Now most politicians are fair game, but not, I think, when the magazine blew the cover of adulterers, even politicians. Enjoyable for us the readers, of course, but it could break up previously seemingly happy marriages and break hearts too, and, worst, destroy whole families.
Alan Brien, a very good journalist famous at that time, wrote a damning condemnation of this practice, accusing the
Eye
of sending the victims’ children ‘weeping home from school’. Ingrams’s defence was ‘Well they [the adulterers] shouldn’t have broken their wedding vows anyway!’ Puritanical Christian wanker!
He and his confederates seemed not to care that they were causing misery. They started, for example, a column on ‘Doctor Jonathan’, a pastiche of Boswell’s
Life of Dr Johnson
, aimed at J. Miller. It was cleverly done in eighteenth-century mode. Miller (who is a real doctor, of course) is depicted as a smug, over-loquacious, self-praising know-all.
Now there is some truth in this, but Jonathan is also a genuinely creative and original man, whose achievements in so many fields are touched by genius. Yet he is still at his age tortured by insecurity. This comes, I think, from a constant ‘pull baker – pull devil’ conflict in his nature. His father was a famous psychoanalyst, entirely serious, and had justified hopes that his son might become a medical
scientist and make important discoveries. So, indeed, Jonathan eventually became a doctor, working for a time as a GP, but while at Cambridge he had appeared very successfully on the undergraduate stage and eventually in
Beyond the Fringe
, which, via the Edinburgh Fringe itself, became a worldwide success, and so the ‘pull doctor – pull actor’ conflict began.
My own instinctive reaction is that if you choose, as he for the most part has, to wear the cap and bells, you have to accept you’ll find yourself at times in the stocks with the critics throwing dead cats at you. But, in defending himself, he often digs his own bear-pit. His work alone defends him, in theatre and opera direction all over the world, in documentaries both serious and comic, in the anatomizing of a corpse on TV and in the creation of a pop-up book of anatomy (were the last two unconscious nods towards his father?), as an essayist, as a lecturer and collage maker/sculptor; and the critics, some of them at least, have increasingly (as he puts it) ‘understood at last’. He needs, he once told me, and it was an odd admission, ‘to stand in a Niagara of praise’. Well, tough tit, but I have always loved him, and hated him suffering from the triumphant mockery of minor public-school bullies.
Incidentally, I too appeared in the ‘Doctor Jonathan’ spoof as ‘a critick and voluptuary’, although I contributed nothing beyond belching and farting. It didn’t worry me, but then a lesson that ‘the good doctor’, as they called him, has never taken in is that bullies at any age and of any class recognize the poor sod who is sensitive and therefore go for him (or her).
*
Yet
Private Eye
did run certain series which surely even its critics could enjoy.
Mrs Wilson’s Diary
was one and the
Dear Bill
letters, correspondence written by Denis Thatcher to a boozy, golf-playing chum, another. Mad, but somehow believable fantasies, they both became popular plays. Indeed Mrs Thatcher, to prove her sense of humour, attended her mauling, and was made so angry, probably by its truth, that she did a Queen Victoria. Had she been Queen, and she often gave the impression she was, she’d have charged Ingrams and the late John Wells, his side-kick, with
lèsemajesté
. She seems to have had no humour at all. Anyway, as an anarchist I rejoiced, and anyway, like
almost
all politicians, she was fair game.
Ingrams, in his pious persona, much admired Malcolm Muggeridge after he’d become religious and, following what black people in the American jazz world call ‘turning’, had decided that the Lord should make him chaste there and then. For his part, Muggeridge made sure that everybody knew. And indeed the Lord favoured him, dear boy. He gave up booze, fags and women, ‘just like that’.
Wally ‘Trog’ Fawkes, who had loved and continued to love Muggeridge, and I, who couldn’t altogether resist his unaltered charm either, introduced into a ‘Flook’ story a medieval monk called St Mug, who had forsworn all the pleasures of the flesh except in private. Grossly unfair, perhaps, but many irritated by his public piety were very amused, and he became St Mug in everyday conversation and even the press.
