With malice toward some

Will Waspe

I'll tell you the hardest thing about writing about reviewers and that's reading reviewers. Next to that is associating with reviewers. Neither in print nor in person, with a few shining exceptions, are they invigorating. Nevertheless, Waspe is not one to recoil from hardship and makes his annual bow to popular demand, mustering his now legendary detachment to do unto them as they do unto others ...

Theatre

It. pains me especially to have to chide a colleague, but The Spectator's Kenneth Hurren should really not have complained — when writing in another journal— that there was a strenuous need for a critic of critics. Is Waspe invisible? Is Martin Esslin invisible? Well, yes, perhaps Esslin is invisible, or at least unreadable; but the perspicacity of Waspe is another story and rightly celebrated.

This was a mysterious complaint, to be sure, even if Waspe's 'Consumer's Guide' appears but once a year. It is explicable only by the assumption that Hurren sleeps through Christmas as he has so often slept through plays, defying the efforts of even the most beguiling companions to wake him. Since the retirement of Ivor Brown, he is probably the soundest sleeper in a notoriously drowsy profession, with Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard and David Nathan of the Jewish Chronicle his only conceivable rivals.

I shall agree with him, though, in his expressed admiration for Robert Cushman, the new man at the Observer, who has brought a wit and an acuteness of judgement to that paper's theatre column that it has long lacked. Waspe approvingly notes that he keeps himself fairly aloof from his colleagues, thus minimiting the risk of becoming infected by either their affectations or their dullness.

Over at the Sunday Times, the apd Harold Hobson continues in his strange perversities, and to interest himself endearingly in the careers of nubile young actresses. Not, let it be hastily said, scandalously; although there, is something rather charming in his apparent belief that we can imagine him capering in and out of boudoirs. When the story got about that he had been seen leaving a theatre at the Edinburgh Festival with an especially comely young acresss, of whom he was later to write enthusiastically, the unthinkable implications so evidently preyed on his mind that, months later, Hobson devoted most of his Sunday column to explaining that, honestly, he hardly knew the girl and had only given her a five-minute lift in his car.

Last year I remarked on the numbers of drama critics seeking to deny the 'eunuch' theory about the craft ("They know how it's done, they see it done every night, but they can't do it themselves") by writing plays. In a couple of cases I seem to have been misinformed, and those critics who did have plays staged can hardly be said to have distinguished themselves.

Jeremy Kingston of Punch had a really awful little comedy put on, and, although Kenneth More was in it and it ran for a while, he has scarcely since been able to look some of his colleagues in the eye. Irving Wardle of the Times also exposed himself rather dismayingly in a piece apparently derived from his earlier life as some sort of skivvy in a fruity Kensington boarding house, but the other reviewers were very decent about it and obviously sympathised with his wish to get it

out of his system. • Frank Marcus of the Sunday Telegraph, the one relatively successful dramatist-critic, didn't come up with any new play, though Waspe assumes he has been writing one, for his reviews have become even more humdrum and he is plainly doing something with his time.

At the Daily Telegraph, John Barber continues indefatigably; in really 'dead' theatre weeks, he even writes about cabaret, and worries so much about keeping regularly in print that his eyebrows, if not his hair, have gone quite white. And to complete the year's hirsute intelligence, the Daily Mail's Jack Tinker has , shaved off his beard.

Chubby Michael Billington has settled securely in at the Guardian, and is becoming firmer in his opinions (which is not necessarily a good thing, considering what some of his opinions are), and is increasingly emboldened to pepper his copy with embarrassing little wisecracks, which is something all the Guardian's arts page writers should leave to Nancy Banks Smith, who is the only one any good at it.

Cinema

The single most important event of the year, of course, was the translation (or transfiguration?) of David Robinson to the Times, where his pontifical pieces about the parlous state of the British film industry have been getting a gra tifying response on the " Letters " page (that elephants' graveyard of lost causes), mostly from impoverished film producers. A pale wraith resembling John Russell Taylor has been seen flitting through press showings as if the sunny shores of California had proved less inviting than memories of Printing House. Square, but clearly Robinson is there to stay. The single most unimportant event of 1974 of course, will be the departure of George Melly from the film column of the Observer — the ineffable, occasionally insufferable Melly being about to return to his youthful career as a song-and-dance man. This will not immeasurably lower the standard of local criticism, Melly's carefully trendy reviews invariably calling to mind the title of his best-selling LP, "Nuts."

