DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Next Friday, a Labour MP, Tessa Jow- ell, will place before the House her private Tobacco Smoking (Public Places) Bill 'to control smoking in public places and to make provision with regard to smoking and employment; and for purposes connected therewith'. What a wealth of prodnosery is contained within those 21 words, and why are private members' bills nearly always aimed at stopping people doing things? A public place is, of course, any place used by the public, so it is a widespread restriction that Ms Jowell is looking for. As for smoking and employment, I suppose what she seeks here is a greater incidence of cowed-looking employees reduced to having a crafty cigarette outside the office, store or work- shop. Except that outside the office, store or workshop is a public place. I expect the bill will fail, but this will not stop the health police attempting to implement its provi- sions as if they were law. Now where is the MP who will introduce the Chewing-Gum (Disgusting Habit) Bill? The streets around my home are now liberally speckled with white marks the size of half-crowns, making the neighbourhood look as if it has experi- enced volcanic fall-out. They are gobs of chewing-gum trodden into the pavement dropped there, as likely as not, by virtuous non-smokers or people trying to give up smoking. If these noxious discs were fag- ends, what a fuss there would be.
My distaste for people who stop peo- ple doing things does not, of course, extend to myself. I have just become a patron of Pipedown, the campaign against piped music in pubs, restaurants, shops and, er, public places. Particularly, so far as I am concerned, in pubs. Background music in restaurants is usually something with a bit of taste, but pub background music, or foreground music as it more usually is, is nearly always of the bam-bam-barn variety. I accidentally made a discovery about pub music recently. A pub I use regularly — did use, I should now say — had music on the go continuously, but it was acceptable stuff of the Classic FM kind, and kept at a reson- able level of decibels. Then suddenly it con- verted to bam-barn-barn. The landlord explained that he had just changed most of his staff and, as this was the kind of racket they preferred, he had to go along with them, since good barpersons were hard to find. So the noise you have to endure in pubs is not for the customer's benefit, sup- posedly, but for the staffs. Not a lot of peo- ple know that.
It must have taken courage for the for- mer Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, to acknowledge the courage of Gerry Adams, for the resultant hullabaloo was entirely predictable. Why is courage supposed to be the exclusive province of heroes? Many criminals show great courage as they go about their villainy, but we prefer to call it bravado, just as we pre- fer to believe that all bullies are cowards. As for the outrage of Gerry Adams, I never see his repellent beard, a beard that should have been suppressed under my late men- tor Cassandra's Hirsute Practices Act (why, when he was subject to the terrorism regu- lations, didn't they ban the face but keep the voice, instead of the other way round?) without remembering his first public appearance on these shores many years ago, when he was wheeled on at a Labour Party conference fringe meeting in Brighton. Among the seething mass of journalists, no one except Mary Holland then knew what our man looked like. As a dozen suspects filed on to the platform and took their seats, Paul Johnson stood up and asked innocently, 'Could the mass murder- er make himself known, please?' Adams had half-risen to his feet before the chair- man tugged at his jacket and hissed, 'Sit down, you silly fool!'
The death of the theatre director George Abbott at the incredible age of 107 (Ned Sherrin's Times obituary, which he wrote years and years ago, must hold some- thing of a record for shelf-life) reminds me that as a mere stripling of 78 he directed on Broadway a boulevard comedy by Willis Hall and myself called Say Who You Are (rechristened, for the benefit of American audiences who didn't understand the title — neither did the English, until they had put themselves to the trouble of seeing the play — Help Stamp Out Marriage), with Francis Matthews and Ann Bell. We were rehearsing on the stage of the Booth The- atre, with Mister Abbott, as he was always addressed, directing from the stalls. Unhappy about one of his moves, Matthews finally came downstage and asked, 'Mister Abbott, since neither Ann nor I smokes in this scene, I wonder if you could tell me why I am carrying this ashtray from the mantelpiece to the coffee-table?' `Why, Mr Matthews,' replied the ever-cour- teous if autocratic Mister Abbott, 'because I'm asking you to.' Motivation explained, the near-octogenarian, a keen ballroom dancer, excused himself to go off for his tango lessons. He worked to the end. On his 105th birthday his protégé Hal Prince turned up to congratulate him and found him working on a script. 'What are you doing, Mister Abbott?' Revising Damn Yankees.' I saw the revival on Broadway a few months ago.
Iam scribbling away at a second (and final) volume of memoirs covering the peri- od 1951 to date. Since I have never kept a diary, and so far as my adult years are con- cerned do not quite live up to my reputa- tion for total recall, I was thinking of emu- lating Jeffrey Bernard's famous letter in this journal, 'I have been asked to write my autobiography and would be grateful if any- one could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.' Then I had a bright idea and dug out of a trunk all my account books going back to the 1950s. They are a wonderful aide-memoire. Merely the stark entry of £28 7s 10d for a radio broadcast, for example, brings all manner of recollec- tions flooding back. It beats madeleines never mind what Proust tells us, I bet he had his cash book at his elbow. But some entries defy memory, possibly for reasons of trauma. Did I really contribute (115 15s) material to a revue at Guildford called The Night Is for Delight, and if so why? And why on earth, two years after Beyond the Fringe, did they want to put it on?
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