'Hello again!' Patrick called cheerily. 'We were wondering if we might hear the Bloomsbury monologue this time?'
I sat and delivered.
'Thank you!' said Patrick. 'Thank you ... I think ...' He conferred with John Gale, nodded his head and looked down as if seeking inspiration from the floor. From where I stood he seemed to be whispering to the carpet. 'Well, yes ...' he murmured. 'I think so too.' He looked up towards me with a smile and said in a louder voice. 'Stephen, John and I would be very pleased to ask you to play the part of Tempest for our production. Would you like to do that?'
'Would I? Oh, indeed I would!' I said. 'Thank you. Thank you so very, very much.'
'That's excellent news,' said Patrick. 'We're delighted. Aren't we?' he added, to the carpet.
There was a sort of scuffling and scrabbling, and a figure rose from behind the seats where it had been crouching out of sight. The long, lean form of Alan Bennett unfolded itself with an apologetic cough. 'Oh, yes,' he said, brushing dust from the knees of his grey flannel trousers, 'quite delighted.'
Patrick noted my bewilderment. 'Your agent was kind enough to mention to us that Alan's presence had made you a little nervous, so this time round he thought it might be best to conceal himself.'
Such consideration from a hero was almost more than I could bear. Naturally, being an arse, I expressed my gratitude by not managing to express any gratitude at all. To this day I do not think I have ever properly thanked Alan for his grace and sweetness that afternoon.
Crises of Confidence
Alan Bennett has a huge advantage over most of us in that his shyness is known about and expected; indeed it is one of the qualities most admired in him. It proves his authenticity, modesty and the classy distance he naturally keeps from that creepy media gang of loud, confident, shallow and self-congratulatory wankers to which I cannot but help belong and which the rest of society so rightly despises. Nobody seems to expect me to be shy, or believes me when I say that I am. I cannot blame them. I seem to move with such ease through the world. I was reminded of this only yesterday afternoon. I was a guest on the CBS programme The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Craig is the Scottish comedian who has now become, in the opinion of many, myself included, the best talk show host in America. He told me, as he began the interview, that back in the eighties, when he had been a regular on the British comedy circuit, he had always regarded me as almost unnaturally calm, sorted and in control, to the extent that he was in a kind of angry awe of me. I ought to be used to being told that, but yet again it brought me up short. Never, at any point in my life, can I remember feeling that I was any part of assured, controlled or at ease. The longer I live the more clearly one truth stands out. People will rarely modify their preferred view of a person, no matter what the evidence might suggest. I am English. Tweedy. Pukka. Confident. Establishment. Self-assured. In charge. That is how people like to see me, be the truth never so at variance. It may be the case that I am a Jewish mongrel with an addictive self-destructive streak that it has taken me years to master. It may be the case that my afflictions of mood and temperament cause me to be occasionally suicidal in outlook and can frequently leave me in despair and eaten up with self-hatred and self-disgust. It may be the case that I am chronically overmastered by a sense of failure, underachievement and a terrible knowledge that I have betrayed, abused or neglected the talents that nature bestowed upon me. It may be the case that I doubt I will ever have the capacity to be happy. It may be the case that I fear for my sanity, my moral centre and my very future. All these cases may be protested, and I can assert their truth as often as I like, but the repetition will not alter my 'image' by one pixel. It is the same image I had before I was a known public figure. The image that caused a delegation of college first-year contemporaries to visit me in my rooms and demand to know my 'secret'. The image that satisfies and impresses some, enrages others and no doubt bores, provokes or irritates many more. I would be a tragic figure indeed if I had not learnt to live with that persona by now. Like many masks this smiling, placid one has become so tight a fit that it might be said to have rewritten the features of whatever true face once screamed behind it, were it not that it is just a mask and that the feelings underneath are as they always were.
What I want to say about all this wailing is not that I expect your pity or your understanding (although I wouldn't throw either of them out of bed), but that perhaps I am the one actually offering pity and understanding here. For I have to believe that all the feelings I have described are not unique to me but common to us all. The sense of failure, the fear of eternal unhappiness, the insecurity, misery, self-disgust and the awful awareness of underachievement that I have described. Are you not prey to all those things also? I do hope so. I would feel the most conspicuous oddity otherwise. I grant that my moments of 'suicidal ideation' and swings of mood may be more extreme and pathological than most have to endure, but otherwise, I am surely describing nothing more than the fears, dreads and neuroses we all share? No? More or less? Mutatis mutandis? All things being equal? Oh, please say yes.
