Features

I am an elder statesman, but I’m a versatile old bugger. In about a month’s time I’m hitting the boards in Austin, Texas as a support act for Dame Edna. She’s not a happy lady about it because we’ve never hit it off, or got it off for that matter, and she’s got this bee in her bonnet that the Seppos (Septic Tanks — Yanks) might find me a bit too forthright in the language department and I could end up as popular as a bastard on Father’s Day. I beg to differ. She can stick her opinions as far as I’m concerned, and I’ve got a gut feeling I’m going to turn up in America when they need a man with my positive outlook more than at any other time in their history.

If you ever want to get in touch with the real world, try pretending to be a second world war GI. This is what I did the other weekend and it was quite an eye-opener. I don’t mean the stuff I learned about the correct procedure for debussing and advancing to contact from an armoured half-track — fascinating, obviously, though that was. I mean what I discovered about my fellow Living History re-enactors in the pub, afterwards, when we got on to the subject of impending ecological disaster. ‘Oh that? No, it’s a load of old bollocks that is,’ said my neighbour, and I did a double take.

Rod Liddle — a former editor of the Today programme — says that the Corporation must stop pretending to be democratic if it is to keep the licence fee. Unashamed elitism is the only chance that the Beeb has in the new media world One of the first things to go to hell when the Soviet Union collapsed was elitist early evening television. Within a remarkably short period of time the opera and the ballet and the documentaries moved down the schedules to be replaced by the sort of free and democratic programming with which we in the West are familiar: jabbering cretins, vapid celeb monkeys talking crap, mindless lumpenprole soaps, Yankee import dross, bite-sized chunks of ‘newz u can uze’ and footie. Ah, good, welcome to capitalism, you Russkies.

P.G. Morgan goes in search of the truth about the great director’s flight from the US courts — and uncovers some uncomfortable truths worthy of a scene in Chinatown High above the heat and smog of Los Angeles, a small cardboard box sits on a shelf in LA’s Superior Court building awaiting its Hollywood moment. The handwriting on the box — P v Polanski #A334129 — has faded in the Californian sun. But the box’s contents — witness statements and lurid court depositions from Roman Polanski’s statutory rape case — remain as sensitive now as when they were filed away in February 1978.

Georgia is still on our minds. August’s short nasty descent into violence triggered the first emergency debate of the season. John Kampfner, in the chair, began by observing wryly that the crisis had disproved the notion that ‘two countries that have Macdonalds don’t go to war.’ Oleh Rybachuk, a leading Ukrainian democrat, proposed the motion and expressed his country’s fears that Ukraine and Georgia would become a new eastern bloc and their borders ‘a new Checkpoint Charlie’. Expansionist Russia was busy violating Ukraine’s sovereignty by handing out citizenship to residents of Crimea. This alarmed Ukraine because ‘defending Russian citizens’ had been the Kremlin’s pretext for marching into Georgia.

There are too few active homosexuals and career women in the Third World. This is because blacks and Asians — from Australasia to Bangalore — have a tendency to put them in a pot, cook them and eat them. Primitive African tribes also eat crippled people — those in a wheelchair, or merely suffering from a hare lip — and indeed those they consider to be ethnic minorities. I know of one handicapped spinster who committed suicide rather than be eaten by some gypsies in Bombay. Her illegitimate daughter, an air hostess, who herself had given birth to Siamese twins in Calcutta, appealed for clemency but this fell on deaf ears. She is now an illegal asylum seeker living in the province of Northern Ireland — and a grandmother to boot, with a bachelor son.

It’s possible to get a reservation again at Scott’s. The City boys have well and truly left the building, and can now be found drowning their sorrows elsewhere, in dark corners of the West End and Chelsea, as far away from the prying eyes of the City as possible. ‘“Reduce your risk. Sell. Get flat.” But all I could think about was the school fees and the new kitchen, and how there’s just no recovering from this.’ I was looking into the pained eyes of a former master of the universe, who had until recently stared the credit crunch in the face and laughed. He was now on his sixth (house) whisky and mumbling incoherently about getting buried by Wachovia earlier that day.