Waspe regards magazine film reviewers as wielding insignificant influence even within the general insignificance of their trade, and therefore passes in silence over the New Statesman's John Coleman, The Spectator's Christopher Hudson, and the Listener's Gavin Miller, perched on his lonely outcrop of formalism.

If the Evening Standard's Gaia Servadio, can get to Rome on ex penses, then their Alexander Walker can get to Hollywood, and indeed he has recently returned — invigorated and as sprightly as ever — from that suburb of Los Angeles, believed once to have been, in pre-historic times, the capital of the motion-picture industry. His colleagues, at least, are glad to have Walker back, for when a pres-shown film is really nasty it is always a joy to rest the eye on that fine head of hair, bristling with Celtic disapproval in the front row.

Of the old folk, the Guardian's Richard Roud continues to transmit his sporadic enthusiasms from New York, in no way competing with Derek Malcolm who continues to write the best film reviews in the business. Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times, who nowadays finds most films boring, is returning as the one surviving alumna of "The Critics" when that radio programme goes back on the air. She must now be in the same relation to film reviewing as The Mousetrap is to the theatre, although there have been rather fewer changes in the cast of her opinions. But no dashing young newcomers enliven the scene.

It has not been a vintage year for film reviewers, and perhaps it never can be — for the more vigorously and stringently they beat out the chaff, and pitifully fewer are the grains of good wheat remaining. But Waspe is glad that they still find time to sing and dance, to write books and to travel abroad. So it cannot be the vacuous, unrewarding existence it often appears to be.

Television

Reviewing television is like tattooing soap bubbles, and the success of the practitioners is in proportion to their readiness to recognise the triviality and futility of it all. In previous years Waspe has tried to make some assessment of them, but it is a footless, fruitless task.

There is Nancy Banks Smith of the Guardian — always compulsively readable and very often funny — and there is Alan Coren, an engagingly whimsical recruit to the Times's battery of small-screen watchers, and there is our own Clive Gammon, who occasionally looks at programmes that have nothing to do with fishing. And there are all the others who, in greater or less degree, are bemused into thinking they are engaged in some endeavour of national and even artistic importance. These are all too painful to contemplate further.

Waspe therefore scurries on to go once-over-lightly, for the first time, another assortment of longsufferers whose cross it is to read

Novels

That regular fiction reviewing unhinges the mind has never been seriously questioned by regular fiction reviewers, which perhaps explains why they are such a self-conscious, nervy and gullible crew, the pitiful foci of sympathy .in the restricted social circles in which they move.

Surveying them as a group is inevitably a glum business, though on close inspection vivacious differences can be discerned even among those on the same paper. None is more variable than the Listener's team, though, ranging as it does from letter-to-my-niece type reviews (" Read a super book last week all about. ... ") from Margaret Drabble and Susan Hill to quite stylishly chatty round-ups from Ronald Bryden (considerably more readable in brief than in those drearily interminable features about drama or the West Indies he used to do for the Observer's •colour supplement) and Valentine Cunningham. The Observer has had a fairish fiction team during the year. Claire Tomalin, literary editrix designate of the New Statesman, writes well, though she lacks the petulance and malice vital to good novel reviewing. Anthony Thwaite, who was bundled unceremoniously some time ago from the seat she is about to take,

writes well too, but too often indulges (and fails to justify) his

interest in the Japanese tribe.

Russell Davies writes very well indeed, but likes David Storey.

Non-regulars like Francis Hope and Martin Amis (both of whose conceit grows in proportion to the column inches they are allowed) occasionally take novel reviewing to the fringes of actual criticism.

Fiction is the one literary department that the TLS-bound John Gross has failed radically to improve during his year at the New Statesman: reviewers have come and gone, but all seemed to be stricken by the " New Statesmanish puritanism" to which Paul Johnson's wife, Marigold, en gagingly admitted when she did a stint there herself. Keener on the social sciences than on novels, their reviews are as zestful as publishers' readers' reports. In The Spectator, the stripling Peter Ackroyd, a former tap-dancer, is evidently obliged to write as fast as he reads. He retains a tenuous grip on sanity by forgetting novels very quickly — often while he is still reading them.

