DIARY
It's good news that President Reagan has decided to finance a new phase of the space programme. It seems there hasn't been a good invention in years. Every time you go down to get new batteries for your transis- tor — which seems to be about every six weeks — you are aware that a lot of technology is stuck at a very unwieldy, intermediate stage. Presumably in museums of the 21st century, people will stop and have a good laugh at the glass cases containing little inefficient lamps marked 'Duracel' and 'Ever-Ready'. At your local Currys these days, you can actually get a machine which you plug into the wall in order to 're-charge' a battery, but it definitely has the air of a contraption which isn't going to be around for very long. It will soon be as much a period piece as those tape recorders in the Fifties (were they called Gramdecks?) which could work only when you mounted them on the turntable of your gramophone. Every year motoring correspondents have to pretend to go into fainting fits at whatever advances are being claimed by the big companies. But nobody is fooled. Nothing very in- teresting has happened to cars for the last 20 years. Nor have aeroplanes changed much. You have the same experience travelling by jumbo as you did in the early Seventies. Films are no longer made fanta- sising about a gleaming white, shining future. Instead the future is represented by Mad Max, in which insanely angry people scavenge among dead technology. It seems sad.
0 f course the claims of so-called `progress' were always absurd. Life changes slowly. And indeed if you ask what the much advertised spin-offs from Cape Kennedy are, then all anybody ever seems able to come up with is non-stick frying pans. No, the most appealing thing about Nasa is that an intellectually brilliant group of men should apply themselves to a practical task which is dazzlingly complex, and at which they have enjoyed extraordin- ary success, and in the process be forced to think about the very deepest mysteries of life. Lavishly subsidised, Nasa is now the world's only incontestably great university.
N0 doubt there are good reasons why whole genres of film vanish so suddenly. It is years since anyone made a decent Western. Nor is anyone really making war films, or at least not ones in which a group of men plan to do something and then actually do it. Perhaps there are no longer such wars. Admittedly, there are still a lot of films about 'coming home'. William Wyler pioneered this genre in The Best Years of Our Lives, and now Charles DAVID HARE Wood has used it brilliantly in his film about the Falklands war, Tumbledown, which the BBC is due to transmit in May. It is the first proper memorial which the veterans of that tragic war have had. The genre most notable by its disappearance is the 'crime caper' or 'heist' movie, which was such a staple of post-war cinema on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, this was one in which people pored over blue-prints of bank vaults, and then went out to thin pencil-liners with which they drew thin moustaches on their upper lips. After the robbery, there was always a scene in which an unimaginable number of banknotes cascaded from a suitcase onto the bed, and everyone rolled around laughing and throwing tenners in the air. It is fascinating why this particular film is no longer made. Theoretically, we live in an age obsessed with money, and people's sense of personal honesty doesn't seem to have noticeably changed. Why no robbery movies? Is it that the whole fantasy of the `big win' has died? Do people still believe that a million pounds would make them happy?
Journalists never seem to be able to cope with real people. They keep having to abandon profiles of Peggy Ramsay. Some years ago, the Sunday Times Colour Maga- zine had an extended try, and gave up without publishing. The New Yorker is known to have had something in the works for over three years, and yet it has never appeared. It is something of a tribute to her character that it took Alan Bennett and Vanessa Redgrave in Prick Up Your Ears to offer even the beginnings of a sketch. Last week, after 30 years as London's outstanding dramatic literary agent, she was presented with a silver tray engraved with the signatures of all her clients. Since she represents Christopher Hampton, Robert Bolt, Willy Russell, David Rudkin, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, John Arden, Peter Nichols, John Byrne, Alan Ayckbourn, Anne Devlin, Edward Bond, Jack Rosenthal, James Saunders, Peter Gill, Wallace Shawn, Jim Cartwright and the estate of Tennessee Williams, you will have some sense both of the power and breadth of her interests. Entirely indiffe- rent to money, she regards the stage as the only place worthy of a writer's serious attention. The cinema is an amusing side- line, and television is beneath contempt. Knowing a writer's life to be properly miserable, she advises short, recuperative periods of glamour to compensate. When Edward Bond was in the middle of the scandal caused by his play Saved she advised him to buy an open-topped red sports car and drive up and down the Kings Road looking for girls. In Robert Bolt's words, 'She hates failure and is deeply suspicious of success.' She reads between 15 and 20 plays a week. She calls clients early in the morning with alarmingly forth- right views. If a play is no good, she refuses to sell it. Nor will she take on writers unless they're suggestible. She's quite clear what the benefits of playwriting are. When Peter Nichols called, excited, to tell her that he was off with his wife for the New York premiere of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, she was dismayed. 'You're taking your wife? For your, first Broadway play?' Cer- tainly,' said Nichols. 'What's wrong with that?' Well it's up to you,' she said, 'but isn't it rather like going to a banquet with your own ham sandwich?'
Iam writing this from the Shangri-La Hotel on Ocean Boulevard, Santa Monica. It is a calm, hazy 70°. The last time I stayed here I was preparing a production of King Lear, and used to work beneath the palm trees, opposite the beach. It was pleasantly incongruous to think about Lear's torment in the world's most equable climate, and among a people who would no doubt have told him that there was some effective commercial remedy for his problems. The only good thing about jet-lag is insomnia. Books are better when you read them straight through. Ellman's majestic biogra- phy of Wilde is as fine as they said it was, finer even, though Mrs Wilde seems seriously under-represented in proportion to her suffering. Yes, Ellman's description of Wilde in prison is unbearably moving. But is it truly worse for an artist than for any man? Crime is human, punishment is not. The noblest course any government in Britain could now take would be a general amnesty for all prisoners below a certain level of offence. Justice cries out for it. And, God knows, there would be practical advantages.
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