Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (25 page)

'Course, it a well known fac' dat you can't have de lead star kickin' de jam jar after only four hours o' de film, so we got to do a bit o' de resurrectin', which is where we flashin' across to de super-colossal car'board castle wot goin' by de name o' Chez Frankenstein, an' befo' we knowin' it there's dis great big bolt o' lightnin' wot strikin' a item under a sheet, an' wow! Who dis but Idi Amin agen, only dis time he got de bolt in de neck an de stitchin' all over de worl'-famous bonce, lookin' like nuthin' so much as a Finance Minister wot bin helpin' de Uganda Special Branch wid de enquiries, an' soon as he off de operatin' table he start walkin' about an' knockin' down de doors etcetera, gonna scare de loyal subberjecks witless, also doin' 'em a lotta good, seein' de front door kicked down in de middle o' de night an' de famous Pres stompin' in wid de dander up!

Got a intermission at dis point, an' after we makin' a few bob on de lollies, wot we findin' but de Battle o' Britain, wid de young golden-haired Wing Commander Idi Amin Esq., DFC an' nine Bars, zoomin' about on de two tin feet an' knockin' de Messerschmitts out o' de sky like coconuts on Hammersmif Heath, prior to gittin' de wings knocked off of de Spit over France an' windin' up in de Jap POW camp due to de strong headwins, where I escapin' by diggin' a tunnel under de River Kwai an' swimmin' to nearby Broadway to change de entire course o' de fillum musical wid de revolutionary
Amin Git Yo' Gun
, LPs on sale in de foyer.

Dat de natcherl end, an' everyone goin' out hummin' an' dancin' an' weepin', an' sayin' (like de whole worl' sayin'): ‘Wow! Dat Idi Amin gonna be de noo King Kong!'

The Golden Age
1980–1989

CLIVE JAMES

Introduction

W
riters of humour often have a bag of tricks, and one day the tricks become recognisable. Eventually even S.J. Perelman could be caught in the act of copying ideas that he had been the first to have. But Alan Coren was so inventive that the new ideas – not just the dazzle on the surface, but the structures underneath – kept on coming, with the seeming ease which invites belittlement from the less blessed. The great Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser's achievements were often taken for granted by the local press, on the grounds that she was ‘a natural athlete'. In the same way, Coren was naturally funny. Nevertheless even he had his peak period for minting new coin. He was never better than in the 1980s, when the first flush of youth had been tempered by wisdom and learning.

The learning showed up brilliantly in a piece like ‘£10.66 And All That', which can be taken as the pioneering instance in any medium of a modern humorist exploiting the probability that the yeomen of Olde England, while they waded through the mud, exhibited all the whining venality and warped entrepreneurial ambition that we so admire today. As we join the action, the estate agency William & Bastards is about to be ‘dragged into the 11th Century'. While we read of how the agency strives to flog a ‘property with relatively scum-free well', we can see how Coren was unmatched at the conceit of showing up the delusional sales vocabulary of Now by exporting it to the inappropriate context of Then. Almost every humorist has tried it but Coren could actually do it, at a level of ventriloquism which had been equalled, before him, only by Beachcomber.

Like Michael Frayn in his
Guardian
‘Miscellany' column at the turn of the 1960s, Coren always knew that the only way to keep up with Beachcomber's ghost was to cock an ear to the new, yet instantly tarnished, linguistic counterfeit of the present. This is the secret of Coren's extraordinary feat of mimicry in ‘One Is One And All Alone', the story of what happened when our current queen accidentally found herself at a loose end for a whole day. She kept a diary, in which we find that she played I-Spy with Fusebox Poursuivant. (‘One won.') At the end of the day (the kind of dud phrase that Coren always hijacked at the very moment of its ponderously sprightly arrival into the language) Her Majesty is in prison, and obviously grateful for the change of scene.

Nowadays, Google makes it easier to write a catalogue piece that sounds as if it has been researched in a library, but the list of phobias in ‘No Bloody Fear' sounds like the inside job of someone who had done a lot of delving in his own head. With Coren it's always important to realise that his vast range of particular knowledge almost certainly included a deep insight into himself. He just never let on. Of all the great British comic writers – among whose number, we must surely see now, he stands high – he is the one whose flights of fancy tell you least about the agonies within. Probably, rather than being defensive, he was just too fascinated with the limitless extravagance of the follies in the outside world: to take them personally would have seemed, to him, disproportionate.