Personally, though, I couldn’t take Muggeridge’s total admiration for Mother Teresa about whom he made a documentary, polishing her halo. I’ve no time for Mother T at
all. My impression, not unsupported by evidence, is that while she showed great compassion for the dying poor of India she showed no interest at all in the conditions which had made them poor in the first place. When, but only when, they were terminally ill, would she open the gates of her hospice and, once her new patients were inside, would shut out the filthy slums outside. Looking at St Mug’s documentary and whenever else she’s appeared on film or in print, I think that she was a serious backer into the limelight, and I’m probably in a minority there – but I know the signs.
And then Ingrams wrote an admiring biography of Muggeridge, Mother T and all! No, as editor of the
Eye
, Richard Ingrams was a strange and, it seemed to me, quite a sinister figure…
But then
… Ingrams resigned as editor of
Private Eye
and re-emerged as an ‘oldie’, who organized lunches and started a magazine of that name which published excellent writers who are no longer, or never have been ‘hot’ (although I suppose these days one is obliged to say ‘cool’). The mag is for me one of the most enjoyable publications of our day. Simultaneously he has become a mild and sociable fellow, broad-minded as far as I can judge, and convincingly friendly.
I don’t know who waved the magic wand to effect this transformation. I can’t but wonder whether, if he were still editor of the
Eye
and an explanation for such a transformation about someone came to his ears, he would have published it. No doubt he would, but the change in this case has proved entirely beneficent. He’s become a pussy-cat!
The Oldie
(a new issue has just arrived in the post) covers a wide field, ‘something for everyone’, as they used to say.
Richard edits a funny and sharp editorial and also writes a piece on telly, and, among others, there’s Miles Kington on books and Dr Stuttaford on the health of ‘Senior Citizens’, as he mercifully doesn’t call them. Memorial Services by Ned Sherrin (relevant to us all), and so on. There is a page divided into two, the top half God, the bottom Mammon. These are all reviews, but there are also features, some regular – there is, for example, a beautiful essay on ‘Unwrecked England’ by Candida Lycett Green, daughter of the late John Betjeman.
But for me, as an almost retired raver, my top favourite is a piece by what the mag calls this week, ‘the loathsome scrounger’ Wilfred De’Ath, a wonderful and, given where it appears, a suitable name indeed. The name itself, though, wasn’t unknown to me. Outside Victoria station there is a crescent of shops, one of which was called Henry De’ath, the second name painted without much differentiation between the De and the ath, and then, beneath it, ‘Family Butcher’. Loved that, real black humour, I thought.
Wilfred presents himself as a penniless ex-lecher living off his wits. He offends some who even write to tell the editor that they will no longer subscribe, but others, like me, are ardent fans. And then one day on the northern-bound train en route for a gig, I got into conversation with a neatly bearded man dressed in a reasonable suit. As he got out, I asked him his name and he told me, ‘Wilfred De’Ath’. You could have knocked me down with a zimmer frame. If his self-portrait is accurate then, like the late Jeff Bernard (although I doubt as well paid), he turns his life as ‘a loathsome scrounger’ into a very funny picaresque chronicle.
There are very funny cartoons in the
Oldie
too, e.g. a
gravestone. At the top is engraved ‘R. JONES (M.D.) R.I.P.’ and below ‘L. JONES (Mrs.) (under the doctor).’
Well, if that isn’t a plug – and nobody from the magazine even bothered to bribe me – I don’t know what is.
Not all the many people at the
Oldie
lunches are old. There were, for instance, people like my ex-neighbour, Anna Hay-craft, who has now left the building and wrote well-reviewed, rather sour but clever novels under the pen-name Alice Thomas Ellis. She was an excellent cook herself but often, when I saw her at it, she had a cigarette in her mouth over the stew she was stirring.
She was a devout Catholic, and at one time wrote the ‘God’ column in the
Oldie
. God, if He exists, didn’t look after her, or perhaps He was just testing her à la Job. One of her young fell off a roof and was in a coma as a result, from which, though a long time later, he died. I hope her religion helped her. It was a terrible thing to happen and he was such a nice boy.
One of Anna’s close chums was the writer Beryl Bainbridge. I love Beryl who, in that she is a Liverpudlian, earns an extra bonus. She covers the theatre in the magazine, but also writes amazing novels. Her early books tended to be based on Merseyside, but more recently she has chosen famous moments in history, but from an unexpected angle and giving the reader an extraordinary sensation of being there as if in a time warp.
