Three More Heroes of Comedy Sketched – Alan Coren, John Wells and Roy Hudd

Here’s another three sketches of some of the people I consider to be great comedy talents – the satirist Alan Coren, and the actors John Wells and Roy Hudd.

I’m not quite satisfied with the picture of Alan Coren, as he really wasn’t jowly or fat in the lower face. But I do think he is one of this country’s greatest comic writers of the 20th century. He was for many years the editor of Punch, and just about the only reason in its last years to read the magazine. Coren’s method was to take a ridiculous story from one of the papers, and then write a ridiculous piece about it. Thus, a story about a ‘sexy actress’ missing her pet tortoise turned into a tale of the said reptile making an excruciatingly slow bid for freedom before finally getting caught. The beginning of package holidays to Spain with booze included turned into a tale of a totally blotto bloke trying to write back home. 1984 is rewritten as if it was about 70s Britain, where nothing works. The press runs headlines like ‘Come Off It, Big Brother’, the Youth Spy is annoying brat who shouts to its mother that Winston Smith has a lady friend, and Room 101 isn’t really terrifying because due to supply problems they can’t get a rat. They offer Smith a hamster instead, but he isn’t afraid of them and annoys them by telling them so. They inflict the hamster on him anyway, and he has to pretend to be frightened. Coren has been accused of racism because of a series of pieces, The Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, and More of the Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, in which he depicted the thug using the stereotypical Black pidgin English. I dare say it is racist, but as it’s directed at a brutal torturer and mass murderer, I honestly don’t care. Amin deserved far worse, and I don’t see Coren as personally racist.

At the same time as he was editing it, Coren also appeared as one of the contestants on Radio 4’s News Quiz, facing Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop on the opposing side representing Private Eye. I read Private Eye now, but back then I far preferred Punch, which seemed more genteel and funny without being vicious. Punch died the journalistic death after Coren left it to edit the Radio Times, but he still continued to appear on the News Quiz until his sad death in the early ’90s. He eventually stopped editing the Radio Times and took up writing a column in the Times giving his humorous view of life in Cricklewood. These pieces are funny, but the really good stuff was earlier in Punch.

His pieces were collected in a number of books, some of which had deliberately bizarre names. In an interview on Pebble Mill he revealed how one of them got its particularly striking name. He rang up W.H. Smith to ask them what their bestselling books were about. They told him, ‘Cats’. He then asked them what their second bestselling books were about. ‘Golf’, they replied. He then asked them what the third most popular books they sold were about. They told him it was the Second World War. So, he called it Golfing for Cats and stuck a swastika on the cover. For his next book, he contacted them again and asked them what the most popular product they sold was. They told him it was tissues for men, so that’s what he called it.

Coren’s humour was distinctive – it was dry, but also slightly silly. Answering a question on the News Quiz about one of the members of Thatcher’s cabinet, he replied, ‘Oh – this is the ministry of Gummer’. A question about Prince Philip on an edition of the show in Edinburgh prompted him to reply, ‘This is the patron of this fair city, Zorba the Scot’. When the Tory election broadcast for the 1987 general election showed Spitfires and other World War II planes zooming about, Coren remarked that it was the Royal Conservative Airforce and pointed out that when the servicemen came back from the War, they all voted Labour. He’s been succeeded as broadcaster by his daughter, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, who is genuinely erudite and intelligent, and his son, Giles, who is a right-wing snob, and who made a sneering comment about people in council houses. Although Coren edited the patrician and eminently establishment Punch, he himself was a former grammar school lad, and there was a bit of class friction in the News Quiz between himself and the genuinely upper-class team from the downmarket Private Eye. I stopped listening to the News Quiz a long time ago because I got sick of the anti-religious sneers when Sandi Tokvig was chairing it and didn’t agree with many of the views of the panellists, who seemed to be stuck in the London bubble with a contempt for the rest of the country. Previous series are available on DVD, however, and they are well worth listening to, not least because of Coren. A great comic wit, sadly missed.

