6 OCTOBER 1967, Page 28

Keeping in with the Joneses

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS

There was an exhilarating and life-enhancing roar of rage in last week's New Listener—if you missed it turn on BBC sound or TV for the new multi-wavelength review of Highlights from the New Listener or The Printed Word in Spoke—when their theatre critic, a Mr Jones, flung himself into a teeth-gnashing, blood- vessel-rupturing assault on R. Ingrams and my- self after a visit to Mrs Wilson's Diary. The reason, apparently, was not so much that he did not like the play as that both Ingrams and I had been to public schools, and that our un- sightly prejudices were showing through the bespangled tat. Even Public School Girl J. Littlewood came in for a thumping for having produced the show in the style of the old Music Hall—'that debased entertainment in which working-class people were urged to mock upstarts, like Burlington Bertie from Bow.'

I thought this reaction particularly interest- ing because it represented, caught in a moment of unguarded rage, the Voice of Authority. Authority in other words (and it habitually expresses itself in a gentle, half-bantering tone of amused tolerance—hence the rare delight of hearing it roar) does not approve of jokes at the expense of what it would call, if pressed, the Middle Class. Bash the Upper Crust and it's rich Brechtian satire, bash the Simple Minded Working Man and it's rollicking, boisterous, non-satirical light entertainment, but bash the Bourgeoisie and Authority is not amused.

As in any other age, contemporary Authority feels the weight of its responsibility, even though it may not in this case be fully aware as yet of the extent of its power. It is therefore not the best friend of the belly laugh. Nevertheless it has come cautiously to the conclusion, after suitably agonising Observerstyle appraisals and long cool colour-supplement looks at the prob- lem, that certain subjects are valid targets for the 'satirist.' The Queen, for example, is always considered to be good for a satirical poke, being on the side of the Old Establishment, Power, Armies and so forth; and Authority can regularly be seen rolling about in the stalls in its dark John Michael shirt and tweedy woollen tie at any hint of infidelity on the part of the Consort, the Corgis, or Prince Albert.

The Upper Class is also regarded by Authority as fair game, particularly if, as in the case of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the butt appears to be a mild, absent-minded and rather simple person, liable at any moment to topple and fall over. Endless fun can be derived with a clear conscience from aristocratic speech de-

fects—Lord Salisbury's 'es will have Authority in stitches — aristocratic wives, particularly those with long teeth and eccentric ideas about dress, and aristocratic handicaps like the gout or worse, when the subject of the politically acute satire has to swing about on crutches, hobble pitifully to and fro on a trembling stick, or pat himself pathetically along in a wheel chair. This is all justified intellectually,

Authority will tell you as he wipes the tears from his eyes, by the fact that the Upper Classes

are all to do with Power, Oppression, and Ruth- less Exploitation, even though the individual selected by the dramatist happens to be mani- festly impotent in every sense.

The Working Class is also hilarious, though here the justification is a little more complex.

Authority, benign and flushed after dinner at

some marvellously classless but exclusive trat- toria, will choke itself laughing at the antics of

the ignorant cloth-capped loon in the waist- coat with his front stud showing, and will relish particularly the more sordid aspects of poverty and overcrowding, like bloomers being ironed among the food on the kitchen table. The satiric climax is usually reached when the playwright causes the ignorant person to use words and phrases of an intellectual or cul- tural flavour deemed unsuitable to his humble station. At this Authority will finally have hysterics and will roll on the floor among the Gauloise packets, stuffing its Munrospun tie

into its mouth in a vain attempt at self-control. Questioned in this state, it will eventually grow serious, and explain that it is enjoying the deliciously subtle mockery of cry.pto-Tory attitudes among the class traitors.

The reason why Authority should sit tight- lipped and disapproving through any spectacle representing the Middle Class in a less than favourable light is a little more subtle. As the tiny handful of genuine Working Class writers has a hostile and angry attitude to the Bourgeoisie in the best bohemian tradition. they are rarely disposed to write sympathetic comedies about them, and are anyway for the most part spared the worst excesses of Middle Class life. It therefore falls almost always to the Middle Class themselves to mock the Middle Class, and here Authority begins to grow suspicious. Brought up in almost every case in the Middle Class itself—though Autho- rity will fight for hours in the drawing rooms of Hampstead to establish its working class origins —it faces its most terrible dilemma.

Educated on decent left-wing principles shortly after the war, Authority learned to recognise the Monarchy and the Upper Classes as Power. Having probably in those days little personal contact with either, the caricature was enough. Similarly with the Working Classes there was little personal contact, despite fashionable reminiscences about clogs and coal in the bath, and therefore the caricature was sufficient there too. The Middle Class presented a more complex problem.

Secretly believing them to be vulnerable, Authority still feels it necessary to protect them from attack, just as in the past socially conscious gentlefolk would exclude working class charac- ters from their pantomimes on the grounds that no gentleman laughed at servants. The con- descension is precisely the same. Having become, almost without realising it, the authori- tative voice of the class in power, of the class that subsidises them, it now finds itself in exactly the opposite position to that in which it began, the Middle Class defender of a strong Middle Class. It must be comforting for ladies in Dork- ing to know they have such unlikely champions.