Roger Lewis | The Spectator columnists & writers

Even the Queen wasn’t spared Prince Philip’s bad temper

Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give very little away. ‘He would just look at me balefully and say nothing,’ Brandreth writes. Wondering what Prince Philip’s philosophy of life might be, ‘I didn’t get very far’. When asked about his childhood,‘he brushed away the subject’. Prince Philip’s attitude to parenthood was a flat: ‘We did our best.’ His opinion of the Queen Mother: ‘He would not be drawn.’ His summing up of the consort’s existence: ‘I tried to find useful things to do. I did my best’ — e.g. by introducing a footman training programme or building a log cabin at Sandringham. The encounters often seemed to splutter to an inconsequential halt, with the Prince shrugging his shoulders and muttering: ‘You can’t argue with the inevitable.

Beauty and the beast: Jane Birkin’s love affair with Serge Gainsbourg

I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward plays and a cabaret singer who’d worked with Charles Hawtrey, and when I invited her to a party once she drove her Mini up the steps and into the hotel lobby. Jane’s father, David, had a good war, his boat picking up pilots and spies hidden by the Resistance on the Breton coast. He told me ’Allo ’Allo wasn’t a comedy, it was documentary realism. He endured many operations on his optic nerve. A piece of hip bone was grafted to his eye socket. His lungs, as Jane says, were weakened by ‘too many anaesthetics’. The Birkin fortune came from Nottingham lace. There were aristocrats (the Russells) in the background.

‘Social distance shaming’ is getting nasty

The Queen said in her address to the nation that what’ll get us through the lockdown and its ramifications will be our traditional British good humour. I’m not certain. Tempers are beginning to fray — and as we are looking at another week, minimum, of house imprisonment, I predict disaster. It is getting quite tense out there. A day or so ago my wife and I, peaceable elderly folk, were bumbling along the promenade, here on the south coast. A jogger went past, shouting at us: ‘Effing morons!’ On his way back past us, he again said: ‘Effing morons! Take exercise!’ Had I a gun, I’d honestly have shot his head off. Joggers are always vile anyway, and the ones wearing face masks are the worst. But what’s emerging, across the country, is rudeness, sarcasm and outright rebukes, all in the name of what I’ve heard termed ‘social distance shaming’.

Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head for the screen. They also developed Lucky Jim as a television series and found Kingsley Amis pie-eyed, maudlin and testy, ‘jealous of his son’s success’. They wrote The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks for the disgusting Michael Winner (who once told a starlet: ‘What this part does not require is a diploma from Rada. What it does require is a great pair of tits. Let’s have a look at ’em, then.

Love your enmities

Grudges make the world go around, according to Sophie Hannah. They are ‘an important and fascinating part of human experience’, which ought to be ‘protective, life-enhancing and fun’. I think this overstates the case somewhat, as I can’t see any pleasurableness, though I am aware that my own ability to harbour resentments is possibly pathological and blood-soaked. The first thing I do each day is scan the obituary pages to see if any enemy has met with a fatal accident — and I fully understand Auden’s line about hearing with satisfaction, much later in life, of ‘the death by cancer of a once hated school master’. Not that being dead lets anyone off the hook. I still seethe about the little character actor who, though a paedophile known to the authorities, hired lawyers to persuade a judge that this was an inadmissible irrelevance, and that he could still sue me for libel to protect his reputation.

Biografiends

I saw a biopic about Morecambe and Wise recently. The actors impersonating the comedians were not a patch on the originals — how could they be? You need a genius to play a genius. I often wonder if my own HBO Peter Sellers movie would have been improved if someone fiery, of the calibre of Gary Oldman or Sacha Baron Cohen, had been cast instead of Geoffrey Rush, who was muffled under prosthetic make-up. But my point is, biopics seldom come off, and nor do biographies. Indeed, it is a reprehensible and misguided genre. Privacy is violated, creative achievements are explained away, and great men and women are unmasked as sneaky, predatory, cruel and ordinary. Humphrey Carpenter wrote all his biographies — of Auden, Britten and Ezra Pound — in this way.

