Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks (44 page)

Act II opens in the foyer of the Garrick Theatre, half an hour after the opening of
Feelgood
, with the couple trying to discover the secret of why people take £32 a seat off you and will not allow you to take the seat itself just because you have been in Lewisham, stuck in a play that has been going on while the play you have come to see has already started. The answer seems to be that Tom Stoppard has a lot to answer for, although there is some question about whether the question was Michael Frayn's. The husband goes to the stalls bar at this point and shouts at a lot of staff who aren't there. Eventually someone turns up and sells him two large whiskies for a sum which would have allowed him, in the days when he started going to the theatre, to buy his own pub.

We next see the couple (in an engaging little
trompe de
théâtre
which invites comparison with Jean Cocteau) passing from the stage of their play into the auditorium to watch
Feelgood
, a piece in which a lot of actors shout at one another to scant purpose, as far as the husband can see an hour later, when he re-emerges into the foyer, carrying his wife, who always falls asleep. Both are starving, but (qv. Act I) neither has booked anywhere, because each had, of course, assumed that the other had done it. The wife says never mind, The Ivy is just around the corner.

Act III opens outside The Ivy. It might have opened inside, but for the fact that the next free table is on 3 March 2004, provided there is a cancellation. Since they cannot wait that long, the couple spend the next hour wandering through theatreland in a scene offering more than a passing nod to Edward Bond, looking no longer for a restaurant but for an all-night chemist to deal with the sprain of the husband's ankle caused by being shoved off the pavement by a mob of several hundred theatregoers with tattoos and stapled noses. Eventually they find a chemist, but it is so full of theatregoers waiting for midnight to transform their prescriptions into something to stuff into their stapled noses that the couple decide to hail a cab home.

But there is, of course, nothing to hail; so, poignantly redolent both of
Father Courage and his Swollen Bloody Ankle
and
Long Day's Journey Into North West London
, the play ends with the couple limping home at 2 a.m. to wonder aloud whether they should go to the theatre much, these days.

79
Road Rage

L
ast night, at the Camden Odeon, bang in the middle of
Bridget Jones's Diary
, I got my old trouble back. I hadn't had my old trouble for nearly 40 years. I last got it at the Swiss Cottage Odeon, bang in the middle of
Dr No
. You will say, aha, his old trouble clearly has something to do with Ursula Andress wriggling out of her rubber bikini, that would explain why it came back last night, it was on account of Renée Zellweger wriggling out of her rubber knickers, I rather think we have the measure of Mr Coren's old trouble, do we not – but you are wrong. While it is true that my old trouble is about cinema distraction, when some minor feature suddenly lurches the mind away from the major feature and strands it in an obsessional limbo while the major feature spools on unnoticed, it has nothing to do with snappy latex, or even snappy women. What it has everything to do with is snappy cars.

Now, quiz most filmgoers about James Bond's motor and they will begin rabbiting on about the Aston Martin which could deploy greater firepower than Nato while catapulting undesirable hitch-hikers through its roof. That is because they have forgotten 007's first car. It was a Sunbeam Alpine. I have not forgotten, because I had one, too. I had driven to
Dr No
in it in 1962, but it was getting on for 1963 by the time I got there, because the Swiss Cottage Odeon was at the top of Belsize Road, a 1 in 45 gradient, and the Alpine was the slowest sports car in the world. Which was why, a scant few minutes into the film, my old trouble came on: when Bond got into his Alpine, I did not see the exemplar of butch chic which product placement wanted me to see. I saw a gullible dork who had recently driven out of his local Rootes showroom leaving cackling salesmen rolling about on the floor. Things grew worse when, a little later, Bond effortlessly eluded the doctor's thugs in a highspeed car chase: an Alpinist myself, I knew that, had the arch-villain been not Dr No but United Dairies, their milk-float would have caught Bond within 50 yards. This was a bogus film, with a bogus hero, and, for the remainder of it, I could concentrate on nothing else: when Ursula Andress splashed out of the surf, it might as well have been Thora Hird.