John Wells. He was one of the Private Eye team and was as patrician and establishment as the people that magazine skewered. He was the headmaster and French teacher at Eton. He was also one of the writers of the Dear Bill diaries in the Eye, which were supposed to be the letters of Dennis Thatcher to Bill Deedes, one of the writers in the Times. The book’s hilariously funny, especially when it describes Keith Joseph getting egged everywhere, but no-one can work out why it’s only him that does. Other highlights include him visiting the old folk’s home in which Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan are respectively housed, with Heath hating and ranting about Thatcher while Macmillan still hates and rants about Heath. As with Bentine and the Bumblies, this work of fiction excited the interest of the security people, who asked Wells where he got his information from. Wells replied that he just made it up, and he wasn’t getting any information from anyone. ‘Thank heaven for that,’ the rozzers replied, ‘We thought there’d been a leak.’ Wells had got the tone of Dennis Thatcher’s speech and mindset exactly right, in my opinion. He also appeared as Thatcher’s husband in the farce Anyone for Dennis?, which I can remember being put on TV. There’s a piece of very Cold War humour there, when the Russian ambassador fears that a nuclear war is imminent and talks about the brave Soviet soldiers with their eyes fixed on the last dawn, before collapsing with relief when he finds out that he’s mistaken.

Wells also appeared as a guest on a number of TV shows, including Lovejoy, and the radio shows The News Quiz and Tales of the Mausoleum Club. He had a camp manner, which he knew how to use for great comic effect. For example, when the teams were answering a question about the controversial portrait of the royal family that showed them all nude, he remarked that it was glad one royal was absent because ‘that would have been really gristly’. A question about the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland prompted him to describe her as a woman, who wrote covered in small, white dogs. Tales from the Mausoleum Club was a series of parodies of Victorian classic literature. One of these was a spoof of Treasure Island, ‘Trevor Island’, in which a gang of pirates go after the treasure buried on the island of Tombola. Wells played the pirate’s camp captain, who at one point remarked, ‘Oh damn, I’ve snapped my second-best bra!’

Roy Hudd. He was on TV quite a bit in the early 70s only to subsequently vanish. I can remember him from when I was at junior school presenting an afternoon programme for the elderly. While he vanished from TV, he carried on broadcasting on the radio, where he was the star of the satirical News Huddlines on Radio 2 with June Whitfield. He also appeared from time to time on other programmes, including as an astral seaside entertainer playing the Wurlitzer on the Reeves and Mortimer revamp of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). I’m including him here as he was also an expert on the Music Hall. Back in the 1980s he appeared on a Radio 4 programme about the original Peaky Blinders, who were so notorious that they even wrote Music Hall songs about them. The one he performed was about how they could drink a brewery dry. Away from such elevated matters, he also apparently appeared as the Litterbug in the 1970s public information film against littering.

Three Labour MPs To Defect To Tories? Goodbye, and Good Riddance!

I saw from a headline from the Heil posted this morning on the news section that greets you when you get online that three ostensibly Labour MPs are considering defecting to the Tories. Mike has put up a piece about it this morning, pointing out that no true Labour member or supporter would ever considering crossing the floor to the Tories, because their values are completely opposed to traditional Labour beliefs. Which isn’t to say it hasn’t happened before. Unfortunately it has. I also remember that in the 1980s the SDP was rocked by a series of defections to the Tories after they split from Labour. I don’t think the defectors were exactly met with open arms either. Well, perhaps they were, but there were also a few sneers. The Sunday Express lampooned them in its ‘No. 10’ cartoon, which showed two figures, presumably representing Dennis Thatcher and another Tory watching a clockwork soldier march to the end of a table before falling off. This was matched with some comment about SDP defectors. I only dimly remember it, and not because it was funny. I think it stuck in my mind simply because of its overt, unpleasant sneering.

Mike also points out that if these MPs do defect, it would show how bad the Tory entryism has been during successive leaderships since Tony Blair. Quite. There was a computer game at the time that gave you anagrams of various politicians’ names. I think Michael Portillo came out as ‘a cool, limp Hitler’. Anthony Blair produced ‘I am Tory B’. Or Something like it. And he was, despite all that guff about a ‘Third Way’. Well, the last world leaders to speak about their parties constituting a ‘third way’ between socialism and capitalism were the Nazis and Fascists. They are argued that their noxious regimes constituted such a new politics because they were capitalist, but made ‘social’ by being subjected to the state. Which comes to think of it, does sound a bit like Blair and his enthusiasm for the state partnering with private industry.

And Blair very definitely favoured Tories. His Government Of All the Talents included Tories like Chris Patten. When a Tory defected, Blair quickly had them parachuted into a safe Labour seat. The result of this has been a series of Labour MPs so right-wing that even Tories wonder what they were doing still in the Labour party. Years ago the arch-Tory Anglican blog, Cranmer, commented approvingly on Frank Field and invited him to cross the floor to the Tory ranks, assuring him of a warm welcome. This was the Frank Field who demanded conditions be made even more harsh for the unemployed in order to make them find work. Then there was the Labour bureaucrat, who ended up as a moderator on a Tory website. He astonished the Tories there with his invective against the Labour party which was actually far more vicious than theirs. But the Tories in Labour’s NEC don’t like you to mention it. When a Labour member has asked what these bozos are doing in the Labour party when they’re behaving like that, they’ve been expelled for ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ or some such nonsense. Some constituency parties were quite open about this entryism. There was one that was so horrified during Corbyn’s leadership by the sudden influx of real, socialist members, that the leader started pleading for Lib Dems and Tories to join.

