No. 536: The winners

Trevor Grove reports: The National Society of Non-Smokers recently asked the mic to show characters in plays refusing cigarettes. Com- petitors were invited to help the BBC by compos- ing extra lines of dialogue, suitable for inclusion in any existing (or imaginary) play, which con- veyed the Non-Smokers' message. The exercise resulted in some powerful drama—not very sur- prisingly perhaps, since, as the august non- smoking body who have lent their inspiration to this competition must be well aware, the situa- tion is one fraught with dramatic tension. Amongst those who exploited it most success- fully there tended to be two alternative schools of thought; those who favoured the homiletic, preventive approach, such as Lance Haward, who wins five guineas:

CLOWN This skull hath lain in the earth three and twenty years.

HAMLET Finding his death whereby?

CLOWN In faith, sir, by the lung.

HAMLET Nay, but from what assault?

CLOWN Marry, 'twas a salt of cancer, sir, that crabb'd him, not so hot as your tropic kind nor, to be sure, so regarding of the future as your astral, but 'twill suffice you for a growth as potent as any vintage.

HAMLET A sickness of the gut, sayest thou? What, died he in his beer?

CLOWN Ay, for your bier is a common con- clusion.

HAMLET Nay, thou knave, in his ale?

CLOWN Why, of a surety, they have ailed that lie here. But, for a very pernicious ending, 'twas indeed the revengeful weed consumed him that thought to burn it . . .

. . . and those who preferred to repel the attack after it had been made—N. J. Rock, for instance, with his episode from Dixon of Dock Green.

In fact most competitors favoured Mr Haward's approach. Five guineas to one of the most accomplished of them, Selwyn Tur- ner:

HAMLET Yet worse is to be told than that. In

Wittenberg

I lately saw rude medicals dissect a corpse, A damned slave whose wolfish soul had

fled Forth from the gallows where his carcase hung, I marled its lungs, more black than the Stygian night And my curs'd uncle's arts.

HORATIO But wherefore this, my Lord? HAMLET From smoking.

HORATIO Can it be? Methinks I am distill'd With fear and wonder.

HAMLET Consider Horatio, A cankeed gut, a palsied arm, eyeballs as red As Vulcan's stithy fires are ills infallible Upon the noisome herb. 0 good Horatio, Keep money in thy purse. Don't smoke.

Shakespeare, as is already evident, proved the most popular subject for this kind of bowdlerisation. Next to Shakespeare, Wilde and The Importance were the most widely favoured; G. J. Blundell, for instance, who wins three guineas: LADY B Do you smoke, Mr Worthing?

ALGERNON Like a chimney, Lady Bracknell!

LADY B I am sorry to hear it. Nowadays to smoke like a chimney is frequently to go out like a fire. I should not like Gwendolen to become a widow before she was thirty. Too much pleasure at so early an age tends to spoil a girl.

ALGERNON I assure you, I have no intention of smoking myself to death. I can easily cut it down.

LADY B A laudable aim! Unfortunately, people who talk of cutting down smoking usually find that it has cut them down first. The only sensible course is abstention.

All in all a large and extremely competent entry. Honourable mentions to W. J. Webster (The Caretaker), 0. P. Nicholson (Plato), Adrienne Gascoigne and Eileen Tulloch—who another week would have been certain winners—and a final three guineas to Martin Fagg :

PISTOL . . . for Falstaff he is dead, tho' whether it be from a surfeyte of sack, a superfluitie of sherris, or from the French sicknesse he did contract thro' his overmuche frequentynge of the harlotrie, there is no apothecary has wit enow to tell.

BARDOLPH I' faith, it were none of these thynges, for he did indulge all these lusts mightilie to no ill effect. 'Twas the foul fiend Nickoteen that carried him off.

NYM Marry, they do say your Tobaccoe, be a whoreson polluter* of your freshe grene lung .

* Theobald's emendation. Q putreelyer; F 1 predaytor; F 2 petrifyer.