99 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS PHILOSOPHICAL AS EVER...
IHAVE not caught sight yet of Mr “Ed” Balls dancing on my television receiver but accounts I’ve read of his performances bring to mind the time when the BBC Radio Light Programme came to Cambridge around 1950 to record a pilot episode of Celebrity Come Philosophising.
We all gathered in the rooms of the late Bertrand Russell, though he wasn’t late at the time, of course, in contrast to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who arrived five minutes after everyone else, blaming delays on the line from Vienna.
Besides Russell, Wittgenstein and myself, the fourth celebrity contestant was Karl Popper, who had also popped over from Vienna after the war and we were all to perform a philosophical utterance and then defend it with the aid of our partners: Bertrand Russell was paired with his namesake Jane Russell, while Wittgenstein had Marlene Dietrich, Popper performed with Greta Garbo and I teamed up with Mae West.
Russell and Russell took to the floor first and Bertrand executed an elegant pirouette while singing “Think about the set of all sets which do not contain themselves,” to the tune of the Ode To Joy from Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
Jane then shot out of her blocks saying, “Sets, sets, sets. That’s all you mathematical philosophers ever think about.” Then she raced after Bertie saying, “I like a man who can run faster than I can.” Unfortunately, she caught him rather quickly and flounced off in evident disinfatuation.
Wittgenstein and Dietrich took their place on the floor. Ludwig opened the debate by leering at Marlene and saying, “The human body is the best picture of the soul,” to which Marlene retorted, in a sultry voice, “Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful. I just know what to do with them.”
Taken aback by this riposte, Ludwig snorted and said in a commanding yet dismissive manner, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” and neither of them spoke again for the remainder of the routine.
By that time, I felt that the only serious challenge to Mae and me was likely to come from Popper and Garbo, and Popper’s opening salvo was magnificent. “Falsifiability’s the key to science thinking,” he sang. “Without this hypothesis, you’ll find your logic stinking.”
He sang these words to a tune that later was to become a hit in the film Mary Poppins under the title “super call if ragi list ic ex pi ali docio us ,” but for Popper it all came unstuck when Garbo, perhaps envious of his success, cut through the audience applause by shrieking, “I want to be alone,” and stormed out of the room.
After those debacles, I knew that all Mae and I had to do was stay on our feet and the trophy was ours. So abandoning the risky philosophical routine we had planned, I performed a quick proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Mae West completed it with a few salacious twirls of her own.
As she carried the prize off to her room, she looked back and invited me to come up and see her sometime. Sadly it was all deemed too profound for the Light Programme and has remained in the vaults ever since.