The Lost Diaries. Craig Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ the famous not to say distinguished rock singer Michael George for a three-part documentary series. Today, we recorded the first in a series of interviews, as well as my introduction. There’s a very great deal of excitement about this extraordinary project:

      

      MELVYN: Michael George^* shot to fame as a leading member of the trio Whim!. As a signwriter, sorry, songwriter, he has achieved international success by writing acclaimed songs such as um er by writing several um famous songs. Michael George is now internationally acknowledged as a erm as a leading erm singer, indeed as one of the most singery and singerest singers erm of his generation. On the eve of his first world tour since his last, Michael George gave us this exclusive insight into the way he erm…

      GEORGE: Super to see you, Melvyn! How you doin’? Ooh, you smell nice! Mmmm…doesn’t he smell nice, boys?

      MELVYN: Can we start with the early days, Michael? You began life as a foetus and then you were a baby for – what? one or two years – and then, am I right in thinking, proceeded to become a child, in your case a boy?

      GEORGE: Yeah, it was really eating me up, all I wanted was my dignity and my self-determination and the whole process of like being a child made me understand something about how this government really manipulates us into believing – sorry, Melvyn, can we stop for a sec? You know what? I’m feeling a bit sweaty. Do I look sweaty to you, Melvyn? Now, be honest!

      MELVYN: Zzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzz. (Wakes with a start.) Where am I? Who are you? Where were we?! Yes! Go on!

      GEORGE: D’you know, Melvyn, I’m feeling a bit sweaty?

      MELVYN: Um. No. Remind me. How does it go?

      

       MELVYN BRAGG

       January 19th

      Swiftian? Come off it. That’s what I thought when I read this week’s obituaries, dripping with a sweaty mixture of vintage port, caviar and Marmite sandwiches, of Auberon Waugh.

      I remember it well, the smug old world of El Vino in Fleet Street. Right-wing journalists would mix with left-wing journalists, both drowning their differences in champagne (so much more fizzy than common-or-garden white wine, dontcha know, old chap). It was all just a game – and instead of smashing each other’s faces with their fists, and demanding urgent, much needed social reforms, they preferred to discuss their differences over what they would no doubt call a drinkie-poo. They spent hours ‘debating’, ‘exchanging opinions’, ‘seeing the other point of view’, and so on, in a typical recreation of the toffee-nosed public schools which had, years before, puked them out in their stiff collars, sporting blazers, corduroy shorts and school neckties imprinted with a hundred little swastikas.

      To that hoity-toity coterie, all that matters is a joke or two. And it doesn’t matter if the rest of us can’t for the life of us understand it. ‘Knock, Knock,’ they say, and when their victim replies: ‘Who’s there?’ they mention a perfectly ordinary Christian name, rendering us, their victims, speechless. ‘There’s an Irishman, a Scotsman and an Englishman,’ they say.

      ‘And we are all part of the EEC,’ I correct them.

      So what’s so funny about ‘jokes’? Don’t ask me. I’m not someone who likes to ‘laugh’ – especially not at a time when so many ordinary Britons are living below the poverty line in inner cities deprived of inward investment by the self-serving machinations of big business. Laughter is to be distrusted and abhorred, whether it comes from the right or the so-called left. Funny? So funny I forgot to laugh.

      Don’t imagine the breed is dying out. Far from it. Boris Johnson, editor of the Spectator, is a writer of just this ‘humorous’ stamp, with mannerisms to match. Charming? If you say so. But how can you describe someone as ‘charming’ who subscribes to a belief in the free-market economy?

      The last time I saw him, Johnson asked me to write an article for the Spectator, damn him.

      I refused point blank. I told him that throughout my career I have only written for people who share my views. I’m certainly not going to start arguing with people who’ll disagree with me for political reasons of their own.

      

       POLLY TOYNBEE

       January 20th

      Alfred Wainwright died today, in 1991. He wasted a lifetime on walking, but still never managed to get beyond the Lake District.

      

       V.S. NAIPAUL

      Whatever happened to fun? In the heady, far-off days of my youth, we certainly knew how to have fun! My grandmother, Edith, the seventh Marchioness of Londonderry, taught me how! She had always been intent on injecting gaiety into life!

      Her charmed circle would gossip like mad, play silly games, flirt with each other, tell outrageous jokes, widdle down the stairwell, and drink copious quantities of the delicious pre-war Londonderry champagne!

      She even enjoyed a close friendship with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald! ‘He was an old-fashioned socialist,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘He loved beautiful things, gorgeous pageantry, fine silverware, dressing up in resplendent uniforms, being waited on hand and foot, and taking the cream of the British aristocracy up the botty!’

      Throughout my life, we couldn’t have had half so much fun without our full complement of servants, all of them the most tremendous characters!

      The marvellous thing was how much they respected us! I’ll never forget what the inimitable Mr Chambers, Daddy’s bathroom butler, said after vigorously wiping Daddy’s behind after he had experienced a particularly severe dose of diarrhoea! He said, ‘It’s come up beautiful, sir – and may I add what a pleasure and a privilege it has been for me to attend to you today!’

      Sadly, Mr Chambers shot himself the next day. It could have been the most frightful blow, but thankfully the vacancy was soon filled!

      

       LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH

      Cut a hole in a bedsheet. Put your head through it. Step into a washing machine. Ask your friend to switch it on. Watch the world spin round and round. Step out of the machine. Your bedsheet will still have a hole. Ask your maid to repair it. You are an artist. Yoko loves you.

      

       YOKO ONO

       January 21st

      A great night out for Tony. A great night out for New Labour. And a great night out for Britain. Yup, it was the 1997 Brit Awards, that literally incredible celebration of the new explosion of British youth and talent. ‘I live in a house in a very big house in the countraaaay,’ sang Blur, and you felt your whole body rising up, and not just because it was nearly time to go.

      All of us in New Labour felt it would be fantastic СКАЧАТЬ