DIARY
RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN FEdinburgh or the nth time in my life I'm up at the Edinburgh Festival, primarily to review opera for the Daily Telegraph. The weather is filthy, the city staggeringly beautiful, and the shows run the gamut from magnificent to atrocious; in some aspects, the experi- ence never changes. But this year there's a nip in the air for us lot, emanating from a chill wind called Critical Condition, a Chan- nel 4 documentary series which aired its fourth and final episode earlier this week. The truth is out. We have been rumbled. No misguided high court judge, no pontifi- cating politician caught with his pants down has ever been more humiliated. In four subtle and killingly funny programmes, nar- rated by the deceptively fey and amiable Jon Ronson, the profession of critic has been mocked and vilified, leaving us wretched practitioners of the art of cultural judgment exposed as pompous, petty-mind- ed frauds, consumed by vanity and spite. After our dismal performance, how can we ever presume to point the finger at the ineptitude of others again?
Well, perhaps I exaggerate slightly, but the mood is certainly fractious. Edin- burgh has traditionally been our busman's holiday, a time for camaraderie and an opportunity for light-hearted, late-night boozing and gossip, but this year we have been eyeing each other suspiciously from a distance or forming little pro- and anti- cabals which feed into the general para- noia. A long essay on the series by one of our own number, Peter Conrad, in the Observer has further raised the emotional temperature with its vicious ad hominem attacks and score-settling. I feel a bit smug about all this. Last autumn, Jon Ronson's research assistant asked me to appear in one of the films. Of course I was immedi- ately flattered into agreement, and spent several pleasant hours daydreaming about my speech to camera. A booming, Leavis- like jeremiad about the bankruptcy of mod- ern culture took mental shape. Having delivered it to great reclame, I fantasised, long overdue invitations to air my views on Newsnight and Start the Week would follow, culminating in a contract for my own late- night chat-show. Fortunately, I never heard from Ronson again: his people must have decided I was second-league, small fry, or just not very interesting, and transferred their attentions to more flamboyant charac- ters who went on to strut their stuff and fall flat on their faces. Thank God I was spared: the only moment I feature in Criti- cal Condition is when somebody mutters my name, to which the response is a scepti- cal 'oh'. In the circumstances, my amour Propre finds this perfectly satisfying. The great fascination of the Fringe is that it operates as a free market for the arts, unsupported and unhampered by do- gooding public subsidy or Arts Council pieties, and therefore serves as a perfect laboratory in which to observe the real, raw trends in our culture. What encourages me this year is the distinct sense that the era of the foul-mouthed stand-up comic, rattling an hour of smart-ass obscenities into a microphone, is finally waning. I suppose all the taboos have now been broken, and short of someone defecating in public (it just might happen) there is no longer any frisson to be drawn from sexual or scatolog- ical subject matter.
Instead the last couple of years have seen a welcome return to whimsical narratives, word-play and character observation: among this year's most popular acts is the distinctly U-certificate Ben Moor, whose gentle, literate fooling and shaggy-dog sto- ries wouldn't have been out of place on Stephen Potter's Third Programme. I met Moor after seeing his show, and we talked about the way things were going, joke-wise. He said he was baffled by the absence of new female comedians over the last few years — I guess the likes of Jenny Eclair and Jo Brand have discouraged timid young souls from applying. Perhaps it is once again time for a lady monologist in ball-gown and long white gloves. What are the odds on a Joyce Grenfell or Bea Lillie revival hitting next year's Fringe? Should Baroness Thatcher have a go ?
Edinburgh restaurants have become modishly chic of late, and the colour supple- ments make much of something posing as `It must have been a military target, we bombed it, didn't we?' `new Scots cuisine' — strips of venison replacing sirloin of beef and redcurrant jus substituting for lumpy gravy. G., a native, takes a dim view of this charade. 'Surely you aren't nostalgic for haggis, neeps and tatties,' I insist, but he claims that such delicacies are pure fiction served up for tourists, no more authentic than kilts or `och aye, the noo', and that the reality of Scottish food is something quite different. His own childhood menus were virtually devoid of fresh fruit or vegeta- bles: 'Our special treat was fillet steak with square-sliced sausage, chips, onions and toast,' he tells me. Much of what he ate is entirely unknown south of Carlisle: a Bridie (a cross between a Cornish pasty and a sausage roll), a Single Fish (actually a fish and half), or a Scotch Pie (a concoction of mutton 'plus bits and bobs, the provenance of which you were better off not knowing'), all washed down with 'ginger' (the generic Scots term for any soft fizzy drink) and fol- lowed by a Dolly Varden or a Soor Ploom. G.'s father was partial to something he referred to as 'a slice of Uma Loaf,' but he has never established what this consisted of. Please write to me c/o The Spectator if you know.
To Glasgow to meet the splendid Joan Alexander, Scotland's foremost singing teacher — Marie McLaughlin is one of her many distinguished pupils. Although well into her eighties, Miss Alexander is still in excellent shape and game for a few holes of golf. I coax her to reminisce about her own career as 'the only professional soprano in Scotland', and very intriguing what she remembers is too. It transpires incidentally that she trained in Munich in the mid-1930s, but the early triumphs of Hitler and the Nazis made little impres- sion on her. 'I was there to study,' she said briskly, 'and just kept out of their road.' One of the last of a breed of singer with little interest in the stage, she never appeared in opera but was a regular per- former at the Proms in the post-war years. Under Boult she sang extracts from Berg's Wozzeck and seems to have been the first British soprano to tackle Strauss's Four Last Songs. Beecham she adored; Sargent she did not care for — 'too snobbish, and he told me I sang out of tune, which I never did'. As far as she knows her singing was never recorded, though she can be dis- tantly heard as the voice of Antonia's mother in the Powell and Pressburger film of The Tales of Hoffmann. Does she think standards have declined? 'Not at all. Though there's a lot of bad singing about nowadays.' And what, in her view, is the secret of a sound vocal technique? 'Com- plete control of the breath,' she says firm- ly, 'and no walloping around.'
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