His consolation for a world whose cruelties mocked his mockery – Coren's Idi Amin was a talking doll that spoke from the puppeteer's sense of pity, not from his frivolity – was that the universal madness would always be there, if only because it had been there throughout history. Hence the enchanted insanity of ‘Tax Brittanica', my personal candidate for the title of Coren Piece for the Time Capsule. The scene, once again, is ancient Britain, but this time very ancient. The Romans are here. A sniffling tax collector called Glutinus Sinus? Of course. But when I learned that the tax collector's assistant was called Miscellaneous Onus, I was helpless with admiration as well as laughter, because the name is so exact.
Miscellaneous onus
equals various jobs, get it? Or, as the skiving Briton in the piece would say, ‘Narmean?' Coren was first with that, too: transcribing the tormented demotic with phonetic exactitude. Novelists got famous for doing the same. Coren just did it, from week to week, working so far within his abilities that he was the walking, laughing and dancing (he was a wickedly good Lindy Hop dancer) exemplar of a principle: the secret of success in the popular arts is to have power in reserve.

The worst a critic could say of him was that he didn't seem to be trying. There were critics who said the same of Gene Kelly. But although Coren never had to practise a knee-slide that would finish exactly on the mark that the cameraman's assistant had put down on the studio floor, he still had to do an awful lot of technical calculation in his head before he got his effects. He did it so quickly that he could go on radio programmes like
The News Quiz
and unreel impromptu lines which were so neatly compressed they sounded as if they had been written. They had been: written instantly, a nanosecond before he said them. Somebody with that kind of gift is always going to be underrated. Coren didn't care. He preferred to make the English language the hero. So generous a writer forms a conspiracy with the reader, as they both revel in the splendour of the tongue they speak. For as long as the spell lasts – and Coren could make it last for a thousand words at a time – the reader can almost persuade himself that he, too, knows how it's done. But it's a secret. Writers who convince you that you share their sense of humour are pulling a fast one. They are celestial con-men. Alan Coren was one of them, and one of the best.

36
Tax Britannica

Archaeologists have unearthed what they believe to be the
first Roman tax collecting depot to be found in Britain,
at Claydon Pike in the Upper Thames Valley. The depot
was built around 70 AD, and probably remained in use
until the Romans finally left Britain in 408.

Observer

G
lutinus Sinus, Tax Inspector 126 (Upper Thames Valley Collection), drew the parchment-piled in-tray towards him, removed the curling stack, carefully and neatly squared it off, pared a stylus with the small dagger issued for that exclusive purpose by Inland Revenue Stores (Silchester), straightened his little skirt, and nodded.

‘Send him in,' he said.

Miscellaneous Onus, his clerk, scuttled sniffing to the fruitwood door, and opened it. An odour of goat and feet and orifice wafted horribly in; through the gap, Glutinus Sinus caught a brief collage of mud-caked beards and hovering flies and khaki teeth, heard, as always, the distinctive colonial undercurrent of scratching, spasmodically punctuated by the plop of targeting spittle. The inspector shuddered. He had been out here too long. They all had.

‘Mr Cooper!' called Miscellaneous Onus, into the miasma.

A squat and patchily hirsute figure detached itself from a cackling group who had been engaged in a curious contest from which the clerk had been forced to avert his eyes, adjusted his mangy wolfskin, and loped into the tax inspector's office.

‘Shut the door,' said Glutinus Sinus.

‘The what?' said the Briton.

Glutinus Sinus set his jaw, and pointed.

‘Oh,' said Mr Cooper, ‘it's even got its own name, has it? I thought it was just a bit of wall that came open, bloody clever, you Romans, I will say that for you. Door,' he murmured, shutting it with somewhat melodramatic respect, ‘door, door, door, well I never!'

Glutinus Sinus sighed.

‘Don't butter me up, Mr Cooper,' he said.

‘Me?' cried Cooper. ‘
Me
?'

‘Please sit down.'

‘I built a room, once, up my place,' said the Briton, dropping to his haunches, ‘only we had to climb over the walls to get in and out.'

