1998
27 July 2000
2001
13 April
15 June
(1) Producer Richard Dominick (“If you want to save the whales, call Oprah. If you’re dating a whale, call us.”)
20 June
Today Dog Boy would be a rainbow influencer. He was just before his time.
3 July 2002
She would never know the anguish of that smut-faced child, as kiddie after kiddie was chosen by the adults living in the evacuation area, leaving him alone on the pavement with a shabby holdall… Eventually a policeman and a grim-faced official almost bullied a couple into taking him…
It may be another piece of Freud apocrypha that no one ever lost money on a different kind of smut. Still, even on the strength of mime and mimicry, Les Dawson’s art was far more than double entendres and fossil gags, although the “policeman’s boots type of joke” (Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill) turns up in his autobiography A Clown Too Many in the form of a tanked-up Les getting sick on a policeman’s trousers.
Yes, the book is sometimes a bit flowery and now and then the descriptions are padded with mother-in-law material. It’s a life that’s dog rough in places. But it’s never dull. It’s also epigrammatic, surreal, macabre, hilarious and moving.
For Raymond Chandler there was no complete man without at least a touch of vulgarity and Orwell thought the smutty postcards of his essay gave necessary expression to the “Sancho Panza” or “worm’s eye” view of life, which he saw as a mood that had been suppressed in English literature early in the nineteenth century.
His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures.
Though each of these itself is paradise, when taken in a moderate amount of moderation, this remains a rather tame understanding on Orwell’s part. Of turning a spiritual and professional corner onstage one night in the Sixties in Blackpool, Dawson writes
I glared at the unfeeling audience, and I went on glaring at them with something akin to hatred. After what seemed an aeon, somebody chuckled, and then somebody else. I made as if to see who was at the back of me… “Who the hell’s come on?” The laughter began to grow … “Dawson’s the name, I’m about as famous as Lord Godiva.” … “Do you think I care?” … It was my night… I was one of them. Fed up, sick of society, I belonged to them… I don’t recall driving home at all, but I do remember stopping once on the moorland road… urinating into a bush and shouting, “I bloody did it.”
Les Dawson was born into grime, an only child in the Manchester of the early Thirties. As for the seemingly effortless reproduction of comical Yorkshire speech on the page, the Mancunian Les must have enjoyed that, when giving ink to his stories about their nightclubs. On his mother’s side the family was entirely Irish and, whenever his grandmother had “me tipple” of drink taken, she would end up singing, They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.
In early adulthood he had a string of perversely inspiring Dickensian day jobs. One story sees him trudging through snow to a smelly hovel in order to fix a rusty washing machine but then finding a lost Christmas pay packet that’s stuck in a knackered vacuum cleaner. These jobs he combines with years of night slogging on the northern club circuit, with the attendant awful digs thrown in for any man who cannot get home.
Yes, yes, there I am on the bill at just about the height where dogs find it easy to urinate…
The swirling fag fug…
… the nights when club audiences had booed me off; I remembered the time bottles were thrown at me; the times when I’d stood… with sweat dripping down my suit as I battled to be heard…
Several other thespians were sitting glooming over their fate in what passed for a living room, and when the landlady introduced me, they merely grunted and turned back into statues.
The curious fact that Orwell never stresses the comedy in his long essay on Dickens, nor all that is allied in the macabre and grotesque, is typified when he mentions Krook’s spontaneous combustion in Bleak House. This is made without any reference to the obvious conclusion that the relevant chapter is played for laughs.
“‘Why, I have noticed myself that there is a queer kind of flavour in the place tonight,’ Mr Weevle rejoins. ‘I suppose it’s the chops at the Sol’s Arms.’ (…) Mr Snagsby sniffs and tastes again, and then spits and wipes his mouth; ‘I don’t think… they were quite fresh, when they were shown the gridiron.’”
Les himself ends several portraits with a coda about how a person died, usually unnaturally. He makes much mention too of his own “cowardice” yet, like many an unwillingly tough man, he imposes himself only after extreme provocation. Comedy meets desperation, as in when the grown Les is forced into gallantly tackling a pair of burglars on behalf of a female neighbour.
