Ask the man in the street to quote a line from one of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and he might struggle. Ask him whether he’s heard the phrase, ‘Naughty but nice’, specifically in the context of cream cakes, and you will probably make his day. It was Salman Rushdie who came up with that slogan in his early career as an adman. Remember the ‘irresistibubble’ tag for Aero chocolate bars? He was responsible for that, too.
‘I feel at bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has been piled on top of that’
If there’s any embarrassment on Rushdie’s part (and why should there be?) that some of his best-known words are from the sides of buses, it was undetectable as he sat down with John Wilson on This Cultural Life last week. Their conversation was especially poignant because it had originally been scheduled to take place the week after Rushdie was stabbed in America in August 2022. Describing himself now as ‘surprisingly well’ and ‘a medical miracle’, the novelist alluded to his recent memoir Knife as ‘a way of handling’ what happened, before speaking of his determination to move on.
This Cultural Life being a broadly retrospective programme, moving on, in this case, meant moving back beyond recent history to Rushdie’s childhood and formative literary influences. He cited first of all the independence and partition of India in 1947 as the foundation and deepest source of inspiration for his prose as well as his character: ‘I feel at rock bottom that I’m still that boy from Bombay and everything else has just been piled on top of that.’
The programme acquired a distinctly biographical flavour as Rushdie used his selection of cultural influences to more or less tell his life story, proceeding from India to his arrival at Rugby school, thence Cambridge (where E.M. Forster encouraged him to write), New York and his decade in hiding.
I would love to have heard his thoughts, via Forster, on A Passage to India. Instead, and perhaps more profitably, we were treated to some reflections on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. One of the most arresting moments in the programme was when Rushdie remembered a passage from the novel in which a man’s blood is described as travelling through a town along a technically impossible path before landing at his mother’s feet some distance away. It illustrated perfectly what Rushdie said of emotional truth and reality transcending fantasy in the best passages of magical realism.
John Wilson makes an art of being unobtrusive, but his questions and gentle steering of the conversation have been key to the success of This Cultural Life. There is so much ground to cover that the temptation would be to interject to ask more questions. Wilson gave Rushdie the stage to say what he wanted to say and you could tell Rushdie respected him for it.
How tedious, I thought, when I read the blurb for Vessels of Memory: Glass Ships of Sunderland, a documentary on glass-blowing and the floundering British glass industry, which airs on Radio 4 this Sunday. My misgivings were immediately dispelled when I tuned in to hear a beautiful Japanese-Sunderland accent guiding me through the world in glass – window, smartphone, wine glass, tumblers…
Ayako Tani was drawn to Sunderland, a long-term home of glass manufacturing, from Tokyo, where she worked in an office. She speaks lyrically of handling a material that has always obsessed her. ‘When it’s molten,’ she says, ‘you have to keep turning the rod as if you control your runny honey on your spoon.’ Fail to turn it quickly enough and it will spool indelibly on the table.
Some apparently view glass as an enemy to control and conquer. Making it involves an almighty struggle against centrifugal force, heat and gravity. Others feel bound to respect the material. ‘You can’t bully it,’ says one glass-maker. ‘You kind of have to reason with it. It’s a bit like a relationship where you have to talk it round to your way of working.’
Several of the artisans interviewed for this brilliantly produced documentary started out making Pyrex at Sunderland’s world-famous plant. When it was closed in 2007 and transferred to Europe, many of the heartbroken British workers turned their skills to making ships in bottles for the tourist market.
This proved a tremendous success, with four or five British companies capitalising on the demand. But it was not to last. In came a man with an invention for machines capable of mass-producing ships in bottles. Those machines were built and have now been transferred to China. How are the people of Sunderland to compete when the Chinese models retail for as little as £5? Just as you think it can’t get any worse, we hear that the National Glass Centre, for which Sunderland remains well known, is facing closure by 2026. What a perfectly told story this is for our times.
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