Television
Boring for Britain
Simon Hoggart
I\To need for the gridiron; hell is other people,' said Sartre. Cutting Edge's The Dinner Party (Channel 4) this week showed what he meant. Watching it was almost as hellish as being there, without the consolation of being drunk or the relief afforded by commercial breaks. The cast of real people, who'd answered an ad in the Sunday Telegraph, were depicted in the pre- publicity as fascist beasts, but in fact they were mostly classic examples of the Great British Bore. Goodness, they were dull. Who thinks such people are rarities? You meet them all the time. Taxi drivers, strangers who insist on talking to you on trains, afternoon drinkers, some Tory MPS, distant relatives who grab you at weddings and ask why, if there's so much unemploy- ment, they can't find anyone to paint their fence, women with voices which could split a cantaloupe across Harrods' food hall, the awful husband of that really nice woman you would love to invite but you'd have to ask him as well ... the country is crawling with them. You just make certain they don't come to your house.
It started fairly well. One of the women told a story which ended with the challeng- ing line: 'It's Mary's dildo, go and put that back where you found it!', but things went downhill from there. I feel sorry for teeto- tallers. For them, sociable evenings must be like this all the time. 'Criminals should be sterilised so that you can stop the long- term, the long-term . sorry, my brain is grinding to a halt,' said one guest. 'We had, a pony called Jemima, who was a lesbian (that said earnestly, as if it was a useful contribution to a discussion of homosexual- ity. Useful little word 'queer', before the bigots took it over). 'If you choose to sleep on the Embank- ment in a doorway, that in itself is a free- dom, no ties, no responsibilities, like going to prison, everything's looked after, so what's the problem?' Imagine having to its- ten to that stuff sober. You'd get desper- ate. 'Excuse me, I'll just nip out for half all hour and find a prostitute,' you'd want to say, or, 'If you don't mind, I think I'll chew my arm off at this point.' Jon, the musician, who suffered from a debilitating condition which made him want to think before opening his mouth, looked miserable throughout. There were occasional vicious cutaways of other guests looking bored beyond any tolerable limit. Then the wobbly, from the woman who had been silenced by braying men. 'I won't shut 11P, I'll leave rather than shut the fuck up, SO fuck it!' I can't really blame her. Rather like Harry Enfield's public service announcement, there was a general view among the chaps that women shouldn't think too much because their brains fill up. One of the lethal sisters, Bridget and Judith, was interrupted and replied crisply, 'I don't think I've finished yet,' so the men went into a tremendous whooping and Wheezing and Irian fnarr than!' routine.
They got a phrase in their heads. 'Dare I say it, but ordinary people like us. .."Dare I say it, but leadership qualities ...' There Was a clear sense that the world outside was a hostile place, where any deviation from political correctness would be ruth- lessly punished, not least by the media who are hopelessly biased (i.e. do not reflect their precise view of the world).
George, the publican and Oliver Reed wannabe who turned out to be the star of the show, felt the danger literally. 'If I say What I want to say, I'll get a bomb through my window, fifty Asians are going to come to the pub and wreck the place.' Really? How many instances are there of roaming gangs from the sub-continent destroying the property of people they disagree with? These guests thought of themselves as ordinary people' yet they perceive the world around them as more horrible and threatening than a Judge Dredd comic. Their terrors were juxtaposed against Sparse, elegiac shots of the East Anglian countryside around them, lazy streams, long flat roads, trees full of rooks. What a nice place to live, what dreary neighbours.
Was it terribly unfair? I suspect not. All the guests were interviewed at length away from the others and were shown chatting casually and uninterrupted at their work. One of the women reflected on camera that Michael Portillo was 'a greasy little shmeball, isn't he? Don't print that!' George, the one who made David Evans look like Donald Soper, vouchsafed that he had got from his mother 'compassion, sym- pathy and the ability to see other people's Point of view'. Heavens, I never knew that Margaret Thatcher had had a third child, no doubt raised in a locked attic.
Andy Warhol was wrong, as so often. Fif- teen minutes of fame is nothing like enough. We need to be famous for much longer, if only to fill the hours of otherwise empty broadcast bands. Why not a dinner Party cable channel? Why not a dozen? There would be the East Anglian bores Channel, the Islington chatterers channel, _the Mancunian academics channel, the Wee Frees channel, shown only in the Highlands. We could invite our friends round for dinner to watch them.
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