Broken dreams | 19 October 2017

In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and burn. Oliver! ran for 2,618 performances, but no other Dickens adaptation has succeeded— and Oliver! had to overcome a reluctant producer who’d suggested it could be much improved with an ‘all-black cast’. And would Lionel Bart’s plan to cast Elizabeth Taylor as Nancy, Richard Burton as Bill Sikes, and Spike Milligan as Fagin have helped or hindered the longevity of his show? Flops provide rich subject matter —lovingly explored in Must Close Saturday — and it is easy with the benefit of hindsight to scoff at the bizarre notions that have been set to music: the electric chair; Dr Crippen; Scapa Flow (‘Earl Mountbatten inspected a cast line-up’); the match girls at the Bryant & May factory; Francis Drake (‘randy sailors pillaging Portsmouth in search of the city’s whores’); Hoxton Babies’ Home; premature ejaculation (referred to as ‘an impatient groin’, with Roy Castle); Christmas crackers (Pull Both Ends — it opened and closed in July); highwaymen; and Barnado’s orphanages.

Spectator books of the year: Roger Lewis recommends his own unwritten books

I wish I could pull off the Anthony Burgess stunt and recommend books of my own — Erotic Vagrancy, about Burton and Taylor, and Growing Up With Comedians, about, well, comedians. Both are doing well on Amazon and have garnered wonderful reviews. They are clearly my most successful and esteemed achievements. Unfortunately, neither title actually exists as such and no words have been written. The publishers jumped the gun with their announcements — though in our ‘virtual’ world perhaps this no longer matters. A book I do have physically in my hands, which I enjoyed immensely, is David Hare’s The Blue Touch Paper (Faber, £20), which is as phosphorescent as a Larkin poem. It is easy enough to see how the puritanical repressions and genteelisms of post-war Bexhill-on-Sea fomented Hare’s anger and gave him impetus as a playwright — but what about his mother? I have read no more powerful a scene than the one where Nancy Hare, after a lifetime of provincial middle-class ‘recessiveness and apprehension’, waits until her deathbed before she can finally snap: ‘Well then damn you.

They sought paradise in a Scottish field — and found hunger, boredom and mosquitoes

Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because it promised ‘challenging times ahead’. If, in the not too distant future, famines and droughts more or less wipe us out, that will be our own fault for allowing population levels to reach an unsustainable nine billion — the predicted figure for 2050. How much better the planet will be with a select handful living in their villages of yurts, log cabins, teepees and straw-bale huts, the children gambolling happily ‘amidst the bracken and the trees’. The air will be cleaner. Wildlife ‘will make a comeback’. Neighbours will help each other out. People will be fitter as a result of their manual labour.

Spectator books of the year: Roger Lewis on hating Sheridan Morley

Sheridan Morley was an old enemy of mine, so I was thrilled to see him brilliantly denounced and called to account by Jonathan Croall in his first-class book about writing a book, In Search of Gielgud: A Biographer’s Tale (Herbert Adler Publishing, £10.95). Morley is called an ‘arrogant, self-important and spectacularly lazy hack’, whose work was ‘sycophantic and severely lacking in depth’. One almost feels sorry for the old boy. Staying with the theatrical theme, Covering Shakespeare by David Weston (Oberon Books, £14.99) is a highly recommended rollicking account of being a jobbing actor. ‘I always thought I’d do Bottom one day,’ says Weston, who was Ian McKellen’s understudy as Lear, ‘but it was not to be.’ It is not generally known that Peggy Ashcroft had an earpiece under her wig so that she could listen to cricket commentaries, or that Edith Evans believed the secret of stage-acting was to ‘stare out front and think dirty’.

A Stratford Stalin: the nasty, aggressive and stupid world of Joan Littlewood

If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was — yet I must admit it was fun making notes on her spitefulness. Few escaped her scorn and derision: Sybil Thorndike (‘a shocking actress’), Rachel Kempson (‘she had a face like a scraped bone’), Laurence Olivier (‘not trying’), T.S. Eliot (‘thin gruel’), Daniel Massey (‘a dud’) and John Gielgud (‘voice wanking’). Rather wonderful that last one, let’s be honest. Joan dismissed every one of the Redgraves (‘How do these untalented people make it?’) and when she saw Flora Robson, Cedric Hardwicke and Ralph Richardson, she was ‘appalled’. Shakespeare didn’t quite make the grade, because ‘too politically middle-of-the-road’, and neither did the second world war impress her, as it was ‘large, boring’.