This is a problem many writers and comedians face: we possess the primary arrogance that persuades us that our insights, fixations and habits are for the most part shared characteristics that we alone have the boldness, insight and openness of mind to expose and name: we are privileged thereby, or so we congratulate ourselves, to be spokesmen for humanity. When a stand-up comic describes nose-picking or peeing in the shower or whatever it might be we can interpret our laughter as a 'me too' release which itself triggers more laughter: we laugh again because our initial laughter and that of the person sitting next to us in the audience proves our complicity and shared guilt. This much is obvious and a truism of observational comedy. On top of it there can also be laid, of course, that conscious game comics play in which they shuttle between those common, shared anxieties and ones that are very particular to them. And here I suppose we laugh at how different we are. How similar, but different. How the comic is living a more extreme life of neurosis and angst on our behalf. A kind of 'thank God I'm not that weird' laughter is the result. When a comic or a writer has established their credentials by revealing how much of what they do or feel is something we also do or feel, they can then go further and reveal depths of activity or feeling that we may not share, that might revolt us or that perhaps we do share but would much rather not have dragged up into the light. And of course, comics, being what they are, appreciate that point.
It is common enough to hear this kind of routine: 'You know, ladies and gentlemen, you know when you're sat watching television and you stick your finger up your arse and wiggle it about? ... No? Oh, right. It must be just me then. Sorry about that. Oops. Moving on ...' Well, with an average stand-up comic talking about physical things like peeing in the shower and nose- or arse-picking it is easy enough to see the distinction between what is communal and what is individual. But those are discrete identifiable actions of which one is either 'guilty' or not. Some people pee in the shower, others do not. I have to confess that I do. I try to be good and refrain from doing so in somebody else's shower, but otherwise I am guiltless about what seems to me to be a logical, reasonable and hygienically unexceptionable act. I also pick my nose. I will stop the confession right there for fear of embarrassing you or myself further. You can decide whether to put the book down now and say to the vacant air: 'I too pick my nose and pee in the shower.' Plenty of people do neither. They are likely, I hope, to forgive those of us who are less fastidious in our habits. But in either case whether or not they do is not susceptible to interpretation. But feelings ... I may know whether or not I pick my nose but do I really know whether or not I feel a failure? I may be aware that I often feel bleak and unhappy or filled with nameless dread, but am I right to interpret these feelings as a sense of moral deficiency or personal inadequacy or any such thing? The root of the feeling may after all be a hormonal imbalance, heartburn, a triggered unconscious memory, too little sunlight, a bad
dream, anything. As with colour sense or pain sensitivity we can never know whether any of our perceptions and sensations are the same as others'. So it may very well be that I am just a great big cissy and that my miseries and worries are nothing compared to yours. Or perhaps I am the bravest man on the planet and that, if any of you were to experience a tenth of the sorrows I daily endure, you would scream in agony. But just as we can all agree on what is red, even if we will never know if we each see it in the same way, so we can all agree - can't we? - that no matter how confident we may appear to others, inside we are all sobbing, scared and uncertain for much of the time. Or perhaps it's just me.
Oh God, perhaps it really is just me.
Actually it doesn't really matter, when you come to think of it. If it is just me, then you are reading the story of some weird freak. You are free to treat this book like science fiction, fantasy or exotic travel literature. Are there really men like Stephen Fry on this planet? Goodness, how alien some people are. And if I am not alone, then neither are you, and hand in hand we can marvel together at the strangeness of the human condition.
Celebrity
Aside from University Challenge, the BBC's transmission of The Cellar Tapes was the first time I had appeared on national television. I don't count There's Nothing to Worry About, which was inflicted only upon viewers in the north-west ITV region.
The morning after The Cellar Tapes was aired on BBC2 I went for a walk along the King's Road. How ought I to treat those who approached me? I switched on a sweet gentle smile and practised a kind of 'Who? ... me?' gesture that involved looking behind me and then pointing with questioning disbelief at my own undeserving chest. I made sure, before setting out, that there were pens in my pocket as well as some artfully random scraps of paper for autographs. Would I write 'Yours sincerely' or 'With best wishes'? I decided that I should try each a few times and see which looked better.
Photo call in Richmond Park for BBC version of The Cellar Tapes.
The same: ultimately a git with a pipe stuck in his face.
The first people I passed as I made my way up Blacklands Terrace were an elderly couple who paid me no attention. Foreigners possibly, or the kind of Chelseaites who thought it smart not to have a television. A young woman came towards me with a West Highland terrier on a lead. I added an extra 10 per cent of soupy modesty to my sweet gentle smile and awaited her gasps and shrieks. She and the terrier passed right by without a flicker of recognition. How very strange. I turned left at the King's Road and walked past the Peter Jones department store and twice around Sloane Square. Not one person stopped me, shot me a sideways glance of admiring recognition or favoured me with a single puzzled stare that told me that they knew the face but couldn't quite place it. There was simply no reaction from anyone anywhere. I went into W. H. Smith's and hung around the periodicals section, close to the piles of listings magazines. To pick up a Radio Times people had to ask me to step aside; obviously and by definition these persons must have been television watchers, but my features, by now set into a wild, despairing grin, meant nothing to them. This was most strange. Television, everybody in the world knew, conferred instant fame. One morning you do the weather on BBC1, the next you are besieged at the supermarket checkout queue. Instead I had woken up to find myself anonymous. I was still nothing more than another face in the London crowd. Maybe almost no one had watched the Footlights show? Or maybe millions had, but I possessed one of those bland, forgettable faces that meant I was doomed never to be recognized. Surely this was unlikely? I had told my face a lot of tough and unforgiving truths in the past, but I had never accused it of being bland or forgettable.
