Contains my sister Joan Bakewell, exploding showers, amazing displays by Kings and Queens of Mean, how to survive three plays in 12 hours, and the end of a short War (and Peace)
A version of this appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on February 9 2016
Smart, heartfelt and honest, I have really enjoyed Joan Bakewell’s daily essays on Radio 4 about family, friends and ageing. Yet some commentators have suggested that she has used her seven year affair with the playwright Harold Pinter to plug the new book.
Phooey to that: it was Harold who decided to go public about their seven year affair, first in coded form, by writing the triangle up as a play, Betrayal, then more explicitly for his official 1996 biography, knowing this sent reporters round to Joan’s door.
Now in her eighties, Joan has faced down sexist double standards since the 60s, when she was dubbed ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’ by Frank Muir because she had both beauty and brains. More recently, there’s been the snide suggestion that her affair with the married playwright meant she was not supportive of women, an odd charge that treats feminism like a driving test: one mistake and you fail the whole thing.
My experience when I was a student working on Newsnight, was that she was very supportive of men, women and anyone who was on the fringe of a busy office. At the time the show was very male-dominated, stuffed with patrician war correspondents and languid Oxbridge producers. Joan was one of the few women in the office: glamorous and rather famous, but also lovely and encouraging. When an obscure point of Scottish law came up in the show, it was Joan who diligently recalled I was studying law, and pushed me forward to my first-ever TV credit. Her new book Stop the Clocks reflect many of her qualities: unshowy, meticulous, and with a deeply unfashionable concern for more than her own career
An unknown tale of Peter Rabbit is to be published for the first time in September 100 years after it was written. I rather like that Beatrix Potter has decided to write about an older, chubbier Peter Rabbit, possibly going on singles nights with Mr McGregor, and learning to come to terms with his lettuce-dependency issues
I once knew a family who eschewed the rip-and-tear approach to presents on Christmas morning. Instead, they unwrapped their presents very, very slowly and carefully. When I first saw this, I was impressed: here were good people, trying to savour the anticipation of unveiling a carefully-chosen gift.
That wasn't the case at all. In fact, they were trying to avoid shredding the gift-wrapping, and once the gift was safely unshelled, they handed over the Christmas paper to their mother, so that on Christmas night, she could iron off the Sellotape, give the paper a quick press, then store it away for reuse next year. “Some of this paper has been in our family for 15 years”, she told me, in the manner of Eric Knowles enjoying a particularly fine Georgian heirloom
I was reminded of this by Ilona Richards, self-styled Mean Queen, who has compiled a money saving list of economies that includes no more than one bath a week, and wearing pants meant for teenage boys, because they don’t incur VAT.
I’m not sure I can quite bring myself to endorse shopping in the boys underwear section. That unused fabric has to go somewhere, and it’s my guess that giving yourself a wedgie by the end of the working day is an acquired taste, but Ilona is very clear that she regards herself as careful, rather than mean. If there are visitors, she will splurge on electricity to heat and vacuum the house: the person she spends the least on, is herself.
That’s an important distinction; if you live a frugal life, that’s understandable. Very few normal people get through life without being broke at some stage and having to make necessary economies. When living in Aberdeen, I could afford to rent a flat, or pay the heating bill, but not both, so my father lent me his RAF greatcoat, a hefty beast of a thing that was so stiff that I had to hurl myself forward in it in order to get momentum to reach a door. It did keep me warm though, after I propped it up on it bottom hem and lived inside it, like an indian with a tepee. And when I had to get a car for work, I bought the most economic thing available — a Hillman Imp, a car so old and flimsy that there was the a real risk that it might be stolen by squirrels.
Only a dolt would sneer at someone who makes economies out of necessity. But if you dodge your round despite having the funds, try to pass off a Gluwein to a dinner party, or present a family of five with one cheap holdall as a present, especially if it’s clear you got it as a free gift anyway, then you’re not thrifty, you’re just mean. Treating friends as an opportunity to stretch a pound, is an economy too far.
A year or so ago, a group of us went out for a meal. Some were facing uncertain futures, but one of us had managed to secure a new job, on top of a handsome payoff from his previous employer. He was also the one who ate the most expensive dishes, ordered extras, then insisted we split the bill equally. Wallet-dodgers should remember is that even if you go unchallenged, everyone notices. Being tight is the halitosis of human relations; unbearable and unforgettable.
And so farewell War and Peace, especially Pierre with his two potatoes and one facial expression.
Despite your reputation, and Tolstoy’s brick-thick book, you were done in just six episodes: shorter than some trips to the bottle bank.
Things you might expect at 4am: this winter’s rainy season rediscovers its second wind. The croupiers on Channel 5’s Supercasino gather to discuss alternative TV jobs with more sociable hours. Foxes investigate the contents of your bins with the same considerate stealth that teenagers deploy when returning home after a hard night’s clubbing.
Things you don’t expect: to be woken by a noise like a gunshot, then the sound of a sack of marbles being emptied into a skip, followed by fizzing and crackling.
Did you know that shower screens can spontaneously detonate? Apparently flaws in tempered glass can lie dormant for weeks, and even years before suddenly exploding glass into your bathtub. The clammy embrace of the shower curtain now beckons.
It was with some trepidation that we set out for Edinburgh at the weekend. Our mission: to see all three of the Scottish National Theatres James plays, one after the other, in 12 hours at the start of its Scotland-wide tour.
Each play is two and a half hours, which isn’t bad given that this includes intervals, but I was slightly apprehensive as to how we would fit in meals and had to be dissuaded from packing a thermos of tea, in the manner of a trainspotter on an awayday.
I haven’t done an arts marathon since I was taken to see 9 hours of a Sanskrit play called “The Mahabharata”, an experience very like crossing the Indian subcontinent in the third-class carriage of a train. But the James Plays are more like watching very exciting, better written Games of Thrones, with James I tracking the Scots king’s return to Scotland to claim his throne after years of imprisonment in England. James II shows the brutal way a young king becomes his own man, after being bullied by his advisors, while James III gives us another stage of kinging: the disillusioned monarch, falling into dissolution.
A vital, gripping portrait of a feral age, the James plays are so well-staged, nimbly-dramatised and acted that you want to cut the heads off whoever decided to chop our arts budget. Meanwhile James II overcame some particular non-historical challenges at our performance: actor Andrew Rothney spectacularly popped his knee during a mediaeval football match, but completed his performance by kneeling and hopping discreetly through the rest of the show, including a murder. Like Rothney, these are plays that stand up remarkably.
Donald Trump is now in the lead amongst evangelical voters. They love him. Apparently, the reason he’s so popular is because a Trump presidency would mean the world really is coming to an end.
Nightowls may have caught the US Superbowl in the wee small hours, with a live halftime show from Coldplay and Beyonce. Poor Coldplay: the vegan answer to U2 were easily blasted offstage by Beyonce and her team of dancers, who performed a ferocious formation squarebashing routine that would have had North Korea whistling in admiration
