked the old days, when they had the pictures in the compartments. C lovell y.

2nd Engine-Driver: Right. Remember that one of the floral clock, Cleethorpes ... ?

PUNCH . April 261978

Pu nc h. April 26 1978

The fastest reacting photochromic lenses in the world What is a photochromic Jens?

Howfastisfast?

A photochromic lens changes almost magically darker or paler according to the brightness of the daylight.The brigflter the light, the darker the Jens.

When exposed to bright sunli ght, Reactolite Rapide glass is a British lenses made from the new Reactohte Rapide product. It has been researched,developed and produced by Chance-Pilkington, one of glass darken in a mere 30 seconds.

And when you move into the shade, the the world's most experienced and respected lenses clear halfway in about two leaders in the field offine optical glass. minutes-much faster than any other Sounds good-so what do 1 do? photochromic lens you can buy.

Prescription Lenses Ask your optician to Are they for sunglasses or let you see Reactolite Rapide !?rescription prescription lenses? lenses for yourself-you'll rap1dly realise how distinguished and elegant they look, Both! Whether in sunglass or fitted in the fashion frame ofyour choice. prcscri ption lenses, Reactolite Rapide glass Sunglasses If you're choosing sunglasses 1s optically surfaced to ensure that it does insist on Reactolite Rapide glass lensesnot cause distortion of image. Neither does available at leading chemists and the more i t create those irri tati ng "wmdscreen discerning department stores. patterns" caused by pofarising lenses. Soif you wear prescriI?tJOn lenses,you need not carry an extra pmr of glasses or 'di p-ons'.

Howdol benefit?

The lenses compensate for the natural variations in intensity of daylight, protecting your eyes from the strain of constant adjustment as light conditions change,outdoors,indoors or irrthe car.

What's so special about Reactolite Rapide?

Reactolite Rapide glass is new, and a major technical advance on existing photochromics. It gives wearers the comfort of a glass which now fades fast when returned to shade as well as darkening fast to a distinguished neutral grey cofour when it is exposed to bright sunlight.

It is also the widest rangmg I?hotochromic glass in commercial production.

Why is speed important?

Light conditions constantly changeas the sl<y clears and the sun cornes out, or when you go indoors. Ordinary dark or tinted glasses do nothing to compensate for variations in light levels and ordinary photochromiclensestaketoolongto change.The new Reactolite Rapide glass changes darker or paler more rapidly than any other photochromic glass in the world, giving the wearer increased eye comfort.

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What's the secret?

No secret-no gimmick-just extensive development and stringent testing based on world leadership in the photochemistr.>' of light-sensitive silver halide crystals. Jt's the action of millions of these crystals invisibly embedded in the glass which causes the lenses to react to the light. And because they go on worki ng for ever, the photochromic process never wears out.

Fast reacting photochromic glass Chance-Pilkington, St. Asaph, Clwyd LLl 7 OLL, North Wales.

* Reactolite and Reactolite Rapide are Trade Marks of Pilkington Brothers Limited.

The new0pe1Rekord.Agrea1

The new 2-litre Opel Rekord didn't get to look so good by chance. Tho se clean, sleek lines are purely the result of an exhaustive windtunnel testing programme designed to eut down wind resistance.Which means lower consumption, better handling and a quieter ride.

That sort of concern is typical of the way we set about creating the new Rekord.

In great shape under the bonnet First, we agreed a 2-litre capacity was just right for the majority of motorists who want big car performance plus realistic running costs.

So the Rekord delivers 0-60in10.5 secs with a top speed in excess of 100 mph (What Car? figures).

In great shape inside.

Now for around f,4,500 you're entitled to expect quite a lot,notjust under the bonnet, but inside the car as well.

We're in great shape there too. Settle yourself in and you're immediately struck by the feeling of space and quiet luxury. As Car magazine said ..."their upholstery is so cleverly controlled in its spring and resistance as to give an uncommonly even distribution of pressure on body and thighs,as well as complete isolation from the motions communicated by the car's running gear." By which Carmean it's very quiet and comfortable indeed.And they summed up,comparing the new Rekord with the Ford Granada: "both cars ride well, but the Opel is notably the better."

'hape for a big carto be in.

Punc ~ .

April 26 1978

wash/wipers, tinted glass and rich velour upholstery.

Government fuel conswnption test (mpg) In great shape for servicing.

Spares are no problem either, Engine Town Constant Constant thanks to Opels highly sophistsize Driving 56mph 75mph icated,computerised spares network.As for servicing, the 2 Litre Saloon M 23.0 40.4 30.7 new Rekord needs only 3 hours 2 Litre Saloon A 23.4 27.2 35.3 spent on it a year for the average 28.0 2 Litre Estate M 22.2 38.2 motorist-something most 25.7 2 Litre Estate A 22.2 33.2 manufacturers would give their right arm to be able to daim.

M = Manual A= Automatic transmission Now you've had your first look at the new Rekord Saloon we'd like you to In great shape for the driver. see it-and the Esta te-in real life. Just ring Nowa look from the driver's eye view. There's 01-580 5221 and we will send you a free brochure a practical, uncluttered dash with easy-to-read, and the name of your nearest dealer. He'll be non-reflective instruments and easily identified pleased to arrange a test drive. controls. Apart from the obvious, you have a 2-speed windscreen wiper (with intermittent action), quartz controlled clock,cigar lighter, illuminated heater controls and halogen headlights.

The top-of- the-line Rekord Berlina HL also boasts electrically operated windows, velour covered rear seat headrests, sun roof, headlamp Keep your options Opel.

REKORD FUEL CONSUMPTION FIGURES

Ooel Rekord Berlina illustrated .!:4,:390 (exclud ing metall ic paint) Sa loon l:4 ,265 High line .!:5,150 Estates from l:4,790 Diesels from .!:5,065.

Prices co rrect al tilll l' of going to prl'ss. include car tax and seat belt s. Delivery and nu mber plates extra. Radio a nd automatic trans mission available at extra cost.

Pu1Kh. April 26197~

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COLIN PEARSON:

Question Time "Willie Whitelaw confessed last week that his daughters knew more about sex at 15 than he did in middle age when he was trying to tell them the facts oflife."-Obser'tJer

Weil. Weil you know. Young people. Like you. Have every. Er. Right. To ask awkward questions like this from rime to time.

It might surprise you to know. Thar. Thar I was very much like you in many ways. When I was er. Your age.

Though of course one has to admit that that. That. That that was man y years ago. And my goodness. Things have changed an awful lot since I was. Er. A young shaver.

But this is how I would begin to answer your question. Er. And do bear in mind won't you. That you're absolutely free. To disagree with anything I say in any way you. Er, think fit.

In this democracy of ours it has long been accepted. Thar everyone is entitled to his. Or her. Opinion. And I for one hope that this state of affairs will continue for many years. To corne and and. And I'm sure most decent-minded people would agree. Whatever his or her colour. Creed. Political affiliation. Or colour. Black or white. Or whatever.

Sorne people. On the one hand. Are convinced. And let me be the first to say I admire their conviction. It is their view. That young people are found at a very early age. Er. Under a gooseberry bush.

Others, not surprisingly, have differing points of view. Sorne favour the stork. Others. The doctor's er. Little black bag.

And when I say. Little black bag. Let me make this absolutely er.

Crystal clear. I make no positive assertion. And I don't believe anybody else will either. Thar. That it might not equally well have been a bag of a totally different. Thar is to say it could equally well have been. Brown. Or yellow. Or even of course. White.

I'm sure nobody is going to suggest. I certainly am not going to suggest that a doctor. Or anybody else for that matter. Hasn 't got a perfect right to have any. Er, kind of bag. That he chooses.

Indeed it's perfectly conceivable, you know. That he may well decide not to have one at ail. Of whatever texture. Quality. Or whatever. He may or may not wish to specify. Obviously he has every right to go about his own business in any way he believes to be right.

And nobody could possibly argue with that. Certainly not .

The fact is . On the question you have putto me. As on ail questions on which people feel. Er. Deeply concerned. There are shades of opinion. Which I respect. Naturally .

On this matter as on ail others there are inevitably. Extremist points of view. Sugar and spice and ail that's nice, on the one hand.

Slugs and snails and puppydogs. Er. Tails. On the other. That kind of debate.

Could you possibly have two more opposite points of view than those? I doubt it. And yet I feel certain. I have a strong suspicion. I wouldn't be at ail surprised if those two confticting philosophies seem not ail that far a part. At the end of the day.

And remember. I saw qui te a lot of this kind of thing at first hand.

In. Er, Northern Ireland. When I was there. Not very long ago.

It 's the same, it's very much the same in politics. People have every right to hold strong views on matters. On which they. Feel very strongly about. So do I from rime to rime. Of course.

But it's one thing er. To express something you feel. Very deeply .

In the heat of the moment. And quite another to find them.

Misquoted. Out of context. By somebody who hasn' t with the best will in the world. Bothered to listen.

I could say more. But then again . There are two sides. Aren't there? To every question. Goodness me, I've been around long enough to known that.

Ali I do say is . Is. Is this. Give careful thought to the points I have tried to make. And then make up your own. Er. Mind. I think that's only fair and sensible.

You 've listened patiently and I hope you won't think it's been a. A complete. Waste oftime.

But now let me put an equall y serious question to you.

What are we going to have for tea?

FARMING WITH MARK-17

Many of you who read that I was doing 60 mph in Whitehall the other day have written in to ask what make of tractor I manage to get this kind of performance from . Weil, it's a 5~- litr e super-charged MaseratiFerguson, with automatic transmission and air-conditioned cabin, streamlined for me

by Alfs Motors of Yeovil.

PUNCH , April 261978

I use it mainly for three-day tractor eventing, in which I've had a spot of luck this year, having won the Chrome Rosette in the Kenilworth Speed Trials and corne second in the tough Tractor-Cross event in Belgium. I very much hope for a good showing in the Muck-Spreader of the Year trials in May.

Running costs of this mode! are small, at about ll5 an endorsement. I find a very useful tip, when chatting to policemen, is to give Buckingham Palace as a forwarding address. Don't forger on motorways to keep to the grass bit up the middle, which is not legally public highway therefore one can do any old speed on it. (Next Week: Parking tickets for compost. )

683

ALAN BRIEN's London

"M

UMBLED-EGGS! Mumbledeggs?" sputtered the beef-faced farmer next to me in the Café Royal queue, his jowls looking as if they would bleed gravy had he eut himself shaving. " The way this lot pronounce it, it's a whole mumbled menu. " We nearby xenophobes of the press, invited to sample the Great English Breakfast laid on by the Great English Tourist Board, guffawed cheerily. Few of us had ever seen su ch a spread, night or day, let al one at 10.30 on a working-week morning.

Cold dishes of pink silverside, marbled brawn, grain y hams; pork, rabbit and game pies with each jewelled gobbet set in amber jelly; silvery trout and mahogany smoked mackerel-like a Dutch still-life recreated in three-dimensions for Widow Twankey's pantomime kitchen. And then the hot dishes-miniature gammon steaks lolling on rafts of toast; soft ivory roes buttoned in bacon overcoats; Craster kippers like ftattened cigars; great dishes of scrambled eggs, yellow waves tipped with white, like desert sunsets; devilled kidneys like goblin ears; splodges ofbubble-and-squeak, inlaid with green, crusted brown at the edges; and a gazeteer of country sausages, Sussex herb, Wiltshire porkies, Devon smoked, Hampshire venison, Nottinghamshire tomato, surrounded by blood puddings, intaglio'd

684

with black and white fragments. But, at least, bill of fare in hand, we kn~w how to pronounce them.

But the Café Royal polyglot staff, more used perhaps to head-waiters' franglais or Chico-Marx-style Italiano, attempting to read the cardboard headstones on the dishes, upside-down and backwards, were not always so fluent . On arrivai, we had been offered as a late-morning aperitifwhat the nervously jangling waiter described, when pressed , as "apfritz''-thus amalgamating the choice between Buck's Fizz and apple juice on hi s tra y. Later, when I indicated the " bloater mousse", the word ran raggedly up the line: " Bloddamoos, bloddamoos, where you puta the bloddamoos, Gerda?"

I asked the English Tourist Board girl, stationed at my table, whether it had proved impossible to match the Great English Breakfast with the Great English Thumbin-the-Porridge Porter, celebrated since Dickens. " Weil, " she said, " English people don' t seem to much want to be waiters."

Personally, this is not my favourite meal, finding it the gastronomie equivalent of starting the day wearing lead-soled divers ' boots. Even the name, " breakfast", is a piece of hyperbole-what sort of fast is it to be ritually broken that lasts only through the hours of darkness when body and soul should be twinned in sleep? Until I left school, breakfast was a triangular piece of fried bread, roughly the taste and texture of a fragment of frosted glass, that I bolted on the way to the bus, having been signalled by the beginning of " W e are the Ovalteenies ... " on Radio Luxembourg that the time had corne to grab my satchel and run. Later, in the RAF, it was a kind of sacrament, the sacrificial dismembering of a fried egg, which reminded aircrew that they were still in notional possession of a working digestive system . Later still, at Oxford, and in Fleet Street, breakfast was a Last Exit to Brook lyn sign which warned the somnambulist bed-driver that there was at least an hour and a half before the day need officiall y begin and the body be delivered for work.

I t was not until, through no fault of mine (I blame the System), I fo und myself regularly week-ending among the upperclasses, as research assistant to Randolph Churchill, in a genuine, Dornford-Yatesstyle, country house, that I began to breakfast seriously. To Randolph, it was, as he often said, the key meal of the day. That didn't m ean that he ate a lot-mainly he indulged in an inventive, child-like rearrangment of the items on his plate. But breakfast was a turnpike that had to be passed through, as if it were Checkpoint Charlie, before really imponant business could be transacted with a tumbler of

Scotch-and-soda in one hand, a telephone in the other, and a shorthand secretary scribbling away just within earshot.

But I couldn't resist eating for two, the vicarious consumer who kept the domestics impressed, as I progressed along the line of silver salvers, warmed by the methylated spirit ftames. I had bacon and eggs, haddock kedgeree, kidneys and bacon, haddock omelette, fish cakes, bacon and sausage, egg and sauté potatoes, dedicated to warring against waste. From a skinny, provincial lurcher, whippet-ribbed, I inftated , helping by helping, into an oblate spheroid, a Home Counties, almost-a-gent, which no baggy tweed s could disguise.

N ow, though I retain traces of the padding, breakfast seem s to me distinctly a non-metropolitan habit. I wake earl y with the first K entish Town light, and tea-drink my way, reading the papers, avoiding reading my correspondence, savouring the silence of the telephone, sustained by mugs of tea until opening hours and the lightest of pub lunches. Breakfast is for tourists, outof-towners, one-off passers-through, not for citizens of London, who live here ail the time, and know where you can nibble round the d ock.

Leaving the Café Royal, around 11 .30, the Palm Court orchestra only just drowning the much-munch of the free-loaders, I felt the day had already filled me up to here.

" f /i1 ed ll'ilh down-and-ouls 10 gel 1he correclfee/ing of whal il 11·as like, 1rro1e a play, couldn '1 sel/ il , 11011· f'm doirn and OUI." 1

PUNCH , April 261978

Piccadilly Circus was its usual pedestrian trap where, however the lights changed, the traffic had precedence over the people on foot.

Where, only yesterday it seem~, the fresh-cut sandwiches would have just been unpacked from their Cellophane-coffins in the freezer for the office lunches, the MidEastern breakfast was now in full aroma"Fresh Falaffel Here! Shish Tawok! Kuba Shanya! " with Arabie translation underneath.

L

ONDON is undoubtedly the most variegated, multi-national of cities for eating out. Not even New York, that melting pot where the races have obstinately refused to melt, has so many peripheral, minority cuisines. The heritage of imperialism, plus the stimulus of our off-shore island package holidays, has given us restaurants, though often just backstreet cafes, which are as good, if not better, than the best that can be found in Malaysia, the West Indies, the Middle East, Soutli America, China and Pakistan.

They decline as they prosper, grow expensive and 'off-hand as they become wellknown, lose their ftavour as the hygiene grows stricter and local ingredients are substituted for exotic imports. Except in the most expensive of them, the most conventional and boring of meals are those which emanate from closest to home, Britain and France.

So I was taken aback slightly, iunching at the Cumberland Hotel off Marble Arch with Isabelle Huppert, British-Oscar winning star of The Lace111aher, to have her request for her hors d'oeuv re, a dish she assured me it was impossible to find in Paris. Miss Huppert, at 23, is not the shy, fragile, easily undermined creature she piays in the film she made two years ago. 1 doubt whether she ever was.

Indeed, with a cool verging on the glacial, and a confidence not far from arrogance, she made Joan Crawford-or even Jodie Foster-seem like a shy star let. She brushed aside ail questions she regarded as trivial or impertinent, or perhaps too pertinent, as if sweeping crumbs from the table. (Something she aiso did from time to time. ) She had never had any doubt that she would be an actress, and a very taiented one.

She had never had any training or apprenticeship, simply turning up at a TV studio and offering herself for the next role available. Though discovered, with ecstatic cries, by the British press as a dazzling newcomer, she has been in fourteen other French films sincc 1961 and regards herself, quire rightly, as a star of tommorow, if not today.

She sat there, eyes as candidly blank as PUNCH, April 261978

"Jusr hro1rsi11g."

shields, or contact lenses, in her heartshaped face, waiting for the next question, unperturbed by silence, answering in deliberate, carefuliy-ordercd English. "I like orily to speak about my work," she said. "I have no anecdotagc. Ail 1 cvcr wanted was to be something at least. I presented myself as a performer. It just happened, that's ail."

