Take his review, in the Eye last, of a biography of the man of letters Richard Blythe, who enjoyed a period of fame in the 1970s as the author of Akenfield:
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward flew into London with hopes of making Akenfield the movie. But Blythe preferred theatre director Peter Hall, who resisted suggestions to cast Jon Voight and shift the action to the US Midwest.
In the end, his TV version featured an amateur local cast including Blythe himself playing a vicar and got 15m viewers in 1975. Private Eye paid tribute with Akenballs column and Princess Margaret declared herself a fan, one of the few who could understand the local dialect.
Behind the jocular claim that a regional accent is impossible to understand lies the ingrained belief that a Southern public school accent is normal and anything else is to be laughed at.
As I said in an earlier post on this Eye column, if the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye.
And behind the idea that Blythe's enthusiasms - liturgy, poetry, history, landscape - are something to be mocked, lies the fear that if a boy grows up with different views from his classmates, he will not be the right sort to take his place as a district commissioner in British West Africa.
Private Eye's investigations are a public service, but its humour and many of its columnists have been of a far lower standard for years.
Ronald Blythe.
ReplyDeleteThanks - someone on Bluesky just beat you to it.
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