Take Two

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth.

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least.

Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this. Yet though Separate Tables undoubtedly depicts a world where small-mindedness and meanness of spirit can flourish, its final scenes present a moving triumph for English decency, compassion, courage and restraint.

In the interval I confessed to my nostalgia for the buttoned-up times Rattigan depicts to a colleague and he told me I was bonkers. Living in the Fifties would have been hell, he said — rotten food, endless class snobbery, primitive dentistry and a grim, drab desire to conform.

Yet the older I grow, the more I miss the stoicism of those times, the innate sense of decorum and dignity. The vulgarity and emotional incontinence of 21st-century Britain, where ignorance is worn like a badge of pride, and so many seem willing to wash their dirty laundry in public, especially if the price is right, hardly seem an improvement.

All of which perhaps explains the fury of my reaction when I heard that Chris Evans was to replace Terry Wogan on the breakfast programme on Radio Two. Yes, I know Wogan is Irish, but he’s worked here for most of his career and received a knighthood from the Queen.