I t has been a most nerve-racking week, whose trauma has
seemed quite impervious even to the ministrations of Valium. I speak, of course, of my concern for Katy Harris and Martin Platt, the Mandy Smith and Bill Wyman of Coronation Street, who have just unleashed news of Katy’s surprise pregnancy on her psychotic father Tommy. It will all end, I learn from the tabloids, in patricide then suicide — so I do hope Spectator readers weren’t hoping for the highlights from last week’s London social scene. Anyone expecting a diarist to forego death in Weatherfield for some book launch has either not read my column in the Guardian, and assumes it contains the occasional story gleaned from such events (the occasional story, even), or considers warm wine and the chance of glimpsing Andrew Roberts a superior sensation. I think there are people you can see for this.
Such has been the strain, in fact, that I almost felt unable to take to this page, relenting only on the basis that it has long been an ambition to be able to use — if only for one week — the totally hot phrase ‘my colleague Simon Heffer’. In fact, while I’m here, it would be a shame not to deploy ‘my colleague Taki’ too. Such a card. I forget whether or not he is still addressing black people as ‘Sambo’ but you really can’t beat him, can you? Pity ...
Writing a newspaper diary means you do receive lots of invitations, all of which I decline, by which I mean rudely fail even to answer on the basis that they largely appear to have been sent by people in some kind of mental distress. Those binned this week include one to a nightclub in South Molton Street. ‘Theme: Country Fête. Dress: Country chic. Bring something to swap at the White Elephant stall.’ What can you say? Except that London life is becoming like some Heat magazine version of the pastoral, and we have only Madonna to blame. When I was at boarding school, there were two dominant female presences in my life. One was the Barbour-clad mothers of friends who collected us for the odd weekend in off-road vehicles, engaging one in tedious conversations about shooting. And the other was the poster of Madonna on my bedroom wall, which depicted her wearing injection-moulded undergarments and a leash and somehow managing to make the act of licking out of a saucer of milk look like a study in female empowerment. That the Queen of Pop would one day aspire so desperately to ape Lady Bufton Tufton has been one of the greatest disappointments in my cultural life, and a pretty depressing testament that not only does the silly fascination with the landed gentry endure, but may well even be getting worse. Can you imagine Jean Harlow lowering herself to bang on about pheasant pens? Too, too ghastly.
An outing to see the Garrick revival of Bill MacIlwraith’s The Anniversary is distinguished not merely by Sheila Hancock’s brilliance, but by an unsettling failure to bump into my theatrical stalker, Coronation Street’s Gail Platt. Last year I ran into Gail three times at the National, twice at the Old Vic and once at the Donmar. The Donmar sighting was particularly troubling, coming as it did in the middle of a period of strife in her family. While one doesn’t want to be judgmental, I’m sure my colleague Simon Heffer would agree that you do have to blame the parents, and what with endless outings to the West End was it any wonder her Sarah-Lou was pregnant again? Anyway, The Anniversary is splendid, with Ms Hancock notably better supported than the last time she gave us a twisted display of mother love. That was in a two-handed episode of EastEnders opposite Martin Kemp, formerly of Spandau Ballet and currently being out-acted by a three-piece suite in the SCS sofa adverts.
By some strange happenstance, I awake next morning to learn that EastEnders’ executive producer has departed after just four months. The BBC says she has not been fired — presumably she felt so comfortable with her legacy that she was ready to leave at any moment — but there is talk of a recent crisis when the show almost ran out of plots. Plots? They ran out of rain in one episode: it was pouring on one side of the screen while the other remained bone dry, an effect which had the distinction of making Acorn Antiques look like Citizen Kane. Our soaps are true institutions — so much more of a credit to our national temperament than the American equivalents which centre solely on the super-rich — so I wish the caretaker manager fairer weather.
Hooking up with my oldest friend has taken a turn since her career change. For some years she worked as a stuntwoman, which engendered conversations along the lines of, ‘How was your day?’ ‘Oh, fine. I fought a pack of ninjas, then got set on fire and thrown down six flights of stairs. What about you?’ ‘Well ... I made a facetious phone call to Iain Duncan Smith.... ’ Now she has qualified as a naturopath, and we talk instead about the mortal peril I place myself in by dining occasionally at McDonald’s. I find myself creating diversions, and this week mentioned the Corrie-based stress. This prompted her to reveal — and I shouldn’t trouble yourself looking for the logical progression — that there is a gentleman in India who can cure every known ailment with water, merely adapting the dosage. Trust me, in these situations it is simply not worth making cynical inquiries about Aids or Alzheimer’s. No, it really is the most fascinatingly rigorous science ... and yet I find myself ever so slightly concerned that some alternative practitioners seem to operate without what people in the fuddyduddy world of conventional medicine, with their backward, closed minds, have tended to refer to as ‘regulation’. The good news is that one man has been given a government grant of £900,000 to establish a kind of GMC for cowboy chakra-drainers. The bad news — and apologies if public life seems like the punchline to a Les Dawson gag — is that that man is Prince Charles. Fortune’s wheel turns again.
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