Radio
Suffering from youth
Michael Vestey
This is the season of repeats; Radio Four is full of them. Sometimes they're welcome; another chance to hear, say, Martin Jarvis reading Richmal Crompton's lust William stories and realising what a good writer of comedy she was, and what a superb radio actor Jarvis is.
As it happens, this hasn't been repeated recently but I thought something similar while listening to a repeat of the late Arthur Lowe reading Diary of a Nobody on Radio Four this week. I missed it the first time so was pleased to hear it now, finding it an excellent way to raise spirits lowered during the preceding Today programme with its summer-spoiling, phoney and man- ufactured verbal conflicts and excess of politics.
I've always thought George and Weedon Grossmith's novel one of the great comic classics of English literature, first serialised in Punch in 1888 and still fresh and rele- vant today. City clerk Charles Pooter of The Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, is not entirely a vanished species: 'What's the good of a home if you're not in it. Home Sweet Home, that's my motto.' There's always something to do in his and Carrie's rented villa, some disastrous DIY like painting the bath red — 'all of which I can do with a pipe in my mouth' — or deal- ing with jeering tradesmen. Diary of a Nobody is a wonderful send-up of lower middle-class life in London. Charles Pooters still exist. They don't have the servants, of course, and their evenings are probably spent around the television set but they live within their means, quietly getting on with life, voting Conservative or Liberal Democrat. The difference today is that they are downsized several times dur- ing their working lives and won't spend 20 years with the same firm and regard it as an honour. They would not make the shocked Pooterish remark: 'I was half an hour late at the office — something that has never happened to me before.' They would have problems with their teenage children. Pooter's rakish son Lupin 'Willie' — refuses to follow his father into the firm but sets up with some City wide boys instead. Pooter writes in his diary that a friend, Gowing, likes Master Lupin very well but says he occasionally suffered from what he could not help — youth.
There are times when the casting of actors reaches perfection and this is one of them: there can be no better Pooter than Arthur Lowe who was himself a man of fixed habits. His reading accurately catches a refined English accent reflecting the social pretensions and petty snobberies. Pooter wouldn't know it but without him and his kind Britain would not have been such a stable society which is why the lower middle class has always been hated by the Left. They have stood in the way of revolu- tion and upheaval. The aristocracy didn't care much for them either, preferring a sentimental attachment to the working class. Intellectuals had no time for them, though H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster and George Orwell wrote sympathetically about them in their novels.
To get some idea of the disintegration of family life since Pooter's day you only had to listen to Relative Values on Radio Four (Tuesday). This was an appalling but all to common tale told by those involved, the Richards family of Streatham in South London, once a very Pooterish place but no more. The producers Charlotte Blofeld and Joy Hatwood assembled this broken work- ing-class family for Michael O'Donnell to talk to and it was painful to hear.
As they talked about themselves you could see exactly where they'd gone wrong but also sense they couldn't. They were baf- fled by the turn of events that had wrecked their lives. Chris had an affair while serving in the army in Northern Ireland and sepa- rated from his wife Barbara, now living in Stevenage with their six-year-old son Jason. The eldest son, Scott, was nine when his parents parted and took it badly. He became difficult, uncontrollable, blaming his mother and her family for the break-up.
There's a Dickensian moment when Bar- bara can take no more and dumps Scott at his father's firm where he now works as a security guard. Living with Chris, the dis- turbed Scott takes up drugs and crime until at the age of 14 he takes part in an armed robbery and threatens his mother with a gun. It is chilling to eavesdrop on this inex- orable slide. Chris doesn't understand it, nor does Barbara and, as for Scott, you wonder if there's anyone at home any more. They weren't inarticulate by any means but had been unable to talk to each other about what was going wrong.
Will Scott pull himself together or has yet another unemployable youth been cre- ated? Although he appears to be steering clear of trouble after a one-year sentence in a secure unit, one could not be certain this would remain the case. Although Scott is white he speaks with a Caribbean accent which, apparently, is popular with young whites in this part of London. He still mixes with the friends he got into trouble with though is chastened by his imprison- ment and doesn't want to lose his freedom again. It's possible that if his parents hadn't separated he might not have turned to crime but we'll never know. Perhaps, as Pooter was told, he's suffering from what he could not help — youth.
Previous page