The Times gives fiction the sort of attention it doesn't need, with fitful coverage from Antonia Byatt and the aged David Williams. In the Sunday Times, Julian Symons is yeomanlike enough and as stirring as Cherry B, while his colleague Maurice Wiggin is rather impressive considering the unusual foolishness of his opinions and the fact that he really has no feeling for literature. The Telegraphs merit no serious mention here. And all that need be said about the Guardian's fiction regulars is that in 1972 they awarded their annual prize to John Berger's modishly opaque G, and in 1973 to Peter Redgrove's modishly lunatic In the Country of the Skin (though Christopher Wordsworth, Waspe hears, was a dissenting voice).

Readers who have wondered where Auberon Waugh went when he died may like to know that he is said to pray regularly to be coaxed back to some journal that doesn't consider it indecently effete to print paragraphs of more than two sentences, and that his prayers are enthusiastically endorsed by stenographers at the Evening Standard who have to cope with his appalling handwriting.

Art

Waspe detects no great change in the calibre, style or, indeed, personnel among the art critics. Their contribution to the gaiety of the nation is to qualify, more regularly than any other group of reviewers, for Pseuds' Corner (Nigel Gosling of the Observer, and Richard Cork of the Evening Standard vie for the championship), the inevitable result of the aura of esotericism in which they wrap their judgements.

I raised an eyebrow momentarily the other week when John Russell of the Sunday Times, having been employed to write the catalogue notes for the Diebenkorn show at the Marlborough, was not shy about later reviewing the show ecstatically. Only momentarily though. The practice is legitimate enough. It is, however, a kind of activity exemplifying what is wrong with art criticism and the enclosed, inbred art world. The reviewers write for one another, for the gallery owners, perhaps for the artists, but rarely for the public.

Tim Hilton deputising for Gosling for a few summer weeks, flirted dangerously with the idea that art criticism could be interestingly sharp. And Caroline Tisdall of the Guardian has forsaken some of the earnest cliches and taken to expressing occasional testy disapproval; once the most tediously long-winded reviewer in the business a title wrested from her with some ease by Paul Overy of the Times), she now seems intent on becoming the Mary Quant of the art critics. Elsewhere even Michael Shepherd of the Sunday Telegraph has seemed wearier this year, as though the 'strain of combating his colleagues' pretentiousness was getting him down; as though, too, he had said it all before; as indeed he has; they all have.

Music

Ave, atque vale, as they say. 'Dismal' Desmond Shawe-Taylor has snuck off to New York, whither Andrew Porter has returned. On balance, Waspe would regard this as London's gain.

Sighs of relief at the departure of Shawe-Taylor were tempered only by the regret that meetings of the music critics' circle will be even duller than ever, since the liveliest point of interest at such gatherings had been in watching the dear old gentleman slowly dozing off as the proceedings wound their dreary way. It seems unfair that the Sunday Times's No. 1 spot has not, however, gone to trim-figured, fun-loving Felix Aprahamian, who has certainly been waiting for it for long enough (and he is one of the few critics actually to give the impression of ejoying music). Not that Waspe can seriously object to the appointment of David Cairns, sometime of these very pages (and therefore, almost by definition, a writer whose learning is matched only by the elegance of his prose style); but he will have to watch his obsession with Berlioz, which verges on the unhealthy.

Porter's return to the Financial Times is welcomed — mostly by those weekly and monthly reviewers who like to save themselves time by cribbing from his erudite pieces. From their point of view, though, his Grand-Old-Man .habit of rarely deigning to write a notice until at least three days after the event is disconcerting. Since at least half of each piece (the half in which he expounds historical background and personal reminiscence) could well be, written three days before, Waspe suspects he may be doing it on purpose to frustrate them.

The exploits of his colleague at the FT, the lovely Gillian Widdicombe, have not been confined entirely to music criticism, but a cartoon of her by Nicholas Bentley in Private Eye (showing her in the act of entertaining several cabinet ministers at Blackpool) was cruelly inaccurate, save in the delineation of her belle poitrine.