Mike quotes the Mail, which said that the defections could greatly harm Stalin’s leadership. Well of course they would. As Mike says, it would show that he prefers Tories to real Labour people and suggest there were more closet Tories in the party. I don’t doubt that. I can see any defectors making exactly this comment, as well as encouraging those still hesitating to join them over on the Tory benches. Mike says that it might even make more of these quisling consider leaving, so that real socialist can be elected instead.

Of course, what could happen is that the defections could also give the message that Starmer is too left-wing and weak even for the parliamentary Labour party. This could push Starmer even further to the right. Or if ends up being the target of the kind of right-wing coups and defections that the right inflicted on Corbyn, he made have to swallow his Thatcherite pride and start trying to appeal to the left to bolster his leadership. But I don’t see that happening.

But what might happen is that Starmer goes down through infighting and plotting by his own side, which will further show just how unpleasant and treacherous they are.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2021/10/03/three-labour-mps-could-defect-to-the-conservatives-good-let-them/

Scots Tory Davidson Warns Boris Willing to Destroy UK for Brexit

On the 18th of this month, Mike at Vox Political wrote a piece noting a YouGov poll that found that the majority of Tory members are hellbent on getting Brexit, even if it means the break-up of the United Kingdom, significant damage to its economy and even the destruction of the Tory party itself.

The poll found that, when asked the question whether they would be willing to avert Brexit if it meant Scotland or Northern Ireland leaving Britain, 63% and 59% of Tories would be quite happy to see those nations leave Britain. 61% said they would also be prepared to accept significant damage to Britain’s economy if we left the EU. 54% also said that they would be happy to see the Tory party destroyed for Brexit. Only 36% put their party’s survival before Brexit.

See: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/06/18/most-conservative-members-would-see-party-destroye

Commenting on this, Mike predicted in his article that Scottish SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon would mention it in her speech marking 20 years of devolution.

The Tory death wish: They’ll have Brexit even if it destroys the UK

And now, according to the front page of today’s I, 28th June 2019, the leaders of the Scottish Tories, Ruth Davidson, has warned that Boris’ determination to achieve Brexit whatever the cost – ‘do or die’ – risks breaking up the UK. She was therefore backing Jeremy Hunt instead. Davidson said

‘I want to see him [Johnson] make assurances that it’s not Brexit do or die, it’s the Union do or die. That’s exactly what we’ve seen from the other candidate in the race and that’s why he’s going to get my vote.’

The newspaper also reports that

Polling has suggested that if the former foreign secretary becomes prime minister it could boost support for Scottish independence. (p.6).

Mike reported that the only thing that would stop the Tories from demanding Brexit at the first opportunity is the likelihood that this would lead to Corbyn taking up the reigns of government. But, he concluded

such a government is more likely if they choose a leader committed to Brexit at any cost.

And at the moment, Boris Johnson is the the leading candidate in the Tory leadership contest, despite his determination to force through Brexit whatever the cost. The I has also reported that he’s said that those Tories opposed to a no-deal Brexit will not get posts in his government.

And I’m not at all surprised that the Tories are willing to risk the break-up of the EU. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve heard rumours that the Tories were on the verge of collapse during Blair’s tenure of office. So much so that they were considering changing their name to the ‘English Nationalists’. And I do remember reading an opinion piece in the Heil, which considered that the departure of Scotland from the Union would not significantly harm Conservatism. This claimed that it was only recently that the Tories in Scotland had called themselves Conservatives. Before then they were called the Unionist party. But this still goes back to the period after the early 18th century union with Scotland. What would be the point of having a unionist party, if there was no union, and no real likelihood of ever reviving it?

It just confirms that Brexit is very much an English demand, and the Tory Brexiteers are bitter English nationalists, neither more nor less.

