Letters from London (3 page)

This cumbersome method of seeking to extract information from and/or humiliate the Prime Minister is further weighed down by the knowledge that, apart from the Leader of the Opposition, no Member can come back at the PM if her answer is deemed unsatisfactory. The Tories, in any case, tend to ask their leader predictable, even toadying, questions, by which she is rarely stretched. At one of the first televised Question Times, for instance, the Conservative backbencher Dame Janet Fookes asked the Prime Minister, “Will my Right Honorable Friend take a little time today to reflect on … her own outstanding achievement as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister?”—whereupon Mrs. Thatcher willingly did just that. The exchange was more appropriate to the dying years of Ceauşescu’s Romania than to a Parliament that prides itself on plain speaking. The Labour Party, on the other hand, finds itself torn between (a) turning a question into a speech and (b) trying to bowl her out by asking something she might be unprepared for. Giles Radice, MP for North Durham since 1973 and a senior Labour backbencher, explains that the best way to do this is to invite her to reflect on the merits of something in which she is known to see no merit. “Would the Prime Minister tell the House what are the positive arguments for joining the Exchange Rate Mechanism?” might embarrass a Prime Minister who cannot think of any positive arguments, while annoying pro-Europe Tories, who disagree with her. Radice suggests that the Prime Minister is bowled out in this way about once a fortnight.

Whether or not the viewing public will notice that the Prime
Minister has been dismissed is another matter. Television is not about what happens but about what is seen to happen. An image consultant who approached MPs before curtain-up estimated that their viewer impact depended on the following factors: 55 percent on how they looked, 38 percent on their voice and body language, and 7 percent on what they actually said. Although the House scoffed jollily when these figures were laid before it, MPs have nonetheless been taking backstage advice about suits (medium gray is recommended), shirts (nothing stripy), and ties (nothing too flash, nothing too dark). Whatever the long-term advantages of MPTV to the electorate, there’s no doubt that the first beneficiaries have been the dry cleaners and tie salesmen in the Westminster area. Balder Members of Parliament were even offered a free issue of
papier poudré
to diminish excess glare on the glistening pate; but cranial cover jobs seemingly have yet to find favor.

So far, MPTV has proved a modest, uncontentious success, even if Prime Minister’s Question Time is unlikely to offer a ratings challenge to
The Oprah Winfrey Shaw
, against which it is set. Nor has the fear of bad behavior come to anything (though it has yet to be tested by a Cabinet crisis or the run-up to a general election). Conservatives occasionally bellow “This is London, not Bucharest!” at the Labour benches, and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition responds with cries of “Sleaze government! Sleaze government!” But these are no more than routine diplomatic niceties. The main focus of interest in the opening months has been on the front-bench exchanges between Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Kinnock. When coverage began, the Labour Party had more to gain than the Tories did: for a start, television would show the Opposition properly at work (instead of merely debating in a studio); the two party leaders, each standing at his (or her) own dispatch box and backed by his (or her) own team, would be displayed with some sort of useful parity; and Mrs. Thatcher might prove vulnerable when she was unable to control the rules of engagement in advance.

Yet it may be that the Prime Minister has benefited more than the Opposition. The longer her reign has gone on, the juicier have become the rumors. She’s quite mad, people will assure you: paranoid;
a megalomaniac; actually, it’s hormone-replacement therapy that’s done it—makes her think she can go on forever. When it became known last year that the Prime Minister every so often visits a nonmedical practitioner in West London and receives tiny electric shocks while sitting in a bath of warm water, this less than Churchillian behavior struck even some of her supporters as a bit quaint. But such whispers probably worked to her advantage: she only had to appear half normal on Prime Minister’s Question Time to seem reassuringly in control.

