DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Does anyone know what I can do with the first act of an abandoned play, working title Hitting the Fan? It was to have been a dramatisation of the Alan Clark Diaries a sort of political Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. Or maybe a Westminster Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, since I had elected to regard the PM and her Secretaries of State as noises off, leaving the stage to Clark and his strutting Young Turk pals and their scheming civil servants. It was going rather well, no particular thanks to me — some of Clark's lines need only the lightest of dra- maturgical touches to become an actor's dream: 'Nowhere in this fucking castle, with its 17 outhouses, garages, sheds and 18 vehicles, can I find pliers. I am surrounded by unreliables. My new, red, vintage tool- locker was empty. I ransacked the China Room, where I keep all my most precious
things ' My own main contribution was a Walking Footnote who reminds the audi- ence, with the occasional aside, how all these people slotted into the parliamentary Passing show. For instance, when Clark Wonders who told Mrs T about his refer- ence to Nigeria as Bongo-Bongo Land, the Walking Footnote confides behind his hand, 'It was Douglas Hurd.' Ned Sherrin, who was to direct, had some interesting casting ideas, and it looked as if we were shaping up for a lively and unusual theatri- cal experience. Alas, as rehearsal dates loomed, our protagonist began to have sec- ond thoughts. For one thing, he wanted control. A politician in charge of a play is as ludicrous a prospect as a dramatist in charge of defence procurement. And then the Clarks were doorstepped for a week by the Sunday Times, culminating in a half- Page piece raking up some of the choicer Clark nuggets and illustrated by a mock-up theatre poster: 'Alan Clark Is Unsure'. Whereupon, I gather, the long-suffering Mrs Clark asked, `Do we really want to go through all this again?' And that was that. Shame. It would not have been 'all this again', it would have been great fun for everyone, and good for the ego. Where Ned and I perhaps made our mistake was In not inviting Alan Clark to help audition beautiful young actresses for the part of the shop assistant on the train with the 'delight- ful globes'.
Touching on doorstepping leads me naturally to the Daily Mirror, now an unfor- tunate gaudy shadow of its former self. (I am told that one of the surviving giants of he Mirror's golden age, when asked what ne thinks of the rag these days, claims to be a retired deckchair attendant from Bournemouth. It seems that Piers Morgan, the Paper's hapless editor, was very excited
to learn that Mystic Meg, who has a slot on the Saturday night National Lottery televi- sion show„ is in the habit of having a mean- ingful consultation with her cat before making her predictions. Bellowing the headline: 'Mystic Mog!', Morgan demand- ed pictures of the psychic animal. Since Mystic Meg has an arrangement with a rival tabloid, however, no co-operation could be expected from that direction. The Mirror's picture desk accordingly hired a freelance photographer at £200 a day to doorstep the cat-flap.
Iwas appalled to hear from Pipedown, the campaign against piped music in pubs and elsewhere, that a music teacher, cur- rently serving a sentence at HM Prison Acklington in Northumberland, is being forced to endure five hours of musical bub- blegum a day from loudspeakers in the prison workshop tuned to local pop sta- tions. Presumably this _happens in other prisons too. Pipedown protested on his behalf, but the prison authorities' response
Sorry I'm so late ringing, but there was a queue of terrorists making bomb threats
was that the other prisoners like the racket. Five hours of pop a day strikes me as a cruel and unusual punishment. But perhaps that is the idea. Victorian jails had the treadmill, ours have Kiss FM.
Modern manners. Three little maids from the metropolitan university (n8e Poly) troll into the pub and carry their pints (yes, pints) to a corner table. Simultaneously they produce cigarette packets. One of them leans over to the old man at the next table, who is smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper: "Scuse me, could I borrow your lighter?' But, of course. He hands it over. She lights up and passes it to the sec- ond girl, who likewise ignites her cigarette and passes the lighter on. (No nonsense here about lighting somebody else's fag for them.) The third girl, having lit up, begins absently flicking the lighter on and off, which she does for some minutes. Finally, tiring of the game, she throws the lighter on the table. The second girl picks it up and she too flicks it on, but this time holding the flame steady, with the apparent object of seeing how long it will remain alight without guttering. Then she too tosses the lighter down. The old boy, a mite peeved, rises and reaches for his lighter, asking, `Have you fmished with this?' One of the girls says carelessly, 'Oh, sorree!' The one who borrowed it in the first place does not even look at him.
APS to my paragraph last week about my failure to secure the Amis Adler for the Garrick Club. By a bizarre coincidence, you may recall, I was outbid by another Water- house across the world in tropical North Queensland. I have now had a pleasant fax from this rival, one Dr Robbin Water- house, a radiologist. Assuring me that the old manual typewriter will reside in an air- conditioned, dehumidified library along with his collection of Kingsley Amis first editions, he writes: 'I can understand that you feel the Garrick Club may be a more appropriate resting. place but can I offer some consolation in its having gone Abroad? Firstly, it will be in the possession of a known Amis fan whereas at the Gar- rick there could be one or two negative vibes in the air. Secondly, it will not live in an alcohol-free zone and I promise that it and the memory of .Sir Kingsley Amis are regularly toasted in his favourite whisky, Macallan single malt.' That is as may be. While I have framed a suitably polite reply, little does Dr Waterhouse realise that some of us at the Garrick are planning a raiding party across the Great Barrier Reef.
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