She is also a legendary boozer, although you’d never guess so from her crystalline prose, and she smokes non-stop (although I heard a rumour that she is trying to give up). Once, at a literary thrash, I noticed I had been left alone
with her. When, only a little later, I helped her get to her feet again after she’d fallen into a mercifully unlit fireplace, I began to understand why.
I found myself obliged to pour her into a taxi and accompany her to a mainline station to catch a train to, as far as I can remember, Dorking, to address her publisher’s salesmen, as writers are obliged to with a new book on the stocks. Somehow I put her on the train. I can’t imagine what she told the travelling book salesmen.
But some of the
Oldie
diners
are
old, and some
very
old. Until he ‘left the building’, Spike Milligan was most often there, on his final visit assisted by his new wife-cum-nurse, a clearly sweet-natured blonde (and she must bloody well have had to be).
He was visibly dropping to bits, clearly close to dying, looking like what my mother called ‘death warmed up’. Especially with his pretty carer, he looked like ‘Young Mr Grace’ in
Are You Being Served?
Indeed, he went soon after. He’d been a remarkable man, seriously hampered by being a manic-depressive, but certainly a comic genius to whose spring of creative invention most worthwhile post-war British humour owes its origin.
Sometimes he and I got on, sometimes we didn’t. When I was TV critic for the
Observer
, I covered a documentary made with Spike’s co-operation about his mental illness. In it he insisted that the staff of the asylum had
deliberately
given him a room overlooking the yard where at 6 a.m. they brought all the rubbish bins and emptied them into the vans, making the maximum noise to torture him.
Reviewing these sad delusions, I queried his belief that
they housed him there by design to drive him more mad. I did praise him as a comic genius. But the following week I got a furious letter. In it he told me that he’d been up all night trying to persuade a paranoid young man not to commit suicide. ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR THE FUCKING HUMAN RACE TODAY, MELLY?’ he thundered. He also attacked me for calling him a genius. ‘Van Gogh was a genius,’ he told me. ‘I’m
just a comedian
!’
No, Spike you were not
just
a comedian. You were also the author of six best-selling comic books about the war, a fine actor, and the inspiration of many surreal-minded heirs. Even today, and usually rather irritatingly, people imitate the catchphrases of your grotesques in
The Goon Shows
. Then there is
The Running, Jumping and Standing Still
film (Dick Lester’s short but brilliant début is spiked with your spirit), you played in
Treasure Island
at the Mermaid Theatre for many years; while in
Oblomov
, in the leading role, you improvised every night, and the rest of the cast had to ad lib too – nerve-racking, I’d have thought.
No, Spike, you were quite right when you claimed that Van Gogh was a genius but, however angry it made you to be told, so were you.
What is a genius? Who qualifies to be called one? I once asked the philosopher and excellent hoofer Freddie Ayer to define it. ‘A genius,’ he said, ‘is someone who alters, however radically, however slightly, our perception of reality.’ That will do me, and supports my assertion that Spike Milligan falls into Freddie’s category.
Some years back they made a TV programme around John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, with Spike Milligan as the star guest. I was to sing and Spike to read his children’s poems,
which happen to be my least favourite area of his work. I know the kiddies love them but for me, while showing our shared admiration for Edward Lear, Spike’s homage lacks the touching melancholy of that ‘Dirty landscape painter who hated his nose’ (W. H. Auden). Spike, who loved jazz and wished he’d been skilled enough to play it professionally, also agreed to join Chilton for a couple of numbers.
The evening turned out to be a disaster, as far as Spike was concerned. The usual seemingly half-witted audience were delivered by that worldwide agency prepared to fly them anywhere in the universe (only joking, folks!). They turned out to be friendly, if hardly rapturous, towards the songs and the band, but totally indifferent towards Spike’s poems. What they really went for (presumably in illustration of Dr Johnson’s assertion that the public will go anywhere to see a dog walking on its hind-legs) was Spike playing with John. They clapped, they shouted for more, and Spike, the rejected poet, the acclaimed jazzbo, came off furious about it – sulky and snappy.