In fact, everyone agrees that she has cannily altered her act for the TV camera. “We thought it would reveal Mrs. Thatcher as shrill and authoritarian,” Giles Radice laments. “But she’s avoided that problem. She’s totally changed her style. She used to roar like a lion, now she coos like a dove.” David Dimbleby, about the only political interviewer on British television who doesn’t approach the Prime Minister on all fours while loosening the collar to allow easier entry of the stiletto heel between the neck vertebrae, recalls, “She used to stand with her hands on her hips and bawl at the Opposition like a fishwife.” Now she has “completely changed her tone.” But even in this modified version, softened for television, her act remains a compelling one, as forceful as it is eccentric. She stands rather stiffly at the dispatch box, with swept-back hair, firm features, and an increasingly generous embonpoint thrusting at her tailored suit of Tory blue or emerald green; there, butting into the spray and storm of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, she resembles the figure head on the prow of some antique sailing ship, emblematic as much as decorative. She now sports a large pair of spectacles, which she often holds by the sidepiece while reading an answer, before whipping them off to give the Labour benches a basilisk stare. She has never been a great debater or a great emoter, but she remains a great presence. Just as in Jarry’s play
Ubu Roi
a single performer is sometimes called upon to represent The Entire Russian Army, Mrs. Thatcher seems aware that she is acting The Entire Conservative Party. And it is part of this role and condition that occasionally one has to peer over the parapet and listen to the distant catcalls of those misfortunates who for some
peculiar reason have banded themselves into parties that are not conservative.

At Prime Minister’s Question Time the day after the first Vietnamese boat people in Hong Kong were sent back to Hanoi during the middle of the night, Mr. Kinnock launched a two-question attack that deliberately sought comparison with the forcible repatriation by the British in 1945 of Cossacks who then went to their deaths at the hands of Stalin. Was it not the case, Mr. Kinnock asked, that the Prime Minister in the present instance was the only person who couldn’t say she was “just obeying orders” in the matter of repatriating the Vietnamese—for the very reason that she herself was “the one giving the orders”? Cheeky stuff, but The Entire Conservative Party did not deign to rise even to this implied smear of “war crimes.” “The Right Honorable Gentleman’s remarks,” she replied majestically, “are feeble and nonsense.”
Feeble and nonsense:
neither the lack of subtlety nor the lack of grammar will probably do her any harm with the electorate. If the House of Commons, with its incessant background noise, its schoolboy rowdiness, its dominant maleness, and its low level of repartee, often resembles nothing so much as the canteen in a minor public school, then Mrs. Thatcher is cast as Matron. She is the one who supervises the dinners and hands out the cod-liver oil; when Kinnock Minor accuses her of the worst crimes under the sun, she merely frowns slightly, as if he were making yet another complaint about the quality of her custard. For she has seen generations of boys come and go, some well groomed and courteous, others rough and uppity, and she knows that all of them, in the long run, will look back fondly on her legendary strictness. She is also familiar with the work of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, and knows that others, too, remember the couplet

And always keep a hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

I
T WAS FITTING
that MPTV started up at the same time that London’s more traditional theaters gave themselves over to the winter pantomime season. Both these venerable entertainment genres attract
sentimental homage; both regularly fall back on the oldest of plots, while intermittently updating their personnel; both are prone to infantilism. But, whereas the Mother of Parliaments can to some extent boast of its exportability, the pantomime remains stubbornly local. The British have managed to export some surprising things—cricket, marmalade, the humor of Benny Hill—but they have never succeeded in unloading the New Year pantomime on anyone else.

The panto has its historical roots in the harlequinade and was cross-fertilized by the Victorian music hall. In essence, it consists of a fairy tale—the story of Cinderella, Mother Goose, Aladdin, Dick Whittington—that, while drawing on a traditional narrative line, is constantly updated by topical references, often of a satirical nature. Its central modes are farce and melodrama, with large openings for the miraculous and the sentimental; it aims itself simultaneously at small children, who follow its twists with an awesome directness of response, and at their accompanying parents, who are wooed by coarse double entendres supposedly above the heads of their offspring. It includes two elements with powerful appeal to the British: cross-dressing (the principal boy is always played by a girl, and the Pantomime Dame by a middle-aged man) and comic animals (who aren’t played by themselves, either). It retains, if in an attenuated form, a worldview in which Britannia rules the waves and foreigners are a humorous supporting act. Finally, it boasts a promiscuous permeability to modern culture, so that at any moment the stage is likely to be invaded by some two-minute television cult that the parents have barely caught on to. Darth Vader outfits jostle with TV magicians, old Empire racism with Green jokes, and all is resolved with much audience participation and a join-in-or-die singsong. Perhaps, on reflection, it isn’t too surprising that the panto hasn’t caught on in other countries.

