Culture

Having a saint in the family is dreadful, They’re often absent, either literally or emotionally, and because they’re always thinking of higher things they can’t be expected to do prosaic stuff like take the rubbish out or pay the gas bill. They tend not to enjoy jokes, much less teasing. Worse still, they’re convinced they’re right about everything. Street angel, house devil, as the old saying has it. Do-gooders crop up here and there in fiction, from Dickens’s bustling, bossy Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House through to the long- suffering Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited to Ian Bedloe, the miserably stubborn hero of Anne Tyler’s brilliant Saint Maybe.

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head for the screen. They also developed Lucky Jim as a television series and found Kingsley Amis pie-eyed, maudlin and testy, ‘jealous of his son’s success’. They wrote The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks for the disgusting Michael Winner (who once told a starlet: ‘What this part does not require is a diploma from Rada. What it does require is a great pair of tits.

Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising. Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins.

Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s and becoming fully fledged in the 1970s. Their ritual, tribal aggression supplied an outlet for youthful male violence in the relatively peaceful second half of Europe’s most savage century. At first, the curve’s semi-circular ends,behind the goals where ultras congregated were, for all their territorial violence, politics-free, but Tobias Jones notes ‘how hard certain ultras were rubbing the lamp [of fascist revivalism]before the genie appeared’.