KANE’S UINTET OF TALES ON AN AGE-OLD THEME
Former newsreader’s first novel tells five stories of sex among the over-60s
RETIRED newsreader Vincent Kane has written a saucy novel about sex among the over 60s. The broadcasting legend penned The Old Sex Symphony over two years at his home in Cyprus.
The 83-year-old, who worked for the BBC for more than 30 years, insisted it was “all a figment of my imagination”.
“But one’s imagination is informed by one’s experiences in life,” he said.
“I was a journalist and a journalist observes and over a period of time comes to conclusions about things and writes them.
“But an author, when he sits and imagines situations, a lot is what they have seen.” Ageing helped with the tome. “In order to write about old age it’s a good idea to be old in the first place, and it’s a good idea to live in a society full of ex-pats,” he said. “Cyprus is full of ex-pats.” No matter how old people get they always want sex, said Vincent.
“People think that when they get old they develop various conditions and they do,” he said.
“I know this because I’m pretty old myself. People get prostate trouble or heart trouble or lose their hearing, but in every case libido does not die, it’s still alive.
“So I thought I would write a symphony of five movements about people coping with a condition, whatever it is, but still responding to libido in one way or another.
“Some of them are quite funny but two of them are quite serious.”
He said: “I tried to write a symphony in words.
“Instead of chapters there are movements.
“It is built like a symphony.”
Each of Vincent’s movements has a central character: a soldier, a friar, a professor, a chairman and “a rotter”.
Dad of three and grandfather of six Vincent said: “People who write about sex usually choose people in their teens, 20s or 30s.
“Beyond that people are not interested.
“One serious point I make is that anyone who thinks libido fades when charisma fades, it does not.
“People lose youth and attrac- tiveness but libido stays and people have to cope with it one way or another.”
None of the characters was based on himself but Vincent said his “experiences through life all come together in what I have written”.
“I’ve not been a monk,” Vincent, from Cardiff, said.
“But there has been a touch of everything else in my life.”