Back to basics
James Delingpole
There was a lovely piece about me in Private Eye this week suggesting that the influence of this column is so powerful that I am destined to sell as many books as Tony Parsons and Allison Pearson, which was nice. But I really must take issue with the mag's outrageous calumny that when not writing about myself all I ever cover is documentaries about the second world war.
Readers. Dear, loyal, loving readers — defend me here. You know as well as I do that I write about loads and loads of other stuff besides that. Vietnam, for example. The Peninsula War. Nelson's Navy. That horrid incident in Korea when they all had to retreat down the valley, clinging to tanks and getting shot to pieces. Mediaeval siege warfare. The Civil War. The first world war. To name but a few.
This week I had hoped to broaden my scope still further by writing about the American War of Independence (except unfortunately Rebels and Redcoats, by the magisterial, nay God-like Richard Holmes, has finished: but it was bloody good, wasn't it, especially those fascinating Nam parallels?) or perhaps about the conflict in Somalia (except, sadly, the video of Black Hawk Down: The True Story never got to me). So I guess I'll just have to do That'll Teach 'Em (Channel 4, Tuesday), instead.
Actually, I don't know why I'm feigning reluctance, because That'll Teach 'Em was the thing I most wanted to see all week. I was a huge fan of its predecessor Lads Army, in which a group of late-teens foolishly volunteered to undergo NationalService-style basic training; and this one — slightly younger teens relive the Fifties grammar school experience — looks set to be nearly as good.
I say 'nearly' because already I've noticed a couple of annoying flaws. One, the teachers aren't allowed to cane the pupils. Two, all the kids look suspiciously well-brought up, bright and middle class. Hiding sweets underneath the mattress and pulling funny faces on espying their first spam fritter is about as naughty as they get. No doubt this is in keeping with the period and not unrepresentative of the children who did actually pass their eleven plus. But just think how much more fun it would have been if they'd got a few kids in from the inner-city estates, with their gats and their teeth-sucking, facing down the mofo headmaster and declaring that they ain't going to be nobody's bitch.
Also, for all its attempts to make out that this school was really harsh and demanding, I can't say the regime looked any worse than the one I experienced at prep school in the Seventies. We too got spam fritters (quite pleasant, I used to think — relative at least to some of the other gristly swill they tried forcing down us); we too had stern matrons who inspected the hospital corners on your counterpanes every morning; we too had our secret tuck confiscated. Plus, we had the real actual cane. But I was eight when that started. These pussy teenagers are double that. so I really don't know what they're grumbling about.
Well I do, obviously, because as the programme likes tirelessly to reiterate, things have got awfully different between then and now. Today's teenagers have the temerity to imagine that the crappy, illformed thoughts in their hormonally challenged demi-brains somehow count for squat, hence, for example, the hilarious scene at the end of part one where Spoilt Mancunian Girl grumbles about how angry she is that she is not allowed to 'say my opinion or anything' to the teachers.
Excuse me if I come over all Dr Dalrymple a moment but, teenagers, I have a message for you. Everything you think is utterly worthless. None of it has been validated by experience. All your opinions are second-hand. We grown-ups don't give a toss what you think. So just piss off upstairs to your bedrooms will you, read a jazz mag, watch TV, sulk, whatever, but don't come down till you're a human. OK?
Which leads me to possibly the most piquant aspect of the programme: the teachers themselves. Naturally enough, they're all played by genuine teachers and — as with the NCO instructors in Lads Army — it's hard not to share their barely concealed glee at being able to discipline their charges as they'd like to discipline them, rather than according to whatever wussie PC code they have to follow in the schools where they teach normally.
Yet the strange thing is that this makes the programme slightly less realistic, not more. You see, in the days when schools really did have rigorous disciplinary codes teachers and matrons had no need to go around flaunting their toughness. Sure, you got the odd sadist. But mostly — in my experience anyway — the teachers recognised that the conditions you were living under were already so harsh and unpleasant that the last thing they wanted to do was make them any worse with martinet tyranny. In fact, they were generally avuncular and nice.
But apologies for the uncharacteristic digression. More war and more intense, unadulterated me in a fortnight, I hope.
Previous page
