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Paper Mies Bill Grundy
Humour, as everybody knows, is a very serious business. Humorists are very gloomy people. And people who talk about humour are stupid, no matter how clever they are. That being so, it would seem distinctly dicey to start discussing newspaper humorists, and, yes, I do remember what Alexander Pope said, about fools and angels, but nevertheless, here goes.
I have been sparked off by a Peter Simple paragraph in the Telegraph last week. Mr Simple, who is really called Mr Michael Wharton, has long been one of the day's delights. I remember once describing him in a TV script as 'my favourite fascist.' The legal eagle who was vetting the script, once his heart had started beating again, suggested that there might be a word to replace 'fascist.' So I rang Mr Wharton, who was extremely polite and said that he
didn't really think he was a fascist and what other word did I have in mind? I suggested 'reactionary' and he almost purred with appreciation. So 'my favourite reactionary' he became, still is, and no doubt ever more shall be.
Anyway, last week he was off on one of those flights of fancy that mark him out as an original. The occasion was the pronouncement by the Young Socialists that the Prime Minister's possession of five homes was scandalous. " Not for the first time," Mr Simple observed drily, "I disagree." He wondered grumpily whether the Young Socialists thought Mr Wilson should live in a cave or a derelict henhouse. Then, quite suddenly, he took off.
"It is not generally known, by the way," he went on, "that Lord Mountwarlock, the tenebrous, eight-foot tall, cyclops-eyed owner of Mountwarlock Park, in Leicestershire, famous for its collection of wyverns, basilisks, gorgons and other fabulous monsters, many years ago offered the enormous, disused west wing of the house, adjoining the augean stable block, as an additional residence for the Prime Minister 'in perpetuity'."
It is a measure of the way Mr Simple creates a convincing at mosphere that I actually read the owner's name as Mounfbatten at first, and wondered what Lord Louis had done to offend my favourite. (Incidentally, this ability to satirise by being only just unlikely is long-standing. I remember several innocent young TV researchers coming quite seriously into programme conferences with stories which, on investigation, turned out to be straight from Simple.) "The offer, for some reason," Mr Simple continued, "was never taken up, but it still stands. Ac cording to Phantomsby, Lord Mountwarlock's factotum and one of the few practising werewolves left in the Midlands, the Earl is particularly anxious that the present Prime Minister should take advantage of it."
There was a lot more about what Mr Wilson and his staff would find to amuse themselves with at Mountwarlock, and there was a stiletto-like last sentence: "There is also plenty of scope, particularly on the blasted heath at the northern side of the park, for land reclamation."
Nobody else writing in Fleet Street today can do that sort of stuff. It isn't just that it's funny, though it is. It isn't just that it is subtle, which, despite the gro tesque, it is. It isn't just that behind the humour it is deadly serious, though it is. It is much more that it carries conviction. I now know for a fact that the Midlands is a dark, gloomy place (' tenebrous ' was the word I was looking for until Mr Simple gave it me). I know they still have werewolves there, and I am con vinced that Mountwarlock Park contains "a deadly Upas tree" and an " ornamental chasm believed to be directly connected to the infernal regions."
Mr Wharton, in other words, creates his own, entirely consis
tent world. And there aren't any other Fleet Street humorists who do that. There are a few who can make me laugh — Keith Waterhouse and Jon Akass, for example. There are a few whose satire can bite deep — Keith Waterhouse and John Akass, for example. But there are few, if any, who can do both things and also take me with them into a world of their own.
The extraordinary thing about Mr Wharton is how he manages to do it so consistently. I've been reading him a long time now, and he never lets me down. People like J. Bonington Jagworth of Staines (Britain's most eminent motorist); the garden city of Sterchford, gateway to pollution control: that group of instant demonstrators, Rentacrowd; all of these are so real that if they hadn't existed, we'd have had to invent them. Come to think, we have, but only now are they brought to our notice by the light Peter Simple shines on them.
Thinking back, I can only remember two other writers who had Mr Wharton's special gift. One was Michael Frayn — remember Rob o Swavely, the PR man? — and the other was Beachcomber, who gave birth to immortals such as Dr Strabismus, whom God preserve, of Utrecht, not to mention Mr Justice Cocklecarrot and the seven redbearded dwarfs, as well as that famous Scandinavian newspaper, the Svenska Bassondraft.But their great days are gone. Instead we are left with people like Patrick Campbell, who the longer he lives in Provence, the less funny, and the more self-indulgent his pieces become; Alan Brien (I assume his One Man's Week is meant to be funny?); and I forget who else.
Only Peter Simple remains, despite the length of time he's been at it, brightening our darkness by his attacks on the sillinesses of the Left, Right and Centre, as well as on those of no fixed abode. Long may he continue to do so. And he probably will, for did not somebody once observe that he who laughs, lasts?
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