It has always been a ramshackle, catchall, demotic genre. Parents returning to their first panto since they themselves were kids are apt to bemoan the debasement of this popular old British art form, but the truth is that it has always been debased—that’s to say, various, eclectic, vulgar, referential, and topical. Whether one panto is actually
“better” than any other is almost impossible for an adult eye to judge. Perhaps more to the point is that the pantomime is usually a child’s first introduction to the theater, and that the allure of the tiered darkness, velvet curtains, and interval ice cream seems undiminished and undiminishable. Amazingly, the pantomime doesn’t put kids off the theater for life.

This year, the pantos have ranged even more widely than usual. There have been modern pantos, retro pantos, Green pantos, even (perhaps not surprising, given the strand of sexual ambiguity in the genre) a lesbian panto
(The Snow Queen: A Fairy Tale for Christmas)
. In terms of personnel, the genre has always drawn on a wide mix of performers: superannuated pop stars, TV comedians, young hopefuls, middle-ranking faces who were once young hopefuls, end-of-the-pier old-stagers brought out of semiretirement to “tread the boards” annually for a six-week run and bore the new young hopefuls about the romance of greasepaint, plus a raggle-taggle of outsiders who are celebrated enough in their own fields to make the transition to theater despite an alarming lack of thespian aptitude. This last category reflects the nature of modern fame, and is itself a form of cross-dressing: if you are acclaimed in one area, then you are accepted as a valued guest in another where you have no natural business. For instance, this year there were three television newsreaders appearing in panto, in London, Stevenage, and Torquay. Russell Grant, a spherical TV astrologer made famous by breakfast TV, fun sweaters, and a hospitable campiness, starred in
Robinson Crusoe in
Cardiff Eddie Kidd, a motorbike Stuntman who has leapt over dozens of London buses and broken almost as many limbs in the process, was in
Dick Whittington
at Deptford. But the real novelties this season were the pugilistic pantos. In Reading, you could see Barry McGuigan, the former featherweight world champion, make his theatrical debut in
Snow White—
while Snow White herself, with an ironical deftness rare to panto, was played by one of the nation’s best-loved topless models, Linda Lusardi. In London, the hottest ticket,
Aladdin
, also featured a boxer, the former British heavyweight titleholder Frank Bruno.

Bruno, the first black champion here, is very large, very civil and
very popular. He is an excellent example of the traditional British veneration for the good loser—the “plucky little Belgium” syndrome in the national psyche. For many decades, the country has not had a boxer capable of winning the world heavyweight title, but the manner in which local champions are dispatched by American titleholders is always carefully scrutinized. Henry Cooper once put Cassius Clay (as he then was) on the canvas with a left hook, and for buttoning The Lip, if briefly, Cooper has remained a national hero ever since, advertising Brut toiletries and appearing in countless TV game shows and pro-celebrity golf tournaments. Bruno is the most personable champ since Cooper, and the manner of his inevitable defeat last year by Mike Tyson endeared him to the nation with a solidity that only a charge of child molestation could conceivably budge. He stayed upright for several rounds, hit Tyson with one punch that we are practically sure almost hurt the American champion, and didn’t disgrace the flag. Plucky big Frank! His salability as a TV commodity was greatly enhanced; he landed a six-week run in
Aladdin
at the Dominion Theatre, Tottenham Court Road; and in the New Year Honours List he was awarded an MBE by the Queen.

At the Dominion, Bruno plays the Genie of the Lamp, whose main task is to materialize whenever Aladdin rubs the magic lamp and seeks assistance. Bruno was never exactly twinkle-toed in the ring, and his Genie is a less than impish conception. When he is required to dance, he watches his feet lest they do something wrong; when he is required to spar, he watches his hands lest they forget themselves and do something right. He is dogged, wooden, and touchingly word-perfect, pushing out the words in the same way he pushed out the left jabs—schooled rather than natural. But this awkwardness makes him, if anything, even more popular with the audience, and as he stands there, in a costume half out of the boxing ring and half out of
Dynasty
(ankle boots and whopping shoulders), the former heavyweight champion doesn’t look particularly incongruous.