The was off-set, however, by her getting the pin-up spot in the Daily Record during the Edinburgh Festival, captioned "Festival Fun Girl No. 4" (four — what a put down)and revealing that our girl from "the smoke" was having a super time in Auld Reekie, while making no mention of her occupation. She can count herself lucky it wasn't the Sun, or she might have been deprived of that 4ilk stars-and-stripes blouse that made such a deep impression on first-nighters at the Coliseum a couple of years ago.

Another FT colleague, Elizabeth Forbes, formerly of Heywood Hill bookshop, is taking the plunge and becoming a full-time reviewer. Waspe wishes her luck (she knows a lot and lays it out prettily), while warning the unsuspecting that she can drink any man under the table. Probably something to do with her having once been in the navy.

Enough of this loitering with the ladies, and turn to the Guardian's venerable Philip Hope-Wallace, before whose urbanity and wit all colleagues grovel and cringe as he holds court at El Vino's. He has been slipping a bit of late, but remains formidable, if you are going to give a tenor a snotty notice, though, it is only fair to mention that you left just before he had sung his main aria.

Things are cheering up at the Observer: Peter Heyworth is writing the official biography of the late Dr Klemperer, so is appearing less in the arts pages (though it must be said in his favour that he was the only critic to walk out of the grisly Callas concert and was honest enough to say so). I am glad to note that his No. 2, Stephen Walsh, has heeded last year's advice to liven up his style a bit. His recent marriage to a kinswoman of Auberon Waugh may be partly responsible. His acidity and amiable facetiousness, refreshing enough in themselves, have predictably found little favour with either artists, who mostly loathe him, or colleagues who know a rival when they see one.

Newcomer Bryan Northcott parades formidable learning (no substitute, alas, for judgement)

week by week in the New Statesman. He is to be congratulated on

making Pseuds' Corner within his first year, but censured for being rather wounded by the achievement. But he is young yet,

and will dooubtless graduate to one of the heavies (if there is anything heavier than the NS).

Congratulations, too, to Tom Sutcliffe, former counter-tenor and editor of Music and Musicians, now on the Guardian staff: first on his marriage, second on being the only critic to use the word 'queer' in connection with Death in Venice. The clatter of dropped knitting needles could be heard for miles around. Nice one, Tom. He has also written a deeply researched feature on traffic problems in Munich, which was of lasting interest to all those concerned with traffic problems in Munich.

The Spectator's man, Rodney Milnes, the rogue viper of the trade, had uncharacteristically benign moments during the year,

mostly while attending the Coliseum's Ring. But his colleagues, learning that he had actually bought tickets to see it a second time, despaired of him all over again.

Ballet

The ballet world continues to be divided into two factions: those who support MacMillan's directorship of the Royal Ballet, and those who don't. The latter group is headed by the Times's John Percival, the former by the Financial Times's Clement Crisp.

The Crisp faction has lately been strengthened by the promotion of Edward Thorpe from the Listener to the Evening Standard (his glittering costumes continue to out-dazzle most of what is seen on-stage). But for both of these reviewers to rave over the Royal's dreadful new Sleeping Beauty was to carry loyalty too far.

Percival, on the other hand, admitted in print to having closed his eyes during a performance of the same ballet, thus bolstering a Waspe suspicion that this has been his practice for some years; it can be the only explanation for most of his notices.

Fernau Hall of the Daily Telegraph still gabbles noisily through musical introductions, but Waspe was pleased to hear that one of his colleagues had at last told him to shut up, rather loudly. Noel Goodwin of the Daily Express has grown a beard. Admirers of his picturesque wife, cynosure of all eyes in Covent Garden intervals, will be relieved to know that she has not followed suit. I can think of nothing else to say about Noel Goodwin, or indeed about ballet.

As might be deduced from all the foregoing, the Times still has the dullest and deadliest arts page of any national newspaper. Its editor, the stately John Higgins, has, however, one thing to be said in his 'favour: he is the source of one of the disrespectful arts world's happiest nicknames. Higgins once returned home to find that his slightly deaf cleaning lady had written on the message pad, "Maud Drogheda telephoned" — since when the noble earl has inevitably been known in a small and charmed circle as Maud.