Changing gear
HENRY TUBE
Of the many novels and plays which have attempted to capture our new sub-culture, the world of the 'communicators," none has, to my knowledge, come near succeeding. Either the author is fatally infected with the communica- tors' own admiration for themselves, or he goes to the opposite extreme and takes too heavy a moral hammer to crack what turns out to be only a parcel of very lightweight nuts. I did not
see Alan Bennett's BBC series 'On the Margin,' but the strip-cartoon which Mark Boxer based on it and which has been appearing for the last year and a, quarter in the Listener, has exactly the right-touch; the nuts are laid open for our delectation without any loss of their peculiar. shapes'or flavours.
The Trendy Ape, a selection from the first year of Marc's cartoon, will come as a welcome remedy. to all those afflicted with Sunday Paper
Melancholy or Television Twitch. The satire, unlike Feiffer's, is gentle; where Feiffer treats of private and public monsters, portraying their variOug dangerous brands of insanity with a
repertoire of savage grimaces and- physical con- tortions; Marc. gives us social dummies, prey
to sniall fears and worries, adept at a limited kind of one-upmanship but the very pillars of a stable society.
Marc's characters, Joanna and Simon String- Along, the Touch-Paceys, Bernard Goldblatt and the'rest, vary their facial expressions and theiflestures little, though they change their posttYtes, clothes, furniture and reading-matter frorefrathe to frame. You will scarcely ever catch a 'glimpse' of Simon's eyes, for he wears his heavy black-framed glasses, like his two-line horizontal frown, in the bath as well as in bed.
Joanfla's eyes' appear' as tiny predatory dots, like 'the antennae of ah -eager but unattractive insedt;intht corners' of her swept-up feminine verskth-Of those same 'heavy -glasses, while Bemiai'd Goldblatt iceepS 'his eyes turned pre- sumAhry oh himself, behind demure finger-' naillhaPed lids high above his mighty wedge
of a-EY:Ste: • ,. .
TfiflY..Stand .or sit about in relation to' each othefilid tonVerse in typescript:They are pre- occuPled With one another as rivals, stepping- ston@i-lo' sniall'advances in status but above all as alitdience, and the television screen, from whic-IY'rhoSt of them earn their living, acts also as the final arbiter in all these matters. Thus, when Bernard Goldblatt leaves the String- Alongs' party to go and burn poems outside the Arts Council. they are upset not at his going. but at his' going to 'a protest meeting nobody has ever heard of,' but when he appears on the Tv news later the same evening, 'holding a match to his Gunn,' Simon concedes him out-, right admiration : 'I must say, it takes someone of Bernard's Intellectual calibre to ,break through from discussion programmes to the gritty reality of television news.' Nevertheless Simon's small rigid mouth takes one of its rare upward turns when Joanna announces to him on another occasion: 'Darling, isn't it exciting! - Bernard's show has been panned by the critics,' and, hands in the jacket pockets of his heavily striped double-breasted suit, one foot in bi- toned shoe Placed confidently on a pouffe. he • replies: 'With any luck I'll soon be able to publish my profile of Bernard in our "Where are they now?" series.'
The String-Alongs' and their friends' politics resemble the monkey's tail as it appears in the human-being, a residual vestige of something which once had its own purpose. They will agree with their neighbours in the crescent to tear down the fences and make a communal gar- . den so that in Simon's words 'we will be doing
something to create our own little kibbutz,' but shortly afterwards Simon will be seen hammer- ing the fence back into place with the stern observation: 'I found Tristram playing with a highly unsuitable child. I discovered the father is one of the PRO'S for the Greek government.' On the other hand, when Heidi the au pair is sacked to make way for 'some poor girl from Bradford , .. as our, patriotic gesture for I968,' and the replacement turns out to be black, Joanna's huge rouged mouth dives down parallel ,,to the tops of her swept-up glasses and Simon acquires. an unprecedented third line t.o his frown, as Joanna says: 'Simon, I said you were mad to, advertise our modest needs—sight unseen- 'in the New Statesman.' Their politics. like Simon's kipper ties or the cardboard fur- niture which Joanna offers the vicar for his
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