I flogged my doddering Alpine soon after that to some Bondabee sucker, and bought an Austin-Healey 3000. A true sports car: had weedy Bond got in and turned the engine on, he would probably have fainted at the thunder. And every film it appeared in got the casting right: it was always driven by a raffish cove with wrists of steel and a bulldog briar. Never a twinge of my old trouble there. Offscreen, I drove mine with joy until 1969, when I sold it with grief, and bought the car which, last night, did bring on the old trouble again. I had to do that because in 1969 Mrs Coren gave birth to a
Times
columnist, and when I went to collect the pair of them from Queen Charlotte's Hospital, we could squeeze
The Times
columnist's carrycot into the little slot behind the seats only by shoving the seats so far forward that our knees covered our ears. Nor, when it began to rain at Shepherds Bush, could we shut the roof because
The Times
columnist was in the way, so he got wet. It didn't bother him, because he knew he would get at least three paragraphs out of it some day, but it bothered us.

The next day I chopped the Healey in for a secondhand Mercedes 220SEb cabriolet. It was not only the biggest convertible in the world, it was the safest: conceived out of postwar nostalgia for the Tiger tank, it was two tons of iron and walnut, with a three-ply reinforced hood able to protect
The Times
columnist from anything the heavens could chuck at him. For Jerry, it was a snook cocked at the shade of Bomber Harris, but for me it was a rite of passage: I was a family man now, tasked not to boy-race, but to trundle and protect. And that is why, last night, the old trouble came back.

In
Bridget Jones's Diary
, Hugh Grant plays a cad. We do not know he is a cad, though, until he takes the cuddly eponym off for a lively weekend; and the egregious signifier of his caddishness is his car. An autobuff 's veteran one-off that gives the finger to the common Ferrari or Porsche, it is patently a Flash Harry's car; for that is what 30 years have done to the Mercedes 220SEb cabriolet. It irritated me no end; it ruined the film; it left the second half unnoticed. I just sat there thinking: this car was not put on earth so that smirking jerks could pull dippy women, it was given to us so that solid men could poddle invulnerably through the traffic with
The Times
columnist and his sister the
Observer
poker correspondent on the back seat, punching one another and shouting: ‘Dad, Dad, are we there yet, Dad?'

80
Southern Discomfort

M
ost
Times
readers, I suspect, will not have been nearly as excited as I to spot a tiddly paragraph tucked away in a page 11 cranny of the newspaper's Monday edition. That is because most
Times
readers spend fruitful lives in worthwhile employment, instead of frittering away their brief span staring out of a window and wondering whether they will ever write a blockbuster novel. I, on the other hand, have spent 40 years busting my block in the effort to do exactly that, to no good end: because I cannot come up with a novel, in either sense, plot. On those infrequent occasions when I think I have thought of one, second thoughts serve only to make me think of who thought of it first. Bloody Tolstoy, I think, bloody Smollett.

Or, rather, used to think. Because, since Monday, I have been unable to think of anything but. I am thicker with plots than a Cabinet sauna, thanks to Ms Alice Randall. Here is that paragraph in full: ‘The estate of Margaret Mitchell is seeking to block publication of a novel that tells
Gone With
The Wind
from a slave's perspective. Alice Randall said that her novel
The Wind Done Gone
is an antidote to a text that has hurt generations of Afro-Americans.' The woman is a genius: though I do not know whether that genius extends to her writing – the book may be full of scenes showing mobs of enthusiastic spectators high-fiving one another and shouting ‘Yo!' as Atlanta burns to a frazzle, or Rhett Butler being floored by an expertly swung banjo – frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn. For Alice's true genius lies in the invention of the obverse plot: everything that has hitherto been written can henceforth be rewritten from the other side.

My only problem now is selection. Patently, revisionism will, these days, have to go hand in hand with political rectitude – no publisher would touch
Sophie's Choice
written from Himmler's point of view – but, if anything, that casts my net even wider. Should I take a crack at
Lady Chatterley's Husband
, in which Mellors falls for the bloke in the wheelchair? Or
Ahab the Fishmonger
, written by a tragic hero (‘Call me Moby') threatened with extinction at the hands of the catsmeat industry, a bestselling blubber from start to finish? What about
Robinson's Jam
, in which the cannibals, gamely refusing to chuck in the sponge and give up their time-honoured ethnic cuisine, not only barbecue Man Friday but also imaginatively extend their diet to include white meat? Then again, could there ever have been a minor fictional figure more constantly abused, and therefore more deserving of his own 15 minutes, or perhaps seconds, of retributive fame than the eponymous hero of
Portnoy's
****?

