The Revolt of the Pendulum (44 page)

Richard turned up in Paris and read Donovan the news about the necessity of doing the boring stuff properly if he wanted to make an exciting film. For the task of dressing Donovan down, Richard
was wearing real shoes, a sign of how serious the situation was. When standing on his dignity he wanted the right kit. Donovan was a tough customer but he shot the coverage. The scene taught me a
lot about Richard and about life. Short on moral courage, I would always avoid telling people what they didn’t want to hear. Richard didn’t enjoy doing that either but he could do it.
Over the next twenty years I didn’t see the real shoes very often, but every time I did see them it was for a crucial confrontation that would never have taken place if it had been left to
me. I remember one studio director, intent on spoiling the clean effect of the set by adding some superfluous scaffolding, who said, ‘It has to look designed.’ I thought,
‘That’s just how we don’t want it to look.’ But Richard actually
said
, ‘That’s just how we don’t want it to look.’

For the studio shows, Richard was the kind of executive producer that every producer fears most: the kind that never leaves the control room. Most of the producers who had to live with him
watching their every move were grateful for the lesson. Directors were often less so, and especially when they were shooting on film out on location – a context in which every young director
tends to think that he is Fellini. I always preferred to narrate in voice-over rather than do a walk-and-talk. A walk-and-talk looks so unnatural that only David Attenborough can make it
interesting, and mainly because you suspect that he is about to be attacked by a buffalo. But fledgling directors like the shot that moves: the shot that draws attention to itself by smoothly
linking things up. I wanted less spectacular shots of single subjects, so that I could narrate at my own pace back in the editing room, without being forced to a thought just because the shot was
panning. Richard would appear suddenly out of the sky on various continents and tell the director to stop trying to win a BAFTA. The directors who took the lesson in were the ones who went on to
prosper. (One of our directors, Laurence Rees, is currently producing the best documentaries ever made about the Nazi era, and I am sure he would agree that Richard taught him a lot about never
letting the technique become the subject.)

Financially, the ‘Postcard’ programmes were made possible by the weekly studio show. Under various titles on different nights of the week on different channels, the studio show was
the one that earned the bread. Most of the many innovations of the studio show have by now been so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream that everybody has forgotten where they started. One-line
captions over photographs, fake commentaries over re-edited news footage, satellite interviews – none of it would have been possible at that time without Richard’s ability to run a
creative office, because the easier the results looked the harder they were to get. In later years, to get the script, Richard would lock me and our brilliant writing staff, Colin Bostock-Smith,
into my office for three days at a stretch. In early years he would lock me in alone, and when I came out to go and buy a takeaway lunch he would have me followed. Everybody knew that Richard was
the man in charge, so when Michael Grade moved to the BBC, a phone call to Richard was one of the first he made.

We arrived at the BBC just in time for Grade’s resignation, after which we were at the mercy of the managerial revolution. An incomparable scrounger, Richard managed to convert half a
floor of the Beeb’s new White City building into a special unit devoted to programmes with my name in the title. This was very flattering for me, but Drewett’s independence made him a
target for re-education into the managerial ethos. He could have taught the managers more than all of them knew put together if they had been capable of learning, but he patiently went off for a
whole day per week of the kind of meeting where six grown men work out the best way to lower an egg out of a window with a piece of string.

For once usefully impatient on his behalf, I persuaded him, when the chance came to jump ship back to ITV, to take it. Within ITV’s embrace, we started Watchmaker Productions, a company
run by us along with Elaine Bedell, one of Richard’s many discoveries among the new wave of female production talent. Whether male or female, the production staff at Watchmaker had to spend
only a few weeks under Richard’s tutelage before they realised that they had enrolled themselves in flying school. Some of the men are now tycoons, having built companies that they could sell
for millions. But the blazing career paths of the women alumni are what please me most, and I think Richard felt the same. One day somebody will tell the salient truth about Watchmaker: it was
certainly full of knockout females, but they were treated neither as eye candy nor as wage slaves. They got their chance, and an unusually large proportion of them went on to great things.
Generally, when we recruited the women, we followed the principle of hiring nobody that we couldn’t see ourselves working for when she came to power, and generally the applicants who got the
job didn’t mind being called the Drewettes. After all, it wasn’t Richard who invented the term. It was one of them.

Eventually, as the turn of the millennium approached and television veered inexorably downmarket, Watchmaker was sold to its backers as per contract, and Drewett and I were left with the only
real money either of us had ever made in show business. We had always been well recompensed, but on the whole, in television, nobody who cares a lot for the finished programme makes much money out
of it, and we cared a lot. Richard cared even more than I did, and for a man who never had much to apologise for he gave me a deep and touching apology when he proved too ill to supervise the
editing of the last show we made, at the end of the year 2000. He was right: the show would have been better if he had seen it through to the end. Those of us who knew him well are now feeling the
same about our own lives. A great one for catch-phrases, he had a line with which he started every meeting: ‘I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you all here.’ A lot of
people will be saying it at his funeral, and smiling at the memory.

Guardian
, February 4, 2008

ALAN COREN

Writers of humour often have a bag of tricks, and one day the tricks become recognizable. 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 Englande, 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 60s, 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 Pursuivant. (‘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 Britannica’, 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 a radio programme like
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.

PAT KAVANAGH

Already a star agent in the days before there were any others, Pat Kavanagh had the glamour to reduce most men and not a few women to slavery. She was beautiful, clever and
loved to laugh, but she could also have a blunt way with a fool. Since most writers are fools, especially about money, a new client was likely to find his dreams being set straight quite early in
the relationship. I can’t speak for her other clients – she never spoke about them either – but in general I would be surprised if there were any who were spared a close encounter
with brute reality when she first explained to them why it would be unwise to start living like Donald Trump on the assumption that the next advance would be as big as the last one.

Such bluntness could be daunting but it was also reassuring, because the client guessed, correctly, that his new mentor wouldn’t be pussyfooting with the publishers either. Pat could make
publishers shake in their hand-made shoes. On the appointed day to have lunch with her they always dressed with extra care. Some of the awe she inspired at all levels of the business might have
come from the fact that she had a self-assured hauteur and yet was hard to place. She didn’t come from any recognizable British social stratum. She was a South African who had sent herself
into exile. Like the Australian expatriates of the same generation, she counted as having come from nowhere.

People who had come from nowhere could score an effect if they looked as if they knew something. Pat looked like that. She didn’t even have to say anything. At the parties and
book-launches that endlessly punctuate the literary round, one babbles to stay alive. Pat never babbled. Her gift for waiting until she had something to say was enough to scare the daylights out of
those of us who were busy saying anything at all without waiting for a moment. Julian Barnes, who doesn’t babble either, was at a loss for words when he first met her at a party in the old A.
D. Peters office. Wisely he sent her a letter saying so, and from then on he was the lucky man. But not even Julian’s looming presence could subtract from her individual status. She was
always at the centre of a roomful of admiring glances.