Paul Merton’s is the most boastful autobiography in years

Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At school Paul Merton was terrorised by a nun who, in her black outfit with a white band, ‘looked like an angry pint of Guinness’. She walloped the future comedian if ever she detected an imaginative strain in his English compositions. ‘You can’t write about things that aren’t true,’ asserted this believer in the actuality of virgin births and rising from the dead. For stating that Beethoven invented rice pudding and Mozart baked the first crème brûlée, Merton was told he’d ‘poisoned the minds of your classmates with your ridiculous stories’. Of course, Merton has been poisoning and entertaining us ever since. His formal education further blighted by the Jesuits — who believed that pain could be equated with learning, and that the only way to teach algebra was with the strap — Merton left his secondary school in Wimbledon and joined the civil service in Tooting.

The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield

Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big thrusting chin. Celebrity Eskimo Sandi Toksvig, Ellen DeGeneres, Jodie Foster, Clare Balding, Vita Sackville-West, God love them: there’s a touch of Desperate Dan in the jaw-bone area, no doubt the better to go bobbing for apples. It is thus a tragedy that Dusty Springfield’s whole existence was blighted by her orientation, which explains ‘the silence and secrecy she extended over much of her life, and her self-loathing’. One glance at her chin should have revealed all — but the Sixties was not a fraction as liberated and swinging as people now assume. ‘Being gay was either a pitiable affliction or an actual mental illness,’ Karen Bartlett reminds us in this sympathetic biography.

Charlie Chaplin, monster

No actual birth certificate for Charles Spencer Chaplin has ever been found. The actor himself drew a blank when he went on a rummage in Somerset House. The latest research suggests that he was born ‘in a gypsy caravan in Smethwick, near Birmingham’. But surely the truth has been staring people in the face ever since the Little Tramp first popped on the screen: Chaplin is the lost twin of Adolf Hitler. Peter Ackroyd almost suggests as much. Both men first drew breath in April 1889. They had drunken fathers and nervous mothers. There were patterns of madness and illegitimacy in the family tree. They were short and sported an identical moustache. They had marked histrionic skills, each man ‘appealing to millions of people with an almost mesmeric magic’.

The harrowing, inspiring life of Andrew Sachs

Comedians always like to claim that they started making jokes after childhoods made harsh by poverty; that at a formative age they were tormented by appalling cruelty and neglect. Griff Rhys Jones had to leave Wales at the age of six days, for instance. Nevertheless, the Chaplin family could afford a maid in Kennington. The Leeds of Alan Bennett and the Morecambe of Victoria Wood always sound cosy — as does the Hadley Wood of Eric Morecambe; and there was not much wrong with Barry Humphries’s salubrious Melbourne, though I concede it has been knocked flat by ‘developers’ since. But with Andrew Sachs the horrors were very real. Aged eight, ‘I stood open-mouthed as a number of men, wielding wooden clubs, shattered the front of a shoe shop.

The abstract art full of ‘breasts and bottoms’

Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the shapes and colours. Picasso’s cubist planes, as critics have noticed, usually disclose wine bottles, mandolins and bread baskets upon a table — icons of his Catholic childhood. The red and black slabs of Mark Rothko are our planet as mapped from outer space. Jackson Pollock created mad spiders’ webs. Klee is full of farmyard animals. Piet Mondrian’s grids are Holland’s dikes and polders. Our own best abstract artist was Terry Frost. Here again the semicircles and thin looping lines are as representational, as ascertainable in the real world, as any horse by Stubbs or cloud by Constable. What looks like a geometric pattern has a local habitation and a name: St Ives, Cornwall.

