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Christmas notebook

Barry Humphries

Wednesday, 12th December 2007

Barry Humphries on battling BT and Australia's new Prime Minister

I notice that the Spectator has started to advertise wrist-watches. There seem to be more and more advertisements for these trinkets everywhere you look and I often see handsome old George Clooney flashing his timepiece in the glossies when he isn’t coyly sipping Nespresso. How much money does George need? Another good-looking man facing poverty is David Beckham, who advertises everything you can think of, including his own aftershave called ‘Intimately Beckham’, which sounds about as anachronistic as ‘Sensuously Wolverhampton’. To drop a couple of names, I met him on Thursday at the taping of the last Parkinson show and decided he was very nice indeed. So nice, in fact, that even my client Dame Edna couldn’t bring herself to ask him, with one of those moues of hers, why his wife is called ‘Posh’. I suppose she is posh anyway — by Australian standards.

Name-dropping is the only voluptuous pleasure that should be indulged sparingly, if at all. But when is name-dropping name-dropping, or just talking about people you know? It is only de trop if the dropper deliberately manipulates the conversation in order to show off. I am hitched to a family with close ties to the artistic establishment. My mother-in-law, without a trace of self-consciousness or snobbery, constantly drops illustrious names as if they were uncles and aunties. Thus, Tom is Eliot, Isaiah is Berlin, Henry is Moore and Iris is Murdoch. Last night that old Paul Newman picture The Hustler was on television. I had never seen it and asked my wife if she had.

‘I saw it back in the Sixties at the Curzon,’ she replied. ‘We were hoping it might cheer up Igor after the death of Pope John.’

‘Igor?’

‘Stravinsky.’

Merry Christmas.

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D Brennock

January 3rd, 2008 5:11pm

Mr Humphries, the correct amount to tip a tradesman is £20 and has been for so long now, that it will surely be inflated to a 'nifty' before the end of this year. Had you offered the correct gratuity to your BT engineer it would have been accepted and trousered faster then the speed of a digital telephone exchange, followed, most importantly of all, by the words "Thank you very much Sir, before I leave I had better just check that all your internal extensions are working" This, as I am sure your esteemed colleague, Mary Killen, can confirm, would have saved you many hours on hold to BT and would have proved cost effective in the long run.

David Page

January 8th, 2008 2:01am

I've just caught up with this. From Barry Humphries account inflation in Brown's Britain must be well under control.The BT bill for GBP 346 plus VAT is about what Barry's alter ego Bazza McKenzie had to pay for a taxi ride from London airport in the 1960s.

Rex Mutton

April 16th, 2008 3:48am

The spelling of "Labor" in the Australian political sphere derives from one King O'Malley, American, teetotaller, orator and foundation Member of the Australian Parliament.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_O'Malley

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