‘Mr Cooper, about your tax-return for the current—'

‘We had not cracked the secret of the door,' said Cooper. ‘It was beyond our wossname. It must be wonderful, civilization.'

‘Mr Cooper, you are a maker of casks and barrels?'

‘Correct. Definitely.'

‘And yet,' here Glutinus Sinus riffled through the pile of parchment, selected one, flourished it, ‘you have entered a large deduction against last year's income for the purchase of new industrial plant, to wit millstones, four, nether and upper. Can you explain this?'

‘I have branched out,' said Cooper. ‘I do a bit of grinding on the side. Mind you, don't we all, ha-ha, catch my drift, all men of the world, narmean?'

‘Branched out?' said the tax inspector, icily.

‘Bit slack these days, coopering,' replied the Briton, ‘due to introduction of the glass bottle and carboy. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying glass is not dead clever, probably miraculous even, it is what comes of having a god for everything, the Roman god of glass has come up with a real winner, I am not denying that for a minute. All I am saying is, it has knocked the bottom out of the cask business, having a container what does not leak on your foot when you are carrying it out over the bedroom wall of a morning. I have therefore diversified into flour.'

‘Then you ought to be called Miller,' interrupted Miscellaneous Onus irritably. ‘All this is cocking up the ledgers.'

‘How about Cooper-Miller?' enquired the Briton. ‘Due to following two professions? It's got a bit of tone, that, my old woman'd fancy being Mrs Cooper-Miller, she would be invited to open the Upper Thames Valley Jumble Fight, she would be asked to judge the Humorous Bum Contest, it could put us right at the top of the social tree.' He smiled oleaginously. ‘We could be almost Roman. Uglier, mind.'

‘So,' said Glutinus Sinus, ‘you are engaged in the manufacture of flour for profit? Why, then, have you made no relevant return for—'

‘Who said anything about profit?' replied Cooper. ‘Cooper Flour plc is a registered charity, due to where it is distributed to the needy, gratis. It is a good word,
gratis
, we are all very pleased with it, what a spot-on language Latin is, got a word for everything.'

Glutinus Sinus put his fingertips together.

‘True,' he murmured. ‘
Gratis
, however, does not translate as receiving chickens in return for flour.'

‘Ah,' said Cooper. ‘You heard about that, then?'

‘Mr Fletcher entered them as outgoings,' said the tax inspector levelly.

‘Yes,' said Mr Cooper bitterly, ‘he would. You got to watch him, squire. The plain fact is, them chickens are definitely not income. We do not eat them. They are pets. You cannot count a household pet as income.'

‘How many have you got?' enquired Miscellaneous Onus, licking his nib.

‘I don't know,' replied Cooper, ‘I can't count higher than XLVI. I have not had everyone's educational advantages, have I?'

‘With all those chickens,' said the tax inspector, ‘you must be getting hundreds of eggs a week. Surely you eat those?'

The Briton narrowed his already imperceptible brows.

‘Eggs?' he repeated. ‘What are eggs?'

Glutinus Sinus stared at him for a while. The Briton stared innocently back. Eventually, Glutinus Sinus snatched up his stylus, and drew an egg on the back of a tax-form.

‘Oh,' said Cooper, nodding, ‘chickens' doings.'

‘No, no, no!' cried Miscellaneous Onus. ‘They're delicious! You fry them!'

‘Get off!' exclaimed the Briton. ‘Pull this one. I've seen 'em coming out.'

‘In that case,' snapped Miscellaneous Onus triumphantly, ‘how is it that Mr The Other Cooper is buying them at eighteen denarii a dozen?'

‘Search me,' replied the Briton. ‘He is probably putting them on his roses.'

Miscellaneous Onus sprang from his stool, waving a document.

‘This invoice carries your address!' he shrieked. ‘How do you explain that?'

The Briton squinted at it.

‘That's not me,' he said. ‘You will notice it is signed Mickey Mus. Come to think of it, I've noticed our yard looks remarkably neat of a morning. Clearly this bloke is nipping in at night, nicking our chickens' doings, and flogging them on the side. What a liberty! Imagine anyone stooping low enough to steal droppings. Mind you, you'd have to, wouldn't you, ha-ha-ha, sorry, just my little joke, where would we be without a laugh now and then, that's what I always say.'