Forget a stiff upper lip, let’s have a laugh while in the thick of it
AS another Lent ends, I’ve finally begun to realise what it meant to spend 40 days in the wilderness.
OK, I’ve only had three weeks of it and, unlike Jesus, I’ve been able to eat and drink, although Satan is tempting me every afternoon to sup unholy spirits.
The gospels don’t say exactly what He did to kill time in lockdown in the Judean desert, but I’m guessing he pledged to do a lot of things, and failed.
That’s my story. I told myself I’d re-discover books, but whenever I got a few pages into one I’d hear an alert on my phone, look away, spend half an hour scrolling, and realise all literature is doomed if it exceeds 280 characters.
I tried to learn how to cook something new to add to the one dish a week I make, but my paella stuck to the pan and I lashed it into the bin when one of the kids laughed and asked if it was called a paella crap.
I grew a beard, which I thought made me look a bit like Al Pacino in Serpico, only for my wife to tell me I looked like Jon Pertwee in Worzel Gummidge.
I decided to put a coat of varnish on the rotting garden furniture but the three paint brushes I had were glued together with old paint, and when I drove to B&Q, they turned me away because I hadn’t worked out how to click and collect from them.
I never will.
So I turned to Netflix, hoping to get hooked on a new American drama or documentary series and got so bored I ended up scouring US news channels to find a Donald Trump press conference for some mental stimulation.
And then a week ago I did something that finally beat the lockdown blues. I dug out my old DVD box sets and started to re-watch comedy classics. I devoured The Office, delighting again at Ricky Gervais’s glorious anti-PC creation David Brent. I stuck on Fawlty Towers and remembered how funny John Cleese used to be before he became a real-life whining malcontent.
Watching the greatest political satire ever, The Thick Of It, left me marvelling at the master of the four-lettered insult Malcolm Tucker. Father Ted and The League of Gentlemen had me howling with joy and I’ve yet to start re-runs of Alan Partridge, Peep Show or The Royle Family.
I can’t recommend doing this highly enough. Not only will it lift you, it will make you realise that at this time of national self-doubt, we do one thing brilliantly – make the world laugh through our unique, self-mocking humour.
It’s not a stiff upper lip that will lead us out of our current wilderness, but having an uncontrolled belly laugh at ourselves.
That’s the true essence of our national character.
‘‘ I got so bored I wanted a Trump press conference for stimulation