A Spectator's Notebook
There was a time when to enter the public service at Whitehall or Westminster meant a high degree of vocation and the sacrifice of the financial rewards open to those who chose to enter,business or a profession. As recently as 1940t Sir Edward Bridges, as Head of the Civil Service, received £3,000 a year, and a Senior Minister 0,000. Now, during a period of grave economic crisis and with employment in jeopardy, judges, top civil servants and service chiefs are to receive immediate and substantial increases in salary followed, inevitably so it appears, by Ministers and, indeed, plain Members of Parliament. No example is set even by a discussion of these increases, let alone by a direct reduction of salaries, when it is clear that several prominent Ministers and Shadow Ministers, who are known to have entered public life without private means, have acquired more than one private house and such expensive playthings of the rich as yachts, hobby farms and the price of Caribbean holidays.
Reforming Christmas
Christmas week this year was interminable. Why cannot we fix Christmas Day on a Sunday and New Year's Day the following Sunday? To avoid the problem of dates, we • could simply attach no date to Christmas Day, calling it simply that, so the calendar would run December 24, Christmas Day, December 25 and so forth. This is not more complicated than February 29 every fourth year. Christmas Day and New Year's Day next fall on a Sunday in 1977/8. That would give us plenty of time for a minor but sensible reform which, would, at one stroke, do away with the havoc of midweek Christmasses and Hogmanays. I do not expect to see this happen. It is the sensible reforms which seldom take place; and the utterly foolish and retrograde 'reforms', such as decimalisation and metrication which go through, more or less undebated by Parliament, and almost entirely loathed and resented by the public at large.
Jack Benny
Jack Benny, who gave a rib-hugging delight to millions for over four decades, has died. There is a certain irony that would not have been lost on Benny that his death occurred in a month when some insurance companies here cut the surrender values of their policies, for it was in London that he remarked, in support of his reputation for prudence, that, "I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is—when I go, they go." The public, all too ready to pin peacock feathers on the Humpty-Dumpty world of show business, have for a moment stopped to acknowledge the departing of a talent, bred in the world of the deprived and of the immigrant descendants of the ghetto, that happily translated to the world of the self-styled Scrooge mocking the careful uncle and stonyfaced, usurious moneybags.
Nearly all the newspaper obituary tributes to him made a point of saying how expert was his a too-obvious comment, it seems to me. As 'a successful comedian (and few of our time were as successful as Benny), timing was his business, and remarking on it is of a piece with saying of a successful jockey that he rides a horse well. Of course, comedians 'time' in different ways, but most put their trust in one of two methods. Some, like Bob Hope, know just how long to ride an audience's laughter before talking over it into the next laugh: Others know just how long to hold a pause to get the biggest laugh from the line that follows it. Jack Benny was in the second category: he held pauses as long as anybody in the business, he even got laughs from the pauses, and he got laughs from lines that wouldn't have been funny at all without the pauses.
My favourite example of this (apart from the famous 'hold-up' gag) was when he walked out on the Palladium stage a few years after the war. He walked out from the wings — that highly distinctive walk somehow combining a stroll and a mince — and held a long, long pause while the audience finished applauding his entrance and just looked at him. Finally, "My God," he said, "but he looks so much younger in the movies."
What I always thought unique about him was that, unlike other comedians who work with someone else (a stooge or straight man), Benny allowed Others to do the fooling about and falling about: he himself was the straight man in the act, but still got the laughs. I was never sure how good he was or could have been as a violinist. I'm inclined to think that, as he might have said himself (and perhaps did, if the joke is not too old), he could have been, with application, another Heifetz. (Pause.) Not Jascha — another Heifetz.
Those 'best sellers'
I have always suspected that booksellers consider the reading public to be no better than lemmings, and that they push their slow-selling stocks on the newspapers' 'best-seller' lists in order to create a demand for them. My worst fears are now proven, since this can be the only explanation for the marked discrepancies in the best-sellers of 1974' entries in the Sunday press. Why, for example, does Alistair Maclean's Breakheart Pass come first in the Observer fiction list but only tenth in that of the Sunday Times, and not at all in the Sunday Telegraph? How can Frederick Forsyth's The Dogs of War be first in the Sunday Times and nowhere in the Observer? And how can it be that The Goodies File is second in the non-fiction lists of the Sunday Times, but not in the top ten of the Sunday Telegraph and nowhere to be found in the Observer? Either we all buy books in markedly erratic ways, or the booksellers have been, shall we say, amending their returns. I incline to the latter view.
Lobby Lyrics-8
The noble Earl, Lord Waffley, would Attend the FlAuse whene'er he could, But, when they voted, he would find He never, could make up his mind.
In vain, his party whips would tell Him that he must obey the bell And, if he voted as he ought, It didn't matter what he thought, When others to the lobby sped, He simply sat and scratched his head.
One day, a-measure was proposed, So odious, that,all supposed That, this time, even he would know For certain where his vote should go. They watched with baited breath, — until He cast his vote against the Bill.
But this suspenseTroved such a strain, They begged him not to vote again.
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