DIARY
JOHN OSBORNE
nia's goddess Zuni scored again last Satur- day when the BBC's 'Performance' series, devoted to 'classic' plays, transmitted its offering of The Entertainer. As those other weird sisters in the Scottish Play put it, 'The charm's wound up,' I doubt that the Daughters of Eve would stoop to popping the eye of disadvantaged newt or toe of male-dominated frog into their sisterly brew, but their secret, black and midnight incantations did a triumphant job on my poor old play. Fair is foul and foul is fair, girls. For the second time this year, I am left to peak and pine over the public dese- cration of my work.
What had been Olivier's most cher- ished venture into the unknown emerged as no more than a bland sit-corn. Slovenly miscast, carelessly directed, even the mag- nificent Michael Gambon floundered. (I have to say that an actress called Helen McCrory, quite unknown to me, is an exhil- arating discovery.) As with the revival of Inadmissible Evidence at the National The- atre, the pain had been extracted like the sin from prevailing Anglican belief. Even Jock Addison's superb score was discarded, without a by-your-leave. I had been treated to the perfunctory pre-production supper at the Ivy, but no one questioned me to any profit about the phantom I, alone, once plucked from the air. Being forced to wit- ness and then brood upon the rape and mutilation of your mind's frail offspring is a grievous loss, a bitter defilement for which there is no effective prayer, let alone fatu- ous 'counselling'. When I first saw the videotape of this calumny on my fugitive reputation, I wrote to the producer, implor- ing him to re-shoot some of the more vul- gar sequences. As with Mr Chamberlain, no such undertaking was received. No reply at all. A writer once took for granted his constitutional right to be consulted, advise, encourage and warn. Well, we are now ignominiously deposed, governed by the guttersnipes of Entertainment, Its only a play, you may say. It will pass, and is already forgotten. Yet it is my life, my limbs that have been severed. As Titus says of his daughter's butchered stumps: Or shall we cut away our hands like thine? Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows
Pass the remainder of our hateful days? What shall we do? Let us that have our tongues,
Plot some device of further misery, To make us wonder'd at in time to come.
Nice one, Zuni.
As for the rape of Anglicanism, what relish it provides for outsiders. I suppose I must now count myself as one. Rome is a forever foreign place and no road for the likes of me. My ticket was booked for Can- terbury, and I'm not looking for lifts to other exotic parts. Recently, I was agree- ably astonished to learn that I had been attacked at inordinate length by Dr Hab- good, the Archbishop of York, over a review I had written months ago of a beguiling new edition of the Prayer Book But after the hollow, shrill celebrations fol- lowing the ordination slug-out, I've been too dispirited or feeble to go to church, even though they do a decent Matins twice a month up here, and Evensong, to me the most perfect and sublime order of the day, survives by a thread. My wife has given up asking me on Sundays, 'Are you talking to God this week?' No. I've nothing of even trifling interest to say, even less to ask, Iturned on the wireless to listen to the omnibus Archers and, in the first of a series of Advent services, caught a sermon-snatch of the King James' version of Isaiah quot- ed, albeit in hearty sky-pilot's intonation. Had the Religious Affairs mafia, where the word 'mankind' is now forbidden, been nodding off? The cloud quickly unfolded. The Redcoat cleric explained his quaint descent into archaism. 'Well, that's the poetry of a bygone age,' he breezed. 'He did have quite a touch of the poet, didn't he?' Kiddies,' I expected him to add. Cler- gymen seem to pursue infantilism as reso- lutely as any recidivist rock star. Poetry, if you please. He joshed on reassuringly into an Alan Bennett life-is-like-a-tin-of-sar- dines spiel, likening our post-Bulger moral dilemmas to, yes, being bunkered on a golf- course. This Tupperware party closed with a tinkling of sing-along-a-God finality. I waited for the credits. This was no mere parish vicar but the hard-hitting Bishop of Maidstone, no less. Last Sunday, I listened to the second in the BBC's Advent series, from Birmingham. It made Maidstone's knees-up sound as sweet and scalding as the afternoon angels of Magdalen. The closing hymn, I promise you, was sung to the tune of 'I'm a blue toothbrush, you're a pink toothbrush'. 'Jesus is here. To check us out,' said the Bishop. Will you have your input ready!' So comes the message of Advent. Smirking mush: no rigour, nor ter- ror and, specifically, no vile bodies.
Dismay at the misuse and debasement of the English tongue merely invites bus- pass sneers from the officially young. To hell with that. The duff currency of our own coinage is dreary enough, proclaiming the dismal verbal dominance of Yookay Yobocracy: 'at the end of the day', 'moving the goalposts' to 'a level playing-field', `taken on board' with 'relationships', 'coun- selling' and 'targeting'. But what amazes of late is the frantic adoption by politicians and journalists of shiftlessly minted transat- lantic clichés, the intimidated tolerance of rap and green-ink-speak. Millions of peo- ple in this country never see a black face except on kiddies' TV, yet there prevails this concerted death wish of multicultural- ism, the self-imposition of Black and Amer- ican colonisation and the mass repudiation of a thousand years of civilisation. Plain- speaking 'talk to' has been abandoned for German-American mit sprechen 'talk with'. To talk 'with' implies conspiracy; `to' has a vocative intimacy. 'Meet up with'. These hideous German constructions go unre- marked together with American pronounci- ations — harassment, research. Why this craven capitulation? Does it matter? Well, Zuni's plaything feels it so. The latest mis- appropriation is the general use of 'out there', implying a looming, lonely and for- bidding continent. That may be how the Yookay looks to you, but it is not the island of my birth.
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