Then there is Margaret Thatcher, into whose universe double meanings and humour had never swum. Introduced at a training centre to a large youth (‘who was, as it happens, black’, adds Hoggart warily), she noticed he was brandishing a giant wrench. She said, ‘Goodness, I’ve never seen a tool as big as that’. Invited to fire a field-gun in the Falklands, she asked, ‘But mightn’t it jerk me off?’ The only thing is, instead of portraying her as one of the cast of a Carry On film, this just makes her sound rather human, which makes the laughter die a little, always a professional risk to the gigglers in the Gallery.
For it is not the achievements, or lack of them, of such people, or even what they represent, that interests a sketchwriter: it is their absurdity. So a slight despair hangs over these very funny stories, the despair of the stand-up comic, only here obliged to mine his material from the egomaniacs and the disturbed, and laugh on and on into a dark eternity.
As in most journalists’ memoirs, Hoggart, of course, finds his own colleagues far more interesting. He didn’t much like Princess Diana, and quotes with some glee Alan Coren’s reply on The News Quiz when asked about land-mines, which the Princess had then discovered. ‘I don’t know anything about landmines or Princess Di, except you’d be mad to poke either of them.’ The recording has now been locked away in a BBC safe.
It is not just sketchwriting. Reporting on the US for the Guardian he goes to a volcano then expected to blow at any minute and meets an old man, straight out of The Waltons, who doesn’t believe this and has stayed on. The interview, like most things in this book, is funny, except that two weeks later the volano does blow. Two years later Hoggart goes back, and is told what happened when rescuers found a man dead in his car, his body intact. ‘But when they tried to take him out his body just fell away, like a cooked chicken.’ And for a moment the giggling has to stop.
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