Blue Jokes and Red Brick
AFTERTHOUGHT;
By JOHN WELLS
I HAVE always been rather embarrassed as to what I should put in my passport under the heading of 'occupation.' I was particu- larly perplexed on Satur- day, after the taxi had splashed through the pud- dles between the red sand- stone gates of Keele, the University of North Staffordshire, along the tall avenue of beech trees, past the ponies in the paddock and through the half-finished buildings standing abandoned in the rain, to find myself billed as 'A Satirist Speaks.' Clearly the more eminent had declined. But apart from the tactful anonymity, reminiscent of those silhouetted interviews on television where 'A Drug-Addict Confesses' or 'A Homosexual Sings,' I was more than a little worried by the implied exclamation mark. A satirist might be expected to produce vulgar sounds, pull faces, or imitate the distress- ingly painful walk of an elderly cabinet minister, but hardly to speak. Also the title seemed to suggest some sort of paradox : a destructive, irresponsible iconoclast indulging in a construc- tive, responsible, and even creative activity. I wandered gloomily about in the rain, having left London in hot sunshine and dressed for the beach at Clacton, and the water soaked into my shirt as I adjusted to the sober academic atmosphere.
Not that anyone else seemed to find the atmo- sphere in any way sober or oppressive. The week- end was officially devoted to the New Universities Festival, with delegates from seven other univer- sities founded since the war, and with films, plays, seminars, debates and dances going on non-stop from dawn till the small hours, many of them at the same time. Lovely girls in short skirts ran about in the rain, hurrying from the third showing of The War Game to go and boo Mrs Mary Whitehouse at a seminar on responsible tele- vision. A little way up the hill some actors were standing in a small pit among heaps of wet, freshly-dug clay, performing a play called The Hole to a small circle of enthusiasts in mackin- toshes. Under the concrete lee of the Union building a group of folksingers were harmonising for the benefit of ABC Television, whose huge white and blue lorries stood about in the wet, surrounded by their cables and generators and crews. A Securicor man with a red face stood watching them. In another corner a photographer from the television company was arranging girls on pieces of sacking on a cold concrete seat, crawling about close to the ground and murmur- ing 'Just cross your legs, darling. we want a shot of your face mainly.'
Laid out in the rather cramped plan of a temporary army camp in the grounds of the old square-towered manor house, Keele, despite several good buildings, is still lacking in any real style. Set down at the middle of the university is a heavy grey-black brick church with a sharply- sloping roof and two nee-Norman towers; a library just opposite that has been described as looking like a Mississippi steamboat, with a single slender clock-tower and decorated panels beneath its windows; and the Union building with its slightly heavy horizontal concrete dabs. In the rain the effect was depressing. I also made the mistake of arriving in the refectory towards the end of lunch. The meat had a dark, mature look, and the off-white balls of mashed potato fell heavily with the fibrous runner beans. The damsons floated in a particu- larly mouth-shrivelling red juice. Chewing the meat carefully I sat and locked despondently at the programme. 'A Satirist Speaks. The Physics Lecture Theatre.' Was this really the egalitarian Britain that Beyond the Fringe had laboured for three years to achieve? Was this the new deal we had implicitly campaigned for in the pages of Private Eye? I even became nostalgic for the medieval absurdities of Oxford The vision of an innocent Conservative girl I had met two days before came back to me. 'If it hadn't been for your lot,' she had said, looking straight at me with her beautiful brown eyes. 'Macmillan would still be in charge and everything would be all right.' I drank my cup of fourpenny coffee and set off for the Physics Lecture Theatre.
To my surprise my entrance was greeted with a shout of laughter. I persisted nevertheless, giving a short outline of the Satirical Movement and defending our destructive iconoclastic attitude, taking as my text the dictum of Frankie Howerd, 'That's not filth, that's satire.' More laughter. It occurred to me that the tear in the seat of my summerweight drip-dry casuals must have become somehow enlarged. I continued, illustrating my talk with examples of right-wing satire in which custard pies were slapped into the face of working-class clowns by constructive satirists who would then turn to the audience, pull their red noses off to the extent of the elastic, and remark, 'But seriously folks, what a wonderful thing it would be for this great country of ours if British clowns could put up a roll of wallpaper without getting covered from head to foot in flour paste!! Gradually the audience settled down and became more serious. A girl at the front in a low-cut summer dress fell asleep. I dwelt on the beneficial effects of iconoclasm in destroying hardened and meaningless social conventions. I quoted Peter Simple of the Daily Telegraph. Those still awake seemed impressed. By the end of an hour they appeared to be convinced that ,,tire was no laughing matter.
Satisfied, I walked back through the university gardens. The rain had stopped, the birds were singing, and there was a heavy scent of rhodo- dendrons in the air. The sky was a soft blue, the clouds on the horizon a pale yellow. The lights began to come on in the low modern buildings against the dark curve of the hill and the cattle stood out in silhouette on the skyline. From the Union came the deep reverberating beat of the amplified bass, and a Scottish country dancing group whooped to a reel in a white but under the trees. Suddenly it seemed that my scheme to raze Oxford to the ground, so that you could stand at Carfax and look down the gentle grassy slope towards Magdalen and see the oxen up to ti. bellies in the ford by the Botanical Gardens, anu then rebuild it as the University of South Oxfordshire, might after all be worthwhile. I can already see the headlines: 'A Satirist Acts.'
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