Making the Cat Laugh (22 page)

To make matters worse, the phrase ‘To pull the plonker’ is mysteriously omitted from
L’Inglese come si parla.
So the poor
bloke keeps hitting the deck without ever understanding the insistent question on all English people’s lips.

Occasionally, we television critics like to reflect on our lives and pull a few strands together. In particular, we like to emphasize that, far from wasting our childhoods (not to mention adult-hoods) mindlessly gorming at
The Virginian
and
The Avengers,
we spent those couch-potato years in rigorous preparation for our chosen career. ‘It’s been tough,’ we reflect thoughtfully (as our eyes dart unbeckoned to the nearest flickering screen). ‘I mean, er, gosh, Streets of San Francisco, I love this. Oh yes, of course there were a few dodgy moments during the second run of
Blankety Blank
when I feared I might not make it, that the pace was simply too hard. But I pulled through. And leaving aside the damage to the optic nerve, I can honestly say that watching wall-to-wall drivel was the best – ahem – mental investment I ever made.’

I know, I know. Such pious fraud fools nobody. But in the week that saw the thirty-fifth anniversary of BBC1’s
Blue Peter,
and in which I calculated that I watched this enjoyable, educative programme, girl and woman, for a total of fifteen years, I simply felt obliged to trawl for a valid extenuation. In reality, of course, I watched it because I loved it, because it was live and dangerous, and because the invited animals acted up, refused to eat, and sometimes dragged presenters clear off the set. Most of all, however, I watched for its suggestion of that strange made-it-myself domestic world (reached, perhaps, through the airing-cupboard) in which Mummy’s work-basket was filled with Fablon off-cuts, while Daddy was a kindly twinkler in carpet slippers who would happily drill a hole in a piece of wood (‘Hand it here, youngster!’); you only had to ask.

Some people disliked
Blue Peter
for this cosy middle-class idyll; they got chips on their shoulders. But I thrived on these glimpses of a parallel universe. I adored the fanciful idea of aunties who exclaimed, ‘What a lovely present! How ingenious to think of painting an egg-box and making it into a fabulous jewellery case!’ Wisely, however, I stayed on the right side of the airing-cupboard, not dabbling in glitter and squeezy bottles; also, I recognized cheap tacky home-made stuff when I saw it, and refused to get involved. Only once in thirty-five glorious
Blue Peter
years did I let slip my guard (oh, woe) and attempt to make ‘jelly eggs’ as a nice surprise for a family Easter. I regretted it instantly. It was a terrible mistake. One day, they will find ‘Jelly Eggs’ engraved on my heart, just next to the inexpressibly mournful ‘Copy fits, no queries’.

The jelly eggs instructions looked simple enough, but that’s no excuse.

1) Take an egg, make a tiny hole in each end, and then just
blow
the contents through the tiny weeny hole, leaving the shell empty.

2) Boil up some jelly.

3) Cover one of the tiny holes with a small piece of sticky tape.

4) Pour the jelly into the shell, then pop it into the fridge, where it will set. Now, just picture the surprise of the adults on Easter morning when they take the top off your egg and find the jelly inside!

Whatever possessed me to try this at home? Could I blow an egg? No, not without blowing my brains out. Would a piece of sticky tape keep the jelly inside (assuming I could pour it into a tiny hole without a funnel)? No, the only thing that worked, finally, was an Elastoplast – the big brick-red fabric sort, generally used for heels. Would the egg-shell mould the jelly into
the shape of a perfect egg? No, because the jelly seeped into the Elastoplast overnight, and sank to half-way. Were the adults dumb-struck with surprise when they ate their Easter breakfast? No, because they had all been involved in this disastrous enterprise at some stage or another, urging me in my own interests to see sense and give the whole thing up.

But I never lost my love for
Blue Peter.
I now hear that under pressure from the real world they have sealed up the old airing-cupboard door, which is a shame.
Blue Peter
taught me that when my own turn as auntie came around, I should exclaim, ‘That’s lovely, how clever, is it a tissue box with my name on it in glitter?’ – thus making a little girl quite happy. So it just goes to show. Watching fifteen years’ worth of television does teach you something, sometimes.

Alas, I am perplexed again. A few weeks ago, a writer chum phoned me to ask for some help with a difficult ethical question, so naturally I pulled a straight face immediately, rested my fingertips lightly together (tricky when holding a receiver) and suggested she proceed. A friend had left an expensive winter coat in her flat, by mistake, she explained, then flown abroad for six weeks. ‘I see,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully; ‘And so? What?’

My chum’s question was this: if I were in her position,
would I wear the coat?

I was so shocked by the very idea that I instantly abandoned my rational, objective Michael Ignatieff impersonation. ‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘No, I would not.’ ‘Why?’ she asked.

Well, I said, first I would be worried about the safety of the coat, you know, down the shops, bloke on a ladder, tin of paint, Norman Wisdom, ha ha ha. Second, I would be almost suicidally flummoxed in company if anyone remarked: ‘Nice
coat, where’s it from?’ But really and honestly, I wouldn’t wear it because it wasn’t mine.

