DIARY
STEPHEN FRY Ihave always been of the opinion that a man should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?' I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.' I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.' I should have remembered this invaluable maxim when I consented the other day to appear, if that is the right word, on Radio 4's The News Quiz. Perhaps you know the pro- gramme? The regular team captains repre- sent each of Lady Bracknell's ideals. In the Omniscient Corner there is Alan Coren Who knows everything and manages to make it hilarious, and in the Ignorant Cor- ner there is Richard Ingrams who knows nothing (or pretends to) and has you gasp- ing for air on account of it. Peter Cook, the funniest man allowable under EEC regula- tions, joined Ingrams and I was seconded to Coren. In order to prepare I had thought it necessary to read all the newspapers for a week — a perfectly superfluous undertak- ing as it turned out, since Coren could scribble or whisper any answers to me and ensure our team's ultimate victory. I was caught in the position, therefore, of being neither omniscient nor ignorant. The only information with which I could furnish the company was the intelligence that Virginia Bottomley is an anagram of `I'm an evil Tory bigot'. I wouldn't bother your heads With such a trivial observation if it weren't for the fact that a few days later I saw it reproduced in a Sun leader. They men- tioned the fact, without comment, in the hope that it might brighten their readers' clay. It may be the only week in which I Contributed both a Spectator diary and to a Sun leader and I feel . . . is `proud' the word? I must think about it.
The experience of reading newspapers for a week has reminded me of our great national genius for headline writing. I spot- ted a screaming banner in a tabloid last week which ran 'Nude Etonian Murdered BY A Hooker's Junkie Lover'. This I thought deserved some kind of palm for containing six words each of which is a sub- editor's dream. Only `By' and 'A' are redundant. It managed to be free of word- play too, Some years ago I was invited to lunch by the late Mark Boxer, who was editing the Tatter at the time. He wanted to Offer me a job, but was being rather coy about describing it. 'I need you to take a look at each month's edition and smell it,' he said. `Find some way of linking every- thing together. Think about how various features and articles can be reflected on the Cover.' At last, after much puzzlement, I ,suddenly grasped what he was driving at. You want me to write the puns!"Y es!' he cried, thumping the table with joy. For a few months I did as I was asked. If the front cover contained a girl in a scarlet frock, then the 'spine line' would say 'Red Dress The Balance'. Even date puns were obliga- tory: `Feb. & Groovy', `June Know Where You Are Going?' and' Nov. Under You're Feeling Blue'. If there was a major feature about Catholic families inside, the cover would promise `The Smart Sect: Roman Britain revealed' or some such tummy-rub- bish. Fashionable film and book titles would dictate headlines too. An article decrying the influence of Britain's leading design guru would, as a matter of course, be headlined `Conran the Barbarian', just as profiles of the Chancellor today are invariably subbed `Beyond Our Ken' or `Kenneth Clarke Ha Ha Ha'. I lasted no more than three months in this atmo- sphere. My friends just couldn't take it. 'An, the Articulate Laurie,' I would say, 'Hugh are you?' There is no sign of the epi- demic being halted. Last week's Spectator could not resist headlining Simon Cour- tauld's article on fish `Absolutely brill'. It may be time for legislation.
n the subject of legislation, the nation is now ready, it seems to me, for action to be taken on the political correct- ness front. Am I alone in noticing this alarming new development? It has become impossible now to utter a sentence without the barons of the new trendiness insisting on the inclusion of the words 'standards', Individual', `values', `responsibility' and `family'. It doesn't matter in what order they occur or what meaningless nonsense they denote, the words must dominate what statesmen like to call our 'agenda'. Eight years ago I wrote an article in the Listener `More bloody privatisation.' wondering at the half-cocked stupidity of politicians displaying such impertinence. The trendy belief in family values had already been going for a good seven years by then and there seems even now to be no end in sight. Nobody minds that the Con- servative governments of the last 15 years have contained at least six adulterers and two homosexuals at cabinet level and dozens more on the back-benches. If these men want mistresses, love-children and boyfriends, then good luck to them. The British are a decent, tolerant and friendly people and like to see their fellow citizens enjoying themselves in a kindly, responsible and adult way. What really gets our goat is when these same men and their colleagues stand on podia in seaside towns at Party Conference time and tell us how to behave in private; what causes us pain and indigna- tion is to hear them lecture the nation about the virtues of the family and deride those of us who prefer not to have our moral horizons dictated by the Daily Mail. The Family: that noble institution responsi- ble for 70 per cent of all murders, over 80 per cent of incidents of child abuse and a full 100 per cent of all cases of incest.
It is a matter of some embarrassment to the British to be led by people dumb enough to recommend a return to the edu- cational standards of the 1950s. Cannot even today's politician see that the natural result of the 1950s was . . . tra-la . . . the 1960s? The children who sat at their Man- sion Wax-polished deal desks glowing with shiny hair and squeaky shoes in clean straight rows while begowned schoolmas- ters had them conjugating tu/i and 4.11X.0 were the very girls and boys who went on to create TW3, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Oz magazine, Private Eye, satire, sex, permissiveness, anti-Vietnam war demos, feminism, flower power, the drug craze, sit-ins, love-ins and the whole damned thing. Those who went to school in the 'discredited' Seventies with its peace studies, demotic history and graphic sex education are the grown-ups whose ambi- tions today concentrate on better car alarms, longer prison sentences and 32-bit Sega Game Gear for their children. But, no, the blue hair at Blackpool demanded a return to core values, so core values it will be. The strange thing is that I do not know a single Conservative MP — and I count myself fortunate to have met many of the species — who is anything other than huge- ly embarrassed by this sloppy and bloodless new orthodoxy. Still, like all trendy fads it will run its course and only the fashion for punning headlines and Page 3 girls will remain: what the Sun might call 'Cod Values'.
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