… we grappled in silence with only fear as the referee.
Having subdued one, he uses a foot to trap the other, who is hiding in a closet. The most significant fight has, however, come at the age of eleven but, like the account of the school fight in Camus’ The First Man, it leaves him more than anything disgusted by this awful world.
Again and again the fists rained upon my face and chest, and I did not retaliate… I tried to back away, only to be pushed by the crowd into the path of my adversary. Then I hit Dunn with one punch and it was over… Nobody said a word to me, the crowd about-turned and left the scene. Dunn staggered to his feet and shook my hand; he, too, remained silent, and at last alone, I sat and cried.
Some people have presumed a lot of the book’s material (e.g. the Paris job, tinkling on a piano downstairs in a brothel) had to be at the very least embellished but one should note the style and tone never vary between incident and reflection. His extraordinary German experiences alone, thirty years apart, would make a fine play or film. His first stint there, as an army conscript in 1950, makes life in Germany then seem almost as dodgy as it was in wartime. For his second, in West Berlin, the only notable addition was the presence of TV cameras.
The audience was in an uproar; they… thought it was part of the act; little did they know it was a fight to a flour and water death. (…) Kenny Ball staggered on in a cloud of alcohol and wailed into a jazz number…
Les fared better at the other end of the Axis while in Hong Kong. In response to the appearance of his character Cosmo Smallpiece, a crowd of silent Japanese tourists exploded, then rose to their feet en masse to copy his gestures and facial expressions.
As for triumph and disaster, the hard-drinking Les had his own characteristic take on both of Kipling’s impostors.
… if disaster was inevitable, why not meet it with a tum full of the blender’s art?
Triumph in its turn meant all those years on TV when somehow he could hardly put a foot wrong, while attracting audiences of nine or ten million.
The following week I hired a penguin from a zoo, and all it did was waddle on to the stage and stand next to me. I ignored it completely and the audience fell about.
PS
Though generous with his time, his encouragement and his share of the limelight, Les gives an honest Dickensian nod to his meanness with money (outside his family) when recounting a list of his crimes and bungles as an apprentice electrician.
That he did cheat his workmates of two pence per person by buying meat pies cheaper from another shop.
2021
22 June, Tuesday
It’s late and there’s been a light rain for hours and I suspect after seventy pages of Less Than Zero that I won’t have anything to add to what I wrote on the second reading twenty years ago.
2001
19 August, Sunday
Finished Less Than Zero (again) tonight, fifteen years on (almost exactly). Some of the products have vanished (e.g. Betamax, Tab), some are absent because their time had yet to come (e.g. CDs, mobile phones). I remembered the name of the girl (Blair), the suntan lotion, the snuff film, the twelve-year-old girl tied to the bed, the turning on of MTV (with the sound turned down), the elusive ‘friend’ and the dead body in the alley with a cigarette left in its mouth. Certain phrases and lines came back to me too as I read and it was funnier* than I remembered, deadpan funny, but I don’t think there really was anywhere to go (for Ellis) after that. I’d forgotten that he goes back to his old elementary school near the end. It [i.e. the cumulative effect] remains numbing; an extreme on a spectrum against which one can measure other ways of life.** Serial killing isn’t a way of life, no matter if the protagonist is a yuppie.
*Two examples are the photographer and the psychiatrist.
** One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and everything in between. I wouldn’t include Auschwitz, where, as Primo Levi observed, “mental illnesses were healed” (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 65).
March 1984
Dublin
An aunt had submitted the family’s names on a form, without telling them, and they got accepted for a quiz show on the condition that the elder son got rid of the beard. The show was for teams of two parents and two children and they’d never had a nineteen-year-old child before, not to mind one with a beard.
On the day, it became clear the two other families had seen the previous week’s episode, which formed the basis of the practice round. The elder son had not, which caused him to get very worried at the thought that they might make a show of themselves. Darkness fell and at teatime in the station canteen he was unable to eat. They were relying on him and he kept thinking they were going to look like fools.
