Pseudocrap

In Competition No. 2382 you were invited to supply pretentious ‘intellectual’ tosh in the form of a review of a play, book, film or piece of classical music.

Back in 1990 that grand old comper Roger Woddis sent me a wonderful specimen of pseudocrap perpetrated by James Wolcott in the Observer. It deserves some space: ‘What’s interesting about Richard Ford’s Wildlife is not its chipped polish but its numb insularity. For all its Western smoke, it reads like a chamber play for phantoms. It has the ghostly rustle of white folds begging for a bloodstain.’

My apologies to those of you who misread my intentions: the tosh, I presumed, belonged to the reviewer not the work reviewed, and the latter, I also presumed, would be real, not imaginary. There was a general tendency to go over the top, with grotesque, near incomprehensible results which amazed rather than amused. The prizewinners, printed below, avoided this temptation and are rewarded with £30 each, Watson Weeks taking the bonus fiver.

With a more than cursory glance at Euripides’ Cyclops (the one extant satiric drama), Carry on up the Khyber confronts us with the realities of Empire, ably assisted by Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey and Sid James, together with other ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’. The title is richly resonant, hinting at farce and the inevitable schadenfreude, yet with a subtextual high moral seriousness that reflects the zeitgeist and the final endgame. Thus, the scatological (note the rhyming slang in ‘Khyber’) mutates into the eschatological. Likewise, we pause at yet another inflexion of the genre, and the quasi-Empsonian ambiguity of ‘Carry on’. Are we to expect unrestrained, even salacious, behaviour (however overlaid by the angst that is inseparable from the ‘white man’s burden’)? Or is it Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, tinged with the stoicism of Seneca? The film demands nothing less than the most attentive scrutiny.
Watson