Now my friend was much taken with this tin-of-paint idea. When she rang other people for further ethical and practical viewpoints, she found that the irrational Fear of Paint not only entered other people’s neurotic purview, but could easily be brought to dominate it.

But what she didn’t find, apparently, was anyone else who said, ‘No, I wouldn’t wear it because it isn’t mine.’ So she wore the coat, recklessly defied the malign god of magnolia gloss, and eventually decided to write a piece for the
Guardian
about the whole damn thing.

And my point (at last) is this. She told me she was writing an article in which I would – nameless, of course – appear. She read me her description of my response, and told me precisely when the piece would be published.

Such careful, respectful and scrupulous behaviour put me to shame. Because when it comes to other people’s anecdotes – other people’s ‘stuff’ which might come in handy to illustrate a point in a column or a story – I rip it straight off the hanger without asking, shout ‘Yes! This will do nicely!’, and publish it in a newspaper. Which is the exact equivalent of wearing it to the open day at the Jackson Pollock Primal Hurl Art Therapy Group for Particularly Messy Serial Killers.

Luckily, my friends are more broadminded than me. I parade their best stuff in public and they don’t get all twisted about it. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once said that when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. Equally, when a columnist has bosom friends, they find that they no longer have a
thing
to call their own.

Every anecdote they utter goes directly into the writer’s mental dressing-up box, and though any single item may not re-emerge for a decade, it will undoubtedly turn up again one day – albeit crumpled, stained, mildewed, or laced with holes
– to the owner’s muffled astonished cry of’ But surely that was
mine
originally, wasn’t it?’

It is no extenuation whatever to claim (as I do, frequently) that so long as I attribute stories to ‘a friend’; so long as I don’t tell the story
against
the originator – well, then it’s all perfectly OK. In her Great Left-Behind Coat Ethics Research, my friend encountered precisely such casuistical chicanery, and I poured scorn on all of it.

For instance, perhaps it would be a different ethical kettle of fish if the item were not a coat but a frock? Or if the owner were the sort of person who suffers from amnesia? Or if you only allowed yourself to wear the coat outdoors on National No Decorating Day? Bah, I retorted; the matter is simple. If it doesn’t belong to you, leave it in a cupboard. The rest is sophistry.

And so here I am, writing about my friend’s article about borrowing things without asking. And did I ask her? Of course I didn’t.

‘Yes! This will do nicely!’ I yelled excitedly, as I tried it on for size, did a quick twirl, and hacked a few inches off the sleeves with the bread-knife. Such a gigantic fuss about nothing! As the great Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz might have remarked, if they didn’t want me to wear it, they really shouldn’t have left it lying about.

At the cinema these days there is a rather peculiar advert for jeans. It is basically a witty rewriting of
Cinderella,
but since it appears to have been edited by a madman run wild with a bacon-slicer, the narrative unfolds so precipitately that it takes at least two viewings to get the gist. Anyway, it goes something like this. Clock strikes bong for midnight. Boy rushes off without his jeans. Girl holds jeans to face with funny
wistful-but-determined look in her eyes, then hawks jeans around town, getting big fat men to try them on. Finally, she locates her beloved, who buttons up a treat. And that’s it. Allowing for how difficult it is to make trousers even slightly interesting, this ad is a huge success.

The thing about fairy tales, surely, is that they can be used to sell anything; indeed, it is almost their primary function. Anyone who thinks it is radical of the Disney studio to turn the heroine of
Beauty and the Beast
into a modern-thinking self-determined book-lover (‘There must be more than this provincial life!’ she sings discontentedly, several times) is right in only one respect. Yes, it is radical of
the
Disney studio. Previously Disney sold other things; now it is selling this. A generation of girls grew up believing that to be a heroine (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) all you required were a decent whistling technique, first-class handiness with a broom, and an ability to sleep for extended periods in a glass box without mussing your make-up or dribbling on your frock. And as values go, these were probably OK for the time.

But my point is this. In the traditional folk tale, women were not these puny types. Big tears did not roll down their pretty faces, and they did not wear rouge. Instead, they rescued princes from enchantment, tipped witches into ovens, all that. The reason we know only of the rescue-me namby-pambies is that we inherit our knowledge of folk tales from the Victorians, whose respect for divergent viewpoints, especially in the realm of sexual politics, was notoriously meagre. Funny how
The Sleeping Prince
got dropped from the canon, wasn’t it? I wonder why.

But as Alison Lurie points out in her marvellous book on children’s literature,
Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups,
even the Grimm brothers tidied up the tales to reflect the mores. ‘In each subsequent edition of the tales,’ writes Lurie, ‘women were given less to say and do.’ At issue, of course, is whether it is cynical and
outrageous to impose modern values on traditional stories. When George Cruikshank, the Victorian illustrator, rewrote four of his favourite fairy stories as temperance tracts, Charles Dickens countered with a brilliant essay, ‘Frauds on the Fairies’ (1853), denouncing the practice. But what is odd now is to see how certain Dickens was that the versions he remembered from childhood were necessarily the originals. Cruikshank, thundered Dickens, ‘has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main. Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.’