As Luck Would Have It, by Derek Jacobi - review

Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know what she means. It’s strange how he has always been singled out for prizes and high honours — why not Ronald Pickup, Charles Kay, Edward Petherbridge, Frank Finlay or the late Jeremy Brett? Ian Richardson absolutely hated him — just couldn’t contain his envy and incredulity, at least in my presence. Though I’ve never been able to believe in Jacobi on stage or screen as a villain or as a passionate lover, by being fundamentally unthreatening (and shrewd), he is esteemed — just like the Emperor Claudius, his signature role. He is a good courtier, having been a pal of Princess Margaret’s and a guest at Windsor Castle, where the Queen said to him, regarding the plot of Richard III, ‘Some things never change!’ He even holds the Order of the Dannebrog, first class, awarded to him by Queen Margrethe ‘during a celebration in Tivoli Gardens’.

A Rogues’ Gallery, by Peter Lewis - review

Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a massage (‘I have this trouble, a hernia, you see. Gives me a lot of discomfort’); Diana Dors confessed to him that she’d rather watch television than go to orgies (‘but I had to become a sex symbol on tiger rugs and in mink bikinis’); and Samuel Beckett made his excuses and fled (‘Sorry, I just have to go to the lav’). Lewis, a venerable freelance reporter, attended CND rallies with Bertrand Russell, located Sean O’Casey as a recluse in Torquay, and, like Mel Brooks claiming he’d dated Joan of Arc, all Lewis’s Christmases came at once when he comforted Judi Dench after she’d been ditched by John Neville: ‘We took a long, memorable walk in the Warwickshire woods.

What Fresh Lunacy is This?, by Robert Sellers - review

Midway through this startling book, Robert Sellers asks himself a question with such apparent seriousness I barked with laughter: ‘Was Oliver Reed an alcoholic?’ A more pertinent enquiry would be: ‘Was the man ever capable of drawing a sober breath?’ What Fresh Lunacy is This? is the monotonous chronicle of a nasty drunk whose ‘explosions of pissed aggression’ filled every waking hour, culminating in a deranged session, while filming Castaway in 1986, when he attacked an aeroplane. Reed would gulp 20 pints of lager as a way of limbering up. He’d then switch to spirits and the cycle of fighting and carousing would begin. It’s a miracle he survived to be 61, dropping dead in a Maltese bar after ‘drinking copious amounts of rum and arm-wrestling with 18-year-old sailors’.

The Diana effect

My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.’ Diana’s ambition was to have ‘a big house, a swimming pool and a cream telephone’. She achieved these, plus psychopathic husbands, bankruptcy and an early death from cancer. It is a wonderfully sleazy and vivacious tale, told in po-faced fashion by Niema Ash in Connecting Dors (Purple Inc Press, £14.99). No fool, Diana ‘always knew she would have to leave Swindon to make her dream come true, because nothing magical could ever happen in Swindon.

The darker side of Dawn

I like Dawn French when she is playing a sinister nurse much more than when she’s a jolly vicar. As her new novel, Oh Dear Silvia (Michael Joseph, £18.99) is set in a hospital, her darker side is gloriously indulged. We are at the bedside of the comatose Silvia, who has fallen off a balcony. Or was she pushed? Siblings and offspring trot to the ward; each chapter offers an internal monologue or confession — a gallimaufry of recriminations, alliances and reconciliations. What complex interactions there are with somebody who doesn’t move or say a word! Nevertheless, ‘somewhere deep inside the brain of this paralysed body there is life.’ New Age Jo is my favourite character. Her attempts to smuggle pets into the hospital — because dogs and hamsters emit ‘healing energy’ — is as funny a set-piece as anything Milligan put into Puckoon.

Burning his bridges

They have mostly achieved eminence, the original cast members who appeared on stage or in the film adaptation, 30 years ago, of Julian Mitchell’s homoerotic spy fable Another Country. Kenneth Branagh has his coveted knighthood, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth have won Oscars — and Rupert Everett? I’m not quite sure what has happened to Rupert Everett. He never quite caught on as a leading man, despite being strapping. He was so languid, you felt his co-stars had to organise their movements in order to nudge him awake, jostling him into coming up with a reaction. It was only when in drag as Miss Fritton, Alastair Sim’s old role in the St Trinians films, that his eyes began to sparkle — and Everett at last came alive as an actor.