Three pretty hostesses each had a family to mind. Theirs was a very slim redhead with her hair cut short and a Canadian accent. She was a part-time model. He said very little, hoping his parents and aunt wouldn’t strain their necks looking at the personalities or point their fingers at them. More relatives arrived but he was barely able to acknowledge their presence. He felt sick.
The dad of the family that had won the rehearsal then went and changed from one expensive suit to another, before the real thing, like it was just going to be a lap of honour. Behind the black drapes in the wings of the studio stood the show’s host, Mike Murphy, otherwise Ireland’s king of the candid camera. He was completely blasé with an affable smirk but, as he explained, he did this all the time.
He then kept them waiting while he talked sh*t interminably to the studio audience. Still hidden, they had to be careful not to trip over cables and loose lengths of timber. Old cameras hung from the ceiling and the elder son could hear his mother cursing under her breath.
In the real thing, though, the other families weren’t quite as sharp or clever as when they knew the questions in advance, while the scare meant our crew had their fingers firmly at the buttons at all times. Once they got going at all, the elder son felt like ice. They won, in terms of money and prizes and knocking out the other families, but the prizes varied in quality, with the worst being a generous five tins of paint. Contrary to Dungarvan lore, though, one prize that was not carried off was the sun roof for the family’s Volkswagen Beetle.
Then there was the matter of the shoot-out. The grand prize was a car. To get it, one person from the family had to move to a black leather chair in a spotlight and answer a series of questions. He could only afford to miss one out of six. The first asked him the year of the American Bicentennial. 1976. The second asked the name of the Biblical character who dreamed of a ladder going up to heaven. The film Jacob’s Ladder wouldn’t be made for years yet so he hadn’t a clue. He could afford no more misses. The third concerned the author of Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky. The fourth asked the language of Panama. Spanish.
He fell at the fifth. Not watching enough television had diminished his general knowledge of rum, sodomy and the lash (i.e. the Royal Navy). Nelson’s Victory had been in the news, not that he knew that or remembered the ship’s name.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
“Ah, I’m so sorry, you were very good,” said Mike.
He closed the show and the audience started to clap as the technicians came on to clear up. The question setter then told the boy in the hot seat what the last question would have been. It was something about Thomas Bowdler and 1616. The date would have given him the answer. Shakespeare.
The car was worth eight thousand at the time, which would have paid for both sons’ education, but that much just wasn’t meant to be. The episode lies preserved on one or two old video cassettes on which the car’s lights can be seen blinking in the background. They are still blinking, like Christine.
Bernard Pivot was the literary face of French television for thirty years, chiefly on the long-running shows Apostrophes and Bouillon de culture. On p. 38 of his lexical memoir, Les Mots de ma vie (2011) there is a quote describing the author (“un concentré de Français”) that suggests his book will reflect both sides of the French coin – bittersweet romance and meaningless abstraction – but coins have three dimensions and here there are also many passages of wit and comedy.
Pivot seems to have been especially amused by Vladimir Nabokov. Marguerite Duras turns up a couple of times too, such as when he didn’t want to encourage her after she rang him at two in the morning to read some newly written text over the phone, but the account of Nabokov’s studio demands is perhaps the funniest.
That Nabokov’s teapot contained whiskey was well known but on Apostrophes the great man didn’t want to present the French public with the spectacle of a man drinking on live television. Therefore a verbal formula was devised to enable him to tipple away discreetly on set. Encore un peu de thé, monsieur Nabokov?
The novelist also insisted, on the basis of some prostate trouble, that an emergency urinoir be installed behind the studio decor but this demand was quietly ignored and of course Nabokov forgot all about it. He kept talking long after the final credits and then used the regular toilets like everyone else.
