DIARY JOHN HUMPHRYS
ter half a century of suffering I believe I have finally cracked it: the ideal Christmas holiday. The secret lies in the things one does not do. Remember, where Christmas is concerned you cannot begin preparing too early, so start planning for Christmas 1998 now. Do not eat turkey. Turkey is to goose what sliced white bread is to the finest soda bread. Stay away from the shops and, therefore, canned carols and crowds. To children you give money (which is all they really want anyway) and to adults you send a publisher's list and ask them to choose a book. If your friends do not read, find new friends. Stay away from the family. If you are married with small children, that can be tricky, but this is a time for ingenuity and no, repeat no, conscience. Watch no television, absolutely none. Yes, I know I appear on it, but a drug dealer seldom uses his own product. Radio is allowed. Send no Christmas cards. If you enjoy receiving them they will still come. It is easier to remove a spin doctor from his portable phone than your name from someone else's Christmas card list. There are many more things not to do, but you'll have hours of innocent fun adding to the list as the year rolls by.
Ihave long enjoyed the cartoon which shows one man telling the other that he is writing a novel. 'Oh really,' says his friend, `neither am I.' For years I have resisted the blandishments of publishers. It has always struck me as absurd that they will, for no better reason than that you appear on the wireless or television, happily pay you a king's ransom to bind your profound thoughts between hard covers. It may or may not make commercial sense, but quite why the ability to read from an autocue without falling off the chair, or to ask a few questions without making a total pillock of yourself, qualifies anyone as a writer is beyond me. Sadly, however, I have finally given in. Call it vanity; after all, everyone else seems to have done it. Call it greed at the prospect of all those lovely royalties (who's kidding whom, I wonder). Call it too much wine over a too good dinner But I have said yes; I will write a book. So now my life is ruined. It will not be a novel, you understand; even a broadcaster's vanity knows some bounds. It is non-fiction and it is about a subject on which I thought I had strong and clear views — until I began writ- ing, that is. What had seemed so simple and powerful argued over a pint or two of decent bitter becomes complex or trite as the words appear on the computer screen. And no longer do I own my own time. None of it. I have always packed a reason- able amount into the working day but at least there was usually enough left over at the end, or even in the middle, for the odd moment of self-indulgence. No longer. Guilt at missed deadlines corrupts the most simple pleasures. And it's not as if I could crack it by getting up earlier in the morn- ing. Earlier than 4 a.m., for God's sake! If there is a God, please make my signature vanish from the contract — and make it soon.
Apropos the above, a tale much told at Television Centre is of the self-regarding presenter (yes, hard though it may be to believe, they do exist) who had more in the way of braggadocio than brain cells but who, nonetheless, wrote a book. Said pre- senter rolled up for work the morning after he had typed his final word. 'Finished my first book today,' he told his long-suffering colleague. `Oh really . . . ' came the reply, `and what did you read?'
By the time you read these words the Today programme will have a new editor, one Rod Liddle, and I shall have a new boss. He's a perfectly agreeable fellow, indeed a prince among men (just in case he's also reading this; one can't be too care- ful in my precarious business), but I won- der if he knows what he's letting himself in for. He will need the constitution of an ox for the early starts and late finishes, the skin of a rhinoceros for the endless assaults from politicians and their spin doctors who whinge if they're not invited to appear and then whinge even more if they are and don't like the questions, and the boredom threshold of a goldfish to equip him for the endless management meetings which are, of course, the real purpose of the BBC. So forgive me, boss, but perhaps you should think again. As an American senator once said of the US presidency: anyone who really wants that job should automatically he disqualified.
N. interviewing task is more to be feared than that with the winner of some great honour the morning after the New Year's Honours List has been published. What, as we say in my trade, is the second question after they've told you (as they always do) how delighted they are? Here is the interview you have never heard. JH: 'Congratulations on your CBE . . . you must be delighted?' Recipient: 'Bollocks! Two hundred grand to their f—ing party and all I get is a few letters after my name. I told 'em right from the start it was a K I was after. Been promising the missus she'd be able to call herself Lady ever since we had that spot of bother over my last sec- retary, so how the hell am I gonna keep her sweet now? Would you like to know what those b—s in the PM's office have been saying to me . _ ? JH: 'Yes, please, I rather think I would.' But it's always at that point I wake up.
Oh, a final 'don't' for Christmas: don't spend it in Wales. I did. I spent many hours walking on the hills and cliffs of west Wales. It was ghastly. Wales is a truly dreadful place, filled with the even more dreadful Welsh. None of that is true, of course. It's a wonderful country and we are a truly remarkable race: musical, literate, articulate and modest. But some English- men, notably A.N. Wilson and A.A. Gill, spend endless hours of their sad lives vilify- ing Wales and the Welsh. Mr Gill has just been at it again and so upset the race rela- tions people in Wales that they are (I kid you not) referring it to the lawyers. A few fat fees there for the taking, methinks. But please, please believe them, not me. If the effect of their tiresome tirades is to keep the English out of Wales, so much the bet- ter. A land of beauty with few tourists is doubly blessed. Incidentally, why is it that certain Englishmen abjure their given names in favour of initials? You don't find the Welsh doing that sort of thing. Except for R.S. Thomas, of course, and he was doing so long before Messrs Wilson and Gill first put pen to paper. What's that they say about imitation?
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