I was juggling all these options and more – having somewhat regretfully rejected
The Chumps of the Light Brigade
, metrically recounted from the point of view of a Russian gun-crew laughing fit to bust, on the ground, that poetry was not my bag – when a little lightbulb suddenly appeared in a bubble above my head, to be replaced an instant later by the dustjacket of
Snow White and the Seven Winners For
Whom Stature Is No Impediment
. Not the catchiest of titles perhaps, but if you're looking for mega-sales nothing beats a book that does what it says on the tin, and here we have a community of dedicated but impoverished titchy mine-workers, living, through no fault of their own, a celibate life in a hole in the ground, who suddenly stumble upon a terrific-looking brunette, take her back to their pitiful premises, show her more caring concern than she would ever get from men twice their height, but – shrewdly thinking ahead – never lay a finger on her. And what is their reward for this impressive combination of kindness and restraint? She takes off with the first tall handsome horse-borne toff who catches her eye. Do the little guys take this lying down (admittedly not perceptibly different from their taking it standing up)? Not this time around, because they have figured it all out first. They have observed the loving couple for some time, disguised as shrubs (a boon of smallness), and they have photographs, they have tapes, they have tabloid contacts, they are sitting, wise to the irony, on a goldmine. They get to be as rich as Bernie Ecclestone or Paul Daniels. They live happily ever after.

Should I start typing it right now? Possibly, if I can just get this idea for a smash-hit play out of my head. I once saw something called, I think,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead
. Might have been
Deaf
, but anyway, they were these two assassins, and I thought at the time how much better it would have been if the play had focused on their victim instead; so I might well take a crack at that first. Am I spoilt for choice, or what?

81
Poles Apart

T
here are some 12 million married couples in Britain, and I am confident that Mrs Coren and I speak for all of them when I say we are flabbergasted at the hysterical adulation currently being lavished on Mr and Mrs Thornewill. We are flummoxed; we are gobsmacked; we are stumped; and, yes, we are not a little gutted. We cannot for the life of us understand what all the fuss is about. Why are Mr and Mrs Thornewill being lionised and feted, simply for becoming the first married couple to walk to the North Pole?

What kind of achievement is that? To walk to the North Pole, you point the compass at the horizon and put one foot after the other. There being neither roads nor car, one spouse does not have to read the map while the other spouse drives; there is no risk of yelling, grabbing, chucking maps out of windows while swerving dangerously, or turning this bloody thing round right now and going straight home, it wasn't my idea to come in the first place. Nor, as night falls, is anybody sitting in the middle of nowhere interrogated as to why they didn't have the sense to fill up when they had the chance, or invited to explain in words of one syllable why they won't stop and ask someone the way, since there is no one to ask, unless you speak bear. As for finding mutually satisfactory overnight accommodation, transarctic spouses do not have to run in and out of a dozen hotels to find a room one of them neglected to book in advance, or end up sleeping foetally on the back seat while drunks widdle on their bumpers; transarctic spouses have a folding nylon hotel on their little sled, and when they are tucked up snugly inside it and fancy dinner, they do not go nuts trying to catch the waiter's eye or ringing a room-service voicemail that never rings back, they simply pop a bubble-pack and chomp on a nourishing pellet that tastes of nothing requiring comment. Neither of them orders a second bottle when they know what it does to them, your father was the same, nor do they engage in stand-up rows about toenails in the bidet or hairs on the soap.

Upon arrival at the North Pole, no married couple will suffer recriminatory disappointment. Of course it is not finished. It is not even started. There is no lying ratbag of a manager to wave a brochure at, there are no rooms better than the one they thought they'd booked, and the swimming pool is a reproachless umpteen miles across, albeit solid. Neither spouse will find the place infuriatingly classier or tackier than the other had led them to believe: the clothes they stand up in will be absolutely perfect, because, if they try to change into anything else, they will not be standing up for much longer, they will turn blue, topple, and snap.