Such a happy ending did not ensue the last time someone was allowed smoke on Bouillon de culture. An unfortunately-placed camera made it look like a female guest – Jacqueline de Romilly, already nearly blind – was engulfed by the cigarette smoke of Philippe Sollers. This led to the switchboard being inundated by protest calls and a snowstorm of letters accused Pivot of complicity in such boorishness and barbarity.
Invited by RAI to watch an episode of an Italian programme he was told was inspired by his own, he emerged horrified after an hour of shouting – fuelled by a noisy presenter – in which the guests brandished books like the Red Guards waved the thoughts of Chairman Mao. Though he never learned English properly, Pivot also mentions he was reliably informed that English political and literary talk shows, in contrast, were just boring. A wild guess could have told him the same.
He claims that foreign writers, especially Americans, were surprised to be able to talk about their books on French TV with a host who had actually read them. This happened without being interrupted by ads or having a minister, a stripper or a golf champion on as fellow guests. Funnily enough, he does not mention the appearance of Charles Bukowski on his show in September 1978. Bukowski’s departure from the studio was like a scene from the restaurant in the Jacques Tati film, Playtime (1967).
Pivot likens the differences in talk shows to different national styles of playing soccer. His love of le foot is a recurrent theme that helps put a more regular face on the writer. In other passages he is an anorak, not least about food. Only a Frenchman could be an anorak about food, though his exploration of its impact on French slang and idiom is instructive. There is also a pair of funny food stories, as in the time Pivot, as a young journalist sent to report on a theatre, was nabbed trafficking spuds into Belgium.
On his way to Brussels he stopped off to see his wife’s family in the Pas-de-Calais, where a thirty-kilo sack of potatoes was placed in his car boot by his father-in-law. A Belgian customs officer demanded that he open the same boot, whereupon a bunch of them converged to accuse him of smuggling potatoes. They asked if he didn’t know Belgium was already a great producer and consumer of chips / fries and if the sack was a present for the director of the theatre he was about to visit. In the end he had to turn the car around and give the potatoes back to his beau-père.
In the entry on freeloaders and gatecrashers, Pivot distinguishes between those who come just for the show and those literary ones who come to eat and drink, wolfing glasses of wine and sandwiches in the morning and champagne and petits-fours in the afternoon. Always located very near the table or the bar and sometimes shoved aside by impatient publishers, without ever protesting they give way just enough to regain their strategic position with minimum delay.
Not all Pivot’s comedy is intentional, though, as in the classic line, Certains couples lisent au lit, puis mettent un marque-page, referment le livre, éteignent et font l’amour (‘Certain couples read in bed, then place a bookmark, close the book, switch off the light and make love’). Only a Frenchman could solemnly sketch that scene that in the English-speaking world would always be played for laughs.
Pivot retired as a regular TV host in 2005. The day after the maiden broadcast of his first programme, Ouvrez les guillemets, back in the early Seventies, the channel boss Jacqueline Baudrier phoned him to tell him the show had not been good but that was normal, as it was his first time out.
Ne remettez cette veste : vous aviez l’air d’un garçon de café. Je suis sûre d’une chose : vous êtes fait pour la télévision.
(‘Don’t wear that jacket again, you looked like a waiter. I’m sure of one thing. You were made for television.’)
The first credit on Na Chéad Fight Clubs means ‘Based on an idea by Michael McMahon and research by John Flynn’ (see above). In late 2007 I submitted a written proposal for a TV history documentary to an Irish production company that took it up with enthusiasm.
For a year or so it seemed I was in the loop. Then silence descended again, due to funding issues, I thought, until I discovered by accident in April 2010 that the thing had been commissioned by the Irish-language channel TG4 and was already in production. My father happened to be visiting an old friend who had whitewashed buildings in his yard when a location scout knocked on the door.
Legal advisers were then called in – a single letter from ours had the production company meekly offering to settle – and happily the project soon got put back on the rails, contractually. Plus we got paid. As did their very expensive lawyer. The legal lesson for all concerned was that copyright isn’t just about plagiarism, it also covers adaptation. Méaracha dóite is the Irish phrase for burnt fingers.
Dr. John Flynn 