I pulled a compensatory BBC Micro magazine from the shelf and left. As I was trailing disappointedly back to the flat I heard a voice behind me.
'Excuse me, excuse me!'
I turned to see an excited young girl. At last. 'Yes?'
'You forgot your change.'
Here are the first lines of Love's Labour's Lost:
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death.
That is the King of Navarre's opening speech, the one Hugh had such trouble with in the 1981 Marlowe Society production. It is a fine sentiment, but nothing could run more counter to the way the world thinks today. It certainly seems that all still hunt after fame, but how many are content for it to come only in the form of a tombstone inscription? They want it now. And that is how I wanted it too. Ever since I can remember I had dreamt of being famous. I know how embarrassing an admission this is. I could attempt to dress it up in finer words, imputing and inferring intricate psychological grounds, implicating and adducing complex developmental causations that elevated the condition into a syndrome, but there is no point dressing it up in fine linen. From the first moment I was aware of such a class of person existing, I had wanted to be a celebrity. We are forever telling ourselves that we live in a celebrity-obsessed culture; many hands are daily wrung at the supremacy of appearance over achievement, status over substance and image over industry. To desire fame argues a shallow and delusional outlook. This much we all know. But if we clever ones can see so clearly that fame is a snare and a delusion, we can also see just as clearly that as each year passes a greater and greater proportion of the western world's youth is becoming entramelled in that snare and dazzled by that delusion.
We have in our minds a dreadful picture of the thousands who audition so pitifully for television talent shows and whose heads seem always to be buried in garish celebrity magazines. We feel sorrow and contempt for the narrow dimensions of their lives. We excoriate a society that is all surface and image. Teenaged girls in particular, we suggest, are slaves to body-image and fashion fantasies, they are junkies on the fame drug. How can our culture be so broken and so sick, we wonder, as to raise up as objects of veneration a raft of talentless nobodies who offer no moral, spiritual or intellectual sustenance and no discernible gifts beyond over-hygienic eroticism and unthreatening photogeneity?
I would offer the usual counters to that. Firstly, the phenomenon simply is not as new as everyone thinks it is. That there are more outlets, pipelines, conduits and means of transmitting and receiving news and images is obvious, but read any novel published in the early part of the twentieth century and you will find female uneducated characters who spend their spare moments dreaming of movie stars, tennis-players, explorers, racing-drivers and barnstorming aviators. You'll find these dreamy shop-girls and head-in-the-clouds housemaids in Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse and every genre in between. The propensity to worship idols is not new. Nor is the wrathful contempt of those who believe that they alone understand the difference between false gods and true. In the story of the Ten Commandments I was always on the side of Aaron. I liked his golden calf. Biblical colour plates for children showed it garlanded with flowers, revelling idolaters dancing happily around it, clashing cymbals and embracing each other with wild, abandoned joy. The music and the hugs were clinching proof (especially the cymbals) in the minds of the Victorian illustrators that Aaron's followers were debauched, degenerate, decadent and doomed to eternal damnation. With the party in full swing, Moses returns with those fatuous tablets tucked under his arm, dashes them petulantly to the ground, melts the golden calf and grinds it to powder, which he mixes into a drink that he forces all the Israelites to swallow. Next, being such a holy man of God, he slays 3,000 men before hauling his vengeful arse back up Mount Sinai to get a second batch of commandments. I think we can celebrate the fact that we now live in a culture, flawed or not, that instantly sees that, while Aaron may be a weak voluptuary, his brother is a dangerous fanatic. The gilt bull beats the guilty bullshit any way you choose to look at it. We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen a
ctors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.
Secondly, is it not a rule in life that no one is quite as stupid as we would like them to be? Spokesmen across the political divide from us are smarter than we would have them, mad mullahs and crazy nationalists are nothing like as dumb as we would wish. Film producers, shock jocks, insurgents, journalists, American military - all kinds of people we might reasonably expect to write off as mentally negligible have cunning, insight and intellect well beyond what is comfortable for us. This inconvenient truth extends to those on whom we lavish our patronizing pity too. If the social-networking services of the digital age teach us anything it is that only a fool would underestimate the intelligence, intuition and cognitive skills of the 'masses'. I am talking about more than the 'wisdom of crowds' here. If you look beyond sillinesses like the puzzling inability of the majority to distinguish between your and you're, its and it's and there, they're and their (all of which distinctions have nothing to do with language, only with grammar and orthographical convention: after all logic and consistency would suggest the insertion of a genitival apostrophe in the pronominal possessive its, but convention has decided, perhaps to avoid confusion with the elided it is, to dispense with one), if, as I say, you look beyond such pernickety pedantries, you will see that it is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of the cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told.