Ciutching at the one chink available, I asked what was this food that oniy the British could suppiy? The Cumberland would not let me down. "It is my favourate and it is called cottage cheese."

Too easy . A click of the fingers, a wave of the hand and the Italian waiter was at my side. He smiled, and bowed his head, a sure sign that the answer was about to be "no" in restaurant language. He regretted this, what was it? collage checsc, or cottage cheese, was not on the menu, was not in the kitchen, could not be procured. If the gentleman had been able to order this speciality in advance, perhaps. But, at this moment, he regretted, "No."

T

HE ingenuity of the heavy-breathing tclephone cailcr, one of the big-city special menaces, ncvcr ceases to amaze me. I have, ovcr the ycars, developed my own counter-mcasurcs, as befits a father of five, four of whom arc girls, which I pass on to each one.

Just say nothing. Rctaliatc by striking back at the only portion of the callcr's anatomy available, the cardrum, cither by a loud clap with a cupped hand on the mouth-

piece or by a shrill, corner-end whistle down the line. I'm only sorry I cannot see the effect on the other end.

Oniy this week did I iearn that at least one obscenc telephoner has found a technique to obtain his similar satisfaction-that is to observe the reactions to his words. I should have thought this impossible as the whole point of his insinuating attack is that it is delivered, invisibly, from a distance.

My step-daughter had just made a cal! in a Piccadilly Circus booth, and repiaced the receiver, when it rang again. The calier asked for "Jane" and when told she wasn't there gradually embarked on a schoolboyish dirty analysis of the female genitalia.

Being a tough and direct girl, she brushed aside the smut, remaining cheerfully unshocked. Somewhat baffled, the man then suggested that they meet in five minutes by the ticket office. "Certainly not," she said, "But anyway how will you know it's me?"

The calier iaughed, "I know what you look like," he said and rang off.

It was only when she had left the box she reaiised he must have been a few feet away and observing her every reaction to his words. If so, it must have counted as a failure in his campaign to shock and outrage. But it suggests other uses for the method by adapting the bank ofkiosks to be a kind of Citizen's Band radio, and a way of contacting attractive persons, of either sex by either scx, with pleasant and winning propositions. It could be one of London's new games for the Spring.

685

SITTING PRETTV lnsanely jealous at learning that the Foreign Office sends out 25,000 signed photographs of David Owen every year, a number of his Rt. Hon . colleagues immediately rushed round to MAHOOD's Snappy Studios . ..

686

PUNCH , April 261978

PUNCH ' A pril. 261978

687

PAULJENNINGS:

The Plane Man's Guide to Romania

A YBE the true successors to the old alchemi sts are not scientists but economists .

Scientists nowadays seem to know what they're going to discover. Crick and Watson were looking for the shape of th e DNA chain, it was just a matter of recognising it. When some team or other finally finds how to make meat from grass (without cows coming between) the public will just yawn and say "about time too!" And it wi ll simply be a new bit of a system where everybody knows that turning lead into gold was and is an impossible old magic dream.

But economists, gabbling and muttering obscure incantations among themselves, hidden in strange glass institutes (in some countries old peasant women cross themselves whenever they have to pass one), inhabit a strange real-unreal world where a magic formu la wi ll one day turn everyth ing into money, purest of the elements.

But not real money, not money having any more relationship to the dull, basemetal lOp or new Monopoly-type l l note in your pocket than alchemist's gold had to the actual stuff poured from crucibles by goldsmiths in little dark rooms over medieval bridges to make gewgaws for the wives of uncouth barons. Mad, hypothetical, unreal money, untold millions of it, snatched away at cockcrow by mocking spirits, or, like the weekly llO million of British Steel (for governments have economists the way medieval courts had alchemical wizards), "Written off'' by some devil's formula from which any fiesh-and-blood bank manager (such as mine) would recoil with instinctive horror.

In accounts of alchemy you keep coming

M

across people with names like Robert of Chester, Bartholomew the Englishman, Richard of Wallingford , Raimbaud of Cologne. Maybe in some future civilisation after the present Dark Ages people will be reading about Harold of Hampstead (Laski), Bernard of Cricklewood (that Donoghue, ad viser to Wilson and now Ca llaghan), John of America (Galb ra ith), Nicholas of Hungary (Kaldor) and Gerald of Westminster (Kaufman)-and, again won't be sure whether these were actual practitioners or mere chroniclers.

Actually we're not sure even now, are we?

Does anybody, even Gerald of Westminster himself, understand who is paying whom, and how much, for those Polish ships? And what about this, buried in the Telegraph the other day and as far as I know not even noticed anywhere el se: !200rn AIR DEAL

By Our Air Correspondent A l200 MILLION deal for Rumania to build BAC 1-11 airliners is about to be completed, Mr Kaufman, Minister of State, announced yesterday.

Just, as Tommy Cooper wou ld say, like that. Who 's going to gel the l200 million?

Is Rumania going to pay us l200 million to train draughtsmen, aerodynamicists, instrument fitters, hydraulics men and everything? I read lots of newspapers but I've never seen anything about a Rumanian aircraft industry, th ey' ll have to start from scratch, wouldn't these strong-faced, black-moustachioed , folk-dancing, virile and ath letic people (what was that little gymnast girl, ah yes, Comaneci) be better advised to start with somcthing simpler, like Tiger Moths, and work their way up?

It seems no more likely than it does that

"/t 's the same year afier year- nobody ever turns up !"

688

PUNCH. April 261978

''Howwesav A er illfrom the hi·fi jungle!'

Roger Neill is the sort of guy who loves listening to music, all kinds of music.

But he's no hi-fi fanatic.

The thought of taking hunting trips through hi-fi stores and technical mags and being attacked by dB's, Hz's, RMS's and THD's frightens the life out of him.

Even if he makes it, the idea of connecting all those wires to the right places is like cutting through the Congo with a bread knife.

Fortunately,Hitachi decided to help Roger.

By developing the Matched Hi-Fi Consoles, they carved a clear path through the hi-fi jungle.

Simply, it's hi-fi music, without the hi-fi hassles.

Hitachi have put all the hi-fi separates into one superb wooden cabinet.

All you need to dois sit back and enjoy all that beautiful music. · And beautiful music is just what you get.

With a Dolby* cassette deck, a direct drive tumtable and a big powerful tuner amplifier, all matching in important specifications.

They sound great together. And they look great together.

All the pieces fit neatly into the wooden cabinet, so you can shelve any thoughts of re-building your shelves.

And, there are no ugly wires to fight through.

If that's not enough, Hitachi have built-in a very spacious record and cassette storage area.

And there's a choice. The low-line model shown or an upright model.

Now that you know what Hitachi Matched Hi- Fi Consoles are,. you're probably wondering who Roger Neill is. He's just a guy who enjoys music.

HITACHI Hlll=PERf'ORmAnœ

The HC 200 HW matched Hi-Fi Console consists of the SR 303L 20 watt 3 waveband tuner amplifier; the 0220 Dolby'' cassette deck;and the HT 350 direct drive tumtable and costs .1:388. including stand. (Please note-speakers are not included.) If you would like to see full technical specifications or details of the other matched Hi· Fi Consoles just send your name and address to:-Dept. K. Hitachi Sales UK Ltd., Hitachi House, Station Road, Hayes, Middlesex UB3 4DR. • Dolby is a registered trade mark.

PUNCH , April 261978

689

those Polish ships will ever get built, let alone launched, in real, hammer-clanging shipyards (or even in the surrealist, weedgrown Swan Hunter yards, where one might just glimpse the distant figures of boiler-makers, arguing about demarcation in a high elfin chant, disappearing over green horizons clutching l l 0,000 each in fairy redundancy money).

Yet in these crazed alchemical fantasies of economists whole communities are conjured .out of the clouds, like Prospero's spirits. Perhaps coachloads of men whose

names ail end in -escu will be decanted outside new prefab classrooms at Weybridge, HQ of British Aerospace. Then it will be found that their English technical instructors are not available for three months as they arc on a crash course in the Rumanian language (not easy, for " it is curiously isolated among the Slavonie and Magyar-speaking peoples. Words of Latin origin m ingle with Bulgarian, Russian and Hungarian intruders and even with the Turkish, Greek and Albanian. " ) Sorne of these instructors, fascinated by

Hewison's PEOPLE

17. The Collector "The accumulation of like objects where the emphasis is on numbers rests on atavistic links with behaviour patterns demonstrated in the aggressive domination of unusable terri tory by the Abyssinian cat-fish." Thus wrote Dr Arpad Brutius in The Psychology of Cumulumania (Budapest, 1953), a treatise ofuneven quality on the subject our own Prof. Adrian McEllroy so neatly dubbed The Jackdaw Effect.

Raymond here as far as we know has not yet corne across the Abyssinian cat-fish and is unacquainted with the works of Dr Brutius, and if he has an y aggressive instincts at ail they would be directed towards his mother who never stops complaining about the "junk" that is gradually pushing her out ofher house and home-junk which he tries to explain to her is several unique collections that one day will be worth qui te a lot of money and who will be complaining aboutit then, eh?

And anyway, most ofhis abjects take up hardly any room at all-it's just the Early Supermarket Trolleys and the District Council Deck-chairs which need what you might call a bit of space, his scouring-

690

powder canisters and cornflake packets and lager cans have only recently started to spread out from the front parlour, and besicles, now that father doesn't seem to be returning she could quite easily move into that little room at the back which would mean that he would have some space at last to accommodate the spent electric light bulbs he's been keen on collecting for some time now, especially as Reggie Copthorpe is offering him twenty-eight mixed Mazdas and Osrams (miscellaneous wattage) at a knock down price and that sort of opportunity doesn't corne along every day, does it? Might also allow him to ease out some of those second-hand filing cabinets from his own room, the ones that house his cigarette cards, cheese labels, orange wrappers, match box tops, bus tickets, free gift vouchers, postage stamps, et many cetera-the ones he has to climb over to get to his bed each night. It is therefore not su rprising that he belongs to umpteen societies and associations devoted to collecting; any day now he will latch on to the idea of starting a Society for the Collection of Collecting Society Literature.

the verse of Mihail Eminescu, "the greatest of the Rumanian poets, steeped in medievalism and mysticism" , realising that life has better things to offer than minimum drag curves or titanium stress flow charts, will leave the industry, never to return (and with tuition fees etc it will now be l200 million). Other instructors will arrive to give the Rumanians crash courses in English (l230 million). Crowds of BAC workers, drawn by the sound of wild and plangent gypsy music, will overstay their lunch hour, with resultant arguments about the firm's time, strikes etc Cl300 million).

There will be romances, knife fights, international marriages, passport rows, football matches, visits by Rumanian VIPs, dinners, liaison and recruiting ftights by our VIPs to Rumania (l400 million). By the end of 18 months there will be one wooden mock-up of the tail assembly of the first Rumanian BAC 1-11 (l430 million) ...

Or are we paying the Rumanians l200 million? With the growing popularity of the Tri-Star and the European Air Bus and the often-heard statement that the BAC 1-11 is noisier than the Concorde, here is this imaginative plan to keep BAC people employed, give them a nice change, and cventually collect Rumanian licence payments when the great sil ver birds begin to climb sharply into the clear sky over the wild Transylvanian Alps and the Eastern Carpathians.

It isn't only the sophisticated city dwellers of Bucharest or Cluj, the industrial and oil workers of Ploesti and Galati who will look up with pride and drink a toast to Gerald of Westminster in some lusty, resinous local wine. Orthodox monks in lost, marvellously-frescoed hill monasteries with hcrb gardens, horsemen on the Wallachian plain, timber workers, nationalcostumed girls in long grass dotted with blue ftowers, will ail look up with grateful wonder. "There goes one of our BAC 111 's," they will say or perhaps "one of our RAC 1-1 l's".

And what a change for the Weybridge people! At first, in their simple, charcoalheated fiats on the new estate Cl280 million, already) near the technical complex of the new ( 1945) university of Targui Mures (in the encyclopaedia; Tirgu Mures on the map, but what the hell ), they live the ghetto life of ail immigrants anywhere, complain about the fizzy beer, oily food, the dullness of the State television service. But gradually, learning the language, exploring th e country in cars which they are able to buy on a special exchange rate Cl320 million), they visit the Iron Gates through which the Danube ftows toits strange marshy mouths into the Black Sea, they see Trajan's wall, they absorb ail the tangled history since the place was called Dacia.

They buy summer chalets or old stone farms up in the h ills, they put down roots, they are happy; and soon they are making BAC 1-1 l's that are just as good as ours, if not better, only at a far more competitive price, so there has to be an Equalisation Fund. l600 million, ll,000 m illion?

Who cares? It will only be alchemist's gold, economist's money, another part of a dream.

PUNCH , April 261 978

'c o.

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Feature s of the Colt Sigma 2000 incl ude : 2-litre 'Si lent Shaft' e ngi ne .

5-speed gearbox (automatic optional extra). Reclining back seats with built-in head restraints. Push-button radio . Tinted glass . La mi nated windscreen . Built-in front air spoiler. 12 months ' no-exclusion' unlimited mileage warranty . 10,000 mile major se rvice inte rva ls.

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Plus a very advantageous Leasing Scheme.

SIGMA 1600 GL EJ ,700 SIGMA 1600 GL Auto EJ,980 SIGMA 2000 GLX E4 ,220 SIGMA 2000 GLX Auto E4,500 Pr ices shown are rec . retail prices applicable to UK main land only and include : * Seat Belts * Number Plates *Radio * Heated Rear Window * Delivery * CarĂŽax *VAT

For U.K., Export , N.A.T.O. and Diplomatie Sales , The Colt Car Co. Ltd ., Spitalgate Lane , Cirencester, Glos. Tel : Cirencester 61441 .

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Colt range. Plus full details of the following: The Col t Special Insu rance Scheme D The Colt Leasing Scheme D (Tick in the appropriate Box)

1

Name

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Address ..

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PĂ?2 6/4

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RĂŠmy Martin. Fine Champagne Cognac.

First of a series of Round Britain Gigs with GEORGE MELL Y

MeIIymobile MOTEL-ROOM on the outskirts of Middlesbrough . One wall, behind the bed, is of grooved and polished wooden planks of deliberately varying widths, the other walls and the ceiling are covered in white pebbly paper . The carpet is blue-grey, bcdspread and curtains striped in blue, brown and green . The built-in furniture is of wood and laminated white plastic. The door-knobs to bath unit and room are aluminium and disproportionately large. There is quite a lot of technologica l equipment: TV, trouser press, radio, Teasmade, thermostat heating, alternative lighting, time alarm, much of it operated from push-button controls in a panel by the bed.

The view through the picturc window is of a strip of lawn, a strip of major road, a strip of pavement with swan-necked concrete lamp-standards, a strip of wooden fencing, detached suburban houses set amongst trces, a strip of grcy sky. As it is Sunday morning the traffic is comparative ly sparse, pedestrians even sparser. On the radio is a selection of records for the middle-aged: Buddy Greco, Sinatra, Nat King Cole. In the courtyard out~ ide my door, the bandwagon is loaded, waiting to take us to Bolton for tonight's concert.

The rest of the band are reading the Sunday papers in identical rooms or strolling in this secmly suburb . I myself made such an expedition an hour ago to buy this notebook. Most of the houses are less than ten years old, inoffensive and without any of the kitsch charm of the twenties or thirties.

Not so what 1 co uld see oftheir interiors. In one window an elderly woman with a disappointed air patted her hair among a sizeable collection of cloth models of Spanish fighting bulls stuck with banderillas. (Souvenirs of holidays on the Costa Brava?) ln another window was a huge china object in rose and beige representing a mushroom aswarm with mischievous elves and languorous fairies.

On the grass between the houses children played with dogs burning up their excess Chum or Pedigree. Turning a corner l almost collided with a young father propelling a pram with his stomach, his nose stuck in the confessions of Joan Collins in The News of the World. Next to the newsagents there was only one shop, a Chinese takeaway called the Kwong Luk, but a large sup ermarket was under construction against the sky-line. Returning via another,

A

PUNCH , A pril 26 1978

almost identical route, l passed a modern church, St Thomas Moore (R.C. ). Likc most contemporary ecclesiastical buildings, it relied on variegated triangles of glass or raw brick, a style not dissimilar from that favoured by the more modern zoos.

The public part of the motel, reception area, restaurant, bar, conference-rooms etc, is in rather better taste than Crossroads, the fictional equivalent with whosc melodramatic relationships l am completely au fait through watching it most evenings as I bath and change prior to an early dinner with the band beforc the gig. In this real-life motel there are some walls of rough-hewn local slate and blown-up sepia photographs of local life around the turn of the century: a lively fish-market with men in curly bowler hats, a fairground, children watching Punch and Judy on the sands at Whitley Bay. The food, too, hints of an earlier, more idiosyncratic world; there was blackpudding on the breakfast menu and last night, at dinner, the vegetable soup was real not tinned, or even worse, and increasingly common, out of a packet and reeking of monosodium-glutamate.

Still, it's fairly anonymous, could be anywhere, part of that world whose cathedrals are airports, whose roads are all M, whose shops arc chain-stores and where the Muzak never stops. ln this world we, as itinerant musicians, spend much of our time. Our fellow pilgrims are commercial travellers addressing each other as "squire" and glum footba ll teams playing away.

Breughelian feasts are represented by motel wedding receptions, there was one here last night, with a disco with ftashing lights and Abba at full blast. It's a comfortable, bland, standardised world, very different from the abrasive life we lived in the Fifties with its dragon-like landladies and damp-sheeted squalor. From it we emerge to play, in my case to sing, the music of urban American Blacks, its roots in the wide open New Orleans of seventy years ago. Outside, too, is another and more lively England.