Rollicking self-invention

When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead. Whilst it is true that few of his 60 or so books come off at all — and that his confidence in himself was never as great as he pretended it to be — I rather love the old rogue again now. There is something splendid and heroic about his boastful, mendacious personality (‘At the moment I’m working on a novel about the life of Christ’). I applaud the way he’d turn up on television and at literary festivals puffing a cigar and sounding off.

Gruff Justice

James Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson ‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees a patient complaining about shrapnel up the — ‘rectum?’ offers Spratt. ‘Well,’ comes the plaintive reply, ‘it didn’t do ’em any good.’Gruff and domineering, Spratt and the actor who indelibly played him were interchangeable — except that James Robertson Justice wasn’t really an actor. He didn’t have any showbiz friends or interests, and drew a blank trying to talk to Donald Sinden.

His mysterious ways

Norman Mailer spent his life hunting for a subject big enough to suit or satisfy his titanic ego. The post- humous On God suggests he finally hit the spot. The Almighty is made to come across as an embattled novelist — as a version of Norman Mailer himself in fact — ‘a mighty source of creative energy,’ whose most developed works are human beings, though ‘think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being’. Yes indeed — the mighty brontosaurus can readily be seen as Mailer’s evolutionary ancestor. Earlier in his career, however, God wasn’t quite so competent and went through a long apprentice phase marred by failures — fish ‘with hideous eyes’ and ‘worm life, frog life, vermin life’. As for insects, these must surely be the Devil’s contribution.

Perfecting the art of rudeness

Everyone will have met Basil and Sybil Fawlty in real life — the would-be genteel types who, in running a provincial hotel, have condemned themselves to quite the wrong vocation, who are convinced their clientele are riff-raff and by whom the most modest request is interpreted as an unforgivable imposition. I encountered a classic couple only the other day — the virago muttering behind the desk, pen poised, and her lanky, put-upon husband sighing to me as he emerged from the cellar and lifted (quite violently) the grille at the bar, ‘Has the Gestapo given you the wine list?’ Such people loathe the idea of service — like those antique dealers and gallery owners who’ll kill you if they get mistaken for shopkeepers.

Little and Large

T. S. Eliot was happily married to Valerie Fletcher for years, but it is only his relationship with Vivien Haigh-Wood that people want to hear about. (‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.’) Lauren Bacall’s second husband was Jason Robards — but who cares about him? In her memoirs and on chat shows it’s Bogie, Bogie, Bogie. Dame Plowright must be irritated to be eclipsed in the Larryographies always by Scarlett O’Hara. So it goes. It is as if there is room only for a single grand passion in a celebrity’s life, and though Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were divorced in 2001 and have since moved on to new partners, they still belong together in the public mind.

The man in the iron mask

Isn’t it peculiar when people change their name? John Wilson becoming Anthony Burgess, Peggy Hookham being borne aloft as Margot Fonteyn, or Richard Jenkins leaving Port Talbot as Richard Burton. When a person insists on being called somebody else we are witnessing an identity crisis. (Frank Skinner was Chris Collins until 1987. It is rumoured that as Chris Collins he still attends Johnson and Boswell conferences in Lichfield and presents academic papers.) The cocktail of vanity and self-loathing involved in renaming yourself is pungent and extreme — and helps to explain the career of Sir Michael Caine CBE, who was born in 1933 as Maurice Micklewhite, the son of a Billingsgate porter, and raised in a one-room flat off the Old Kent Road.

Well, no, yes, ah

So Meby Graham NortonHodder, £18.99, pp. 342, ISBN 0340833483 Frankie Howerd’s career was a series of comebacks. In the early Fifties he was a radio star with listening figures of 16 million; he topped the bill at the Palladium and appeared in a Royal Variety Performance eight times. He flopped on live television, however, and between 1957 and 1962, when he was rescued from oblivion and put on at the Establishment Club by Peter Cook, he’d so lost his confidence he thought of leaving show business to run a country pub. Edgy and depressed, and feeling like ‘a disintegrating jigsaw’, he could scrounge work only at the pier-end in Scarborough and Yarmouth and in ‘poorly paid pantomimes’ in Streatham and Southsea. Additionally, the Revenue was after him for thousands in back taxes and his crooked manager had secretly siphoned off the comic’s earnings, depositing the funds in a separate account used to pay for a wrestling venture.