Kingsley Amis wrote an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force and it was about his relationship with his son Martin

Well here's something I didn't know, even though I've seen the episode on YouTube before and even remember watching it when it was broadcast in 1974. 

Kingsley Amis wrote for Softly Softly: Task Force.

If you click on the picture it will take you to the whole episode. Many thanks to John Salisbury for posting it on YouTube.

That picture, incidentally, doesn't show Kingsley's son Martin Amis, though it looks uncannily like him. It's actually Simon Fisher-Turner, who we've come across before in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

But if you read this 2006 Daily Mail account of Kingsley Amis leaving his wife Hilly for Elizabeth Jane Howard, it's hard not to see him and the teenage Martin in this script:

When they arrived - at midnight because their plane was delayed - Amis opened the door in his striped pyjamas, 'rearing back from us,' as Martin recalled, 'in histrionic consternation.' The telegram Hilly sent announcing their visit hadn't arrived.

'It wasn't just that he was surprised to see us. He was horrified to see us. We had busted him in flagrante delicto.' Amis's opening words to the boys were: 'You know I'm not alone.'

Martin describes Jane looming behind Amis 'in her white towel bathrobe, with her waist-long fair hair, tall, serious, worldly, already busying herself, cooking eggs and bacon, finding sheets, blankets, for the beds in the spare room.

'It would have been an impossible heresy for me to admit any woman was more beautiful than my mother. But I could tell at once that Jane, while also being beautiful, was certainly more experienced. I acknowledged the appeal of that with simple resignation and I did not feel disloyal.'

Philip's first impression of Jane was that she was 'obviously someone who didn't like children'. She watched the boys warily, while they watched her, she says. 'We were all trying to conceal our shock - they hadn't known I'd be there, and we'd had no warning of their arrival.'

There then followed a week of what Jane calls 'grandiose treats' (mostly visits to the cinema) and 'long and often tearful sessions spent by the boys alone with their father'.

Martin remembers Amis being 'outwardly calm, unusually quiet voiced' during these sessions, patiently taking 'whatever we threw at him', including, 'incredibly', Philip calling him 'a c**t'.

Martin Amis is no Mike Brearley

I got interested in Martin Amis's collection The Rub of Time when I saw it had an index. With his love of both high and low culture, Amis had the potential to produce indexes every bit as good as those you find in Mike Brearley's books.

It's the juxtapositions I look for in an index: the unlikely couples who find themselves paired in consecutive entries.

Sadly, Mart let me down.

Yes, he showed promise, and I enjoyed:

Camilla (Parker Bowles), Duchess of Cornwall
Camus, Albert

Keane, Roy
Keats, John

Sade, Marquis de
Sampras, Pete

but there weren't many more. Maybe tennis just isn't as literary game as cricket?

Anyway, hurry off and enjoy the indexes of Brearley's books On Cricket and On Form.

Angela Carter discusses Peter Greenaway's The Draughtman's Contract in Channel 4's first week

This is television gold from the first week of Channel 4 in November 1982: the novelist Angela Carter discusses Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract.

Starting with this film, Greenaway enjoyed a vogue in the 1980s. Some thought him pretentious, but his concern for images in their own right gave his work a distinctive, Continental flavour.

Yet you could also say his films were very English. Drowning by Numbers, for instance, brings out something sinister that lies just below the surface of genteel Southwold. In fact, I had been on holiday in the town for a couple of days before I worked out why it felt so familiar.

The Draughtsman's Contract is a mystery film, though whether you can really solve that mystery from a study of the drawings made by the hero I don't know. Greenaway's original cut of it ran for three hours - and I would gladly watch it - so any loose ends can be attributed to the way this had to be whittled down.

When he went out of fashion it was partly because of a strain of cruelty that people saw in his films - you can see it here in the scenes from The Draughtsman's Contract.

That strain worries me more today than it did in the 1980s - there seems something crass and adolescent about it. But then, perhaps because I had seen so few films as a teenager, I had my own cinematic adolescence to catch up on.

The other thing that made Greenaway's films stand out was the music of Michael Nyman. His near-frantic reworkings of Baroque masters fit particularly well in The Draughtsman's Contract. These include Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, which was one of the pieces of music my mother enjoyed in the last weeks of her life.

Angela Carter was a novelist, known for her feminist and magical realist approach. When she died in 1992, aged only 51, her reputation with both critics and the reading public stood extremely high.

It's my impression that she suffered little of the collapse of interest in their work that almost all writers suffer in the years after their death, but I've not read enough of her to tell you much more than that.

Besides, there is something else about her that cannot be ignored: that accent. She sounds extraordinarily posh and like someone from three decades before. It's how you imagine Princess Margaret must have sounded. At the same time, the odd word gives a hint that the accent is not entirely secure.

Carter's biographer Edmund Gordon was asked about the subject in an interview by Caleb Sivyer for Angela Carter Online:

CS: I remember being quite surprised by the particular sound of Carter’s voice the first time I encountered it. Although her voice changes quite a lot, I was surprised at those moments when she appears to adopt, perhaps self-consciously, an educated-sounding voice.

