Notebook
Or David Owen bears an uncanny resemblance to those nice, polite young men who used to stand around in striped trousers in Posh shops like Fortnums. and Harrods, advising customers where they could find the tinned pheasant counter. I suppose it is an inevitable part of having to live through °Itr Post-imperial decadence that we should eventually have a floorwalker Foreign Secretary. But who would have thought even ten years ago that we would ever see such a scene as was presented by the BBC News on Monday evening? There was a s"ot of the Floorwalker being uncerefm:Miously bundled off into some obscure corner of an Angolan airfield, while a huge, irtiPortant-looking jet arrived on the main airway. 'Dr Owen had to be got out of the way before the arrival of President Kaunda of Zambia.'
Illenovelty-crazed Radio Three programme' Planners who pick the 'Composer of the Week' at 9.05 each morning have really excelled themselves of late, In the past month or two they have not only managed ccime up with several composers who literally no one has ever heard of, such as 11 '°, er, Schmelzer and Machaut. But if they uo choose a well-known name, the selection as like as not will be limited to 'Wind Music Composed by Beethoven in his Bonn Period. or 'The Church Music of Balakirev' (although the low spot, it must be confessed, had when, in honour of the Jubilee,listeners Ist_cl to endure a whole week of those Masters of the Queen's Muzack, Bliss and W. Illiamson). This constant hunger for the 9bscure and intolerable, however, does not just affect 'Composer of the Week.' In the ast Year or two, the Music Programme Seems to have shown almost as great a rtPredilection for ghastly nineteenthand eWentieth-century French music as it did Ight or nine years ago for deservedly fortacItten composers of the Baroque. I am sure L trouble is that the people who choose the Music the rest of us listen to, become so icaded after a few years in the job that they annot imagine anyone would ever want to orlerar the Eroica or K.467 again—forgetting. course, that every time these pieces are 2PI .Y.ed, there are probably tens of thousands u,‘01 listeners who are actually hearing them r the first time The answer must be that no ...ne responsible for making the choices '.nould ever serve in the job for more than Lwo or three years.
Some Pretty silly things have been said in favour the of Britain's unspeakable New Towns he past twenty years (mainly by people whO do not actually have to live in them),
but nothing quite so beautifully far-fetched as the claim of a Radio Three newscast last Friday. It was solemnly announced that, on his visit to Britain next month, President Carter would be paying a call on Washington New Town—`the place after which the American capital is named.'
A year ago union leaders like Jack Jones were proudly boasting to us of the tremendous contribution, they had made to the fight against inflation, by their appalling sacrifice in agreeing to Phase One of the 1975 incomes policy. So carried away were they by their self-righteousness that they completely omitted to notice that they were thus making an astonishing and unprecedented admission—viz, that wage rises can actually contribute to inflation. Now Messrs Jones, Drain, Gormley etc tell us that the policy has failed, and that we must have a speedy return to Wonderful Collective Bargaining. This can only mean one of two things. Either we are to have general large wage rises across the board (which must inevitably be followed by huge rises in rates, bus fares, coal and electricity prices etc). In other words, a further catastrophic rise in inflation. Or, if inflation is to be avoided, then some groups in the community can only be given more at the price of other groups getting less. Perhaps whenever a television interviewer has the honour to get Messrs Drain, Gormley or Jones in front of a microphone in the next few months he can ask these ludicrous figures to explain which of the two alternatives they are urging.
There has been something almost hypnotically horrible in recent years about the various steps proposed to protect the buildings of the Acropolis from imminent
disintegration under the ravages of Greece's burgeoning late-twentieth-century technology. It has been like a black fairy-tale of our civilisation. Last week one group of scientists finally chucked out the suggestion of another that the entire Acropolis be 'preserved' for tourists under a huge, plastic dome (only on the grounds that it was 'impracticable,' not because it was so profoundly offensive). But the corroding caryatids on the Erectheum are still to be taken down to a museum and replaced by fibreglass replicas—whereby hangs a suitably surrealistic tale of British know-how. Some ten years ago my friend Mr Bennie Gray was setting up an antique market in Kensington, and thought to brighten up the exterior of his rather undistinguished building with some classical statues. Knowing of the provision of the British Museum charter that anyone has the right within reason to take a cast of any object in the museum, he thought, `What about a few copies of that caryatid pillaged from the Acropolis?' The only problem was to find a ,suitable weatherproof material to make the copies in. He then recalled that a friend of his had recently been working on a film which involved Peter Sellers clambering about on a half-life-size replica of the dome of St Paul's, made in fibreglass. This turned Out to be the ideal stuff for turning out six inexpensive copies of the museum caryatid, which were duly installed in Kensington High Street. When the Athenians later sought advice as to what to do about their remaining caryatids, the British Museum was able to advise them that fibreglass might well be the substance they were looking for. Perhaps in the end the entire Acropolis, including the Parthenon, will be a fibreglass replica. It would be hard to think of a more suitable footnote to our age, Loth as I am to join the ever-lengthening queue of journalists who beef on at great length about their favourite grammatical or semantic solecisms, I have for some time been itching to enter the lists against the almost invariable misuse of the word 'archetype.' There is a very good (or bad) example on one of the explanatory placards at the National Gallery's exhibition of fifteenth-century German painting, which speaks of Stephan Lochner's 'inspired colour, refined detail and gentle atmosphere' as 'archetypes of the Cologne School.' This is completely meaningless. The word 'archetype,' originally derived from Greek philosophy and of course popularised in our own time by Jung, has an absolutely precise meaning as an underlying or primordial 'form,' which then takes on specific expression—as in 'the Quest is an archetypal plot of literature.' What most people mean when they misuse 'archetype' is 'supremely typical' or 'a paradigm.' Thus Lochner's characteristics could be said to be 'supremely typical' or 'paradigmatic' of late Gothic painting.
Christopher Booker
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