DIARY JOHN MORTIMER
There is nothing more bizarre than judges discussing the laws of blasphemy, for all the world as though they were some Court of Holy Inquisition without bonfires. Reading the reports last week my mind went back to 1978 when Professor Kirkup wrote a poem about the Centurion and the body of Christ which was published in Gay News, a work which would have passed quite unnoticed had it not attracted the eager eye of Mrs Whitehouse (how she came to be reading Gay News was never disclosed). She launched a private prosecu- tion. Professor.Kirkup was absent from the proceedings — a rumour, no doubt un- founded, suggested he was standing in a ray of sunlight somewhere in the Far East — and Mr Lemon, the editor, whom I defended, was left to stand trial, together with his magazine, for blasphemy. At the trial it was ruled that we could call , no evidence on the poet's sincerity or the poem's literary merit (so blasphemers are far more harshly treated than pornog- raphers). Mrs Whitehouse led her follow- ers in a prayer for a guilty verdict in the corridor, and her prayers were answered. The judge later disclosed that his summing up had been inspired by the Almighty, and I seem to remember that His Lordship interrupted the proceedings to tell the jury the score in the Melbourne Test Match, a piece of gamesmanship which I felt not to be cricket. In the subsequent Appeal we discussed the banning of Shelley's `Queen Mab', the works of Tom Paine, and the far more lenient approach which the judges took to blasphemy at the time of Huxley and Darwin. The result is that we have been left with the worst of all possible worlds, a draconian blasphemy law which applies only to Anglicans, hasn't been used in Scotland since the 1840s and merely makes the intolerant of all religions want one too. If the Anglicans can have it, it's hard to see how it can logically be denied to Moonies, Mormons, Holy Rollers and followers of the Maharishi.
The existence of our blasphemy law must be painful to most Christians, and the idea that a faith which has produced so many heroic martyrs cannot put up with scurrilous' attacks is insulting to believers. In all the murderous fuss that has been made in the Rushdie affair no Muslim has ever suggested that The Satanic Verses has destroyed his or her faith; beliefs are no doubt confirmed by argument and even ridicule. The Devil's Advocate is, after all, an important Vatican official.
Political roles are now reversed and the Labour Party, once the scene of endless dissension and schism, looks almost as cosily united as a Conservative Party con- ference, whilst the plots and counterplots are all in the other camp. At a Labour politicians' dinner Marcia Falkender, whom I liked very much but hadn't seen since we polished up Harold Wilson's television appearances together, called for everyone to 'unite behind Neil'. At a similar Conservative function I heard that the talk was all about the leader's depar- ture and the Chairman was disrespectfully referred to as `the man with the self-basting hair'. Dinner parties must be more exciting for Tories at the moment.
Having finished a batch of television scripts, I'm looking forward to a summer of rehearsals. Draughty church halls round Bayswater, paper cups full of dubious coffee, performers sitting round knitting or doing the crossword; none of this seems to be part of the glamour of show business. Yet I've never got over the excitement of first hearing my lines spoken by actors at a read-through, and the best performance of any play is invariably at the end of rehear- sals. When they perform without costumes or scenery, with the sudden confidence of knowing it, the whole thing often seems magical. When they start dressing up, putting on make-up, using real props and showing it to a lot of other people, the illusion fades and it is never quite so satisfactory.
The pleasure of rehearsals for actors is no doubt due, in part, to the absence of critics. I have no idea whether Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest musical is good, bad or indifferent, but the New York notices, which have compared it in some way to Ceausescu's Rumania (even the actresses' underwear has been said to suggest `the no-nonsense austerity of Mrs Thatcher's Britain'), are clearly dotty. I don't know what it is about criticism that makes its authors fly to ludicrous extremes and forget that, after all, it's only a play. What the reader wants is an accurate description of the event and not a paroxysm of outrage. Perhaps there is something about the act of judgment which leads to exagger- ated language. Trial judges can't come to reasonable decisions without giving vent to some such inanity as, `Most girls are not averse to being ravished occasionally.' In the old days, I remember, they couldn't even decide the simplest divorce case without calling the guilty party something like `this cold-hearted suburban Messalina who had lost all sense of shame and remorse in the arms of her paramour'. And all that was about some housewife who was probably as harmless as Mr Lloyd Web- ber's musical.
Arranging visits and receiving visitors to and from the Soviet Union has revealed some surprising facts. Getting a visa to visit Russia entails filling in a lot of forms and hours of uncomfortable waiting outside the Soviet Embassy. But if a Russian wants to visit England he or she has to queue for six days outside our embassy in Moscow. Of course you get a number and go home at night, but if you miss your turn you go back to the end of the line. Moscow is the only place where we issue visas, so prospective tourists from Georgia, for instance, who can't wait for months for a visa to come through the post, have to travel to the capital where they know no one, can't get into hotels and sleep in the railway sta- tions. This is a system we should and must change in the interest of international friendship. Meanwhile I discovered that, while Russian intellectuals protested at the invasion of Czechoslovakia, there are no such objections to Mr Gorbachev's attitude to Lithuania. Life in Russia has been hard and often humiliating and its people's pride, in life and literature, has been that they live in a huge space. The idea of its sudden fragmentation, which might begin in the Baltic, is hard for them to contem- plate. However, everyone agrees with Mr Bush when he says problems between states should be solved without violence; and we are only occasionally left to wonder where Mr Bush was during the invasion of Panama.
Having had some harsh things to say about judges, I am delighted to salute one from the North Country who has been telling a story against himself. When at the bar, he came home and told his wife that he had successfully defended a brothel keeper called Florry, who as a reward had offered him 'one on the house'. `All right', said the judge's wife, not looking up from her ironing, `why don't you finish your tea and go straight down to Florry's place and disappoint some other woman?'
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