Never seen Bake Off ? You’re in good company ‘ ‘
‘Imake time only for the most excellent,” said Goethe, the poet-playwright-novelist-botanist-diplomat-architectlinguist. So it’s a fair bet that if they had demonstrated The Great German
Bake Off in the streets of 19th-century Weimar (“please to taste our Faustpretzel, liebe Herr!’), he would have closed his curtains and gone back to formulating his theory of colour.
No matter what the wallahs of fashion think, we don’t all follow the latest fads. I have never watched The Great British Bake
Off, about which we have read so much this week, and do not feel particularly deprived. Neither have I seen Cold Feet, even though a pal of mine stars in it. Nor have I ever watched Strictly Come Dancing, EastEnders, or, for that matter, The West Wing, which apparently is very good. Close Encounters, Star Wars, Jaws? Not in this parish. Harry Potter? Not a lotta. Taylor Swift? There used to be a plumbers’ firm of that name in Swadlincote. I have never read a word of Jane Austen, heard a note of Elbow (a trendy pop group, m’lud), eaten caviar, sipped absinthe, or snorted cocaine. I have never been to Spain, swum in the sea, caught a fish, fired a gun, ridden a horse or changed a tyre. Nor, I suspect, am I alone. On the other hand, I have met the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and Nelson Mandela in Soweto. I have made Ken Dodd laugh, swapped poems with Harold Pinter, discussed songs with Stephen Sondheim, taken wine with Sir Ian Botham (not quite as straightforward as it sounds), heard Sinatra in New York, and shared a stage with the Berlin Philharmonic (in the wings). As a schoolboy I made a century, and as an adult I have been banned for life from the Groucho Club. And while I’m prouder of the first accomplishment, the second is not to be sneezed at. Plenty have failed in the attempt.
“Life is too short to play Rachmaninov,” said Alfred Brendel. He wasn’t necessarily right, but the great German scholar-poet was. There is so much more to savour, for all of us, than the arbiters of taste imagine. How we laughed when Private
Eye mocked Dave and Deirdre Spart, and other gormless metropolitans who supported demonstrations by “black lesbians against killer asbestos”. This week, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, the fantasy was made flesh when nine “activists” who had disrupted London City Airport with a protest on behalf of Black Lives Matter walked free.
One lady, it goes without saying, was an expert on “lesbian culture”. Another was involved in “youth empowerment”, another committed to “intergenerational education work” (teaching, it is more commonly called), while a particularly selfless man was determined to bring about “the downfall of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.
At least four were university graduates, three had double barrels in their surnames, and one lucky lady, a cousin of Ralph Fiennes, boasted two hyphens! It is unlikely that any of these social warriors knows much about Dickens, so let us point them towards Mrs Sparsit, the faded aristocrat in Hard Times. “If I could make myself a person of common descent and ordinary connexions, I would gladly do so.” Dickens was joking; they were not.
Those who rail most vigorously against humanity, Dickens also wrote, tend to be among its most unpleasant specimens. It isn’t often that one sees that truth presented in so unflattering a light. Jeremy Thompson, who is retiring as the anchor of Sky News at the age of 68, was the best presenter the BBC never had. Mind you, as he speaks clearly in wellformed sentences, the public service broadcaster wouldn’t have had much use for him.
No no, the producers at Langham Place will say, we’re much better off with Fiona “Squinter” Bruce, who loves nothing more than swallowing her words, unless it is placing a curious emphasis on the wrong syllable. And we certainly can’t get rid of Kirsty Wark, whose chummy “interview” this week with Tina Brown on the subject of Hillary Clinton was a lowlight of
Newsnight’s increasingly ragged journalism.
Braver souls, however, may consider it worth their while to engage an experienced hand like Thompson to show younger journalists how to speak on screen. Perhaps his race is not yet run.