Making the Cat Laugh (23 page)

Dickens boiled with sarcasm (‘Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of
Robinson Crusoe
, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in’); and then embarked on a thoroughly sardonic rewrite of
Cinderella
incorporating absurdly modish references to tax reform, vegetarianism and, interestingly, the rights of women. Cinderella, in this version, was a moral swot and reviler of meat, who on becoming queen did all sorts of absurdly fashionable things. She ‘threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices, and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and
whom nobody dared to love
’. It is the mark of a great writer that he allows his own imagination to scare him like this. Come to think of it, this must have been the version that was read to the infant Neil Lyndon in his cot.

Where does it all stop? Well, it won’t stop at all, of course. Walt Disney is supposed to have said, ‘People don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. In the end they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.’ But now Linda Woolverton, the scriptwriter of Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast,
has started saying she would like to remake ‘the old Disneys’, so it turns out that nothing is sacred after all. Cinderella, she
says, needs to stand up to the ugly sisters, stop hanging around with mice, and not necessarily marry the prince. Hmm. Snow White should not stay at home all day but work with her chums in the mines and marry one of the vertically challenged men with pickaxes. And lastly, Sleeping Beauty – the most famously inert character of them all – should ‘track down and personally punish’ her wicked stepmother immediately she wakes up in the glass box. Whether she will punish her stepmother by making her watch the new version of
Cinderella
is not made clear.

I promise I didn’t make any of this up. I just wonder how serious Linda Woolverton was when she said it. Currently she has been let loose by Disney on a remake of the famous animal adventure film
The Incredible Journey
, which seems at first glance to have fewer opportunities for political correctness, although the cat could have a wooden leg. Meanwhile, it ought to be said that Belle may indeed be a book-reader, who swoons at the sight of the Beast’s enormous library, yet she is a traditional heroine in most other respects. She is kind, friendly, chats with cockney teapots, and has enormous eyes. And of course she is everso, everso pretty. But then ‘Passable Looking and the Beast’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it somehow.

Anyone watching the BBC news on Sunday night, with its edited highlights of the Remembrance Day ceremony, will have noted a very curious thing. The newsmen cut out the two minutes’ silence. Thus, the clock went ‘Bong’, the distant cannon went ‘Bang’, and the next thing you knew, they were playing the Last Post and laying wreaths. Since the annual two minutes’ reflective silence is about the most moving thing on television, it is possible that the edit was intended to protect the already raw feelings of the grief-stricken. But I doubt it. What we witnessed
here was the consequence of fear, of a feeble failure of nerve. You see, silence on the television is about as unthinkable (Oh no!) as blank lines in a newspaper, thus:

In fact, the chances of this gaping white wound not being panic-sutured by someone in the course of the paper’s production (‘What the hell is this? There’s a
space
on page 18!’) are very slim indeed, and I am thoroughly foolhardy even to attempt it.

Gaps are great, however. I firmly believe we should have more gaps, especially in broadcasting. ‘And now on BBC2, er, Nothing. Over on BBC1, in just over ten minutes, good grief, Nothing there, as well.’ Personally, I would embrace the return of the potter’s wheel, the interval bell, the test card, and the inventive use of ‘Normal Programmes Will be Resumed Shortly’, but arguably Nothing could be finer. Don’t other people’s brains get overloaded? Or is it only mine? Has no one else noticed that new books are published every week, without let-up, over and over, till the end of creation? Why don’t they stop sometimes? Why don’t they admit they have run out of ideas? Am I run mad, or just in desperate need of a holiday? Asked recently in a published questionnaire to compose a headline for the event that I would most like to cover, I’m afraid I gave myself away completely. ‘Airwaves eerily silent,’ I wrote, ‘as all networks simultaneously run out of programmes.’

Clearly this is an unusual attitude to our splendiferous burgeoning culture, especially in a television critic, but on the other hand, for God’s sake somebody,
help!
While others famously ‘surf’ through the television channels – presumably humming ‘Catch a Wave’ by the Beach Boys as they paddle back out, letting their fingertips stiffen from prolonged immersion – I find I can only cope by taking short exhilarating dips, then towelling off vigorously and getting fully dressed again. Sharing a sofa (and a remote control) with someone who uses
commercial breaks in cop shows as an opportunity to surf over and ‘see what’s happening in the snooker’ is guaranteed, in fact, to drive me to violence.

‘Shouldn’t we switch back now?’ I say, after a minute has passed.

‘Not yet, this is interesting.’ Pause.

‘Let’s switch back, go on.’

‘Not yet.’ A longer pause, more charged with tension. There is an irritating click of balls.

‘Give me that thing!’ I shout, suddenly. ‘I want to go back to
Columbo!’

At which point a grabbing-and-kicking scuffle breaks out, and the remote control is somehow hurled out of the window, where it lands with a plop in a rain-butt.