Last night, for instance, in the crypt of Middlesbrough's great Gothie town hall, we faced a raving boozing audience determined and able to turn a wet night in a depressed area into an orgiastic revel, and afterwards, in our dressing room, a mayoral parlour with a cocktail bar, a Bacchanalia took place under the pretext of signing records. The North East remains the most foreign arca of Britain, not only in its Scandinavian vowel sounds, but in its aggressive friendliness and insistent hospitality. There were two art teachers trying to coerce me to corne and lecture on Magritte, three parties in the offing, the potential host of each conspiratorially trying to put down the delights offered by his ri vals. There was a young man whose jeans were a monument to the late Marc Bolan, and an exdelinquent embracing, with affection and enthusiasm, his pretty ex-probation officcr.

Most remarkable, however, was a fiercc lac; y insisting l sold her my hat to give to her husband, a stalwart citizen I'd earlier observed knocking back the Newcastle Brown Ale at a noisy but appreciative front table.

"He loves ya!" she told me, adding that if however she found us in bed together, she would emasculate him forthwith. Ali this was expressed in what are still ca lled fourletter words used with the forceful panache of a Geordic stoker at closing time.

A rather timid elderly man, waiting for me to sign his record, blushed like a young girl.

"Ah deedn't heeah that," he kept insisting, but he did and so did I .

England isn't all motels and Muzak yet.

There are Still plenty of men and women left who, like Falstaff, have earned their right to rest on Arthur's bosom.

"/ do love you. But, 10 be pe1fec1/y honest, I ll'Ou/d have loved any other lovebird who happened to turn up ."

691

SIX LOVELY NOBEL PRIZES !

AND THEY MUST ALL BE WON! You cou Id win a free trip to Stockholm in October, lots of lovely kr么ner, a certificate stating you have beaten the panel and mu ch much more!!

Simply tick the boxes where appropriate and send off your entry to Dynamite House, Stockholm

DI have discovered an extra-galactic source of energy (a pulsar) so far off that its effects are unmeasurable on any scientific instrument.

LITERA TURE PRIZE OOver the last forty years I have had three small volumes of poetry issued in my native Chile where, despite their selling only 400 copies each, they are sung nightly in secret by millions of oppressed peons. I am now languishing in a tyrant's cell or at least working at a very menial job; if offered an amnesty I would be prepared to refuse it.

OOver the last forty years I have had three novels unpublished in my native Russia, though they have done rather well in the West. I am persecuted daily in my small writer's fiat, mostly by Western journalists though also by the KGB . If offered a Nobel Prize I would be prepared to refuse to leave Moscow.

OA!though I have been the greatest living Australian writer for forty years, no-one in this country has even heard of me.

Dl have been the " in" Third World writer for about forty days and would like to get a prize before I am superseded. I combine passion with a wry awareness ofhuman frailty i.e. I am not committed to any one party. I photograph well.

Dl am the Bernard Levin of Finland.

D l have been spoken well of by George Steiner/Jose Luis Borges/ Time Out. O My latest book has been translated into forty languages/seized by the police/made first choice by the Cuba Book of the Month C lub/reviewed by the TLS only three years after publication/remaindered already.

D l have stumbled across a rather amusing side-effect of X-rays which cou Id revolutionise the testing of facilities in motorway service areas.

D After twenty-three years of patient work in a small laboratory in Cambridge, my colleague and I are on the verge of what might be a startling break-through in the field of, let's say, genetic engineering, which could lead to the production of a much better dass of experimental rat and would not involve the Nobel Committee in any controversial daim that any race was inferior to another race.

D I am part of a huge research team in Cincinatti which has recently corne up with an amazing new tincture which gives your complexion that oh-so-peachy-look.

D l have developed a new long-range bomb which destroys only politicians.

Dl am deeply into interplanetary communication theory and have definite proofthat apparently random radio signais from outer space are actually part of the entertainment output from other worlds who wish to daim us as part of their listening figures to boost their own galactic advertising rates, which would prove that capitalism has reached a much higher state elsewhere, which I personally find frightening.

D l am not Arthur Koestler or Brian Inglis .

If! was awarded the Nobel Prize, I would O use the money for further research Dhave it sent from Sweden, as I am so busy D indulge in a small sherry Obuy the la test Abba album and th us reinvest some of the money in Sweden

Olfthere is a court case, I would like my defence to be conducted by John Mortimer QC/the Baader-Meinhof defence gang/Vanessa Redgrave.

I would like to win the Nobel Prize because D it would sell three more copies of my book Dl wish to corne to Stockholm and defect Dl long to appear on the South Bank Show

PEACEPRIZE

PHYSICS PRIZE D l have discovered a new sub-atomic partide so small that its existence can only be assumed on my say-so.

692

D l sincerely believe that my Administration, though thwarted by an unwilling Congress and hampered by an unhelpful economic downturn situation picture, has done its very human best to preserve peace on this planer of ours, and that although things have turned out to be more complicated than I dreamt possible when I took office, a nice simple gesture like giving me the Nobel Prize would help no end.

O Hello . Since I sent the tanks into Czechoslovakia ten years ago there has been no fighting anywhere in Eastern Europe. I just thought I would mention this. People often do not give you credit for things. Not that I mind. Are you giving the Literature Prize to a Russian again this year? How boring. Make it the Peace Prize and PUNCH , April 261978

surprise everyom:.

DI am David Owen.

OHave you noticed that whcnevcr people point to Idi Amin as an exam;:'k of corrupt Afric:m rule, I am mos t often quotcd as an African statesmar. who ca11 be re<;ponsiblc? (I en dose cuttings. ) \Xi ell, it would m ake m y job ea, icr if I had the od첫 Peace P ri ze o r two . T he old ju-ju trick, you know.

D l am a non-mi litant, moderate Pa lestinian leader. This mea ns that although I havcn't a hope in he ll of winning back a square foot of Israel, I am eminently su ited fo r p eace prizes. I do not go aro un d unshaven in pyjam as like Yasser A rafat. o r am David Owen . H ave you got m y hom e add ress?

surgery almost cvery morning cxcept Friday, when Doctor Pnrter stands in for rr.e, so don' t ring me up that day as you might find yourself giving the prize to him and he has been to Stockholm scveral timcs aln.:ady. lJI am Still on the verge of a trunendous breakthrougr 1r: tl1e treatment of ep1lcpsy (sec my prcvious entries 1961- Ti ).

D l have d iscovered a method of keepi ng you r eyes open when you sneeze.

If I won th e No bel Prize I woul d O pu t a sti cker in m y ca r : " N O BE L PRr ZEWI NNE R V I S I T I NG" O get a cushy job with a big dru g compan y O go priva te

o r 'd be th e first to admit that m y d ram at ic fti ght to J eru salem didn 't lead to a new Go lden Age bu t by Alla h it was th e biggest peace sto ry to h it the head lin es since C hamberlain fl ew to-no, I don ' t ca re fo r that para llel ; let's just say that thou gh it ail happened ve ry earl y in 1978 I shall be ve ry upse t no t to get the P rize. o r am Dav id Owen . I co uld fit in a q uick tr ip to Stockho lm on O ct 14 or 28.

ECONOMIC S PRIZE o r have pcrfected a n ew theory w hereb y inflati on is actua ll y good fo r wor ld econom y.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE O lf yo u do not award m e th e N o bel Prize for C hem is try, a ve ry large explosi ve device will go off u nde r the Swedi sh Academ y of Arts and Science on the award day.

D l can get a b ig Joan fo r you an y t ime you want from the World Bank .

D I have recentl y left working for the I MF and , boy! have 1 go t som e stor ies I co uld te ll you !

D l look like K en net h Ga lb raith, I talk like Lord C lark and in the African cou nt ry I work in I 'm con sidered the Maynard K eyn es of the T hird World . I am H u n garian , bu t no t ve r y.

D l have been wo rkin g selfless ly and inspirati on all y a t Brussels fo r th irt y ycars in the ca u se ofEu rop ean fisca l unity and co nsider m yse lf to be the ideal face less burea ucrat for a N o bel Prize, as n o-o ne has hea rd of m e ye t I have o bviou sly been at th e centre of things, if yo u don ' t believe m e, as k m y secr eta ry, n o ho ld on she's away n ext week, we ll, an yway I ' m in R oom 10 18, C entre <le Comite E u ropeenne, it' s on th e fo urth fl oor , w hen yo u corne ou t of the lift turn left and . ..

D l think I have worked o ut a way wh ereby we can kee p th e J apanese from d ominating the wo rld econom y without cau sing th.cm to Jose face .

MEDICINE PRIZE O N ow that p eo ple are no lon ger scared by ta lk of cho les tero l or po lysa turated fa ts, I am wo rking on a new d ep osit whi ch represents a con sidera ble health threat . At the moment I envisage it be ing caused by suga r, sm okin g and white bread ; it will be called pigmento l ; and it will auack the young more than the old. R ather than line the arteri es, which is o ld h at, I think it sho uld attack th e n erve end s and ca u se p rogressive dullness and Jack of reaction . Eve ryone can identify with that . I think it should be pretty scary. o r have perfecte d a vaccine aga inst drunkeness.

O I have isola ted the virus of nex t yea r ' s flu (P ekin g R ed ). o r have achi eved th e wo rld ' s fir st vasectom y transplant . o r have effected a breakthrough in the treatment of ca ncer w hich does no t actua ll y bring the cure of ca ncer an y nearer but m ay well alla y th e sympton s slightl y, certa inly enough to justify a headline in the Sun of th e ord er of " BRITISH BOFFIN C RA C KS C ANCER COD E: CURE ON ITS WAY ".

D l have invented nothing, di scovered noth in g. I am m erely typical of tho usands of gen eral practitioners a il over th e wo rld . W o uldn 't it b e ni ce fo r a change to gi ve a N ob el Pri ze to an o rdina ry docto r? r am sure it would m ake a sm all million -selling p ap erback with som e such title as Js there a Nobel Winner in the H ouse?. I can be reac hed at the PU NCH , April 26 1978

O You aren ' t go ing to believe thi s, but I ' ve been d o ing some hom ework on th e ltalian crisis and I think r can see how to ge t the country on its fe et aga in by inv iting the M afi a lO fo rm a gov ermnent.

Without going into detail, which I would rath er reserve fo r the S unday T imes, this would give res pon sibility to th e M afi a, put the fea r of h ell into th e R ed Brigad e, res tore effi cien cy to the bu siness world , ge t co rrupti on in th e op en wh ere we can see it and eve n get the tra ins running on tim e. I haven ' t wo rked out what to d o a bo ut th e Communists yet. o r run a think ta nk which we ca ll an Institute becau se it sound s b etter , fro m w hi ch we iss ue fo recas ts of the wo rld 's future fro m time to time, non e of whi ch eve r corn es tru e either becau se we are careful to fo recast m an y yea rs ahead or beca u se people pay attenti on to w hat we say and thus avo id what we fo recas t , and it 's about rim e we had a N obel Prize, whi ch I forec as t w il l do Swed en a lo t of good if yo u give u s on e.

If 1win a Nobel Prize, 1 would like O N o publicity D A bit of publicity O Your M aximum Publicit y i.e. 1! inch es on p . 8 of The Times und er heading " H onour goes to Little-known Scho la r fo r W ork in Obscu re F ield "

693

When you're stuck for a phone, look forouryellow sticker.

With around 200,000 shops, garages, restaurants, hotels, launderettes, pubs, hairdressing salons and other places display:ing Payphone signs, you

shouldn't have much d.ifficulty you see the sign, don't hesitate to finding a Payphone when you use the Payphone where it is needone.

The proprietor sees it as a service to his customers. So, if

available.

Your call will cost the same as from any other public telephone.

Post OfficeTelecommunications 694

PUNCH , April 261978

JONATHAN SALE:

Boom with aView F you are reading this, m y week's work will have been was ted. Unless the pages of this magazine are shrivelled by mighty ftames, and you and I are being turned into well done steaks by chefs with horns, tails, cloven feet and pitchforks, then I have chanced my reputation in vain, as well as having to justify the expenditure of the firm ' s cash on wasted cab fores.

It is paradoxical that as we proceed further down the Armageddon trail- killer satellites, neutron bomb, pollution, overpopulation-the number of those prepared to walk up and down, Oxford Street with a placard warning of the doom to corne has, or had, reached zero. It was not always thus. In m edieval times, if ever you wanted to start a movement believing that between the lOth and 14th February 1420 (to quote an actual example from Bohemia, where King Wenceslas had just been succeeded by his brother, Emperor Sigismund ) the towns and villages would be razed to the ground, yea, like Sodom-if that was the message of your party political broadcast, then you cou Id always be certain of a decent quorum .

I can't speak for conditions in 1978 Bohemia, but I know the score for London W 1. " It must be ten years since I 've seen one," said the Duty Officer at West End Central, asked about end-of-the-world nuts. "The onl y one you get nowadays is the man with the placard about eating Jess lentils and being Jess lustful. And the sandwich men advertising Lost Property umbrellas." He suspected they had taken legal advice, since they didn' t adopt a stationary position, which could be construed as obstruction , instead making sure they were guilty onl y of walking down Oxford Street. I took note.

1

PUNCH , April 261978

What does it take to prophesy the end of the world? A m essage of course, which I had, or could easily work up b y lunchtime.

Something stiff on which to write the message, which I found in the basement of the building, d own among the filing cabinets whose retiring age is past and the archives full of the ghosts of dead cartoons. " Where do you think you ' re going with that, then? " demanded the man from Maintenance, noticing the large sheet of plastic. " I t's for my end-of-the-world kit," I explaihed, somewhat diffidently. He is not easily fazed . " Ah, then you'll need a small-toothed saw to eut it to shape, and a hand-drill for the string holes," he said, rapidly finding and operating the two implements.

Then there was the matter of the clothes .

What is the well-dressed loony wearing these d ays? Colleagues suggested something not too sharp-never a danger in my case-but more on the lines of an orange, waterproof hat, of the sort I normall y wear on m y bike; yellow, waterproof jacket, as seen on me biking to work; and a pair of oilsrained trousers, as modelled by me between 9.30 and 10 a. m. every day. A spare pair of bootlaces linking the back and front of the sandwich, and I was in business. The office srood around, amazed at the way I looked the part, and that was befo re I 'd even put on the placards.

Now, if 1 was to fil! the gap in the doomwatching market, I had to corne up with a slogan that was in the mainstream of British lunacy, yet still persona! to my own feelings. I saw m yself as not so much an outand-out nutter, but as more of a thinking man's nutter, aware of the uncertainties of an age that has lost its fa ith . H ence the

message ovèr my chest, "The END of the WORLD is NIGH, probably." J ean -Paul Sartre couldn't have put it better. And my rear view was designed to appeal to Arabs and others buying up Oxford Street: "Repent now while stocks last! " Should that fail to convince, I had a little leaftet to press into the hands of My People (as I was rapidly coming to think of them).

This followed up, in more detail, the theme that "The End is at Hand, Quite Possibly!" and gave a series of alternatives, such as "It might be divine retribution," as, indeed , it might, and "It might be a gap in the ionosphere round the planet," which is a case that can be argued, if not for very long.

With this bread to cast upon the waters clasped in my hand, I clambered out of the taxi near Oxford Circus and began my ministry.

Talk about apathy . Their eyes, it is true, swivelled from the straight ahead position, swept over my chest, and refocused down the pavement. Sorne may have turned their heads as I passed in order to contemplate my B Side. The more extroverted nudged their neighbours and whispered the slogan with a smile.

But where was the falling down onto knees, the raisi ng of hands in prayer to the heavens, the clatter of glass as soul s shaken to the core walked absently through the plateglass fronts of the Hot Flanks Jean Boutique? Wh y was there no spiritual rustle of new leaves being turned over? In Russia I would have had m y own dissident movement by now, even if it would be a bit difficult to mastermind it from behind the walls of m y psychiatrie hospital. In California I would have been a youth cuit, with Robert Redford and Farrah Fawcett-Majors Jeading the rush to join m y mystic commune . In London they hurried past to the shops, anxious to spend money like there

"/ passed 1he eye of 1he needle les!. "

695

"Haiâ&#x20AC;˘e you 1hough1 of laking oui a persona/ injury policy :'"

was no tomorrow. Even if there might not be.

I got more reaction when I handed out leaflets; peop le edged further away. Soon I was cleaving through the human tide, with pedestrians streaming round me like the bow wave of a tug. The trick was to fix upon someone unlikely to kick me in the teeth, like a little old lady weighed down by shopping-bags, catch her eye, smile benignly, and thrust a Xeroxed leaflet into her hand.

Gradually I got bolder. I approached young girls, men in pinstripes, lads in denims. Many took leaflets, some thanking me. A Japanese boy held out his hand voluntarily. "A memento of your stay in London," I assured him . A young couple crossed the pavement and asked for a copy; from their laughter, I suspect that I had not made any more con verts.

Finally, I was down to my last leaflet, which I kept as a souvenir, and as evidence, when the Last Trump is called, that I for one had done my bit. Whether there will be any follow-up, I shall never know. The telephone number on my pamphlet was that of a tape-recording service of the GPO, giving in Spanish details of what's on for tourists in London; the address to which the curious were recommended to write was that of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Weil, you don't want to make it too easy for them. The real Seekers After Truth must find their own path to Salvation.

What I needed, I reflected as I unstrapped myself from my board and oozed, like fish paste from two slices of white bread

696

and marge, is a stronger message. There are those who prophesy the end of Life As We Know I t, even if they are not parading down the West End. With my placard and their dogmas, what hordes of the mentally unbalanced could we not summon!

The Aetherius Society is, how shall I put it, outside the main stream of scientific thinking. "The other planets in our Solar System are inhabited by highly cultured races millions of years ahead of us, spiritually and scientifically." That's a fa ir bet, given that they exist, but some scientists might quarre! with the Aetherius account of the mighty ruler who will lead us into the new age: "New Master To Come 'Shortly' In Flying Saucer."