EG: Absolutely. I think it’s partly a generational thing. As Martin Amis says somewhere in his memoir Experience, "it used to be cool to be posh". I think there is partly that. 

But you know, she was not entirely un-posh. She had working-class roots but she was one generation removed from them. Her father was a Fleet Street journalist, she was very middle-class and she went to a private school. But what is extraordinary about her voice is that it suddenly shifts between registers, and indeed between accents. 

Last night [at the British Library celebration of Carter] when they showed two clips of her, she sounds sort of Northern sometimes and south London sometimes and very genteel and posh sometimes. It is an odd voice. 

But then I also think that in her work, there’s so much about performance and she obviously was a highly self-conscious person, and it is the voice of someone who’s quite self-conscious, somebody who is very aware of how they sound and how they’re coming across.

Perhaps unfairly to both women, I am reminded of what someone said about Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who had the misfortune to become the first Mrs Boris Johnson, at Oxford:

"She speaks to you as though she were launching a ship."

Martin Amis and the left

Introducing his attack on Jeremy Corbyn the Sunday Times described Martin Amis, improbably, as "a leading figure on the British left for three decades".

Though he was a central part of the New Statesman in its last glory years, he has never shown strong signs of being on the left beyond his support for CND in the 1980s.

When I think of Amis's novels I remember his skewering of the showbiz left in his 1995 novel The Information:

Are you a Labour supporter, the interviewer asks Gwyn. 

‘Obviously.’ 

‘Of course.’ 

‘Of course.’ 

Of course, thought Richard, yeah of course. Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious. Obvious not from the ripply cornices 20 feet above their heads, not from the brass lamps or the military plumpness of the leather-topped desk. Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the 20th century. There was nothing else for such a person to be. Richard was Labour, equally obviously. 

It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in the land was Labour, except the Government.

Jonathan Coe has a good article on Amis and Corbyn in today's Guardian.

Russell Brand to edit the New Statesman

You may have seen the embarrassing interview with Brand on yesterday's Newsnight.

The New Statesman's decision to ask him to guest edit an issue reminds me of this column I wrote for its website in the magazine's glory years:

I liked the Statesman in the 1970s. Under Anthony Howard’s editorship, the back half was written by the hip young gunslingers of the day: Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes. Those in the know called them “The Hitch”. “Mart” and “Julian Barnes”. 

Further forward it was all politics. They even printed the leading article on the front cover, which made the magazine appear wonderfully serious. 

Today, after 30 years of educational advance, the Statesman has to put a colour picture on the front or it wouldn‘t sell at all. 

And if you open it today you find that every comedian in the country has a column. And Julian Clary has a big one. 

It wasn’t like that in the seventies. The contents page didn‘t read: 

Freddie "Parrot-Face" Davies on the future of the Common Market; Dickie Henderson on the Palestine Question 

And coming next week: 

Mike and Bernie Winters debate the Bullock Report on Industrial Democracy.

Six of the Best 344

"It's like buses: you wait all your life for this kind of coverage for a book you've written and then, suddenly, two of them come along and you can't link to them to spread the word." David Boyle on the joys and frustrations of getting extensive coverage of his new book behind The Times and Sunday Times paywall.

Jonathan Fryer on the decline of the Green Party.

Over the past 11 years, according to Defence for Children International, some 7,500 children have been detained in Israeli prisons and detention facilities. +972 Magazine has interviews with some of them.

On 18 April 1930 the BBC announced that there was no news. The Questing Vole wishes it would do it more often.

Dave Rattigan's Facebook page has some then and now photographs of the Bradford locations used in the film Billy Liar.

"Martin Amis thought chess was an unmasterable game, but the machines are proving him wrong. Cricket, with all of its variations and oddities, its geographical sweep, its luck and its superstitions, its weather and its deadly psychology, actually might be. But some of its deeper mysteries are being revealed, and new kinds of machines are emerging to play it." The Old Batsman writes on the growing role of biomechanics and statistical analysis in cricket.

Hitch-22: A memoir by Christopher Hitchens

My review from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Hitch-22: A memoir
Christopher Hitchens
Atlantic Books, 2011, £9.99

This is the story of a journey. Christopher Hitchens began his working life on the fringes of London left-wing journalism and became a New York intellectual who toured American television studios to support the Iraq war.

You can make a case that this was not a simple shift to the right: traditionally, it has been British Conservatives who have been sceptical of foreign entaglements when no direct national interests are involved and the left that has been more likely to urge internvetion. And Hitchens’ willingness to criticise sacred cows from Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton is thoroughly healthy and was a necessary part of making his way as a contrarian. But his support for George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz does feels like conformity to the opinions of his new hosts.

Indeed, the book as whole has a very American feel. It’s not just the spelling, which is an irritant to the British reader which could surely have been corrected: the readers he has in mind are American too, judging by the references he does and does not explain.