And it flies in the face of the way the Tories under Thatcher appropriated Britishness, its symbols and history. I can remember one headline in the Sunday Telegraph, unsurprisingly about how wonder Thatcher was, had the headline ‘Don’t Call Them Boojwah, Call Them British!’ I think it was a quote from Maggie herself. But the Conservatism she promoted was deeply bourgeois and nationalistic to its core. They seemed to waste no opportunity to drape themselves in Union Flags, like Tim Brooke-Taylor in his Union flag waistcoat on the Goodies, but without the comic trio’s irony. In one programme about Thatcher and the Tory party, her husband, Dennis, declared that his favourite song was Rule Britannia. Which he then tried to sing, only to realise he didn’t know the words. And then there was their infamous 1987 election film, which seemed to show that they had singlehandedly won the Battle of Britain. This showed old wartime footage of Spitfires chasing about the skies, while an excited voice declared ‘Man was born free. It’s our fundamental right.’ Really? I thought the complete quote, from the first sentence or so of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract was ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ Which effectively describes the condition of everyone, who isn’t massively rich, under the Tories. The sadly departed Alan Coren commented drily about it on the News Quiz, calling it the Royal Conservative Airforce, and saying what a pity it all was for the Tories that after the War the servicemen all came back and voted Labour. Quite. But it does show how the Tories appropriated British patriotism.

And it also shows the reverse: how the Tories demonised anyone who didn’t share their chauvinism and racism – who wasn’t, as Thatcher put it, ‘one of us’ – was really an evil subversive intent on destroying Britain. Left-wing members of the Labour party, who supported the ‘troops out’ movement, like Tony Benn, land who made the reasonable point that to stop the violence we had to talk to Sinn Fein, were vilified as supporters of the IRA. And the same people, who wanted to thaw relations with the USSR instead of ramping up tensions like Reagan and Thatcher, because of the very real danger of nuclear Armageddon were also vilified as Communists by the Tories, the Tory press, and the press secret state.

Oh yes, and if Labour got in power under someone like Benn, Foote, Livingstone or even Neil Kinnock, when he actually believed in traditional Labour values, would destroy the economy.

But it isn’t Labour threatening to destroy the UK. Corbyn and his supporters aren’t telling the world that they’re content to break up the EU or consciously wreak the British economy, provided they get a disastrous policy through. It’s the Tories.

They’re the real subversives and destroyers of this nation. Which is why they have to make up bogus stories about the Labour party being full of anti-Semites, Trotskyites and Stalinists.

If you want to see a genuinely prosperous, united Britain, that’s fair to working people of every nation in this great country, vote Labour.

Because the Tories are happy to see it destroyed and impoverished.

 

Throwing Stones in Glass Houses: Cameron Criticises Miliband for Having Two Kitchens

The Tories have been demonstrating their own double standards again. Mike over at Vox Political has this story, ‘Two-kitchens Miliband’, Tories? At least he didn’t use public cash like Cameron! about the latest Conservative ad hominem attack on the Labour leader. The Tories have accused him of not really being a ‘man of the people’, because in addition to the main kitchen, he has a ‘functional kitchenette’ in his home.

As Mike points out, this is all rather hypocritical coming from team Cameron. Miliband may have two kitchens, but at least he spent his own money. Unlike Cameron, who according to the Guardian spent £680,000 of our money in 2011 renovating 10 Downing Street. And part of the money was also spent on improvements they’d made the previous summer to No. 11.

Mike’s article is at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/03/14/two-kitchens-miliband-tories-at-least-he-didnt-use-public-cash-like-cameron/. Go to it for the fuller story, plus piccies.

This is not, of course, by any means the first time the Tories have made a personal attack on a Labour leader and his domestic life. Some of us can remember how way back in the 1980s, when Kinnock was head of the party, the Sunday Express really laid into him. Part of the suggestion there was that he wasn’t the perfect father. Supposedly his children had been playing happily with a train set, until he came up to show them how it was done. He was so bad at this, that his children were supposed to have left the toys crying, leaving him the only one still using it.

My guess is that, if this incident really happened, it was pretty much has happened in thousands of families up and down Britain and across the world ever since Adam and Eve. A lot of dads try to show their kids how to work a toy properly, only to find it much harder than they thought. It’s provided material for humourists right across the generations. Like Michael Rosen’s poem, ‘My Dad’s Thicker Than Your Dad’, in which two children compete to see which of them has the most stupid father. Nothing to see here, and nothing to show that Kinnock was a bad father, or particularly incompetent either.

Of course, there was never any suggestion that Maggie and Dennis were less than the perfect parents to Carol and Thickie Mork. Mind you, I don’t think I read any story about Dennis actually playing with the children, let alone the Leaderene. Probably beneath their dignity.