How shortly is shortly? The man at the Aetherius Society HQ down the Fulham Road said that Dr King, their contact with the Cosmic Forces, "has publicly stated that it is sooner than we think; in cosmic terms it is just round the corner. It will corne with tremendous catastrophe and upheaval, or gradually and slowly."

Putting a date on Armageddon can be embarrassing; those of us who have survived to our mid-thirties can remember sitting down to a school luncheon and wondering if, after al!, the current prophecy would be accurate and we would never make it to the semolina pudding. The Seventh-day Adventists originally came a cropper in 1843, when their hopes of the Second Coming, complete with the end of the world, proved on the whole inaccurate.

Wisely, they today do not mark a specific date in their diaries.

John A. Greed, author of End of the World?, gives us some dues. His checklist of 30 points to watch for includes " (6) Nuclear warfare involving Russia and other lands, " (22) Mount of Olives split in two, " " (25) Army of 200 million mobilising east of Euphrates," " (20) Collapse of world economic system" and " (30) Return of J es us Christ". In case you forget any of this when it occurs, John A. Greed asks: "Please fill in the dates as the events happen."

Patrick Moore has just finished writing a historical survey of the Armageddonspotters, entitled Th e End of rh e World.

When I asked him for his own beliefs, he came up with some cock-and-bull story about the sun running out of hydrogen and burning up the earth, but added "5 ,000 million years is the minimum time, so there's no need for immediate alarm. " Weil, there are a lot of cranks around these days.

Meanwhile, I am crouched behind my desk, jumping at loud noises and wondering which, if any, of the above messages to take to my waiting Peoples. On my next trip I hope to meet my lust-and-lentils sandwichman, so that we can compare notes and recipes. Unfortunately, his next appearance is said to be Thursday Late Night Shopping, and I'm not sure I can wait that long.

We could ail be dead by then.

Ominously enough, this article has been dogged by disaster from the start. I nearly didn't make it to work on the day in question. I lost the key to the padlock on my bike.

"Never mind," said my wife, "I'll run you in by car. I t's not the end of the world."

Vandals are stripping the Lake District of its daffodils.

SOUR WILLIAM I wandered mindful of my job, .

And wondering what rhymed with "hi lis'', When ail at once I saw this mob Of nutters nicking daffodils, Beside themselves like maddened bc::es, And ready for lobotomies.

I watched those Friends of Frankenstein Destroy that aureate display; "Please leave the flowers," declared the sign.

(They even carted rhat away).

Ten thousand tourists from Japan Do less than British locusts can .

Now often when I hear the news Of ploughshares beaten into swords, And missiles that can kill and cruise, I ponder on those hare-brained hordes.

What yahoo planet are they from?

What's more, who needs the neutron bomb?

Roger Woddis

PUNCH , April 26 1978

Punch . April 26 1978

Swissair would like to remind you of some acquaintances in Europe who would enjoy yourvisit. ln Frankfurt: An aristocratie Lady, by J. Carucci da Pontormo, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Dürerstrasse 2.

Swissair flies to Frankfurt 4 times a day

ln Marseilles: Monsieur Baillot, by H. Daumier, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Palais Longchamp. Swissair flies to Marseilles every day

ln Budapest: Prince Ferenc Rac6czi, by Adam Manyoki, Hunganan National Gallery in the Royal Palace. Swissair files to Budapest every day

ln Warsaw: Leonia Blühdorn. by Henryk Rodakowski, Muzeum Narüdowe w Warszawie, Al. Jerozolimskie 3.

Swissair fl1es to Warsaw 5 times a week

ln Paris: Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her sisters,school of Fontainebleau, Musée National du Louvre, Palais du Louvre, Place du Carrousel. Swissair flies Io Paris 73 limes aweek.

ln Berne: Paul Cézanne, by Paul Cézanne, Kunstmuseum, Hüdlerstrasse 12. A non-stop bus from ZurichKloten Airport runs 9 limes a day to Berne.

ln Hamburg:Nana, by E. Manet, Hamburger Kunst halle, Glockengiesserwall.

Swissair flies daily to Hamburg.

ln Geneva: Comtesse Mari e de Coventry by J. E. Liotard, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Rue Charles Galland 2. Swissair !lies toGeneva from morethan 60 world-widedestinations.

1n Amsterdam: William Il and Mary Stuart, by A Van Dyck, Rijksmuseum, Stadhouderskade 42. Swissair flies to Amsterdam 5 limes a day

ln Nice: La Siréne, by Gustav-Adolf Mossa, Musée des Beaux Arts Jules Chéret, Avenue des Baumettes 33.

Swissair flies to Nice twice a day

ln Helsinki: The Girl with strawberries, by Nils Schillmark, Ateneumin Taidemuseo, Kaivokatu 2- 4.

Swissa1r flies daily to Helsinki.

ln Madrid: Maja, by Goya, Museo del Prado, Paseo del Prado (Copyright J; Museo del Prado). Swssa1r flies twice a day to Madrid.

ln Zurich: Pierre Loti, by Henri Rousseau, Kunsthaus, Heimplatz 1. Swissairflies toZurich from85citi estheworld ovel

ln Malaga: Cayetano Ord6fiez. by Joaquin Peinado, Museo de Malaga, Seccion de Bellas Artes. Palac10 de Buenav1sta, Calle San Agustin 6. Sw1ssair flies to Malaga f1ve limes a week.

ln Zagreb: Madame RĂŠcamier, by Jean Antoine Gros.

StrossmayerGalleryofOldMasters.ZrinJSk1Trg11.Sw1ssa1r files da1ly to Zagreb.

ln Lisbon: Helena Fourment. by Peter Paul Rubens, Museu da FundacĂ o Calouste Gulbenk1an, Avenida de Berna.

Swissair fl1es da1ly to L1sbon.

ln Oslo: Henrik Ibsen. by Erik Werenskiold, NasJonalgalleriet, Universitetsgt. 13.

Swissa1r flies to Oslo everyday

ln Rome: The Fruit-Seller. by Mlchelangelo da Caravaggio, Galleria Borghese, P1azzale Sc1p1one Borghese 5. Swissair flies to Rome four limes a day

1

1n Cologne: M. and Mme.Alfred Sisley, by Auguste Renoir, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Kolumbastrasse 5. ( <t, 1978, Copyright by SPADEM, Paris &COSMOPRESS, Geneva.)

Swissair flies six limes a week to Cologne.

Details only are shown of mostof the paintings. Swissair cordially thanks all the museums and owners of the works of art illustrated for permission to reproduce and for help in making this advertisement a reality Ali further information on the best connections to see these or more distant acquaintances is available tram your trave/ agent or Swissair.

ln Istanbul: Alexander the Great, 3rd century B.C., Archaeological Museum, Sultanahmet- lstanbul. Sw1ssa1r files there 9 limes a week.

ln Moscow: The Equestrienne, by K. Bryullov, Tretyakov State Art Gallery, Lavrushensky Pel 10. Swissair fli es to Moscow four t1mes a week

Summer t1111etable 1978. subject tochange

Punch, Apnl 26 1978

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Purenewmd

SHORTSTORY

THEWALLET

by BEN MARCATO W hat

you probably don ' t know, or at lcast I didn't till I got thcrc, is that the big prisons up hcre have shops where thcy sell stuff made by the prisoncrs, arts and crafts type stuff, you know. I got nailed for dipping, that's pickpocketing, when I was cighteen and got sent to Bridgewatcr, where the biggest store is, and some of the stuff is rcally nice, like furniture and hand carved things and leather. Sorne of it went for three or four hundred bucks, and that's good money, I don't care if you're inside or out.

I didn't get therc till I was cighteen bccause when I first started I was stea ling cars, and anyway I was a juvenile, so they had to send me to reform school, where I lcarncd dipping.

But th ey finally got me one day becausc somc old guy rcached for his wallet the same rime 1 did and found my hand there, and I slipped trying to get away. But I learned my lcsson, and now I ' m more carcful.

It 's a good life, actually, and I 'm not grecdy aboutit. A few good hits a wcck and you've g~t four or five hundred bucks and that's ail I go for, because I 'm not trying to put any away now, I just Iikc living high, and besidcs, 1 can always get it. I'm very good with my hands and plus I have vcry thin fingers , so I'm prctty good-all the guys say so. Anyway, a fcw hits a wcek and you're living pretty high, and like 1 said, I likc living high. I have somc thrce-hundred dollar suits, and a whole bunch of different PUNCH , April 261978

coloured shirts I keep in a big drawer, and nice ries and about twelve pairs of shoes. I like to look sharp. Espccially the shirtssometimes I show people my drawer full of shirts becausc it 's kind of likc a rainbow, the broads especially, and they ail like my shirts, and some of the guys started calling me "Shirts" and it stuck. One of the broads 1 picked up once, a real nice one, she went to college for a year or two and when she saw my shirts she said it was just like Gadsby or somebody 1 never hcard of. I gucss hc was a fricnd of hers, but 1 never got to meet him.

Anyway, I ncver saw anyonc with shirts as nice as mine, so 1 guess I never met him.

Except once, 1 met a guy in a bar who had a real nice shirt on, and I mean real nice, and I never saw one likc it before, so I asked him whcre he got it and he said Albuquerque, New Mexico. Weil , 1 didn ' t figure to get to Albuquerque right away, so I asked him if he 'd sell it to me, and hc said what, right hcrc? now? and 1 said yes, so hc asked how much, and I said I 'd give him twenty bucks.

He said make it forty, and 1 said okay bccause I just had to have that shirt, and so 1 bought it right off his back, and he wore his coat over a T-shirt, and I had the sh irt washed and whenever 1 wore it people would say somcthing aboutit.

Anyway, the ncxt day I made a big hit and goton a plane to Albuquerque and looked in a lot of stores, but I didn 't sec anything ncar as nice as what 1 already had, so I got on

another plane and came back. I rcmember I made that hit in the bank district, which 1 almost never do because of ail the cops, but I wanted it fast and figured 1 might have to work till two or three in the afternoon but 1 had one good hit for two-fift y and anothcr for one-twenty and so 1 knocked off at eleven.

Usually 1 work the shopping areas or subway stops like Washington Street, Park Street, Government Center, well, this is Boston becausc that's what I know, but 1 think most citics are about the same. Of course when I work 1 nevcr go ail duded up because I stand out so mu ch, so 1 dress like a working guy, like everyone else, you know, blue shirt, cap, like that. And like 1 say, I'm pretty good.

Anyway, 1 was telling you about this gift shop that I fou nd out the prisons up here have. I was cellmates with a guy who made leather stuff, purses, wallets, belts, and I was always pretty good with my hands so he startcd showing me how to do it, and 1 learned pretty fast, and anyway 1 always thought it was a laugh, me, a dip, making wa llets and purses. I always took a lot of time with them and made them right, and 1 used to fix the straps on the purscs soit was hard for a dip to open. 1 know it seems kind of funny but it 's mostly young guys buy thesc for their girls, or the chicks themselves, and I'd hate to see someone like me taking from a nice young girl. 1 never uscd

697

to do it. R ich old-timers, midd le-class, sure. But not the young kids. Anyway, you cou ld never te ll. Usua ll y they didn't have much. But every now and then some d irty kid with long hair was on h is way to buy a stereo or something or coming from a bank on Friday, and had two hundred bucks in his pocket. But even then , m ost of these kids d idn't have a lot to their name, soit usuall y wasn 't worth it. An yway, th ey were m ostly sharper than th e older fo lks and it was harder to pull off, so you had to rea ll y wa tch it, so I let it alone. Especiall y th e ch icks.

Unless she was rea lly good looking.

Every now and then I'd see a rea l knockout, an d I'd rea ll y want to meet her, b ut how do you m eet a girl in a subway station? So I 'd lift her wallet and see who she was and then la ter I 'd call and tell her I fo und it, an d she'd be so happy sh e'd never catch on .

An yway, I never took the cash, so sh e couldn ' t p rove an ything. But then I 'd tell h er I was go ing to be out her way later that night, and did she want m e to bring it over, and of cou rse she'd say yes. So I 'd ge t ail dud ed up in a good sui t and on e of m y shirts and ties an d m osey on over and she'd in vite m e in just to be poli te, and that was ail I ever needed . So that was a pretty good deal too. I always hear the working gu ys in the bars complain how they make almost nothin g, and n ever get an y, and I never und erstand wh y it's so hard to m ake it lega ll y, but a fe w hi ts and you 've got ail the mon ey and b road s you want. Maybe it' s supposed to be that easy and the rest of th e wo rld hasn ' t cau ght on yet.

An yway, about this gift shop, I started m aking wallets and purses and belts, and pretty soon I was doing real fa n cy on es with

698

Next w eek's short sto ry

KIDNAPPED by JACK TREVOR STORY

com plicated designs and p ictures on them .

I rem ember one belt 1 did just before I got out had an I nca calendar on it, like a b ig wheel, and ve ry tough to do. I t took m e about th ree weeks in m y spare time and 1 was very p rou d of that one. 1 was going to keep it, but 1 p u t it on disp lay in the shop just to show it off and on e day a gu y cam e in and offered fifty bucks fo r it, so the clerk as ked m e and 1 told him to sell it, becau se fifty bucks is pretty good mon ey for a belt.

Anyway, I can always m ake an oth er on e.

But 1 think about that belt now and then , an d l 'd like to see it aga in . Som etimes 1 wonder if 1'11 run in to the gu y who bought it while he's wea ri ng it, and then 1'li be able to see it again an d te ll him 1 m ade it, and m ay be 1' 11 buy it off him the way 1 did that shirt.

Bot I u sed to m ake m ostl y wallets, because I knew them the b est, and 1 figur e I must have m ade twenty or thirty b esides th e purses and belts while I was th ere.

One d ay, after 1 go t ou t, I was back at work at the W ashington Street station and along corn es this well-dressed chick, and boy was sh e a knockout. I was about to quit but I just had to know who she was, so 1

liftcd hcr wallet to see, and you can imagine the jolt I got when I saw it was mine, wcll one of the ones I made. Anyway, she was some girl who worked downtown, but it felt funny to have it in my hands again, just like I was back in prison, except now I was on the outside and ho lding it m the Washingto n Street station.

So I called her in Cam bridge and of cou rse she wanted me to b rin g it back, and invited me in, an d li ke I sa id, that was ail l ever n eedcd.

I don't know why, but later that nigh t it was sitting on the dresser and I wanted to tell her abou t it, that I made it, becau se I was proud of it and she li ked it, an d so on e th ing cam e after the other and she asked a few q uestions and p retty soon she kn ew the whole story.

T hen 1 started wish in g 1 hadn ' t said anyth ing, b ecause of th e way she was looking at m e, li ke som e kind of real crook, and 1 could tell she didn' t like it so 1 go t up and go t out of th ere and walked ail the way hom e. And it was too bad , becau se like 1 said , she was rea ll y nice.

W eil, the end of the story is, a couple weeks later I was working the Park Street stati on in m y working clothes, not ail duded up, aro un d rush hour at night, and 1 gu ess I must have halfway sort of hop ed to see her aga in because she cam e walking down the stairs fo r the H arva rd train . 1 dod ge p eople I know but I was surpri sed fo r a second and just stood th ere, and she stopped on on e of the stairs and looked at m e. I was afraid she might say som ething or call a cop but 1 couldn ' t m ove, and then the trai n cam e in and she just got on and 1 n ever saw her aga in . Or th e wallet.

PUNCH . April 26 1978

by R . G . G . PRICE :

The

Prospect lor Whitby

"The Dracula Society want to place a seat in Whitby churchyard to cornrnernorate the vampire. The clergy object and say he Dai/y Express. doesn't exist."

"Y

OU'RE pale, love," said a mother, as she noticed her daughter looking wan in the supermarket.

"Don ' t fuss me," Barbra whined , then gave what her mother had corne to think of as " ber closed look".

A neighbour put her oar in. "1 tell Mia she ought to get more fresh air. She wakes up tired. She looks as pale as Barbra here." lt was one of an increasing number of similar exchanges in the Yorkshire rown.

Captain Cook, whaling, the decline of the jet quarries and even the Synod of 664 faded from housewives' conversation. All the shopping charter was about girls who woke up pale and tired.

A Health Visitor reported that there seemed to be an outbreak of minor punctures on maidenly throats. An ornithologist, explaining that the observation was, strictly speaking, outside his field, drew the attention of the local paper to the ubiquity of large bats or, though it seemed improbable, one large bat. A gravedigger asked his union to get him vanda l-money, so often were coffins discovered on the surface, however deep they had been buried. Mothers wondered why one particular girl was blooming with no trace of listlessness or pallor; no body noticed that she was the daughter of a French restaurateur who used a good deal of garlic.

One other topic which did interest the town was the new Transylvanian consul.

Tall and distinguished, he gave splendid parties. The food and wines were out ofthis world. The service was so unobtrusive that PUNCH, April 261978

the servants were never seen. Invisible iz igany bands played haunting melodies. One or two guests were puzzled as to why the Count shou ld have chosen to accept so humble a post. Indeed, it seemed a little odd that the town should have a Transylvanian consulate at ail. However, the magnificent hospitality soon silenced questioning.

In rime the separate disquiets in the rown merged and boiled into panic. The matter was raised in the Council, a sure sign of preoccupation among constituents. The oldest councillor said that Whitby had been picked for immortality by the world's Jeading vampire and, with this resurgence, the prospects were good for the tourist trade. A Headmistress snapped that Dracula had been finally finished by Dr Van Helsing and his associates. His head had been eut off, a knife had been plunged into his heart and his body had crumbled into dust before the eyes of the forces of righteousness. If their town did harbour a vampire, and she would require convincing proof, it was certainly not Dracula and, hence, considerably less valuable as an attraction for visitors.

