Jeremy Lewis
‘When I was in my teens, I wrote to the managing director of All Bran, suggesting a slogan. It was “Sweeps through you like a broom”, to be accompanied by before and after snaps’
Constipation was a perennial problem for those of us who grew up in post-war Britain. Fibre and fruit and veg were in short supply, which didn’t help, and magazines like the Radio Times were peppered with ads for laxatives. So obsessed were our elders with being ‘regular’ that, after breakfast at my prep school, we would sit for an hour doing homework while waiting for one of the masters to hand us a small wooden block with a brass number screwed to it: we would then head off to the appropriate numbered lavatory and sit there for five minutes before reporting back, our duty done, in theory at least.
When I was in my early teens, I wrote to the managing director of All Bran, suggesting a slogan which, I assured him, would double their sales. My slogan was ‘Sweeps you through like a broom’, and I thought it should be accompanied by ‘before’ and ‘after’ snaps, ‘before’ showing a potential customer looking limp and green about the gills, while ‘after’ revealed a new man, ebullient and bursting with health after a bowlful of bran. A week later, I received a kind letter from the marketing manager: he didn’t feel the slogan was quite right, but enclosed a ‘factory fresh’ packet of All Bran as a token of his thanks.
I thought of this correspondence only the other day, after suffering my most painful-ever bout of constipation. I won’t go into details, but I had been suffering from two competing forms of pain, both hard to endure. My left shoulder is agony, particularly at night, and to combat this I’ve been prescribed morphine pills, supplemented with liquid morphine – which I find myself gulping at 3am. One of the tiresome side effects of morphine is becoming rigid with constipation, despite downing innumerable laxatives and lubricants. I spent the best part of a day in the lavatory, suffering torment of a different kind, my brow lightly bathed in sweat. I triumphed in the end, but at what a cost. What one dreads, of course, is dying on the lavatory like Evelyn Waugh, who must have been straining at the leash when he was summoned aloft.
What I don’t understand about the Brexit debate is why so many Remainers feel so passionately about the EU (or, as I still call it, the Common Market). It may be that, however we voted on the day, my friends and I are a shamingly apolitical bunch but, whatever their subsequent opinions, I don’t remember any of them ever expressing views on the subject beyond indifference bordering on boredom. We all approved of the EU for cleaning up our beaches, but thought they wasted a great deal of time passing absurd laws, and none of us had much time for the overpaid bureaucrats who ran the whole business without ever being elected for the job. Now people go on as though the entire edifice of European civilisation is threatened – as though no one had ever read Flaubert or listened to Mozart before the European Coal and Steel Community came into being in 1951. It’s all very confusing.
When not asking my wife to press the ‘pause’ button on our telly, so she can halt the proceedings and explain what is going on in some Scandi-noir drama – or even Midsomer Murders, which is nearer my brow level – I spend a great deal of time grumbling over the irritants perpetrated by producers and directors. A newish variation is the cast list at the end being run through so fast that it is unreadable. Sometimes one longs to know the name of a particular actor, but one is never given a chance to find out. I can’t imagine why actors’ agents don’t kick up a fuss on their clients’ behalf. Equally irritating is the cult of darkness – a by-product, I suspect, of the candlelit Wolf Hall. I enjoyed The Crown no end, but found it hard to believe that Buckingham Palace was permanently swathed in darkness, with a touch of smog thrown in.
Altogether more dodgy are those telly programmes – usually ‘factual’ documentaries devoted to history, natural history or archaeology – which end with the ‘team’ making some discovery which reveals something never known before, or even changes our whole way of looking at the duck-billed platypus or Stone Age weapons or the Boer War. These ‘discoveries’ are always made at the very end of the programme, just as the ‘team’ is packing up to go home, and one knows perfectly well that the claims made are false or already familiar to those in the know. Or, as a distinguished Cambridge historian told me recently, ‘almost anything claiming to be the Secret History of … is virtually guaranteed to be a mare’s nest either because the facts are bogus or because they are well known’ – and cited a recent programme about Pearl Harbor as an egregious example. Viewers beware.