A pride of prejudices
Keith Waterhouse
YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP by Richard Littlejohn Heinemann, 0.99, pp. 204 Under a Dangerous Columnists Act, Richard Littlejohn would have been put down years ago. He is the pit-bull terrier of journalism. When they wanted to give him a press award they had to invent a new category — Irritant of the Year. Released from the quarantine kennels of the Sun to the fireside and open French windows of the Daily Mail, he has simmered down a lit- tle, but not much. His bite is still as bad as his bark.
In these days of expanded papers, many are called as columnists — not all of them journalists and not all of them with the clearest idea of what they are supposed to do, as distinct from what they are being paid to be. Littlejohn, an on-the-road, doorstepping reporter and labour corre- spondent for 17 years before he was given his indoor billet, defines our peripheral trade to perfection: 'It is the job of a columnist to sit at the back and throw bottles.'
But all columnists, like Wellingtons sent out over Dresden by Bomber Harris, must have their targets. Littlejohn's running commentary on the mad world our masters have made for us owes much for its inspira- tion to the London Borough of Haringey where he has lived for ten years and where, according to him,
white men from Essex are about the only minority without their own council support unit, community centre and army of dedicat- ed social workers.
You get the scene. The late, great Cassandra was billed as the Terror of the Twerps. Littlejohn is the scourge of the stress counsellor, the lampoonist of the 'I don't care what anybody says — that's a forgery.' lesbian resources workshop, the rubbisher of the racial awareness course.
All of which, from a London taxi driver making his debut call to a late-night phone- in programme, would be fine. But the columnist must do more than rant and rail to earn his keep — Disgusted of Chel- tenham will do that for nothing. He has to entertain.
Littlejohn entertains by reducing the absurd to the even more absurd. One of his favourite devices is to project his victim of the day into some mad, imaginary TV or radio programme — a game show, perhaps, where the bosses of the privatised utilities are invited to play 'Snouts in the trough' to audience cries of 'Oink, oink, oink!', or a spoof chat-show hosted by David Mellor, a favourite target: 'Hello, good evening and that'll be ten grand.'
Littlejohn's catchphrase — useful had he decided to expand his columnar activities by standing in for Bernard Manning on the club circuit instead of Michael Parkinson on LBC — is 'You couldn't make it up.' But you can embellish it, by the columnist's (and the cartoonist's) trick of caricature. Over the years he has created a grotesque Donald McGill menagerie of preposterous stock figures, where prisoners scoff lobster suppers brought in by warders, young offenders are sent on safari holidays, school pantos are called Single Parent Goose, and outreach co-ordinators gather in health-food restaurants to gorge them- selves on high-fibre shredded cardboard and moan about 'the lack of resources for traffic humps and Eritrean lesbians'. Wel- fare scroungers and bearded Guardian readers provide the walk-on parts. All good harmful stuff.
Inevitably, after storing his grudges away for seven years like a malevolent squirrel, the hard case has gone into hard covers. But unlike most collections of columnists' work, this isn't one. Or rather, it is some- thing more. Where most of us are content to bung a file of our best (ie, not our worst) columns over to the printer, Littlejohn has done a little extra work. Mencken-like, he has bundled his prejudices together under various headings — Littlejohn's Law of Local Government, We Don't Need No Edukashon, Nanny Knows Best and so on — and fleshed out his column material into a series of splenetic essays. The fun is fur- ther added to by autobiographical inter- ludes usually centring on various organisations and institutions that have inexplicably taken exception to his observa- tions. It all makes for a very lively read.
One thing you cannot do in this column game is fake it. As he says, you couldn't make it up — you have to mean it. The indignation against, particularly, establish- ment figures is so plainly sincere that, read- ing between some of these lines, I suspect that behind the knee-jerks there is con- tained in the bulky frame of Richard Little- john a closet liberal trying to get out. Or perhaps I am hitting above the belt there.
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