The Transylvanian Consul, who often dropped into meetings to study the British Constitution in action, diffidently asked permission to intervene and pointed out that in the book, of which he had been honoured with a presentation copy, the account of the final scene did not go qui te as far as the speaker had suggested. Mr Harker's great knife sheared through the throat and Mr Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart; but there was no mention of the head's being severed, no mention of filling the mouth with garlic, above all, no mention of a stake through the heart. As for the apparent dissolution of the corpse into dust, he thought he remembered frequent reference to the hero's range of disguises, which included mores in sunbeams and fog.

Grey dust, he humbly suggested, might have been yet another example of versatility. lt was decided to appoint a subcommittee .

Gradually the incredible truth came home to the terrified population. Somewhere, either as a denizen or passerine, there was a vampire and it was generally

accepted that it must be Dracula himself, the sinister Carpathian peer with an odd predilection for Whitby. (Other rumours had him a CIA man and Barman, having tired of Robin. ) Notices were issued warning the public that, though they should be safe between sunrise and sunset, the effect of summer time on vampires was not known . ( The Dai/y Express announced that it was investigating this and that the world was agog for its report. ) There was also a warning against inviting strangers with sharp teeth or bats indoors. Agnostics who had conscientious objection to the use of crucifixes as deterrents were advised not to stint the garlic and wild roses. There was also a notice about a serious shortage of blooddonors.

Only the local clergy did not share the currcnt preoccupation. While they talked of Scout concerts, patronal fest ivals, missions to Sunderland and death-watch beetle, their flocks were making the lives of local librarians intolerable by their urgent demands for arcane works on vampirology or storming a local store which had a new line in garlic-impregnated pyjamas. The Transylvanian Consu l, in an address to Rotary, pointed out that pale young girls needed a good, blood-enriching diet.

The Dracula Society, which wanted merely to place a seat in the churchyard, attracted a good deal of opprobrium from some quarters, from others an embarrassing assumption that it must have vast expertise in vampire-prevention measures. A local sage pointed out that, on the previous occasion, he had been much attracted by a seat, where, indeed, his fair victim, Lucy, had first fallen into his clutches. More ribald inhabitants remarked that it was not only vampires who made good u se ofseats . lt seems unlikely that the premier vampire is going to take clerical insults without retaliation. Accusations of non-existence are likely to bring out the worst in a character pickled in centuries of self-indulgence.

However, the clergy seem unable to think of anything but the annual garden party in commemoration of the Synod of Whitby.

This year it is being held, by invitation, in the Transylvanian consu late.

699

" Ha l'e a care, Ho/111es 1 Tlie Hou11d '.1· 01rner lias a close re/a1ions/11j111 ·i1h Mr G/adstone."

~~ ~ OlSTINGUISHED

·coNDUCT SET OF KITCHEN UTENSILS AND ACONSPICUOUS,~ GALLANTRY TELEVISION SET··

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" They 've decided 1ha1 a1rards of'some ohl'ious pract ica/ 1•a/ue are 111ore approp ria le 10 the kind of 1ror/d we /i1•e in today."

700

PUNCH . April 261978

KENNETH ROBINSON:

Happy

Birth路 day toMe

ODA Y, April 26, is the anniversary of my birth in Ealing Broadway. l've corne a long way since then. About twenty minutes on the 65 bus route.

And my goodness, hasn't the service got worse? Though, mind you, 1 don't use it like 1 did on earlier birthdays. Wasn't it Classina 1 took for two fourpenny ones to Kew Gardens, before an exciting tea of jelly and custard? 1 was only 29. On second thoughts it was Beryl. I remember her lying in the long grass and asking what I thought about the work of the Great Architect. I thought she meant Decimus Burton 's Palm House, because I hadn' t supposed she was religious. As it turned out she wasn' t, but she knew something of my own rash commitment to my Maker.

It was very confusing, in those prepermissive days, to be young, romantically inclined and a Congregationalist. I t was just like li ving in a Boots' library book. And if you are too 路young to remember Boots' library books, you really have missed something. What's more, you are so young that I feel almost envious.

Almost, but not quite. As this birthday approached I realised, for the first time, that it's still not too late. Though I 'm not entirely sure what it's not too latefor. Perhaps a little atonement would not corne amiss.

To have embarked on this any earlier would have been foolhardy. Until recently I had too little to atone for, unless you count that incident in an ENSA hostel on my eighteenth birthday. I still blame the matron, but even to this day I cannot see a corned beef sandwich without feeling a spasm of guilt.

This is ail getting a little Proustian, if you know what I mean . It was Proust, you may remembcr, who could never hear a spoon dropping without being reminded of another spoon dropping on an earlier occasion. Or maybe it was the same spoon dropping. Or both. And when he tasted a

T

PUNCH , April 261978

biscuit dipped in tea it ail came back to him, he said. Which ought to be a warning to people who dip their biscuits in tea.

Anyway, on birthdays I recall how Proust says that Time is not important. Or does he say Time is important? It's one or the other, I 'm sure, because I 'd have remembered if it wasn't.

I was saying it is Still not too late for one thing and another. I ' m reminded that Alan Brien, on his fortieth birthday, wrote about the joy of at last admitting what he didn't like . I think I've rather overdone that sort of thing already. For me the next year must in volve a wider spreading of sweetness and light. Above ail 1 shall stop minding, at home, because nobody ever listens to what I say. I realise it is ostentatious to reach for the telephone, in the middle of dinner, if no-one is paying me sufficient attention. 1 mean I don't have to behave like an egocentric, just because I happen to be one.

And another thing . When anybody does happen to be listening, I really must stop saying I don't like Shakespeare. This is terribly embarrassing for younger people.

They don't like Shakespeare either, but they're wise enough not to say so because they are still sustained by life's traditional self-deceptions. When you get to my age you know very well that, for instance, nobody really thinks countryside is beautiful in itself; or that attending a symphony concert is a satisfactory way of spending an evenirig; or that anybody actua ll y reads Th e Tim es. You know, too, that town planning is funny rather than tragic; that literary criticism is even more badly written than the books that keep it going, and that G . H. Elliott was more amusing than T. S. Eliot.

The more you know of these matters, the less you should speak of them. I t is sad, I am sure, that I shall never again file a solemn film-review from Berlin, entitled "Angst in the Pangst" . And that I could never feel,路 with the same old intensity, that the Oberammergau Passion Play should be rewritten with fewer signs of subversive Nazism. Age and common-sense are terrible spoil-sports . Those of us who have acquired these two qualities must restrain ourselves out of loyalty to the media, the country's substitute for thinking . We must accept, as we mature, that the media represent humanity at its most thick. But we should avoid saying so. I have sometimes ruined innocent broadcast conversations by questioning what they were for. I now realise there is a place for the bland interviewer who merely asks, "S ir Godfrey, how did you actually sel about writing a book?" A lot of listeners enjoy this sort of thing because they themselves are broadcasting's equivalent of the unliterary.

And the unliterary, as C. S. Lewis said, are not the uneducated. They are the lovely people who don ' t look for subtlety, because nobody has told them about it.

To use the words of Bernard Shaw, "l know" (Sixteen S elf Sketches. Chapter xlll, p . 79) that I am rambling a bit . But I am grateful for the chance to make my birthday resolutions in public. Sorne ofthem are very persona!. For instance, I intend to stop boasting that I once accompanied Al Bowlly in Th ere Goes My Dream, at the Lyceum; made a pot oftea for Mary Whitehouse at 67 Cadogan Gardens, and kissed Mariene Dietrich behind the stage at Cardiff. Never again shall I drop the names of I vy Benson,

"Don 't be put off stating th e Libera/ case hy him pre1endi11g 10 riffle through his diary."

701

WILL COME TO BRITAINt A weakly guide for towists

Ali her poem s have burst in a fiowing rupture with som e d ainty ro und lays to imprime th e uni cal qualite of our spring in England . " The years pleasant king" was a tru e praise b y T . N osh of 16th cent wich refrained the lilts of its bounding nature " when bird s d o sing Cocko, jag-jug, pu-wet to w itta woe! " N ow you can see ail read y ch es tnuts bouncing in a green light. M ag D ay is is a tradition .

It is in ail p arts where th ey select a M ad

Queen wh ich is dressed in white and som e children go in a lovely twist with som e ribbon s round the matpole on the green (M ay 1). Or you can jump fro m rustic to the admired civi lian ton e of a p olished chorale of Oxford ; they jump up its fa m ous M agd alen T owel at dawn to sing an anthem by William bird and som e charmin g m adri gals wich can fioat your ear (stud ents can listen in th eir fiat bottom s, punt is a special boat to push w ith a pile und er its dropping willow).

Sorn e m ore n otes ar e; gen tlem en 's gam e of polo wich start on Smiths lawn 1515 April 30, you can see chukkes by Guards C lub exports with a big das h . Also it is N ati on al P ig Fair n ear P eter sbough (its cathedra! with lovely fun va ult ) April 26-27.

P.J.

G lenn M iller an d P aul McCartney, ail of whom rejected m y fox -trot ballad s. And I reall y mu st stop telling m y ch ild ren h ow I started m y career b y m aking tea fo r typists and th en deliberately lost the job by pouring the stu ff fro m a height, so it p rodu ced suspicious- lookin g fro th . I am certa in, too, that nobody ought to hear, ye t aga in , about m y schoolboy su ccesses on the G ranada ta lent circuit. Did I ever m ention that I fo ught wee k after week to wres t th e first prize fro m a whistlin g pensioner wh o ren de red L and of H ope and Glory wh ile lowering a tin y U nion J ac k over the fro nt of hi s trou ser s? I didn' t? W eil, it's too lare now.

As I slide p as t m y birthday I know there is still time to li ve a u seful life. N ot onl y by ta lking Jess, but also by doing m ore. By h elping to fi ght, fo r instance, in th e cau se of rights fo r wom en . I have oft en been less than kind to liberated ladies as they poured their hys teri a over me. I now rea li se that we m en must release wom en fro m the dreadful jobs we have imposed on th em , such as n ews reading, feat ure-writing and television inter viewing. These are som e of the dirty jobs that should be d one onl y by males.

And that 's not ail. But I must end som ewhere in m y list of birthday do-goodery or it could go on fo r ever. I was thinking of celebrating by throwing a large party, but I feel she was thrown quite badl y enough by marrying m e twenty- three yea rs ago.

And th at sort of rem ark is som ething el se I must give up in m y new-found m aturity.

It isn ' t going to be much fun . But whoever said it would be?

As we grow older th e tall d ock Strikes more slowl y In the long hall.

Who said that? I said it. And if you think it is nonsen se, th en everything else I have written here could be non sen se, too.

PUT WEDNESDAY BACK IN YOUR LIFE !

W hy just look forward to w eekends? Take out an an nuai subscription and make W ednesday your weekly high spot. Snip this out and bang it off to

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PLEASE ST ART SEN OING THEM PU N CH AND ENCLOS E YOUR SM A RT G REETIN GS CA RO ANNOUNCIN G MY GIFT.

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by SHERIDAN MORLEY NE of the things to be said in faveur of Don Juan Cornes Back from the War at the Cottesloe (the choice of others is not vast) is that in the only male role it introduces Daniel Massey to the National Theatre company and not before time: one of the finest light classical actors in the land, he will 1 trust be there for several productions to corne. This one, though a flashy showcase start, leaves a good deal to be desired through no fault of his.

Completed by Odon von Horvath in 1936 and newly translated by Christopher Hampton (the team responsible for last year's infinitely more successful Tales From The Vienna Woods at the NT), Don Juan consists of twenty-four brisk blackout sketches of life and times in immediately post-World War 1 Bavaria: the central figure is the legendary Don himself, back from the aforesaid war to find a collapsing Europe in which inflation, the advent of women dentists and the great ftu epidemic seem equally to blame for the crumbling of the old order.

The result is a sort of Anatol Gym: part Schnitzler-modern, part lbsen-epic with the worst of both styles combining to produce remarkably little. Twelve of the best National actresses (led by Polly Adams, Judi Bowker, Susan Fleetwood, Susan Littler, Elspeth Marchand Helen Ryan) play the 35 women encountered by Don Juan in his increasingly frenzied search for a deceased fiancée: along the way we are expected to find more than just a joky dramatic updating, though as the play's companion piece is called Figaro Gets A Divo rce 1 have a feeling this may be what they call a dramatic conceit .

We are perhaps expected to find in Don Juan (unproduced in the playwright's lifetime, a lifetime eut freakishly short when a tree fell on him in the Champs Elysées) a parable for the beginnings of Nazism: the world to which Don Juan returns (briskly indicated by Stewart Trotter's agile production on the Cottesloe's revolve) is a world ready for dicta tors in an age of nihilism and perversion and despair, so corne to the Cabaret old chum. ln an age of other exploiters, what difference is Hitler going to make? A good deal, actually, but so episodic and sketchy is the framework of von Horvath's human circus

0

PUNCH , April 261978

that we are never able to get down to such specifics. Instead , the world turns, Don Juan turns, and we end up with a ramshackle death scene played beside a tomb in the falling snow. 1 think it might ail have been ail right with songs.

Royce Ryton (he of Crown Matrimonial) is a playwright with a distinct interest in the immediate past, and what he has corne up with at the Phoenix in The Unvarnished Truth is not much short of a Ben Travers farce . We are asked not to reveal the finer details of the plot, which is much like being asked not to reveal the precise colour of the Emperor's new clothes, but we are, 1 think, allowed to reveal that it is concerned with a sudden and mysterious (and incidentally never explained) outbreak of female death at a cottage in Thames Ditton known as CosyNook.

There is in fact only one real excuse for The Unvarnished Truih and that is the presence on stage throughout the evening of Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden who constitute two-thirds of BBC television's The Goodies and therefore have the distinct advantage (denied to other comedy players around the West End at present) of being already a team . Like Ralph Lynn and Tom Walis, or for that matter Robertson Hare and Alfred Drayton, they can give the impression of unsexual togetherness and it is invaluable: to look at one is to know not only what the other is doing, but what he is about to do too.

Believability does not appear to be the aim here: Mr Brooke-Taylor, faced with this sudden outcrop of death in his nearest and dearest, rings the police and who should turn up but Mr Garden as an old

army buddie: from there on we're into a rough and ready plot in which BrookeTaylor tries like a demented goldfish to stay aftoat while Garden contents himself with falling through banisters and wrestling with armchairs. Thosc who don't happen to like The Goodies 1 would ad vise to stay away; but for those who want to know what real farce must have been like, The Unvarnished Truth is nota bad approximation.

True, it is horrendously undercast : a part from its two stars only Mr Ryton himself, as an increasingly demented literary agent, turns in a performance that would be remotely acceptable on the pier at Rhyl in a poor season, and the standard of the rest of the actors is presumably in direct proportion to the time they are allowed to remain alive. For ail that I'd not be surprised to find it lasting a year or two at the Phoenix: when, in the midst of their corpse disposai problem, Garden notices that the furniture is coming to pieces and tells Brooke-Taylor that a leg has corne off, my son (a ten-year-old with an admittedly macabre sense of humour) quite literally fell off his chair laughing. But if we do have here, as 1 begin to believe, the makings of the first genuine farcical team since the golden days of the Aldwych, then the first thing that Ryton-Garden-Brooke-Taylor need to do is hedge themselves around with some halfway decent character actors. lt was a precaution Ben Travers never forgot and never regretted .

DON JUAN CO MES BACK FROMTHEWAR DANIEL MASSEY as DONJUAN

703

CINEMA

Flick Flics

by BARRYTOOK HIS week I corne from haunts of coot and fern, if Badminton (the place not the game) can be described as that, and where the only disrurbances to be noticed were young ladies falling off horses, and a small child dropping a sweet wrapper on the grass.

The local police, or Lily Law as our gayer friends are wont to describe the lads in blue, were having a quiet time, in spi te of a crowd of some one hundred thousand-a Wembley Stadium full-who 'd corne to see Royalty and horseflesh in that order. To then be cast into the cauldron of Sweeney 2 ( AA, ABC Shaftesbury Avenue) came as something of a shock. The Sweeney (the name is thieves' slang for the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad) started life as a tougher than average cops-and-robbers series on TV and became a smash hit on the small screen before transferring to the commercial cinema. By a series of accidents, not unconnected with the fact that I'm nota fan ofthick-ear police series on TV, I 'd never seen The Sweeney

T

on the box, and by some oversight missed the first feature film. Sweeney 2 then was my baptism, and 1 thoroughly enjoyed it.

The plot is simple. A gang of bank robbers, or blaggers as they' re referred to throughout, are rushing about London stealing large sums of money from assorted High Street banks with apparent impunity.

The Flying Squad are after them but keep arriving too late . A mixture of tip-offs, insight, and luck put the law and order brigade on their track, and in a bloody shoot-out win the day .

On the face of it unremarkable, and the plot of the film has as many loose ends as a bowl of spaghetti strained through a squash racquet, but what it does have is tension, energy, humour and drama. The director doesn't waste time on self-indulgent car chases or long dialogue scenes that serve merely to fill up the time between the moments of action, and if by the fade-out there are as many mysteries left as are solved, well, no-one complains when Bunuel does the same .

John Thaw as Detective Inspector Regan and Dennis Waterman as Detective Sergeant Carter have polished their relationship over man y hours of TV and bring a depth and understanding to the roles that hitherto we've only seen with Paul Newman and Robert Redford . John Thaw particularly seems to get under the skin of the type of policeman he's playing and gives R egan an air of rough dignity and guarded contempt for law-breakers that, to me anyway, rings completely true.

