T his diary is what happens if the editor fails to
get a lobotomy. I had rung him to ask whether he’d like to grace Newsnight and the nation with his views on the affair between the former home secretary and the publisher of this journal. His response, verbatim, was: ‘Er, cripes. I think I’d need a prefrontal lobotomy before I did that,’ followed by, ‘You wouldn’t do a diary for us, would you, old boy?’ For those of us who do not have access to The Spectator’s water-cooler and whatever it contains, this is akin to being invited to appear on Trisha.
But, as it happens, I had a bit of time on my hands over the holidays, since being dropped from the New Year edition of Woman’s Hour. One of their producers emailed a few weeks ago; the suggestion was to have something called Man’s Hour. Great idea, I said, and thought of how one could be true to the spirit of the show. Well, obviously, one should have a cookery spot: I thought something on how to brew your own beer sounded promising. And something about men’s bits, probably on the horrors of circumcision. There was great potential. For a start, there are the jobs we’re all expected to be able to do just because we’re men. Across the land over the Christmas holidays we were handed the carving knife and told to get on with slicing the turkey. By what mysterious, osmotic process are we supposed to have learnt how to do this? Being a beast which looks as if it was invented by Edward Lear, the turkey is actually easy enough. But how on earth are we supposed to know how to deal with a shoulder of lamb? No one admits the apprehension which overcomes men on these occasions. Personally, I can’t even be confident of sharpening the knife properly.
It was clearly a productive seam. It’s time someone tackled the stomach-churning anxiety of being pointed at a car and told to get it started, or the frisson which passes through you when you’ve rewired an electrical appliance secure in the commonsense conviction that brown is the colour of the earth wire. (It is not — Spectator Health and Safety rep.) But my role in Man’s Hour came to grief on the question of circumcision. How often have listeners sat through similar items about female genital mutilation, including one in which Jenni Murray declared in supremacist tones that the clitoris has twice as many nerve endings as the penis? I do not suggest — mainly because I don’t know that there is any equivalence. That was what we wanted to find out. The producer began beavering away and discovered an organisation called ‘Reclaim the Foreskin’, which evangelises for the little bit of maleness that so often (although less and less frequently, apparently) gets discarded soon after birth. There was even a doctor who was happy to explain his technique for regrowing the missing bit. All was going swimmingly until the editorial hierarchy got to hear about plans to discuss the foreskin. While, in the usual way, protesting their liberal credentials, they were worried about making it ‘relevant and interesting to the audience’. I have been around the BBC long enough to know what this means, and that was the end of my role on Man’s Hour. The antediluvian assumption behind Woman’s Hour is that all the other programmes on the radio are designed by and for men. I don’t think so.
In fact, there is one programme which is designed for neither men nor women. Yeg Talk appears to be a programme by, about and for vegetables. I caught a few minutes of the programme — all cheeky chappy chitterchat — on the way back from the pub the other day. I was sorry to have to switch it off, as this is a journey which takes longer and longer in my part of Oxfordshire, as one pub after another is shut down and redeveloped for housing. The owners seem to have realised that they can make a great deal more money from flogging off the premises than they can through the boring business of selling beer. The old meeting places in rural England were the pub, the church, the shop and the school-gate. The shops and post offices have been driven out of business by the supermarkets. Many of the primary schools closed years ago. And now, as the pubs are shut down, there is simply nowhere at all for people to meet one another. If anyone attempted to get an urban housing scheme with no social facilities past the planners, they would be turned down at once, and rightly so. But that is the fate of much of rural Britain.
The last outpost of community activity to go to is often the church. Such churches as remain operate to rotas (‘family communion on the third Sunday of every second month’, etc.) which require an elephantine memory to manage. Even successful churches now have to survive the instructions of a Church hierarchy which has half digested a lot of outdated management gibberish about synergy and economies of scale. In Berkshire, for example, St Mary’s, Kintbury, has been told it must lose its vicar, and if diocesan bureaucracy has its way, a parish which has had its own vicar for hundreds of years and which counted Jane Austen among its worshippers will have no dedicated priest. It’s not a particularly unusual example. But what makes the plan slightly incomprehensible is the fact that the church has a healthy congregation (most of them well under 70), a thriving Sunday school, and a vicar who would like to stay put. Parishioners who have offered to pay her stipend have been rebuffed. All now hangs upon the decision of the retiring Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries.
Iwas in Kintbury (my friend, the novelist Robert Harris, lives there) when news came through of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Apart from the occasional lapse, which was entirely devoted to the disaster visited on Brits holidaying in ‘tropical paradise’, the coverage seemed to show how much more empathetic we have become about such matters. There used to be a horrible old law in journalism that 100,000 dead in a Chinese earthquake equalled 100 dead in a Continental plane crash, equalled two slightly injured in a car crash on the North Circular. It also brought home how often natural disasters occur during the holiday period. On a programme I worked on several years ago, a catastrophe hit the town of Darwin, Australia. The lonely producer on holiday night duty telephoned the graphics department, requesting an illustration for the news bulletin. ‘I’d like a map of Australia, animated to show Darwin, please.’ As Moira Stuart reached the middle of the story, he watched in horror as a bearded face exploded from the heart of Australia.
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