Low life
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Jeffrey Bernard
Ever since watching last week's episode of The Final Cut, I have been wishing so much that Francis Urquhart really was the Prime Minister. He, or someone very like him, anyway. But that episode and nearly all the videos I have been watching recent- ly on my television have disturbed me because I have noticed that the missionary position is now infra dig. when two stars are having sexual intercourse.
This is obviously an American form of political correctness and therefore suitable for The Final Cut, but I find it odd that the makers of films such as Basic Instinct should feel that it is obligatory. Once again, it indicates to me that nobody with a sense of humour can possibly take femi- nism seriously.
I wouldn't presume to set myself up as a technical adviser in cinematic bedroom scenes, but it occurs to me that experts should be brought in for scenes in films with homosexual incidents in them, and that the scene, for example, in which Alan Bates and Oliver Reed play hunt the thim- ble on the carpet in Women in Love and the whole of Death in Venice need to be rechoreographed. Most things in bed are worth trying more than once, except maybe for wetting it, although that makes it more difficult to set on fire, but I am horribly English and old-fashioned enough to want to lead the orchestra and not be led by it. What a shame it is that an excellent actress like Isla Blair on top of the Foreign Secre- tary should serve only to remind of how much mad cow disease there is about.
Where a woman should have been in the ascendancy and very much on top was in the Sports Personality of the Year on BBC Television a couple of years ago, when that rather sulky-looking prick, Damon Hill, won the award instead of the brilliant and outstanding Sally Gunnell. But the English have this loathsome and perverted love for sportsmen and women who are afflicted with chronic seconditis.
Motor-car racing bores me rigid, but I sometimes catch fleeting glimpses of it switching channels to see if I can find Sharon Stone lowering herself on to a writhing lump of agonised blubber, and all I ever see is Damon Hill winning, if every- one else crashes, and then the most dis- gusting exhibition of champagne abuse. The team award will doubtless go to the England Cricket XI if South Africa beat us, but in a tight finish I expect to see Frank Bruno narrowly beat his nearest rival hav- ing picked up valuable house points by overcoming the public with the exuberance of his own verbosity, to paraphrase Dis- raeli. Sally Gunnell demanded not only affection but a lot of respect. But if ever a country was soft on non-achievers or sec- ond bests it is this one.
And now, after nearly a month, the elec- tricians who have brought havoc and noise to this block of flats are moving out and worse is to follow. I am about to be sur- rounded by scaffolding. They can already see into my bedroom where, sad to say, they have not yet seen me being mounted by anyone, let alone Isla Blair's stand-in, since they completed their erection of steel tubing. And now, shortly, they will be look- ing into my sitting-room and doubtless joining Vera and me for breakfast. Should they still be here in the early evening they will be able to behold my new evening home help, Earlyn. She is a statuesque and worldly Jamaican beauty who occasionally wears — much to the horror of the Muslim woman who delivers my prescriptions high-heeled, patent-leather boots which reach half way up her thighs. It makes me think that maybe there are, after all, some women who wouldn't be all that bad to knuckle under, be under their thumb or many other parts of their anatomy.
Perhaps Francis Urquhart's sacked For- eign Secretary was in the position last week to realise that the American feminists have got it right after all.
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