At last, 18 years after leaving university, the call comes to appear on the University Challenge Christmas Special. A wonderful boost for my intellectual vanity. Not so good for the physical sort. Halfway through filming, at Granada Studios in Manchester, a man in props approached me in the make-up room. ‘I’m afraid you’re strobing,’ he said, pointing at my checked shirt, which produced a blurring effect on telly. ‘Do you mind wearing the studio shirt?’ The studio shirt was bright grey — if that’s not an oxymoron — with a highly varnished sheen. At lunchtime, I rushed off to Brooks Brothers and bought myself a non-strobing, non-shiny blue shirt, for £89. It didn’t do much for my appearance. Halfway through the programme on Boxing Day, I got a text from a friend I hadn’t seen for years: ‘Where’s all your hair gone?’ Telly doesn’t add on two stone, like it’s supposed to. But God, it gives an accurate picture of how old you really look.
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On Boxing Day, I bicycled from north London to Wimbledon for lunch with friends. The streets were empty, except when I hit the Oxford Street sales. The cross-streets, running north-south, were jammed with cabs and buses. Oxford Street itself was lined with an unbroken mass of flesh. I had to get off my bike to wheel it through the human wall. Bicycling back at dusk, Oxford Street was closed off by a line of police cars. Overcrowding, I thought, as I bicycled through empty Regent’s Park — silent except for the squawking birds in the Snowdon Aviary; dark but for the dying glow of sunset over the mosque near Baker Street. Later I heard that an 18-year-old had been stabbed to death outside the Foot Locker on Oxford Street, just where I had wheeled my bike. Hours later, another man was stabbed in the leg outside Oxford Circus tube station. If you want to stay alive in London, stick to dark, empty parks. Killers are more sociable these days.
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I predict civil unrest at next year’s Olympics, not at the ludicrous cost, but at the 100 miles of road lanes reserved for 80,000 freeloading VIPs to race from their Mayfair hotels to east London. Not only will normal motorists be banned from the lanes, but the bureaucrats will be lent 240 BMW limos — at a cost to the taxpayer of £12 million — equipped with special devices that turn red lights green. The Olympic motto used to be ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ — ‘Quicker, Higher, Stronger’. You can throw in Sumptuosius and Depravatius: ‘More Expensive’ and ‘More Spoilt’.
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Private Eye has done a good job of lampooning the journalists who rushed to file ‘Me and Hitch’ memories after Christopher Hitchens’s death. One reason so many people wrote about him was because he was so unusually friendly — he gave me a six-hour dinner in his Washington flat purely on the basis of a few emails. I’d never met him in the flesh before. You may take against his atheism, his stance on Iraq or his attack on Mother Teresa. But friendliness is an unassailable quality, rarely found among those who advertise their generosity of spirit more prominently in their writings. Hitchens was an addition to that list of writers — including Kingsley Amis and Auberon Waugh — who could be outspoken and rude on the page, but extremely friendly, good company off it.
•••
Even without the misery of being knocked out of University Challenge by Trinity College, Cambridge, Christmas telly this year has been pretty dismal — largely because of repeats. Of the 656 films on television over the holiday season, 643 have been on before.There were still a few highlights, though, all involving northern comedians, mostly from the 1970s. There were engaging profiles of Les Dawson (from Collyhurst, Lancashire), Victoria Wood (from Prestwich, Lancashire) and Ernie Wise (from Bramley, in the West Riding). For 30 years, old-fashioned northern comedy has been marginalised by alternative, southern, university-educated comedy. Now it’s being appreciated again. Its appeal is drawn from the consciously unglamorous, downbeat, longing-not-to-please aspect of northern comics — the ideal deadpan backcloth to explode a joke against. There’s an old-fashioned, innocent quality to northern comedy, too, particularly apparent in the Victoria Wood profile. Her nervous innocence and plump-girl-next-door looks deftly extract the shock from uplifting lines like, ‘I’ve got a dyslexic boyfriend — he’s very enthusiastic about my vinegar.’ Happy New Year.
Harry Mount’s A Lust for Window Sills: A Lover’s Guide to British Buildings is now in paperback.
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