Will Waspe's Whispers
Journalistic naiveté, which I had thought to reside only in the most youthful and starry-eyed of political commentators, survives also, it seems, in show business. The Observer's film man, George Melly, has been upset by the use to which unfavourable rereviews of Straw Dogs have been put by the film's promoters. "Alexander Walker's attack is being reproduced in toto as a come-on," whines Melly. Well, fancy that. Where has Georgie boy been all his life not to know that to describe anything as ' shocking ' (with plenty of details of the 'shocking' sex and ' shocking ' violence it contains) is a comeon? Alexander Walker made quite sure of it by proclaiming that if Straw Dogs could get past the censor, he couldn't think of anything that wouldn't.
I doubt whether Walker would.complain, or even be surprised, at the use made of his remarks: for publicity agents and advertising agents, gold •is where they find it. His Evening Standard colleague, drama critic Milton Shulman, must grind his teeth every time he sees the line that has helped to promote that dreary play, How the Other Half Loves, into a long run: "I laughed like a lunatic," it reads, "it is very, very funny — Evening Standard.' Doubtless it is hoped that the public will think, as they doubtless do, that the line was penned by the hard-to-please Shulman.
Of course, it wasn't — but its use is legitiTate in selling the play. Nothing inaccurate about it, for it did appear in the paper. And newspapers play the same game. "Hair star killed in death fall," shrieked the Evening Standard's placards in the London streets on Monday. Nothing inaccurate about that, either, and it sold papers legitimately — even though the unfortunate Hair star in question was in the Australian production.
Gay life
It really shouldn't happen to all those husky actors playing a rugby league team in The Changing Room, but the well-publicised fact that they all strip off for showers on the stage has been bringing the Royal Court its fruitiest audiences since John Osborne's drag-ball play, A Patriot for Me.
In so many words I
The neon-sign industry, at least, will be glad to hear that Anthoriy Newley has a new project in hand. Following his stage show, the relatively succinctly titled SOP the World I Want to Get Off, he made a film called Can Hieronymus Merke Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Hair piness? Now he is collaborating (with Leslie Bricusse) on a new musical for London called It's a Funny Old World We Live In, and the World's Not Entirely to Warne.
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