Recently on Radio 4 the wonderfully repugnant Alan Partridge (spoof Pringle-wearing radio personality chat-show host) attempted a one-minute silence, when an interviewee supposedly suffered a fatal heart attack in the chair opposite. ‘And now, the one minute’s silence,’ said Partridge (or something similar). ‘Yes, ah-ha, here we go … very respectful, this … in case you’re wondering, anyone who’s just tuned in … this is a One Minute Silence … about half-way through, I should think … it’s very moving, actually … perhaps I could use this opportunity to tell you about next week’s show … or perhaps not … can’t be long now … that’s it! Minute’s up! Lovely.’ Well, I’d just like to say I genuinely appreciated what he was trying to do. So here’s another gap:

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Once, when I was still a literary editor, I was instructed by an ebullient boss to commission a piece from Norman Mailer. ‘Try
Norman Mailer,’ he said. ‘If our usual fee isn’t high enough, tell him we can add an extra fifty quid.’ I dropped the tray of cups I was holding. ‘Something wrong?’ he said. Fighting back tears, I forced out the words, ‘Isseny nnuff.’ ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Isseny NNUFF.’ ‘Oh, you never know,’ said my cheery editor, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Tell you what: you can add a hundred. That ought to do it.’ And he went off home.

The trouble with having low self-esteem is that you recognize immediately when you are out of your depth. I was out of mine from the moment the Manhattan switchboard-operator took my call. ‘You’re calling from where?’ she asked, making me repeat myself more loudly, so that she could hold up the receiver for everyone else to have a good laugh, too. As I felt myself sinking, I realized I was like a character in an American short story, hazarding everything on the tiny chance that someone had once saved Mailer’s life by staunching a gunshot wound with a copy of
The Listener.

Mailer’s agent was clearly a very busy man, with little time to mess around with small fry like me. When he at last spoke to me, I was convinced he was having a haircut and manicure at the same time. He started with the bottom line: ‘You ought to know,’ he declared equably, ‘that Norman’s alimony commitments are so
titanic
that if he writes for anything below his bottom rate he actually ends up in court for defaulting. Now, I’ll tell you that the last time Norman wrote for a magazine, he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Tell me what you are offering and I’ll run it past him.’

I did a rapid calculation on a scrap-pad, and figured we were roughly forty-nine and a half thousand dollars short. Did I have sufficient cojones to pledge the magazine into bankruptcy? No I did not. I added an extra hundred to our top fee (‘I can always sell the car,’ I thought), but my effort elicited no cheers or huzzahs from the agent. As he said goodbye, I heard myself say, ‘Don’t you want to know what we’d like him
to write about?’ but it was too late. I hung up and went home. I never found out whether he ran it past Norman or not, but I have often envisaged it bowling past Mailer at top speed, just as he was bending down to tie his shoelaces.

I have dwelt on this conversation ever since. None of it need be true, of course: the agent may just have been trying to let me down gently. But what a terrible fix for poor Norman. It struck me that we might turn the evidence to our advantage, by printing a slogan across the mast-head: ‘The magazine Norman Mailer can’t afford to write for’. But though I ran this idea past the editor, he didn’t attempt to flag it down.

Contrary to popular preconception, you can meet all sorts on a march to save Radio 4 Long Wave. Oh yes. On Saturday, as our happy band of orderly middle-class protesters set off from Speakers’ Corner and headed for Broadcasting House, I actually found myself demonstrating alongside a woman who reads the
Guardian.
Hey! Right! So let us, once and for all, forget this slur that the Long Wave Campaign is about fuddy-duddy types who think ‘grass roots’ is something to do with
Gardeners’ Question Time.
What Saturday’s protest showed was that it is possible to feel very strongly about an issue yet remain polite, that’s all. ‘What do we want?’ yelled our cheerleader. ‘Radio 4!’ we responded, slightly heady at our own daring. ‘Where do we want it?’ ‘Long Wave!’ ‘How do we ask?’ ‘Please!’

It was a small march, admittedly, but the hell with it, we carried lots of balloons. Efforts to recruit bystanders from Oxford Street (‘Come and join us!’) were slightly optimistic, I thought – the bewildered looks of shoppers telling us what we knew in our hearts already: that the cause of ‘R 4 LW’ is not an instantly emotive one, and that the joke about Duke
Hussey being able to pick up FM reception on his leg is a trifle arcane.

‘What are you protesting about?’ a young woman asked the contingent from Belgium. ‘The BBC wants to put Radio 4 on FM only, which means we won’t get it on the Continent any more.’ The woman walked alongside us while she considered this information, in all its many aspects. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said at last, as she nevertheless noticeably slowed her pace and dropped out. ‘Hey, listen, I hope you get what you want.’ And then, as an afterthought, she called after us, ‘This Radio 4, can you get it here?’

There were contingents from all over the place – all of northern Europe, and lots of areas in Britain where trying to get an FM signal is almost as fruitless and frustrating as trying to get a straight answer from the BBC. Embarrassed that personally I did not live in a far-flung outpost of the Long Wave Diaspora, I admitted
sotto voce
to my exotic
Guardian-reading
friend that my FM reception is actually OK so long as I don’t attempt to move the radio, or stand more than three feet away from it in leather-soled shoes. She seemed relieved. She admitted likewise that hers was also OK, so long as everyone in the kitchen made only limited lateral movements with their upper bodies, and the fridge door was left open.