A policeman's lotis not, heaven knows, a

SWEENEY2 JOHN THAW and DENNIS WATER MAN

ffol-~es s GUIDEto RH'rMIN<i SLANG

Yoh""YX( Horne(

704

happy one nowadays and Sweeney 2 reinforces what we know deep down to be the truth, that we are protected from worse horrors by a group of ordinary, decent men, underpaid and overworked, who put their lives on the line every day so that we may go about our business in comparative safety and comfort.

What is heart warming to an old chauvinist like me is that Sweeney 2 is an ail British job.

Euston Films, who made the film, are a branch of the Thames Television outfit, and most of the p.e ople concerned spend the greater part of their working lives involved in TV production.

Now, it's said that British television is the best in the world but what is generally left unsaid is that, by and large, British film s are the worst in the world. What is happening here is that the qualities that make our TV so good (and yes, I know that it's not ail wonderful but it's a poor night when you don't get at least one major production on the box) are beginning to appear in the cinema.

The director of The Duellists (Ridley Scott) made his reputation with TV commercials, and Lloyd Shirley and George Taylor, the executive producers of Sweeney 2, Ted Childs the producer, and director Tom Clegg all started out in television.

The author is Troy Kennedy Martin and his script for Sweeney 2 crackles with terse, natural dialogue, dry, laconic and unsentimental. More than that he gives his characters purpose and hints at life outside the action. Regan is divorced, but in the course of a side action concerned with an unexploded bomb in a hotel he chats up the hotel telephonist. "1 can offer you a decent bottle of wine, a good dinner and you'll be taken home in a squad car-What could be safer than that?" The dialogue, being natural, is shot wi th obscenities but not in any way gratuitously so. This is the language of hard men in an all-male world. Most interestingly, Troy Kennedy Martin gives the bank robbers a point of view and a purpose. Their base is Malta where they live in luxury with wives and children between raids on an England they believe is finished and going to the dogs.

If Sweeney 2 is the success that I expect it will be, and for ail its occasional faults it's a sizzling, crackling movie, then Euston Films are going to be looking for a simi lar story. If they are, 1 suggest they cast an eye over Barry Norman's recent nove), To Nick A GoodBody.

The National Film Theatre celebrated their current Bonita Granville season by inviting the charming and mature Miss Granville to a question-and-answer session in NFT 3 recently . Philip Jenkinson was in the chair and a good time was had by ail the film buffs present.

Miss Granville started her acting career aged seven in 1932, moved from child parts to grown-up rotes via Andy Hardy pictures and the like, and is better known today as the producer of the Lassie TV series.

There's now a new Lassie feature film on its way tous-The Magic Of Lassie. Weil, you can't say 1 didn't warn you.

PUNCH, April 26197 8

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PUNCH , April 261978

705

TELEVISION

Shaw Fire

by BENNY GREEN HE engin es of modern biographical research are remorseless. No trivia is ever so trivial that an industrious investigator cannot inftate it into a balloon of depressing significance. It is not so very long, after ail, since Doris Langley Moore published a vast tome on Byron's unpaid bills, and a Mr Charles Schwartz gallantly attempted to deepen our understanding of the harmonie structure of The Man 1 Love by hinting that George Gershwin enjoyed the occasional visit to a brothel. Is that kind of scopophilia ever justified? Yes, on two conditions, first that the victim is never ourselves, and second that the report handed to us by the literary shamus in question is witty, entertaining and original. The air of faint banter injected

by Molly Panter Downes in At the Pines, her account of the menage-Ă -zero maintained in Pumey by Swinburne and WattsDunton, was exactly right for the theme; Charles Higham 's catchpenny Freudian

T

706

gobbledegook in The Adventures of Conan Doy le was exactly wrong; I cite these two extremes to show that the method itself is blameless; what matters is not the immorality of the subject, but the morality of his biographer.

Last Saturday The South Bank Show , the London Weekend arts programme presided over by Melvyn Bragg, trained its cameras on Michael Holroyd, a selfeffacing gentleman whose modesty cannot hide the fact that he is one of the major biographers in English this century. Having dealt with the mountainous manuscripts enveloping Lytton Strachey, and subsequently climbed the heights on whose summit resides Augustus John, Holroyd set out two or three years ago to scale the Everest of Bernard Shaw's life, an undertaking which every literary gossip in London has already told every other literary gossip in London, will take Holroyd at least ten years. From time to time reports have drifted back of his progress, that he has reached as far as the south face of Shaw's childhood, that he has done a reconnaissance as far as the lower slopes of the ftight to London, and so on. By far the most revealing report of work-in-progress so far was Bragg's show, in which we saw Holroyd trying to show us the process of compiling the ingredients for a definitive biography of a widely diffused life.

Emerging for about half an hour from the labyrinth of microfilm and filed paper to put his cards on the table regarding Shaw's parentage, Holroyd trod the delicate line between sensational revelations and sober detection, in the course of which perfor-

THE SOUTH BANK SHOW MICHAEL HOLROYD on G.8.S

mance he dernonstrated one facet of his work which moved me greatly. Everybody who knows the basic details of Shaw's life will have conjectured in idle moments exactly what part the messianic music teacher Vandaleur Lee played in the household of Shaw's parents. Was he the mother's lover?

If so, did the father know? And if so, did he care? Did Shaw suspect? My own feelings have always been rhat if circumstantial evidence is to be trusted-and sometimcs it most certainly isn't-then Lee would appear to be a strong candidate for the onerous post of father to the author of Man and Superman. What was invaluable about the Bragg show was the way in which Holroyd so matter-of-factly showed us what an incisive and dedicated mind can make of a commonplace.

We saw Holroyd going to the church where Shaw's parents were wed, looking up the local newspapers of the time to see to what extent Shaw had been covering up for Lee, and discovering that Lee had moved into the Shavian orbit much earlier than Shaw had always suggested, and certainly early enough to have fathered the guiding spirit of Fabianism. Then we saw him chatting to a local sage who reminded us that both Shaw senior and Lee were called George, and that Shaw himself soon dropped the name. How obvious, and yet somehow I had never thought about it. Finally we saw Holroyd, laden with the fruits of his labours, retire to the inner sanctum wherein he resolves his research into the coherence of prose-his bed.

My feeling was, at the end of it, that no matter how ingeniously Shaw may have rewritten the scenario of his own life to suit his own conception ofhimself, Holroyd will find him out, and having done so, will report to us in prose it will be a pleasure to read . Is Holroyd justified? Certainly, because his underlying sympathies are always with the subject. His occasional essays on writers are pervaded with compassionate insight, and there is no doubt in my mind that Shaw is in the best of possible hands.

Compiling the biography of a great and fascinating man is a great and fascinating enterprise, and in the Bragg show Holroyd conveyed both the excitement of the chase and the scrupulous integrity of the dedicated literary worker.

The morbid thought which occurs to every writer from time to time, that nobody ever actually reads him, has been dispelled for me by several letters asking me if I am big enough to recant my heresies on the Dennis Potter series Pennies From Heaven, which, if you remem ber, I described a few weeks ago with derisive intent. It seemed ridiculous tome that musical phi listines should recruit music in the cause of demonstrating that they were musically enlightened. However, having watched some of the later episodes, I am indeed big enough to admit that I was wrong about Pennies from Heaven. It was much much more abysmal than even I had suspected; its progress called to mind the efforts of Hyman Kaplan to master the nebulous art of comparative and superlative-bad, worse, rotten.

PUNCH , April 261978

E. S. TURNER:

The Diary 01 acourtier Members of a royal dinner party which included Jack Jones and Michael Foot, with their wives, stayed overnight at Windsor Castle recently. A Palace spokesman sa id that guests at the Castle were invited to sleep there to save them from a long drive home late at night.

Windsor Castle WHA Ta distance we have corne in my time! My father never tired of describing that diiy in 1924 when the former pacifist, Ramsay MacDonald, came to Court wearing plumed hat and sword. Tiny Sidney Webb was with him, in black knee breeches, perhaps the first and last LSE man to wear them. No wonder the Labour Party foundered for a generation. Now, of course, the Court Circular is full of names like Ron and Len and Sid. These thoughts passed through my mind last night at dinner, when the former satrap of industry, Jack Jones, found himself seated opposite one of those ineffably distinguished noblemen who (as Jones has publicly complained) are descended from prostitutes. Was this an accident of placing, or was it a bit of gracious mischief by Her Majesty? The tainted nobleman made repeated efforts to be affable, asking Jones courteously whether his union had any plans to allow the new inland port ofDidcot to be used for the furtherance of the nation 's trade, but ail his overtures were rebuffed.

Instead, Jones preferred to address himself to Edward Heath, with whom (as it turned out) hc had once shared a common experience. "If you had read my book Trav els," said Heath, "you would know that, as a member of a Conservative student delegation, I addressed you,.along with other members of the International Brigade, during the Spanish Civil War." This revelation caused Jones to choke on his sturgeon. "Good God! " said the little CH to the big MBE, "were you that long-nosed, patronising pipsqueak in Oxford bags? Why did you not stay with us to fight Franco?" A few seconds later the old warrior had to be prevented by his wife from disarranging his clothing to display the scars of the wound he received on the Ebro--the wound he mentions in Who's Who . In the excitement his plate of sturgeon was whipped away, to his manifest annoyance. Then, in one of those sudden stillnesses which happen even in the best company I heard, from down the table, a fiat Midlands voice saying, "A Lady of the Bedchamber, are you? Then how about coming up to mine?"

I was sorry to hear that Jones was lost for three hours in the night, wandering through the cndless galleries in his dressinggown with a Thermos ftask , looking for someone to fill it with tea. But such misadventures used to befall even the most illustrious guests in Queen Victoria 's time. A search party once found the Empress Eugenie, I believe, preparing to doss down in a disused guard-room. Windsor is, of course, the largest inhabited castle in the world and was never intended to be used as bed-andbreakfast apartments for non-carriage folk.

for a session of Any Questions?. The Duke seemed huffed at not being invited to join the panel. "Nobody asks for m y views an y more," he grumbled, "I just have to impose them on people ." He then went out and shot 200 pheasants.

Young Mark Phillips drove up from London in 45 minutes, with Norman St.John Stevas in the passenger seat, looking a littlc shaken. He was for A11y Ques1ions? too. Lacer, when he heard about this, the Duke went out and shot 400 pheasants.

The Queen does not allow her guests to sing Th e R ed Flag at Sandringham, but otherwise they may do what they like. Fred Mulley spends much of his time sleeping.

Windsor Castle WE ARE still recovering from a visit by the two J enkinses . The awful bounder they call Clive attempted to recruit the equerries into one of his managerial unions, as treasonable an actas has been attempted within these walls. Sad to say, the equerries appeared to be responding favourably to his proposais, dazzled by the prospect of a 125 percent ri se and free luncheon vouchers .

If they fall to his blandishments, will not his next targets be the Great Officers of State? As it is, the Master of the Horse is for ever agitating for a "London weighting".

The other J enkins, the one called Roy, arrived en grand seigneur from Brussels, with such a retinue as has not been seen since the progresses of Cardinal Wolsey. He demanded an entire wing, as befitting the dignity of the head of nearly a dozen states.

Apparently his followers were incensed at being offered Continental breakfast and demanded kedgeree, without realising what it is .

In the morning mists 1 saw Hattersley jogging up and down the East Terrace. Although, regrettably, he wears one of those vulgar track suits with stripes running along the arms and legs, he looks every inch our next Prime Minister bu t ten.

Young David Owen solved the tipping problem by giving away those signed photographs of himself we have been hearing so much about. A number ofthem were blowing about the terraces after he had gone.

Windsor Castle: a week later NO FEWER than six Dai/y Mirror peers sat down to dinner last night. They ganged up to demand "democratisation" of Her Majesty's "grace and favour" apartments at Hampton Court, which they thought should go to homeless problem families rather than field-marshals' widows. Cries of"Make up your mind, Liz," and "Get your finger out, Phil," were bandied about the table. As a former Beaverbrook editor Michael Foot plainly took a poor view of the Mirror men's behaviour, and tried loyally to turn the conversation back to blood sports. When he and his wife retired to their usual suite in the Castle they found that the jealous barons from the Mirror had turned the contents upside down. How sad that vandals likc thcsc should ftourish under a royal roof. Personally I blame the parents.

Sandringham A VERY mixed house party, with Jack Jones still trying to overcome his distaste at being served by "ftunkeys". The Duke invited him to a shoot, but Jones had to go to the Village Hall PUNCH, April 261978

"No\\' can ire have a new sofa, dear ! "

707

The way Mercedes-Benz tells you a lot about the way

THIS ISTHE MERCEDES-BENZ200WITHA 2 LITRE ENGINETHATGIVES 94 NET DIN/hp.

THE SEAT IS ORTHOPAEOICALLY DESIGNED TO GIVE YOU SUPPORT AND KEEPYOUALERT AT ALL TIMES.

THE INSTRUMENT PANEL CAN BE CLEARLY SEEN. DAY OR NIGHT.

TAIL LIGHTS THAT STAY CLEAN IN THE WORST OF WEATHERS.

buildcars

DRINK

they perform.

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At Mercedes-Benz we build cars with one abject in mind: to improve life for you as a driver and for your passengers.

We want you to feel comfortable, relaxed, alert and, above ail, confident. To achieve that we have to build cars that find the perfect balance between performance, safety, styling and comfort.

To do this as thoroughly as we do, takes time, infinite patience and an enormous amount of ski li. lt involves endless research into every single one of the components in our cars.

Once we've checked that each one is made of the right material, it then has to work perfectly by itself and in complete harmony with ail the 路 other components. lt also involves ceaseless testing, bath on the test track and in the laboratories, rigid quality contrai and ruthless inspection. lt means, for example testing drivers' reaction to situations of stress and danger. Seeking information that will help you cape with hazardouc; situations, insulate you from the stress of city traffic and help you arrive refreshed after long, tiring journeys.

WE LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE. No detail is tao small for our attention.

Because in a car; you can't afford to leave anything to chance.

For example your position behind the wheel is the result of years of effort on OL1r part.

Your seat is firm to give you support, while also keeping you alert. lt can be precisely adjusted to your most comfortable driving position.

And whatever that may be, you will still have excellent ail-round visibility.

Your contrais are laid out logically: the ones you use most often are close to hand. And placed so that you don't need to take your hands off the wheel. Your instrument panel can be clearly seen day or night.

YOU'LL NEVER FEEL SAFER. We readily admit to being obsessed with your safety.

Our safety system is acknowledged as one of the most advanced in the world.

We start by surrounding you with a rigid passenger safety cell.

Front and back there are crumple zones to absorb impact. lnside, collapsible steering column, burst proof locks and a padded dashboard.

Behind you, a steel shield protecting the petrol tank. Our safety system also demonstrates that a safe car can be a stylish one.

AT THE CAR'S HEART IS OUR ENGINEERING. Our engineering is as legendary as our name. lt means you have an engine to give you the performance you need.

More important, the whole car; in particular the steering and the brake system, is more than capable of handling the engine's power. This means your Mercedes responds quickly and precisely to your commands.

Equally it can respond quickly to any potentially dangerous situation.

Should a tyre burst, for instance, the zero offset steering mechanism wi 11 keep you r car on the straight and narrow.

YOUR CAR IS BUILT TO LAST. A Mercedes-Benz is designed for a long trouble-free life.

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To protectyour car it is given a comprehensive corrosion and paint treatment against rust, road acids and stone chips.

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appM~路;;;d~s-Benz. ~ Thewayeverycarshould be built.

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MixedFeelin猫s

by CYRIL RAY N 1862 appeared a key work in the social history of drinking, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Viv ant' s Companion, by Jerry Thomas who, according to the preface, had "travelled Europe and America in search of ail that is recondite in this branch of the spirituous art. He has been the Jupiter Olympus of the bar at the Metropolitan Hotel in this city. He was the presiding deity at the Planter's House, St. Louis."

Jerry Thomas's book was the first to be devoted to "the social drinks-the composite beverages, if we may call them so . .. one of the curiosities of jovial literature." What is more, it records some of the earliest English cocktail-drinking: " We very well remember seeing one day in London, in the rear of the Bank ofEngland, a small drinking saloon that had been set up by a peripatetic American, at the door of which was placed a board covered with the unique titles of the American mixed drinks supposed to be prepared within that limited establishment.

The 'Connecticut eye-openers' and 'Alabama fog-cutters', together with the 'lightning-smashes' and the 'thunderboltcocktails', created a profound sensation in the crowd assembled to peruse the Nectarian bill offare .... " 1 can well imagine the "profound sensation" experienced by a Victorian City gent at being invited, in the august shadow of the Bank, to an Alabama fog-cutter or a lightning-smash, and it is not surprising that the fashion did not take on, at a time when .

Trollope's Mr Septimus Harding, the warden, dined one day in a London eating-house on a mutton chop and a pint of port, next day on a mutton chop and a pint of sherry.

Americans went on working their way through Jerry Thomas's "eighty-six different kinds of punch es, together with a uni verse of cobblers, juleps, bitters, cups, slings, shrubs, etc," to say nothing 路 of the cocktail, but although that concoction was known to a "fast set" of tightly-corseted adventuresses in the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim, it was to be another sixty years before it. made any impact on ordinary middle-class people, and Alec Waugh, still just short of a sprightly eighty, has earned the credit of dating it precisely : "This writer, giving a cocktail party in October 1925, took the precaution of inviting his friends to tea at half-past four and not starting to serve cocktails until half-past five . He served a rum swizzle ... sweet, cold and strong, and a distinguished woman novelist who, because it was cold and sweet, mistook it for a kind of sherbet, failed to achieve her subsequent engagement for dinner.

