PERSONAL COLUMN

Evil communications

SIMON RAVEN

`If a Mr Simon Raven is on the ground,' wailed the tannoy, 'will he please go im- mediately to the secretary's office in the pavilion.'

No, I thought, Mr Simon Raven will not. He's having a day off and knows of nothing in his life which can't wait till he gets home this evening.

But it wasn't that easy. Fifteen minutes later, `If a Mr Simon Raven is on the ground. . .

Clearly there was to be no peace until I complied, so to the secretary's office I went, and there found a flustered and apologetic girl, the secretary's secretary, who asked me to ring such and such a number in London, reversing the charges.

'You don't know me,' said the voice at the other end, and proceeded to explain that he had rung me at home, had gathered from my landlady (an innocent and unwary woman) that I had gone `to the cricket', and had then. 'in view of the great urgency .

.. What urgency?' 1 said. 'What do you want?'

What he wanted was a long and difficult article, to be written in two days flat (since someone had let him down') and to be paid for at rates which must last have been current in 1904, as this was in such a good cause.

'I'm sorry,' I said, taking the obvious ex- cuse to hand, `but I'm spending the next two days at this cricket match.'

But Mr Raven . . . a cricket match? I had, I said, been looking forward to it for weeks. But in view of such very special circumstances . . . ? I had been asked, I lied desperately, to write a piece about the match and must therefore attend the whole of it. But couldn't I write his piece, he urged, while I was watching . . . after all this time and money he had spent tracking me down, to say nothing of letting me reverse the charge for this present call?

He sounded genuinely aggrieved and hurt; any minute now he would accuse me of 'letting him down'. There was only one thing for it. I said 'Sorry' in the firmest voice I could find, replaced the receiver, and asked the secretary's secretary never, in any event whatsoever, to summon me again. I then returned sweating and trembling to my seat and did not recover my composure until well after the lunch interval.

The moral of this little tale will become even clearer if I now recall a case at the opposite extreme. I was motoring with a friend from Cyprus to England; I had given no address at all (only a half-promise to call at the American Express in Venice if this was one hundred per cent convenient for me); and I deliberately neither read a single newspaper nor heard a broadcast of any description in the whole five weeks during which we dillied and dallied from Fama- gusta to Dover. Result: total peace of mind, and this despite ugly political crises in two of the countries through which we travelled and an appalling family row at home. Of the political crises I was unconscious; of the family row I was also unconscious until I reached Venice, where I read of it at my ease and learned that it had already passed safely into history.

Above, then, we have two simple illus- trations, one showing that modern tech-

niques of communication are a pain in the neck, the other that their absence is an un- mixed blessing. Ah yes, my reader will say, but they are too simple: suppose that call to the cricket ground had been to say that your house was burning down? Or suppose, while you were eating the lotus somewhere round Thessaly, the family row had issued in somebody's apoplectic rage and sudden death?

All right, let us suppose these things. In the first case, the house would still have been burning down however fast I rushed back from the cricket, and I should have sacrificed a day's pleasure to no purpose. In the second case, the victim of apoplexy would have been no less dead even if I had heard of his death the moment it happened and had flown home on a magic carpet to inspect the corpse. But look here, you coarse and superficial fellow (my reader may now urge), suppose some one dear to you had been taken very ill and there were only a few hours left in which you could still see him? Surely you'd want to be told about that. Not a bit of it: death-bed scenes are very disagreeable and readily dispensable. It is only in fiction, or in tarted-up bio- graphies, that the dying person says any- thing wise or witty, and if he's got any sense at all he will prefer to die as privately as possible and without inconveniencing his friends.

Quite clearly, then, there is no domestic affair so grave that it cannot be adequately administered through the decent and lei- surely processes of Her Majesty's second class mail. So much for personal communi- cations—the fewer and the slower, the better. Where I could be on weaker ground is in condemning public ones. I remarked above that because I declined to read papers or listen to broadcasts, I passed without a moment's worry through two whole coun- tries in which nasty crises were brewing. But perhaps I was just very lucky. Suppose, my reader may now insist, that these crises had resulted in national or at least local revolu- tion, I might have been made to look very silly--smugly arriving in Smyrna, let us say, only to find that my favourite hotel had been commandeered by the regional junta. There is, then, something to be said for 'popular media' which purvey early news of impending disaster.

Or is there? To start with, all the facts will be either over-simplified or falsified outright or. even if correctly stated, mis- understood by a gullible and hysterical audience. Authority will be misrepresented or travestied. Premature warnings will be given and panic precipitated. So far from mitigating disaster, the popular media seem to me positively to promote it. One may agree that the BBC exerted a very soothing

influence during the last war; but in that case the whole nation was united and obedi- ent and knew (more or less) what were the issues, who and where the enemy. When it comes to internal crisis or division, in coun- tries less stable than this one, there has been repeated exploitation or corruption of the popular media, which are quite simply taken over by the less scrupulous faction and used to make fools of their opponents and the people at large.

But that is the exception, it will be said, and anyhow it couldn't happen here. Why can't you look on the bright side? Why can't you think of all the interesting things people learn—and of all those cases of injustice (etc) over which popular conscience and compassion have been aroused? Well, I do think of all this. I think of people sitting in front of telly or tabloid, waiting to be fed the ration of 'news' which has now become so necessary to them that if there isn't any news worth the name titillation of some kind must be manufac- tured. 'A bus taking orphans to their annual picnic crashed into a steam-roller near Wel- wyn. Two children were briefly detained in hospital. The driver of the steam-roller, which was on the wrong side of the road, explained that he had recently been suffer- ing from domestic worries.' Ah, poor little kiddies—all on their one day out. And that poor steam-roller man too—wife playing up, I wouldn't wonder. So much unhappi- ness in the world—it makes you think, doesn't it? No, madam: that is exactly what it doesn't do. it simply occupies your vacuous mind for ten seconds and then slides out of it to make room for a garden fete which was opened by Lady Dart- mouth but ruined by a last minute catering strike.

As for occasions when something really significant or unpleasant has occurred, and `the public conscience' (i.e. the love of inter- ference in you, madam, and millions of your kind) has been aroused, may heaven protect me from the massed whining and squealing, the monumental priggery and humbug, which then ensue. `The public con- science' is a bigoted and cacophonous monster and is best left to snore the days away in sleep.

Well, you can say what you like, Mr Raven, but at least the telly and the rest tell you about all the lovely new techno- logical things which we can buy these days. But the trouble is, madam, that you can't afford to buy them, with the result that your soul has gone rotten with resentment and envy. Even if you could afford them, you'd only find out that they are rubbish, and then you'd start coveting something else more costly with ever-escalating greed.

Historical events? State funerals? Spec- tacles of sport? What about all those, Mr R? Very pretty to be sure, madam. But since the mass audience has to be given `full value', it must be assured that abso- lutely everything which it sees or reads about, from the crowning of a prince to the defeat of a heavily bribed and semi-super- annuated wrestler, is `unique', 'unforget- table', 'something we'll treasure all our lives'. No more effective formula could be devised for creating universal boredom and contempt, at the particular expense of the prince.

So for God's sake, madam (and you too, sir), do cultivate the knack of turning the bloody thing off from time to time, and do spend an occasional day without a news- paper. It restores sanity. Believe me: no news is good news, indeed the very best