Bad eggs and love rats
Michael Vestey
It's always a pleasure to hear the smooth, fruity voice of Leslie Phillips on the radio. He was in fine form presenting the first of a two-part series on Radio Four about the fictional and the real-life cad in Cads and Silly Asses (Tuesdays) even if I had to forgive him for hamming it up a little. He was anxious to point out, rather unconvincingly, that he had not played cads, merely 'lovable rogues'. A cad was a rotter, he said, both with women and money, and yet this character had been one of the most popular on the stage or screen for the best part of the last century.
In a clip from an old film, a woman asks her determined seducer, 'You're not married, are you?' He replies suavely, 'Of course I'm married. Every man who behaves like I do is married.'
Gustav Temple, editor of a quarterly magazine I'd never heard of called the Chap, defined the cad as 'really the polar opposite of the gentleman. He may embody some of the qualities of a gentleman, the dress sense, the impeccable grooming, the charm, the panache but with the one crucial element missing, which is a courteous attitude towards the ladies in terms of honour, dignity.' He thought that deep down women still harbour the mediaeval fantasy of the knight in shining armour, the cavalier coming on horseback and bearing them off to a castle. 'Of course in the cad's version it's more like being whisked away in a Triumph Herald to a dirty weekend in Bognor Regis.'
The comedy writer Linda Smith believed it was only the fictitious cad of camp sophistication that appealed to men and women. Most of life was rather dull and samey and so a cad seemed like some colourful tropical bird.
So where did the cad come from? Phillips speculated that the first recognisable, fictitious cads appeared in the 17th century in racy comedies, the rake and scoundrel of Restoration plays that marked the ending of Puritanism. The poor old cravat which we don't see much of these days was, said Temple, the cad's badge of honour, introduced into England by Charles II on his return from exile in France. I have a friend in Italy, an Italian in his late thirties, who loves all things English and who thinks we still wear them. He sports one but is not a cad.
Another sign was the pencil-thin moustache popular between the wars, and then suede shoes, which seems a bit harsh as you still see them worn. By the 1960s James Bond thought the Windsor knot was the tell-tale mark of the bad egg.
Sarah Woodcock of the Theatre Museum believed the cads of old were aristocratic younger sons who didn't have a career. In the 1890s, a period when everything was being taken less seriously, they either became a cad or a silly ass, as in P.G. Wodehouse. 'He basically has no moral backbone, if you like, at all. It is his own pleasure, his own gratification that matters.'
Phillips traced the rise of the lounge lizard to the 1920s, the audience feeling ambivalent about his power, success, charm and ruthlessness and perhaps played to perfection by George Sanders. In Britain Dennis Price is remembered for his ability to be beastly while appearing to be charming. Donald Sinden in Doctor in the House was another. I would have liked to have heard the clip of Phillips from one of the 1950s comedy films, lying in the hospital bed as the ample breasts of Shirley Eaton hover above his face. 'I'm Nurse Bell,' she says. Phillips, observing her assets at close range, replies, 'Ding, Dong.'
Then, of course, there was TerryThomas in School for Scoundrels and its academy for cads, based on the Stephen Potter books about One-Upmanship, Woomanship, and so on. Temple described them as training manuals for cads (`They're also humorous').
So did the 1960s put paid to the cad? Well, there was Michael Caine in A/fie, but by this period the character would have had to see the error of his ways. Phillips believed that in real-life Lord Lucan ended the cad's charms and was never viewed again with even a sneaking admiration. Alan Clark and James Hewitt were cited as cads in more recent times. Temple felt the cad had become unfashionable and had evolved into the love rat, a gruesome speciality of the red-top tabloids. Smith regarded this species as really rather dull and pathetic. Phillips proclaimed with a hint of sadness in his voice, 'The onceproud cad is in retirement.' An amusing programme and I was hoping to hear Ian Carmichael present the second part about silly asses but inexplicably the tape wasn't available in advance. I hope you caught it as he is the perfect choice for the part, as was Phillips.
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