Another voice

Stand up and be counted

Auberon Waugh A rhinoceros will mark out the borders of its territory with a trail of urine and little piles of dung. Anybody who crosses this line will be charged by an enraged proprietor weighing four or five tons and travelling at thirty miles an hour—the equivalent, I suppose, of a human body hitting a brick wall at about 150 miles an hour. Obviously, I hesitate to enter the clearly defined territory of the Spectator's television critic, but the events I am about to describe had their beginnings in BBC Bristol's programme, Points West, which he could not possibly have seen, even if he had been watching at the time.

Hughie Green, I should explain, has been in the West Country to promote his new record: Stand Up and Be Counted. On Thursday of last week he was to be seen in a dinner jacket riding a Weston-super-Mare donkey. The same evening, he attended a banquet of the Travel Managers Institute at the Holiday Inn, Bristol, and made a speech in praise of the Concorde aeroplane. The chef of the Holiday Inn, Mr Allen Gearing, produced as his piece de resistance, a morethan-life-sized American eagle, carved in lard.

I expect they ate it afterwards. Quite probably Hughie Green eats a couple of pounds of lard every day to keep in training for this sort of occasion. There is something heroic about the man, whatever one may say. Is he a real human being, or a pop artist's impression, carved in peppermintflavoured technicolour lard, of the proletarian culture in its own image? Why, of course he's a human being. In fact, he's very, very human indeed, more human than many of us are, did we but know it. His tax positiOn is almost certainly worse than mine, poor fellow.

At any rate, this walking enigma is being interviewed by a pretty young woman called Anita Evans (no relation to the Great Dame) on Points West when I catch up with him. His purpose, as I say, is to ply his new record Stand Up and Be Counted, and pretty Miss Evans plays the record.

It is very strange. Over celestial music, a Hollywood Old Testament voice starts warning us about the National Debt, the need to work harder, to remember Winston Churchill and have fewer strikes:

Music: 'In your farewell to 1976 did you see Britain old and worn and on the brink of ruin and bankruptcy ? . . .

Where do we go from here? . . . we British —Scots, Welsh, English—in the past have earned respect throughout the world . . . Twice nearly bled to death for freedom . . . Blood, toil, tears and sweat ... Do we need loans for these?. . Friends, let us take, yes,

take, not borrow this year 1977 . . . Determination, hard work, freedom from strikes, better management, and from all of us, guts...'

The image of Britons looking old and worn fades and we are left with Mr Green and Miss Evans in the studio, Did I dream it ? No, Miss Evans indignant, Mr Green faintly sheepish—no longer the Winston Churchill that we have all been waiting for, just another showbiz creep caught on the hop.

Of course, Mr Green can quite understand that there are those who don't like patriotism. He just happens to have this strictly personal thing about patriotism himself. . . you know, rather liking it. He nods his head thoughtfully three or four times. Perhaps I am the only viewer who spots the pound or so of lard which shoots out of his ears with each nod. He has received 5,000 letters about the record, he claims. Most of them have been laudatory. Oh yes, there's a market for patriotism.

Beautiful Miss Evans seems to be missing most of the tricks. She does not point out that there are many more than 5,000 bloody fools in the British Isles. She does not distinguish between varieties of patriotism, or remind Mr Green of Dr Johnson's famous aphorism. She pretends not to notice the great globules of lard.

Next morning finds me in Taunton trying to buy the record. Could it really be as I had heard it ? There are four record shops in Taunton, the biggest of which is W. H. Smith. The first three, comparatively civilised emporia, deny all knowledge of Hughie Green or his record. As I feared. I approach W. H. Smith with great reluctance averting my eyes from the filth in the magazine racks and resolving to say a novena of the rosary in expiation.

Perhaps I should explain this reluctance, lest anybody mistake it for malice. W. H. Smith is the biggest chain bookseller in the United Kingdom, but I have never once found a book I was looking for there. A partial explanation may be supplied by their refusal to handle my latest book, Four Crowded Years (Deutsch/Private Eye £2.75, most sensitively reviewed by Martin A mis in the New Statesman, 26 November 1976) on the grounds that it might contain libel. Their lawyers could easily have discovered that the book was a reprint of material which had been appearing for four years in the widely circulated magazine Private Eye (`They always Pay'—Peter Carter-Ruck, Solicitor-at-Law) without provoking so much as a single solicitor's letter, let alone a writ.

But the vile incompetence of W. H. Smug's

lawyers is only a small part of that firm's iniquity. The Taunton branch is vast, selling everything from Tit-Bits to toys and gramophone records, but it does not sell either the Spectator or the New Statesman. 'Sorry, no demand,' they answer triumphantly. In fact, Taunton has a highly cultured population, which swarms into every concert or cultural event which shows its nose in the town, and there would certainly be a market for the intelligent weeklies if anybody at W. H. Smug had ever heard of them.

So I am understandably reluctant to spend money with an organisation which should have been broken up years ago if the Monopolies Commission had a single tooth in its addled old head. But, in the event, I need not have worried, the shop assistant has heard of Hughie Green and he is able to confirm from a printed list that the record is out, but he certainly hasn't ordered one. 'Sorry, no demand,' he says triumphantly. I walk away with a lighter step. It is encouraging to learn that this miserable shop can't even cater properly for the imbecile tastes of the generation it has helped to create.

But it leaves me with the task of checking Hughie Green's words in his Call to the Nation. Eventually I trace a copy in the record library of Radio Bristol, where Hughie has been interviewed by the brilliant Chris Denham who obliginglY plays it over the telephone to me. Yes, it is all there. I haven't been dreaming:

'Determination, hard work, freedom from strikes, better management and from all of us, guts . . . Without these virtues, we will lose our freedom forever.'

Good old Hughie. He and the ArchbishoP of Canterbury will see us through. Brooding about this very very wonderful man and his nice, old-fashioned patriotism. I begin to see a new and historically vital role for him to play. Patriotism takes many forms, and to the extent I indulge in it myself, the form always seems to be that of the true friend prepared to tell a man when his breath smells. But Hughie's role, as I see it, is altogether more sublime. It is to be the mirror in which the nation can see its true likeness, and discover how horrible it is.

From time to time in these pages and elsewhere I have suggested various persons as suitable to lead the country out of its present mess. All those named so far have been intelligent, educated, moderate men, frequently of handsome countenance and high birth. But of course such people would never be acceptable to the British public nowadays. The W. H. Smug generation demands someone cast in its own mould, someone greasy. half-witted, repulsive to behold and bottomlessly ignorant.

Stand up, stand up Hughie Green. Your country needs you, and opportunity never knocks twice. The nation will only come to its senses when it has feasted its eyes on this wonderful man and seen how the rest of the world sees us.