Another voice
Temptation of St Auberon
Auberon Waugh It was a strange and rather horrible experience for a retiring man like myself to return irom a week's holiday in Venice with his wife and family and discover that he had been promoted—at any rate for a day or two—to the rank of People's Hero, along With Kojak and Melvyn Bragg. I may have !received no letters from teenagers saying Take me, I'm yours', as Melvyn does; nor have t yet issued any writs to cash in on my new-found popularity, although that is a matter to which I must, alas, return before the end of this article. But the real measure 9f my new position in the world came to me la the course of a train journey to London. ts'I.obody, thank God, approached me to discuss the television programme which has ' temporarily transformed me into a national figure from being a dim if industrious scribbler in various small newspapers and Magazines of minority interest. But looking round my fellow passengers, as I always do, I found on about six occasions that the eyes of some stranger would meet mine and focus suddenly in recognition; then his face would break into what can only be described as a conspiratorial smirk. With few exceptions, I would judge that these smirkers belonged to socio-economic group Z. I have always believed, from personal 9bservation, that television has a deleterious effect on those who perform for it. Their faces become somehow softer and blander, they adopt a manner of talking Which is completely unknown off the television screen and their moral perceptions grow blunt. In private conversation, they Suddenly become cautious and guarded, as if some unseen television camera were recording them for a private showing to the Great Television Critic in the sky. The most alarming aspect of it is how quite ordinary People when confronted by a television .camera start talking about Rhodeezias and Pretending they see both points of view. The idea of a series of programmes on the class war came to me one day when I was illusing about the working classes on a train. vAlthough it is not so much customary as ,erY nearly de rigueur to sneer at any menOn of the middle classes or the rich on televialon, the lower classes seem to get off rather lightly. Any slight blemish in their haviour is always attributed to badly designed housing or understandable resentinent at being working-class, while the Middle classes and the rich don't have to do a. nYthing mean or dirty or selfish to be held fin the greatest hatred and contempt. Yet teW if any of the people who adopt this attiude unquestioningly would welcome its extension, that we must demand a society of 4bsolute material equality. There is a huge
bogusness lying like a great cowpat on top of the media and smothering all honest discussion. Chiefly, I think, it is the product of a deliberate intellectual dishonesty: media people want to suck up to the masses whom they identify somewhat indiscriminately as anybody less fortunate than they are. And they are terrified of being found out.
Oddly enough, the inspiration for the first programme—on the working classes— came from an article in the Guardian by Judy Hillman. She described the fate of various new housing estates in Birkenhead and Liverpool which had been made uninhabitable by vandalism and were either empty and awaiting demolition or rapidly approaching that point. A little research showed that this phenomenon was not confined to 'high-rise blocks or the 'maisonette' system, and we opened the programme (although few noticed it) in a low-rise Manchester estate awaitingfinal evacuation forthe same reason.
I thought the final product was good television for two reasons, neither owing anything to my presentation. In the first place, the researcher Pat Ingram had found people among the dockers, the council tenants and the unemployed who were not only able to speak up for themselves but able to hold an ordinary human conversation—with its jokes, its courtesies and discourtesies, its irrelevancies, obscenities and occasional moments of passion—as if the camera was not there. This is something I have never once seen in all the studio discussions between a Progressive, a Reactionary, a Negro, a Businessman, a Trade Union Leader, a Homosexual and a Woman ( Ms Nemone Lethbridge). In the second place, the Producer-Director Derek Hart incorporated a number of visual jokes and crafty juxtapositions which were sometimes irrelevant to the argument—indeed detracted from it, as often as not—but added enormously to its entertainment value and also, I suspect, to its sympathetic reception.
Normal human communication, it has always seemed to me, consists in very large part of jokes. Television has never realised this, dividing programmes into 'humour'— preferably with studio laughter to warn critics—and 'serious', which is everything else. This policy produced a whole generation of sociologists, political thinkers and television critics who, at their best, can't recognise a joke unless it comes suitably labelled and, at their worst, are deeply shocked by one. Living in their closed media world, they have no inkling of the extent to which they are considered freaks by everyone else.
The Pavlovian hostility which the first programme aroused among television re
porters might be explained almost entirely in terms of this uncomprehending reaction to humour, although, as I say, I think there is an even less creditable explanation: workers are not to be treated as human beings but as sociological abstractions and instant comparison-objects—or they might turn nasty, eh? As a student of the vituperative arts, I was a little depressed by the general ineptitude shown.
But the notice which excited me most was written by the Guardian's television critic, a boring but self-important young man called Peter Fiddick, who, in the course of a dismal attempt to abuse the programme, used these words: 'I wouldn't mind so much had they not persuaded the London dockers and Liverpool unemployed to think of him as a journalist. I recall a letter to The Times written by the head of a London model agency after the Christine Keeler case was settled and her memoirs were spread across the print. She had, she said, now instructed her clients that the lady who had so far been the "well-known model" should now be described as "the well-known journalist-. Where that leaves Waugh you must judge for yourselves.'
Several thousands pounds richer, I should have thought. One does not need to have been a full-time professional journalist for the last sixteen years (and a fully paid-up member of the National Union of Journalists for the last thirteen of them) to spot the glaring libel there. It is the sort of thing I was trained to spot as a trainee sub-editor on the Telegraph sixteen years ago, when Fiddick, I dare say, was still in his nappies. I have only to prove that I was practising the profession at the relevant date to collect my money (cf. Berryman V. Wise, 1791; Smith v. Taylor, 1805; Rutherford v. Evans 1830 and passim).
The suggestion that I dishonestly pose as a journalist is damaging enough; the suggestion that I am more properly to be compared with a former prostitute can only aggravate damages. Of course the squit Fiddick could plead good faith in mitigation. that he genuinely did not know I was a professional journalist, except that he says in his next sentence: 'I have never found his Private Eve I Nev,' Statesman Spectator ramblings entertaining. .
But Auberon, Auberon, what has happened to your Code of Ethics? Are you really going to sue a fellow-journalist for libel,even a boring and incompetent squit like Fiddick, just because he doesn't know his job properly (not libellous, that—cf. Turner v. MetroGoldwyn Mayer, 1950)? But with a couple of thousand pounds, I could tackle a nasty little outbreak of death-watch beetle in one of my outhouses. If the oaf Preston let it go to court I might win £34,000 with which I could re-gild all my picture frames, and restore some of my Burges furniture. The baleful influence of television is on me. If the editor of the Guardian sends a cheque for £350 to the Goldenballs Appeal, 34 Greek Street, within the next fourteen days, I shall say no more about the matter. Otherwise, he had better start watching his dustbins.
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