"Within a mere eighteen months the cocktail party was an established form of entertainment."

Yet, by 1964, the Paris correspondent of the Sunday Times reported that Somerset Maugham, interviewed on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, broke offto say, "Suppose we have a cocktail' ', putting the words " a cocktail" in quotation marks and adding in parenthesis, " it was his only dated term."

A whole Cocktail Age had slipped into the alcoholic hazes of the past, bearing with it ail those mixed-up drinks for the mixed-up drinkers of between the wars-" Monkey Gland " and " Between the Sheets", " White Cargo" and "Bosom Caresser" - to join the lightning-smashes and thunderbolt-cocktails of the 1860s behind the Bank.

Now, as recorded recently in these columns, a new Cocktail Age is upon us and ah, if only 1 were a fortnight younger, how gladly would 1 subside, after a Bosom Caresser, Between the Sheets, to experience one ofthose lightning-smashes . . .

I

709

BOOKS

New Novels

by MELVYN BRAGG The Professor ofDesire Philip Roth Jonathan Cape [4.50 Success Martin Amis J onathan Cape [3 .95 Madder Music Peter de Vries Gollancz [3.95 N The Professor of Desire it seems to me that Philip Roth is having a look round his estate. He 's not taking stock, he 's certainly not summing up, he's just Letting Go a little with Our Gang looking around The Great American Novel, complaining about his Life as a Man. Or rather his character 's life. This is another of those first person singular novels of Philip Roth which sail, we cannot help but feel, very close to the trade winds of autobiography.

The hero David Kepesh we have met before when he starred in Th e Breast. Indeed he was " The Breast" . And in this nove! too the central tri bute is to Kafka. Kepesh makes a pilgrimage to Kafka 's grave and, most unusually for Philip Roth, whose sense of what is shocking has always been balanced by a very nice recognition of good taste, there is a lapse which could be unforgivable.

For, faced with somebody who has been stripped of ail his liberties and possibilities by the Russian imposition on Czechoslovakia, David Kepesh dares to compare the totalitarianism of his own body to the totalitarianism of the Russian puppet regime.

Not on.

Almost everything else is, though at a slightly lower level voltage than in the other Roth novels. There are our hero's demanding Jewish parents, though this time it's the fat her who cornes in for the tenderly witty and abrasive Roth treatment; there's his scholastic brilliance and his initial fantasies followed by failings followed by tierce triumphs of the prick. There's the delight in taking two women to bed and apparently abusing both of them; there's the pleasure in picking up prostitutes to make up a trio when one of the three weakens and bows out into a breakdown; there's the literary range and reference; and above ail there is the pursuit of sex, of certainty, and the compulsive and scrupulous observation of the least twitch, need, desire, hope, fear and panic of our oscillating hero.

1

710

Roth 's heroes want without responsibility. They just want. And when they get what they want-as David does here- after titillating initiations, a tender and tragically unobserved love affair, a Guinness Book of Records of whoring and coupling, and the ritualistic blood-bath of unsuccessful first marriage-when they get what they want they can't take it.

Even at this level, which is lower than his best, Roth commands our attention. Firstly and above ail because he writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious . It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph. And secondly because Roth has taken it on himself to iden tify sex as the 20th century reduction or refinement of the American's right to the pursuit of happiness. He brings ail his considerable seriousness to bear on this and the unerring feeling he has that he's representative of a generation not only American. And so we follow him willingly even though at the end of this book David Kepesh nuzzles up in such a smothering of self-indulgent confusions, in such a downy fibrous mass of yielding comforts that it seems more than likely that his only way out is to turn back into a breast again.

Martin Amis is an admirer of Philip Roth and has recently written about him at some length in the New Staiesman of which he 's the Literary Editor. He too is preoccupied with sex and with style. And 1 found it rather eerie that when reading Philip Roth's nove! 1 came across a sentence which almost precisely described my feelings about Martin Amis's nove!. Roth's hero is writing of his friend Baumgarten, a poet. "Narrow as his subject strikes me---or rather his means of exploration-! find in the blend of shameless erotamania, microscopie fe-

" Yes , I do consider myse/f intelligent. Ion/y \\路orry about cellulite ifthere 's nothing special on the News."

tishism, and rather dazzling imperiousness a character at work whose unswerving sense of his own imperatives cannot but arouse my curiosity ." Success is told in alternate chapters by Gregory and his foster brother, Terence. Gregory speaks in the voice of the far flung faggot end of the 90s. Rich, spoilt, indulged, his wild (and Wilde) ness is decanted in Nabokovian prose. Terence, the foster brother hauled in from a violently aborted working-class family life, speaks in a funny, yobbish prose which gets much of its rhythm from the use and reuse and use yet again of four letter words. Between .these two is Ursula, the sis ter who kills herself. The London is the London of 1976 in which the Queensway and Bayswater Road area are portrayed as a steaming urban jungle somewhere between the lower East Side and the shanty towns around Mexico City. The book proceeds with careful symmetry both deceiving and self-deceiving and although a great deal seems designed to shock, Martin Amis very protectively gives each of his two main characters a strong last line of defence rooted in their respectively disabling childhoods.

It is a hell of a world this young author sees and the stinks, fears, hatreds, panics, failures and failings presented and embodied by Gregory and Terence are described with such energetic virulence that it can be depressing. But its consistent ferocity and its artistry are finally impressive.

Sometimes the prose is so intense it becomes impacted. There is little cultivation of the tenderness, lyricism and gent le observation which lightened The Rachel Papers. But Martin Amis is a virile and forceful talent stamping out his own patch with a rage which sometimes half-blinds him.

In Madder Music, Peter de Vries takes on Groucho Marx through his hero, Bob Swirling, and mints new maxims which match the well-known Marxisms without a stitch visible to the eye or a hesitation audible to the inner ear. The pressures of too much sex, too much literature, too much guilt and a propensity for being caught up in comic turns, heaves Bob Swirling into the Silver Slopes Sanatorium where, believing he really is Groucho Marx, he seems, frankly, quite happy despite the fact that the doctor and a wife want to restore him to the world he has so creatively abandoned . Finally cured of being Groucho Marx he turns into W. C. Fields. Thar l hope is the signal for another nove! ad infinitum.

Peter de Vries is as witty and inventive and shrewd as he's ever been but, perhaps because of the rattling sabre of Groucho's style, the whole book moves just a little too quickly for our good. Thus for example we enjoy Swirling being Groucho and we enjoy him just as much being Swirling. The transition from one to the other, however, isn ' t as credible as one would like it to be .

Ali of the characters seem to be just that bit short changed, as if Peter de Vries were a little anxious about boring us. He should worry. Most novelists would give their typing fingers to produce a book half as vivid and inventive as this.

PUNCH , April 261978

THE SUNOAY TIMES CLASSIFJEO INDEX

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Punch. April 26 1978

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As defined in H.M. Govemment Tables.

CIGARETTES CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH

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FOOD

Motorway

Blandness

by FA Y MAS CH LER : MAGINE you are not English (perhaps you arcn't, that will make it al! the easier). You arrive in England and for some reason get on to a motorway. You drive along and after a while begin to feel hungry and then on your left you sec a blue and white sign that shows little symbols of a petrol pump and a knife and fork. Even though you can't speak English you realise that it means soon you will be coming to a place that offers petrol for your car and something to eat with a knife and fork. You park your car and go into the building where masses of people mil! around playing electronic games of reckless driving, buying sweeties, and queueing for the lavatories.

Further in therc is the place where people arc queueing for food. The queue is docile.

Finally you corne close to the source of things to eat. But what are they? Though the English (and maybe you ) have little chuckles about how the Arabs relish sheep's eyes and the Chinese never say no to a well grilled snake, here are items you have never encountered inyour life before.

There is a tray of little shrivelleè members, bearing only faint resemblance to the sausage that you might know from your homeland, be it Frankfurter, Saucisse de Toulouse or Cotechino. There is a toiling orange mass containing little round pellets that seems to be heaped onto plates in lieu of anything resembling a vegetable. Triangular fried articles you locate in the illuminated sign above as illustrating the word fish. There are little shrouds of pastry encasing a pink minced substance. Might this be the famous toad in the hole the English are reputed to eat? Further on lurk pastries something like the cake you remember reading about in your translation of Peter Pan, the one that was designed as fatal bait for Le Capitain Hook. Finally there are the petrol pumps you first saw on the sign outside. Only look what's coming out: a thick viscous red substance; an equally sinister dark brown liquid; from the third a Stream that you might think is a rather touching offering of hand lotion, but it turns out to be a uniquely English passion and taste, salad cream. It is for putting on or by salads, which in case you missed them as you were shuffiing past the glassed in compartments were those plates that contained

I

PUNCH , April 261978

a curl ofham, a quarter ofhard boiled egg, a half of a flossy looking tomate, a pile of cubed potato already wrapped in salad cream, and slowly staining the whole thing purple, a few slices of cooked beetroot. Weil let's wash it ail down with some famous English beer. No. Though a minute 's drive off the motorway could get you to a pub, on it, we pretend that we don't drink.

Now you, this imaginary stranger to our quaint and delightful customs, might suppose that motorway food must represent what the English likc to eat. I think-and it's what has been missing from the whole motorway catering rumpus-that to a certain extent that is true.

Firstly, the English are mean about spending a serious proportion of their income on food. The feeling is that it should be free, almost on the National Health, a grcy necessity, not a pleasure. Therefore stuff from tins, likc baked bcans, piled onto a slice of white styrofoam toast, fits the bill (or prescription) nicely. Starch is cheap and filling, so sausagcs composed chiefly of bread seem somehow righr. The fact that motorway food is what people want scems proved tome by the behaviour of children in these places . Staunch conscrvatives to a boy, or girl, they wolf down the platefuls, presumably because it is al! so reassuringly familiar. An "eating out and thus behaving more agrecably" syndrome must be discounted when you take into account the surroundings. Squashed onto a lcatherette seat, sifting your own choice from the debris on the Formica topped tables, it cannot be construed as a treat, even to childrcn.

However, since the motorway cafes do have a captive audience (though a book has just been published showing us where to nip off the buzzing highway and do better) they

seem ideal spots for trying to change some of the national food habits.

Since a govcrnment enquiry is in process and the government recently has been attempting to get us to do beneficial things like jog to work and abjure things like lifts in tall buildings, maybe they could move in with a few new regulations. There are plenty already, it seems, about the amount of money they want in return for developing the sites. For example: !. Fresh food should be encouraged. This can be donc by a) attractive bowls of fruit, of the kind that doesn't wilt, like Granny Smith apples or home-grown Cox's Orange Pippins, b) large slabs of English cheeses, which have the advantage of not ever going gooey, c) properly made salads and a vinaigrette as an alternative to hand lotion. 2. English foods that are frequently well made like Cornish pasties and cold game pies should be purchased and offered. 3. The development of the non-stick surface should be brought to the attention of caterers so that fried foods need not be presented in;\ inch of tepid lard.

4. Although we are Great Britain we must be big enough to concede that items like pizzas and hamburgers and kebabs do !end themselves particularly well to fast food operations . We should not be ashamed of putting a pizza into a micro-wave oven. 5.

Sorne people are believed to like good coffee so a separate queue for an espresso machine could be tried out. 6. Ethologists have observed that people will adapt and respond to their surroundings so maybe if you make the environment more congenial and hygienic, the customers will behavc themselves more decorously. They seem to in other countries. To which, the mythical visiter is doubtless this minute hurriedly motoring back.

''f'm sorry, Kapitan Shmfiwgel, but your eyesight is per/ect ."

711

,BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

France's Gant OI Fame L Y A six mois que la mort de René Goscinny a mis en deuil la Gaule, cette forêt ancestrale de l'enfance nationale où se replient les Français quand ils boudent le présent. Hélas, Astérix a perdu son père.

And hélas, too, for anyone whose formative years on comic strips were spent this side of the Channel; who might misjudge the fanatical barminess with which ail of France took to their answer to Peanuts; who imagined for an instant that the death of his creator-en-chef might snuff Astérix luimême; or who ten years after scraping through A-level French might find himself seated in Bedford Square, struggling to absorb a foreign legend, with Albert Uderzo--earnest, dapper and exclusively Francophonal survivor of the Astérix creative team, here to talk about a book, a film, a phenomenon after ail. Pouf! It was, for your correspondent also, another task of Astérix.

In Britain-as in but few other countries of the world-it is perhaps possible still to have not the foggiest idea what is this thing called Astérix. Books, it is true, have been sold in some quantity describing his adventures. A film, it is true, is at cinemas ail over London . And yet, to date, les aventures d' Astérix have not in this country the universal clout of a Charlie Brown, a Muppet, or a Paddington Bear. This the combined resources ofEMI and Hodder & Stoughton plan to put right on a lavish scale.

And so we must know now who is this Astérix, must un-rust our pidgin vocab to learn from M. Uderzo qu'est-ce qui se passe chez les petits Gaulois-en-livres, alors, enfin, pouf. Astérix, so it goes, is a warrior in a wingèd helmet, stout citizen of ancient Gau!. With a gallery of unlikely friends, he has survived hegemony from ancient, imperialist Rome, thanks largely to draughts of a magic potion, brewed in the marooned village by the local druid pharmacist, the aptly-named Getafix. With his faithful, immensely-strong, but dim-witted

1

712

ln ancient Gaul lives Astérix. France's most popular cartoon character. whose creator. René Goscinny. died late last year. ALBERT UDERZO. who i llustrates the books and films and who was Goscinny's partner for a quarter-century. talks to DAVID T AYLOR . companion, Obélix, urged on by the brawny chieftain of the tri be, Vitalstatistix, and chronicled by the raucous Gallic bard, Cacofonix, our doughty little hero thwacks and schemes his way through a series of hair-raising, uproarious triumphs and contretemps . It is indeed a Potentmix.

Children fasten on to the books because they're colourfully drawn (by Uderzo) and wittily action-packed; grown-ups take them up almost as a cuit because they're shot through with comical cross-reference to the rigours of survival in today's circumscribed world . Bureaucracy is sent up, authority is out-manoeuvred, planners are satirised, commercial instincts debunked .

National characteristics, too, are subtly lampooned when, from time to time, Astérix heads an expedition abroad-to the rain-sodden, beer-swilling, ill-signposted, malingering, tea-and-mint-sauce-crazed shores of Britain, for an example. In-jokes proliferate as the characters become more familiar and fteshed-out than in most kids' comic strips; the lin guistic and artistic puns

turn more and more tortuous, selfridiculing sometimes in their groaning complexity. And at last there emerges a quintessential Frenchness: chauvinistic, droll, unerringly observed. Heaven knows what they make of it in translation in Ja pan.

Noddy never sold in Guam.

It is almost twenty years since Astérix made his debut. The working partnership of Goscinny and Uderzo, writer and artist, until it was broken in November by the former's fatal heart-attack, goes back twenty-five. The first Astérix album, put together from strips they had produced in their own magazine, Pilote, sold a respectable 6,000 copies. The second doubled that and the third doubled up again. Today, 18 million copies are the norm-a staggering total now produced in every major language. Profits were put into the creation in Paris of the Idefix animation studios-a five-storey affair unique in Europe. From there came the half million drawings needed to put together the computerenhanced movie, The Twelve Tasks of Astérix, upon which EMI and Hodder & Stoughton (publishers of Astérix in the UK ) are pinning hopes of Le Grand Breakthrough, enfin, in Britain. Helmets, posters, painting sets and a battery of windup Gauls should be hitting the shops soon.

Meanwhile the books have clocked up twenty-three titles.

In France, Astérix has long been out of hand. He amounts to an unsettling obsession-why else du ring the recent elections should ail political parties, left, right and au milieu, have sought to take him on as their mascot at the hustings? Indeed, adds M. Uderzo with a fiourish, one has only to take a ride on the Parisian métro to witness a succession of advertising posters-for such things as oil for cooking, for cheese, for milk and for he doesn't know what else, ail featuring plucky little Astérix. Even Popeye stopped at spinach. Of course, the loss of Goscinny was a terrible blow, not just because he was a life-long friend, but bePUNCH . April 261978

cause he was the thrust of everything in that world of Astérix, which was from his own imagination. But it has arrived, that world, in this, our world. It cannot now go away.

They must manage to go on, Vive Astérix.

The sales of books, after all, now total somc 95 million. Pouf.

Only four of those millions were shifted in Britain to date. Excellent as the dizzy tales are, some xenophobic resistance to slick-talking, midget, moustachioed Gauls in potion-powcred helmets seems to have set in, despite the new-found Euroneighbourliness . Such little wonders as do catch on tend to do so through TV over here, but, over there, Uderzo laments that there have been always the problems in translating the complexity of the Astérix sets, atmosphere, and il-ne-sait-quoi to the small scrcen.

Not that four million copies is exactly a duff total for any series of books . Au contraire. But it is not yet the, so to say, adulation. Perhaps it could. The commercialisation in France, it was inevitable, but it must have helped also. Now in this country we have the film, in which Caesar imposes such tasks upon our Gaulish friends as were once imposed on Hercules- they must, for example, eat up to the last crumb a gargantuan feast prepared for them by the famous Belgian chef, Mannekinpix, they must brave the crocodiles of Cleopatra as they must cross an abyss on an invisible tight-rope and they must endure many such things-which they do without effort- until finally they must face the lions and gladiators at the circus! But it is turned by them into a real circus and everybody laughs-a threat to the power of Caesar after ail. They can't Jose . Ali are vanquished by the Gauls, Caesar must go into retirement far away with Cleopatra and the centre of the universe become our heroes ' village. So. lt is exciting stuff (Treize gags à la douzaineFrance Soir ) and maybe ifin this country it really catches fire, so, too, the books will have a resurgence and who can say how many millions more people will corne to know of Astérix?

