What is a real woman? My difficult client, the Australian gigastar Dame Edna Everage, is seriously miffed at BBC’s cancellation of her forthcoming appearance on Have I Got News For You. She flew from Australia especially to record this show, installing herself, as usual, in the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester Hotel at her own expense, but the producer changed his mind yesterday and politely gave her the shove, claiming that the show only featured ‘real people’. The insult is all the more hurtful since she has, in the past, done Desert Island Discs and published a volume of autobiography which was always listed in the ‘non-fiction’ category. ‘Not a real woman!’ the Dame spluttered to me on the phone last night. ‘Tell that to Sir Howard Glove, my gynaecologist!’ The producers claimed the wags on the HIGNFY panel would be be overshadowed and discomfited by Edna’s heady and formidable personality. The matter is now in the hands of her ruthless legal team. Another headache for the beleaguered Lord Patten.
I often take friends from Australia and the USA, unfamiliar with London, on my personal tour of the city. Not seldom they exclaim at the hideous and gimcrack modern buildings. Most people know of England’s proud architectural heritage and are dismayed by the fact that there does not seem to have been a decent building erected in the capital since 1920 except for a few modernistic constructions of the Thirties, erected in the hope that they might one day be used in an episode of Poirot. Embarrassed for England, as I so often am, I usually improvise an explanation. I am at my most successful and convincing when I explain that the most promising English architects of their age were all in the RAR (Royal Architects Rifles) during the first world war and were wiped out to a man by the Hun in a Zeppelin raid, so that all construction in the post-war period was supervised by volunteers. A similar disaster occurred in the 1940s during a freak tsunami on the Isle of Wight, resulting in the massacre of an entire generation of British architects, leaving the task of rebuilding London in the hands of amateurs and charlatans. Discouraged by these depredations, subsequent generations of British architects merely gave up. If tourists look sceptical I have only to point to the National Theatre, the Hyde Park Barracks or the Gherkin for them to buy my story.
I am dozing off as I report that Weidenfeld and Nicholson have just published in an edition de luxe some hitherto unknown letters of John Lennon to various recipients. The book is absolute garbage of course, but it was reviewed the other day in the Sunday Times culture (sic) section under the headline a hard day’s write. Not even the Sun would have devised such a woeful pun, and the sub-editor who thought that up should have immediately gone into a corner and slashed his wrists.
At a brief ceremony at Australia House last Wednesday, my wife became an Australian citizen. John Dauth, our splendid high commissioner, and the small but distinguished assembly then sang a stanza of our National Anthem, ‘Advance Australia Fair’, to the 17th-century tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’. The words are well up to the standard set by the anthems of other nations, until we come across the line: ‘our land is girt by sea’. Schoolchildren in Australia apparently have trouble with this line and they haven’t ever encountered that diminutive of the once popular girl’s name Gertrude. Mind you, Gert-by-Sea does sound like a saucy seaside resort of the Donald McGill kind.
I’ve just been reading Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence again. As a novel it’s a failure, but redeemed by Lawrence’s genius for describing landscape and assessing the Australian character, especially considering he was only there for three months. I love the thought of artists in incongruous settings: Verlaine in Bournemouth, Van Gogh in Brixton, Anthony Trollope in Sydney, Gauguin in Melbourne (which, in a letter to his wife in Copenhagen, he compared to Paris!) and Chekhov in Sri Lanka, where he acquired a dusky concubine in the space of a few days. When Marx and Engels were touring Britain in 1879 they were rabble-rousing in Edinburgh, and after the lecture the workers got them so drunk they missed their train to Dundee and thereby the Tay Bridge Disaster, about which William Topaz McGonagall wrote his famous poem. The world might have been a different place if they’d been on time.
I am still brooding dyspeptically over Have I Got News For You and wondering who the BBC considers to be a real person. Jimmy Savile perhaps? A pederastic friend of mine died recently and at the funeral the eulogist said with unconscious veracity, ‘Frank touched everyone he knew.’ The same might have been said of old Jimmy.