DIARY
IRMA KURTZ Heathrow's Terminal One is the place to go for spotting minor celebrities. They are often there in the late morning, gathered appropriately at the low- numbered gates: porn kings, agony aunts, backbenchers with the common touch, starlets whose private lives were briefly of interest to popular tabloids, on their way to talk shows in Glasgow and Liverpool, or quiz programmes where they seem to be suspended in neon frames next to foul- mouthed northern comics. Heigh-ho. It's all in a day's work on the quest for what an aging pop music entrepreneur on a prog- ramme I took part in last week kept calling success. He himself had grabbed success once by the tail feathers in 1983, but apparently it got away from him. He was groggy, still reeling in shock after the strange change from major to minor. No dressing room had been waiting for him at the Liverpool studio, not even a private corner for putting on his mauve suit. He was just one of the panellists; not a 'special guest' like me. 'Special guests' are asked if they'd like a little lie-down after the flight; Production assistants bring 'special guests' quiche on a plate while lesser guests queue at the buffet. To be a 'special guest' is to be glorified by the make-up department and reborn with high cheekbones and charis- ma. So it seemed to me, as I stood in the wings, waiting for my cue, then pushed open the plywood door and stood blinking in the light while a few Liverpudlians who had not preferred the Everton match ap- plauded my arrival. Not only does the experience of holding forth on television no longer terrify me, I can sniff its allure, and I begin to understand why otherwise sensible people mistake it for important work.
A. uberon Waugh wrote in the pages of this very publication that a danger of appearing on chat shows was to find oneself actually liking a fellow panellist. He was talking about an agony aunt, if I recall correctly, whom he had met in a Manchester television studio. The state- ment puzzled me then, but now I under- stand exactly what he meant. When the Liverpool filming was over at last, too late for the scheduled flight back to London, I found myself sharing a limousine home With a young black pop musician called David Grant. Three hours in the back of a car is always an exhausting prospect, and it appalled me to think of spending them with a pop musician. My knowledge of pop music relies pretty much on seepage from headsets in the underground, and I do not like it one little bit. In fact, the journey was a chastening surprise. Our chauffeur said he had never heard two passengers, pre- viously unknown to each other, get on so well. David and I talked about politics, money, love, our mothers, religion and — though we delicately avoided any mention of music — we discussed art, work and fame. I'd ride in the back of a limousine to anywhere with that open, articulate boy. He topped the charts once, and was for a while a major celebrity, though only among minors. But I suspect that he'll come up with something better to do now, because he agreed with me that the single absolutely pure motive for seeking fame is selfishness.
Achauffeur-driven limousine from Liverpool to London must cost something around £200, I imagine. Yet there wasn't a tremor of hesitation before ordering one for us, or any real effort to check on a possible flight from Manchester, which would have been faster, and at around £60 a passenger, considerably cheaper. We had flown up on Manx Air off-peak return tickets; when the unrefundable portion for those of us who missed the plane is added to the car hire, the production costs for a few minutes of television fodder increase by quite a bit. Nevertheless, I didn't hear anyone so much as suggesting ringing British Rail to see if there was a convenient train to London. Minor celebrities like us would, of course, have required first-class tickets which, though much less than a limo, currently work out to only a fiver less than air tickets; approximately three shorts and a packet of crisps in the buffet car. Should long-distance train prices go as high as they threaten to do, there's bound to be an increasing number of short, brutish internal flights that already crowd the skies more than seems safe or sensible. If only British Rail could see milage as a commod- ity, they might come to the same conclu- sion as many airlines have, and accept the established merchandising precept that the customer who buys in bulk expects a discount; otherwise, he'll look for another supplier.
0 dd and varied are the ways men drink. Frenchmen, for instance, as a rule do not get drunk. Though many of them end up with cirrhosis of the liver, they have pursued the disease doggedly, without any real flair for it. Least of all have I ever understood American drinkers. There must be a lot of them around, because every hick town has a flourishing branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, but I've never met one over there at a dinner-party, the way I often do here, and even their political conventions are relatively sober. Serious English drinkers are everywhere, at first uproarious or pugnacious, then tending near the end of their bouts to become macabre. Not morose, the way Scandina- vians are, or maudlin in the manner of middle-aged women and Japanese businessmen, but what a psychoanalyst friend calls `deathy'. Even when pubs kept the old hours, all the men with whom I chose to drink were often deep in con- versation about forensic medicine, say, capital punishment, dead friends and fatal accidents by the time the bell rang for closing. Now, under deregulation, it's going to be blood and gore around the clock down at the old watering-hole.
0 n the first night of the new pub regime I did a stint as agony aunt on LBC's Nightline phone-in. Surprisingly, none of my callers was drunk, except, perhaps, one over-excited soul from Clapham who, from what I could make out, mistook me for an Indian restaurant. It is not a great way for a woman to spend a night, being flooded by the anguish of outsiders while knowing nothing will ever stop it, least of all herself. Whenever I do a phone-in, I feel as though I'm a white witch, but without any spells or magic powder for Maureen of Acton to spinkle on her lover's soup so things will go back to being the way they used to be. I don't know what to tell them all. A carnival gypsy could do the job as well. What about that wretched man whose wife had gone off with his friend after 30 years of what he thought was a normal, happy marriage? Poor chap. And I asked him intimate questions, receiving answers that were not in fact any of my business, and certainly did not need to be heard by thousands of listening strangers. What does he imagine I can do for him? I can't make him young, or happy, or more sensitive and attentive; I can't even make him stop crying. Nor was there any serious reply for the blind man who rang me to complain bitterly about the shortage of pornography in braille. He was genuinely outraged and unhappy, the way people with a tragedy in their lives often are about something insignificant, deflecting emotion from the greater pain so it doesn't become more than they can bear. Who'd be an agony aunt? It's a rum trade.
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