Hodder & Stoughton clearly entcrtain hopes that it will be plusieurs and were entertaining M. Uderzo's scheduled caliers in their boardroom, quelques questions being put from round a polished table of such proportions that it would have taxed Obélix to lift it. And certainly Astérix is possessed of a preposterous charm, a vitality not shared by the other Idefix hopeful, a shambling "laconic cowboy" called Lucky Luke. Despite the twenty-three titles in stock, whether or not Idefix can keep up the impetus without Goscinny must, however, be in some doubt. Said Paris Match, in a maudlin, cover-story farewell to Astérix- son créateur: " Nous avions perdu une bataille à Alésia, mais nous n'avions perdu la guerre." Thar (your French may be even rustier than mine, for ail 1 know) was the Gaulish fort where Caesar putto seige and took off with Vercingétorix, 52 BC. Putting seige to Britain in 1978, Astérix may find he has a tougher nut but 1 wish him bonne chance .

PUNCH , April 261978

"You passed on rhree."

"Why should you and I bother Io came back, Tom? Reincarnation is for people 1l'ho fai/ed this rime a round. "

713

MO NEY

Coininè

It

by WILLIAM DAVIS HA VE no idea what Isaac Newton is doing on my new pound note. He looks pretty miserable aboutit, and I can't say I blame him. I wouldn't be happy either if they had put me on that shoddy piece of paper.

There is a telescope beside him, and the only thing that reminds me of is my favourite definition of inflation-"the equivalent of looking at your savings through the wrong end of a telescope."

On the other side, a fellow called J. B. Page is promising to "pay the bearer on demand the sum of one pound". I wonder what would happen if I walked into the Bank of England, asked to see this Mr Page, and demanded the sum of one pound.

He would be in a meeting, of course.

Everyone in the business world always is. I could wait for him to corne out of there, but they would probably treat me as a raving lunatic.

"Mr Cashier, Sir, there is someone at the counter who says he wants a pound."

"Don't be ridiculous, Perkins."

"I'm sorry, Sir, but he is awfully persistent. He says you promised him a pound, and he won't leave until he gets it."

Sigh. "Very well, then, Perkins, give him a new note-the one with Newton on it-in exchange for his old one and tell him to stop wasting our time."

Money, I'm afraid, has long been relegated to a token status. Seventy years ago I could have gone along to the Bank and swapped my paper money for gold. I certainly cannot do that today. Sovereigns are still legal tender but, paradoxically, no-one is allowed to own them unless he is a licensed dealer or collector. Silver coins were Jast struck in 1946. One rarely sees any today. When did you last bite a coin to see if it is real? If you are under 30, the very idea seems absurd .

No-one bothers to forge ordinary coins these days because it just isn't worth it.

There is no point in risking gaol for the sake of a fake Sp or l Op piece.

Do you remember the groat? No, of course you don' t. It ceased to be legal currency several hundred years ago-a casualty of so-called progress, along with the teston, the ora, the noble and the ange!.

But you remember the farthing, don't you?

I t disappeared in 1961.

I

714

How about the florin, the guinea, the threepence and the ha'penny?

They have ail become redundant in my lifetime, along with the sixpence, the shilling, the ten bob note, and the half crown.

A major turning point was the decision, in 1971, to adopt a decimal system. Jim Callaghan was Chancellor at the time and he thought he was doing us a favour. It was part of the Government's plan to drag Britain " kicking and screaming into the twentieth century". 1 still think that decimalisation, more than any other factor, set us on the road to double-digit inflation and I have reason to believe that Mr Callaghan agrees with me. Large and small businessmen shamelessly exploited the confusion, and money has never been the same.

In the Commons the other day one of the junior Treasury Ministers said that the pound in February 1974 (when this Labour Government took over) was worth 53p in February 1978. I t is the kind of admission which would at one time have been front page news, especially in election year. But we have grown so used to inflation that only two national newspapers even bothered to report it, and both of those printed a single paragraph on page three. I don ' t know about you, but tome that 53p is a devastating indictment of Labour rule and the little new pound note, the one with Newton on it, an entirely appropriate symbol.

In the Lords, around the same time, there was a rather ridiculous debate about the shape of the SOp piece. Lady Ward of North Tyneside (whoever she may be) asked the Government to issue SOp coins in gold colour "to make it easier to distinguish them from sil ver 1Op pieces". Gold? Sil ver?

The good Lady must have been asleep for the last thirty years.

Lord Leatherhead, a Labour peer, talked nostalgically about his service days in France during the First world war, when he

was paid in French coinage. "Sorne of the coins," he said, "had a circular hole stamped in them whereas those of higher denomination were left intact. Would that not be a suitable alternative?"

Yes, My Lord, it would. A coin with a hole in it would be a just tribute to Mr Healey's years at the Treasury.

The Bank of England is said to be considering a [l coin, and this is probably a good moment for sending in your design.

1 don't know how the Queen would feel about being on a coin with a hole, but I am sure the Royal Family would not wish to stand in the way of progress. A [ I coin, with or without a hole, would certainly have a much longer life than that shoddy piece of paper, the one with Newton on it.

If I were asked to submit a design I think I would eut the present SOp in half, not only because it seems simpler than making a hole but also because it makes reasonable allowance for the inevitable further decline in the value of the pound during the next few years.

There are, of course, experts who will tell you that ail this talk about coins and banknotes is irrelevant. They are the apostles of the so-called "cashless society" and they point out that, with a little care, it is already possible to live a rich, full life without soiling one's hands with notes or coins in any form. Cheque books, credit cards, travellers' cheques, season tickets, trading stamps, luncheon vouchers and various other devices are ail considered acceptable substitutes. Even ambulances and mortuaries take credit cards these days and, as we have heard in the latest Old Bailey sex trial, you no longer need cash to get attention in a massage parlour.

The Chancellor gave the whole business a further boost in his Budget and it is by no means inconceivable that cash will eventually become obsolete. I won't be sorry.

'" Hmr aho111 this: ire 1110\'e Lukeji·om sai/ors to medicine . and then f;il'e Christopher the lrm•e/ port/àlio ... , ..

PUNCH , April 261978

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715

THEATRE GIJIDE **A Chorus Line ( Drury Lane ). The best musical of '76: for the best of '78, see next entry but one. ( 4.8. 76 ) **Bedroom Farce ( National ) . Still the funniest of the Ayckbourn comedies thanks largely to Michael Gough and Joan Hickson. Closing May so hasten along. ( 23.3.77 ) **Bubbling Brown Sugar ( Royalcy ) . Billy Daniels, eider statesman of the New York nightclub circuit, starring in a show which is atone and the same time Harlem's requiem mass and its triumphal procession: ail the great black music of the inter-war years. Treat yoursclf. ( 5 .1 0.77 ) Dirty Linen ( Ans ) . Tom Stoppard's hilarious account of Miss Gotobed and the House of Commons. Long-running production now shows signs of wear and tear. ( 21.4. 76 ) **Filumena ( Lyric ) . Joan Plowright in another de Filippo tragi-comedy of Neapolitan family life. ( 16.11.77 ) **Half-Life ( Duke of Yorh' s) . John Gielgud in his lyrical prime, elegantly bestriding Julian Mitchell comedy which looks like Enid Bagnold retouched by Coward . ( 23 .11. 77 ) ***Henry V and Henry VI ( Aldwych ) . Last summer's Stratford triumphs with Alan Howard in both title roles and full RSC in strong support: note especially those Saturdays when they perform ail three parts of H enry V I in unforgettable nine-hour marathon. *I Love My Wife ( Prince of Wales ) . Broadway musical which draws heavily on the wife-swapping plot of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice but well worth seeing . ( 19.10.77) lpi Tombi (Ca mbridge ) . Where the sun beats down upon the plain. (5 .11. 75 )

Irene ( Adelphi J. l 920s musical thoughtfully disinterred for ail who fancy a slow death by drowning in hot marzipan. ( 23.6.76 )

***Macbeth ( Young Vic ) . RSC 135-minute thriller with McKellen and Dench. Unmissable. ( 28.9.77 ) *Oliver! ( Albe1y ) . The one and only postwar classic of the English musical theatre, given here a stu rd y revival with Roy H udd leading the B team . ( 11 .1.78 ) **Priva tes on Parade ( Piccadilly ) . Camp entertainment set in l 940s Malaya. Denis Quilley in fine drag but language forad ultsonly. ( 15.2.78 ) Shut Your Eyes And Think of England ( Apollo ) . Audience more sinned against than Sinden. ( 30.11.77 ) ***Side By Side By Sondheim ( Garrick ) . Third year, third cast, third theatre and Still the most recommendable light entertainment in town. ( 12.5.76 ) Ten Times Table ( Globe ) . Newest of the Ayckbourn's, with Julia McKenzie and Paul Eddington organising horrendous pageant. ( 12.4.78 ) **The Cherry Orchard ( National ) . Finney, Tu tin, Stephens and the Peter Hall ail-stars. **The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin ( Mayfair J. No, not a late Bicentennial treat but Gordon Chater's solo show about a transvestite elocution teacher: the most highly acclaimed Australian play of the 70s and rightly . ( 15.2.78 ) The Guardsman ( National ). Wonderfully polished hat, very small white rabbit inside, but worth seeing for Diana Rigg's superstar Budapest actress. C losing May. ( 11.1.78 ) ***The Old Country ( Queen's ) . Alan Bennett's modern classic about exiles of the spirit: Alec Guinness in superlative form. Critics' award for play of the year. ( 14. 9.77 ) The Travelling Music Show ( H er Majesty's ) . Should be asked to m ove on. ( 5.4.78 ) *Whose Life is it Anyway? ( M ermaid ) . Tom Conti stunningly good in Brian Clark hospital drama . ( 15.3.78 ) S.M.

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Edna Ching suffers from multiple sclerosis - at th e moment an incurable illness. To help her develop the use of hcr partially paralyscd right arm, our Technical Section has designed a long- handled fl ex ible hair brush - and so Edna Ching can brush her own hair.

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Appeal' and Puhlici11 Sccre~u'I : Air Commodore D. i·. R1"on: OBI . Dl ·C. A IT.

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HEATH ER JENNERMARRIAGE BUREAU 124. New Bond St W.1.

01 -629 9634 (Est 1939) Nat1onw1de Interviewers Only clients free

to marry accep!ed.

A RARE AND ELEGANT GIFT A delicately decorated coin to

wear as a pendant. Eac h one is hand-painted, mounted in sterlin g si lver with a ste rlin l! silver chain and cornes individuail y boxed in a luxurious prcsentation case.

Priccs st~ rt at f 15.00. Send sae. large size for new full colour brochure to: ART COINS, (dcpt.

M/A), 17 Brunswick R oad , Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey KT2 5SB. Telepho ne service on 01-486 5353 (24 lm.).

PUNCH , April 261978

FILMGDIDE ***Annie Hall ( AA, Cinecenta 1 and 2 Leicester Square, Filmcenta Charing Cross Road, and elsewhere) . Sin ce O scar rime, London has become dotted with reruns ofWoody Allen films- but Annie Hall is by far the best. Most of his pictures have flashes of insight but with Annie Hall he seems to have corne close to total comedy . ( 5.10.77) Close Encounters Of The Third Kind ( A , Odeon, L eicester Square) . A muddled, quasi-mystical piece of good old fashioned balderdash with superior special effects . ( 15.3.78 ) *Dark Star ( A, Paris Pullman, Phoenix E. Finchley ) .

Shoestring space drama of boredom and frustration "out there" . A beach ball with webbed feet is the only alien on view and the climax has a sort of weary logic, thanks to a literalminded talking H-bomb.

The Devil's Advocate ( AA, Plaz a 3, Piccadilly Circus ) .

John Mills, Stephane Audran and Daniel Massey star in earthbound enquiry into whether a British deserter in ltaly in World War Two was a saint or not. Ifyou can sit through it you deserve canonisation . ( 19.4.78) ***T h e Goodbye Girl ( A, Warner W est End, ABC Shaftesbury Avenue, Studio Oxford Circus, and elsewhere ) .

Neil Simon's latest look at life among apartment dwellers in New York. Not only well acted by Richard Dreyfuss (who won an Oscar for it) but also Marsha Mason as the lady in the piece, and Quin Cummings as her daughter. Slickly directed by Herbert Ross. ( 5.4.78 ) **Julia ( A, Odeon, Haymarket ). Fred Zinnemann has taken Lillian Hellman's story and transferred it almost intact

to the screen the better to demonstrate the talents of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and the consistently excellent Jason Robards. ( 1.3.78) **The Lace Maker ( AA, Academy 2, Oxford Street ).

Quiet, charming and deeply felt story of young love with the exquisite Isabelle Huppert. ( 26.10.77) ***1900 ( X, Act One, Classic One, Oxford Street. Act Two, Classic Four, Oxford Street ) . Movie making on the grand scale (four hours in ail) by the Italian master, Bertolucci . Outstanding performances by Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Laura Betti, and Donald Sutherland. ( 22.3.78 ) **Pardon, Mon Affaire ( X, Curz on Cinema, Wl ) . A splendid trifte, or perhaps more aptly, a soufflé. (18.1. 78 ) Saturday Night Fever ( X, Empire L eicester Square, and ail over ). John Travolta makes what would otherwise be a somewhat leaden excursion into contemporary Brooklyn discos almost worth a visit. If you're into the Bec Gees' music-well, there's plenty. ( 5.4 .78) Semi-Tough ( AA, Cinecenta 3 and 4, Screen On Th e Green !slington ) . Kris Kristofferson, Burt Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh. Semi-funny. ( 19.4.78) **Sleeper/Love And Death ( A, Studio, Oxford Circus ) .

A Woody Allen double bill. Sleeper is about the future, Love And Death is about the past. Both have moments of high hilarity. ( 12.4.78) **That Obscure Object Of Desire ( X, Academy One, Oxford Street ) . Luis Bunuel's surreal jape about an elderly Lothario's quest for sexual gratification. Immaculate playing and direction more than compensate for the occasional puzzlingmoment. ( 5.4.78 ) * *The Turning Point ( A, Leicester Square Theatre ) .

Another smasher from Herbert Ross about the frustrations of life in and out of the ballet. Starry performances by Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, and splendid debuts from Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leslie Browne. ( 19.4.78) B.T.

George Burns is Gad... and John Denver dœsrit believe it either. ~

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A JERRYWEINTRAUB PRODUCTION

GEORGE BURNS • JOHNDENVER · "OH,GOD!: TERI GARR· DONALD PLEASENCE Based on the Novel by AVERY CORMAN Screenplay by LARRY GELBART Produced by JERRY WEINTRAUB Directed by CARL REINER

PUNCH , April 261978

717

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CAPTION COMPETITION· 4511

The two cartoons below were first printed in 1910 and 1933.

A prize of flO will be awarded for the best new caption to each. Entries, on a postcard, should be addressed to Caption Competition 451, Punch, 23 Tudor Street, London EC4, and arrive by first post on Tuesday May 2. The winners of Competition 449 are on the right.

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I NFO R MATION: Thi s is Vol. 274, No. 7177. Copyright< hy Punch Publications Ltd. 1978. Ali ri{:hts of reproduction an• reserved in respect of a li art1des. drawin!(s. sketches. etc .. published in Punch in ai l parts of the world. Reproductions or imitations of any of these are expressly forhidden. The Proprietors w1 JI always cons id er requests for permission to reprint. Editorial co ntributions requiring an answer should be acco mpanied by a stamped and addressed envelope. No rcsponsihility can be taken for co ntributions lost or damaged in the post. CONDITIONS OF SALE AND SUPPL Y. This periodical is sold suhject to the following condi tions. namely. that it sha ll not without the written consent of the publishers first given. be lent. resold. hired out or otherwise disposed of in a mutilated condition or in any unauthorised caver by way of Trade or affixed to or as part of any publication or adve rti sing. lite ra ry or pictorial matter whatsoevcr. Registered at the Post Offic<' as a newspaper.

Postage ofthis issue: in land 15p: overseas by printed paper reduced rate 15p. ADDRESSES: Editorial and advertisini:. n Tudor Street. London . EC'4Y OHH . telephone: 01-583 9199; telegram. Unipapers, London . telex 265863: Circulation a nd subscr iptions. Pun ch Subscription Dept.. Watli ng Street. Bletchley. Milton Keynes.

M K2 2B W. England. YEAHL Y SUBSCRI PTION RATES. lnland .!:12.50; USA a nd Canada $35.00 or the eq uival ent in your own curre ncy. Overseas suhscribers shou ld remit by cheques on their own bankers. Typesetti ng by C. E. Dawkins (Typesetters) Ltd ., London SE! 1 UN. Printed in England by Geoq:e Pu Iman & Son s Ltd .. Cranford Press. Watling Street. Bl et c hl ey. Milton Keynes. M K2 2BW. and published weekly by Punch Publi cations Ltd .. Watling Street. Blctchley. Mil ton Keynes. M K2 2BW.

718

PUN CH, A p ril 26 1978

Punch. April 26 1978

ITS ABOUT AS LIKELY AS ADUFF BOTTLEOf HIRONDELLE.

For some years now, Hirondelle has enjoyed the reputation of being a consistently good table wine.

These days, with the proliferation of unfamiliar wines on the market, it pays even more to know exactly what 1t is you're buying.

Maintaining the quality of wine will always be a delicate business. Not only great care and skill are needed. lt also takes years of experience.

Hedges & Butler, who select and ship Hirondelle, have that experience.

They've been wine merchants since 1667.

That's why they're confident about Hirondelle.

Confident enough to guarantee every bottle.

Hirondelle is available in red, Jweet white, medium路 dry white and roJ茅.