In Competition No. 2630 you were invited to imagine that a literary giant of the pre-television age is guest TV critic on The Spectator, and submit an extract from his or her review.
As Emma Woodhouse says, ‘One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.’ So what would the literary greats of the past have thought of 21st-century viewing habits; what, I wonder, would Miss Austen herself have made of a dripping Colin Firth emerging from the lake at Pemberley in a telly adaptation of Pride and Prejudice?
In a small but impressive entry, the poets were in fine voice. Here’s a snippet from Frank McDonald as Chaucer describing the debut of SuBo: ‘One juriste yclept Simon, smoothe lyke oil,/ asked “What’s yer name?” and she said “Susan Boyle.”’ And a cutting couplet as Pope might have written it, courtesy of G.M. Davis: ‘Here freaks abound, a bottom feeding shoal/ Of phantom selves, devoid of sense or soul.’ But this week’s star of the show is Noel Petty, who pockets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each.
Your editor having assured me that ignorance is no barrier to criticism, I ventured at hazard and came upon a kind of collective viva voce wherein students at the university underwent an examination at the hands of an inquisitor. The examiners perhaps wisely eschewed questions on Greek and Latin, allowing the students to manifest impressive knowledge of physical disportments and prodigious abilities in the identification of low music. Neither of these faculties would appear to furnish them with the requisite resources either to administer physic or preach a sermon on the Trinity. The inquisitor’s chief concern was to discompose the students, berate their deficiencies, and demonstrate his superior learning. Nonetheless, I found it impossible to witness this seductive spectacle without crying out such answers as fell within my cognizance, the only witness to my vanity being Boswell, who did little other than scribble in his little book the while.
Noel Petty/Samuel Johnson
Cream everywhere. Cream in the soups and in the sauces. Cream in the syllabubs and sponges, the charlottes and surprises. Cream in the meringues and in the pavlovas. Cream ladled, whipped and piped; cream heated, cream frozen. Cream singled and doubled and clotted, over and over.
Never such creaminess before, gleaming with temptation on the glowing screen. It would entrance the most jaded sybarite, weary from his tasting of all London’s high-and-mighty cooking, or all the fantasy of foodery that fills the TV channels. No Scrooge here, no ghost bewailing the thinness of the fare. It promises more — not only for the hungry, the undernourished, but also for the well-cushioned, the glossy-kitchened with their eager tongues. And at the centre the Goddess of Cream herself, plump as a dumpling, sweet as an egg. What delights she licks off her fingers; what treats. What satisfactions!
D.A. Prince/Charles Dickens
— And yet, Madam, have you ever viewed such a farrago? Contraxi, non contraxi — this, I believe would be a most literal translation: And I claim no more. — You may delineate yourself a Pilgrim if you so desire: so quoth Mr EDMONDS. — It is no matter. I should have as soon elected the thirteenth as the twenty-first, for you must know that the oscitation of a red box scarce differs from the mouth of a man who, adjusting his jaw, brings forth an expostulation signifying torpor. My father, by the bye, could not abide a red box: — It reminded him of an old hat.
Very much the same.
J. Delingpole is away, — I say no more as to WHY, — but he hath missed a poor tantrum in a teacup. I would as soon encounter a Banker on a highway, which should not advantage him, —
Bill Greenwell/Laurence Sterne
That fiction may assume forms other than those traditionally (and currently) prescribed for it by a canon of accepted and respected aesthetic practices — the ‘rule-book’, one might say, of an established literary culture — must be recognised by even the most staid of authors. Yet in the case of the televised chapter-pay, the ‘soap’, high themes of courtship, ambition, friends and adversaries, while all patently ‘there’, are subsumed by the importunate presence of low passions and ceaseless skulduggery. Emmerdale paints a Yorkshire hamlet as a seething matrix of vice, crime and dedicated immorality on the scale of certain louche neighbourhoods of New York City. Prodigiously skirting limits, it lays stress on what M. Zola has christened la bête humaine, the monster within, whose carnal appetites burn as ferociously as a Bessemer converter, while the spiritual, the uplifting, receives only ‘mouth-honour’, in the name of a ‘people’s art’.
Basil Ransome-Davies/H•nry J•m•s
At the charming Christmas Ball, Strictly Come Dancing, given by the venerable Mr Forsyth and his beautiful granddaughter, the young people appeared positively competitive, this probably a matter of dowries, since many of the ladies clearly could not afford sufficient dress material. Some of the newer dances seemed a trifle intimate for Derbyshire.
Otherwise much time was occupied by a Mr David Tennant, who seemingly belies the truth universally acknowledged that a man of his age not possessed of a wife must bat for the other team. He organised a parlour-game (though what, pray, is a buzzcock?), led the amateur dramatics with Hamlet, and as Dr Who most bravely saved the universe, being in possession of a stately pile of curious dimensions, and the ability to be reborn younger, which even my Mr Darcy never managed! Your reviewer shall ascertain who his parents are, and obtain an introduction.
Brian Murdoch/Jane Austen
No. 2633: Lost
You are invited to submit a poem lamenting the loss of a small but important object (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 3 February.
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