CHARLIE HIGSON There are a few fantasy gigs around
CHARLIE HIGSON There are a few fantasy gigs around, those jobs which we minor celebrities know deep down that we're never going to be offered, but which we prepare for anyway, just in case. Appearing on Desert Island Discs, hosting Have I Got News For You, playing James Bond in the movies, writing the Spectator Diary. All right, perhaps writing the Spectator Diary is not quite up there with playing James Bond, but it is something of an honour. I have always had a fear, though, that I would be asked to write a diary piece when I was doing absolutely sodall. People will happily read about glamorous parties, meetings with great men or what it's like to singlehandedly row around the world blindfolded. They will glaze over, however, if presented with the mind-numbingly dull dayto-day business of being a writer. . . 'Got up. Took kids to school. Sat at desk for six hours. Am currently writing piece for the Spectator about writing a piece for the Spectator. Paused briefly at 3.05 to wonder if this was any way to spend my life.'
T expect many a writer has sat bolt upright 1 on their deathbed, looked madly around the room for a way out and shouted, 'Wait a minute! I forgot to live! The characters in my books had a great time, what the hell have I ever done?'
As a matter of fact, though, I have been busy. I've been doing a month of publicity for my new Young James Bond book. Wait, wait — don't turn over. This isn't going to be one of those dreaded 'book-signing tour' pieces full of hilarious anecdotes about turning up to a signing in Milton Keynes and finding only one punter there, who thinks you are Julian Barnes, and you sign a first edition of Flauben's Parrot 'Who's a pretty boy, then? Love, Jules', so as not to disappoint.
All writers nowadays are required to do publicity. Some enjoy it — those who like getting out into the world and meeting real, breathing flesh-and-blood people. But, let's face it, most writers only took up writing in the first place so that they would never have to go out into the real world and meet real, breathing, flesh-and-blood people. I'm somewhere in the middle, but as someone brought up to believe that it's not polite to talk about yourself too much I find it a little embarrassing. Especially TV interviews. All I can think of when I'm answering questions is that I will come across on screen as a smug, self-obsessed git, but you have no choice. A film crew has tipped up to record your every precious word, so you can hardly say to the interviewer, 'That's enough about me, what about you? Where do you get your ideas from?'
I'm lucky, because of the James Bond factor. As soon as you mention those two words normally serious and sober news types wet themselves and engineer some feeble excuse to talk about it. The supreme example of this was the appalling spectacle of major BBC newsreaders dressed up as Bond characters for the recent Children In Need. In my case, though, it does mean that for every PR photo-shoot I get the inevitable message, 'Can Charlie bring a tuxedo with him? We'll supply the plastic gun.' OK, I accept that it's impossible to make a photograph of a writer in any way exciting (the Guardian has a new series of articles about writers' rooms, reasoning that a picture of a desk is going to be a lot more interesting than yet another shot of a writer touching his chin with one finger). I am always entertained by the spectacle of massed ranks of news photographers at literary festivals snapping furiously away at some startled writer. You imagine them going through the pictures with their editors — 'Who's that, then?"Er, Margaret Atwood? Margaret Drabble? I dunno, maybe it's Andy McNab?'
Sooner or later on every publicity tour you find yourself locked in a tiny soundproofed cell at the BBC doing 16 local radio phone-in shows back-to-back and saying the same things over and over again, often to the same slightly bewildered host. What makes it even harder is that I have just finished making a spoof phone-in show for Radio Four called Down the Line, and I can't take phone-in shows seriously any more. But doing local radio is a fascinating glimpse into Little England.
We are a country obsessed with the trivial. And this is what we focus on in our show. No matter what lofty topics we set up — immigration, war, the environment — the callers always end up talking about local parking problems, grammar, and whether or not Britain has the friendliest robins in Europe. I think this is why as a nation we have been largely immune to major political upheavals and revolutions.
But we do seem to have upset some staunch Radio Four types Mainly, I think, because we serve it all up without comment. We have been accused of being ignorant, bigoted and rude. Many listeners don't seem to understand the nature of satire. They are confused by the difference between a fictional character in a programme expressing a bigoted, crass view and the programme itself being bigoted and crass. Actually, we're being enormously clever and subtle I think Radio Four listeners have become too used to some smarmy Oxbridge type chipping in and explaining everything to them — as in, 'That previous line about being clever was a joke.'
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