DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Aclutch of glittering prizes for Four Weddings and a Funeral at the Bafta Awards puts it firmly in the category of films I must pretend to have seen, and which in the fullness of time I shall per- suade myself that I have indeed seen, thanks to the constant drip-drip of televi- sion extracts, reviews, interviews and snatches of cocktail-party gossip intra- venously absorbed. Although I rarely go to the cinema, I take a keen interest in current films and divide them into three classes: those I mean to see (An Awfully Big Adven- ture, The Madness of King George) but never get round to, until finally they surface on television; those I have no intention of see- ing (Forrest Gump, Dumb and Dumber) and don't mind who knows it; and those I feel I ought to see (Four Weddings, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle) yet nevertheless have no real wish to see, so that in due course I either have to offer surprised friends a convincing explanation for the unseemly omission, or bluff. I usually choose to bluff, and invariably get away with it. Only recently I found myself swap- ping opinions on Pulp Fiction with three or four friends who had just been to see the film and chose to assume that I had seen it too. I did not disillusion them. The trick is to pick up on a point someone made five minutes ago, embellish it from one's scant knowledge of the film, and toss it back into the conversation. My most notable coup in this direction was to hold my own in a dis- section of the chariot race in Ben Hur. Here again deception was thrust upon me. You do not own up to never having seen Ben Hur when you are talking to Charlton Hes- ton himself.
Lunch with Jason Donovan, late of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, to celebrate his succession (and, I doubt not, his success) as the latest in a long line of Billy Liars. He is to star in a revival of Billy the musical, not seen pro- fessionally since Michael Crawford's record-breaking run of over 900 perfor- mances at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. That goes back to the early Seventies. The play (Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay) and the film (Courtenay) go back to the early Sixties, the novel to the late Fifties. What a lifetime ago. After the ratpack at our press launch had finished grilling Jason on how he came to keel over at `supermoder Kate Moss's birthday party in, nudge nudge, `the same club where actor River Phoenix took the cocktail of drugs that killed him in 1993' (his reply was `I'm not Mr Perfect'), some of them began to ask me how the young rascal has survived over all these years. Billy, I mean, not Jason. Apart from the generation war, on which no truce has ever been declared even though fathers now ape their sons instead of sons their fathers, the only answer I could come up with was `Youth's a stuff that will endure,' to which an earnest young thing responded, `It's "will not", actually,' crushing my joke. Well, at least she knew the quote. She also knew my novel, having like Jason been made to study it as a set book at school. All those Brodie's Notes — you would think it would put them off the mendacious little devil for life, but it doesn't: at a National Theatre revival of the play two or three years ago, I was pleased to see that the audience was predominantly in the under- thirties bracket. I must say that when I wrote Billy Liar 36 years ago, or Saturday Night at the Raz), as it was to be called until Alan Sillitoe published Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, I didn't expect him to pro- vide my pension. Nor, identifying with my hero as of course I did then, did I see the day arriving when I would switch allegiance to his father. Apleasant way of passing a train jour- ney is to think up new grudges against British Rail and its successors. My latest fume is directed at the printed injunction that the ticket I have purchased is not transferable. Why, pray, is it not transfer- able, and what harm would I do by giving it away or selling it, whether at a profit or at a loss? As the railways constantly remind us, we are all customers now, and a ticket is a commodity like any other. After all, when we buy a can of beans or a pot of jam, we do not expect to find a printed warning that these beans or this jam must be consumed by the purchaser only. Nor, come to that, do we read while we are brushing our teeth, `This tube of toothpaste is issued subject to the conditions shown in the Manufacturer's current Conditions of Sale and also in any other of the Manufacturer's publications and notices appropriate to its use.' But you can bet that there will be more rather than fewer of these steam-age regulations come privatisation.
Arising out of some nostalgic exchanges at a memorial service, there was a remarkable but unreported reunion at a club in London a few days ago. The first qualification was that you had to have been associated with the Daily Mirror back in the heady, Cudlippian mid-Sixties when the cir- culation soared to an all-time record of over 5 million copies daily. The other quali- fication, of course, was that you had to be alive and more or less well and could be bothered to make it. We mustered over a hundred, including Hugh Cudlipp himself who made a rousing but unsentimental speech, and a jolly time was had by all. I don't know any newspaper that could raise such a gathering after such an interval. With sales now neatly halved at 2.5 million, and the shares, shall we say, steady at around 135p (from near 200p a couple of years ago), Mirror Group sees itself described as 'one of the highest-profile media companies in Britain' with all man- ner of technologically led spin-offs in the offing. In the unlikely event of a reunion 30 years on, I wonder how many would turn up? I was about to say perhaps only the for- ward-looking chief executive David Montgomery, but I believe he is not a party man.
Ashelf of books in a hotel room is a civilised touch, is it not? So I thought, until I came to examine the dozen titles left out for me in my American hotel. They were all wrapped in cling-film. Break seal, and 'for your convenience' the price of the book goes automatically on your bill. The literary equivalent of the mini-bar has arrived.
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