New York is an intoxicating city, but in some ways it is surprising that Hitchens has landed there. While his friend Martin Amis’s literary heroes were always American to begin with, Hitchens is a far more consciously English, even if his great hero P.G. Wodehouse did end his days on Long Island.

Hitch-22 came out last year, but a reading of the paperback edition takes place in the shadow of a discovery that he made after writing it. In the words of Hitchens’ new preface: “I suffer from Stage Four esophageal cancer. There is no Stage Five.”

In many ways the early chapters of this book are the most interesting; certainly they are the best written. As well as being one of the last men of letters able to describe the experience of being subjected to the miseries of a traditional prep school education, Hitchens paints sympathetic portraits of his parents. His father was a disappointed former Naval officer who embraced a rather cheerless variety of Conservatism. His mother, the beautiful and brilliant Yvonne, committed suicide in a pact with her new lover in an Athens hotel room when Hitchens was in his early twenties. By contrast, his brother, the journalist Peter Hitchens, barely features at all.

Hitchens’ days at university were torn between a desire to be a social and sexual success and a burgeoning career as a Trotskyite agitator. Ironically for someone who was later to become a very public atheist, his induction into the International Socialists resembles nothing so much as a religious conversion.

Then it is on to Hitchens’ New Statesman days. These chapters are dominated by his accounts of the wit and wisdom of his Martin Amis and James Fenton and, from an older generation, Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. Some of the stories are good, but there is no surer way of killing an anecdote than introducing it with “I heard a really funny story the other day...” and that is the cumulative effect of Hitchens’ lavish praise for his friends here.

The British reader may find Hitchens’ account of his time in America, which dominates the second half of the book less interesting. While his concern from human rights in Iraq goes back a long way – much longer than it does with most his later allies on the American right – some of the writing is mawkish. And his claim that he knows that weapons of mass destruction were discovered there is not credible.

In all honesty, much of Hitch-22 does not show him at his best. For that you have to turn to his journalism – witty, angry and wonderfully well read. But I did like the story here about the mother who bought Hitchens’ book Letters to a Young Contrarian for her son in the hope that he would become a contrarian himself. He refused to do so.http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitch-22-Memoir-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/1843549212

Why Eliza Carthy has never met a Tory voter

I was struck by something the folk musician Eliza Carthy said in today's Guardian. She was quoted in an article about the free folk festival in Trafalgar Square on Saturday as saying:

"Nobody likes a Tory mayor."

Presumably some people must like a Tory mayor or Boris would never have been elected.

What Carthy means, of course, is that no one in the circles in which she moves would dare admit to voting Conservative .

It reminds me of an interview with Martin Amis reprinted in Nick Cohen's recent collection Waiting for the Etonians:

A passage from the opening of his 1995 novel The Information presciently captured the conformism of middle-class liberal opinion long before it was arrayed against him. At the end of the long period of Tory rule, Richard, the wretched hero, is visiting the Holland Park mansion of Gwyn Barry, a literary rival who, unconscionably, has become an immense success. Richard’s envy is heightened when he walks into the study to find a sycophantic colour-supplement journalist seeking Gwyn’s opinions on the issues of the day.

Are you a Labour supporter, the interviewer asks Gwyn.

‘Obviously.’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course.’

Of course, thought Richard, yeah of course. Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious. Obvious not from the ripply cornices 20 feet above their heads, not from the brass lamps or the military plumpness of the leather-topped desk. Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the 20th century. There was nothing else for such a person to be. Richard was Labour, equally obviously.

It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in the land was Labour, except the Government.

Of course children are poor, Polly Toynbee

In this morning's Guardian Polly Toynbee observed:

in the tightest budget this March poor children were the one cause Darling paid out to generously.

But when Martin Amis wrote in his memoirs Experience:

I was very short of money when I was a baby. I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough.

it was a joke. Of course he was poor. All babies are poor. And if his early years were more straitened than most - which is unlikely, given that Kingsley Amis was a university lecturer - it was because his parents were poor.

To a large extent Labour's concern for child poverty is a way of attempting to preserve the welfare state by sentimentalising it. As if one could help children from poor families without helping their parents. Deborah Orr has said so. Chris Dillow has said so. For what it's worth, I have said so myself.

But there is a sinister side to it too. Again and again in her work Toynbee praises schemes like Sure Start and sees the fact that children are spending less time with their parents as a triumph. Most of us, if we were describing our utopia, would include happy family life. Not Toynbee.

At the back of her thinking is the idea that children have interests which are quite separate from those of their parents. And that those are interests are to be secured by the state acting through... well, people rather like Polly Toynbee, actually.

House Points: The alternative Lib Dem short-list

My House Points column from this week's Liberal Democrat News.

Alumni alternatives

The air over Westminster is black with chickens coming home to roost. According to the Civil Aviation Authority they are stacked six deep as far away as Kettering. The Labour Party made such play of ‘sleaze’ in the 1990s that it was bound to come back to bite them in the bum one day. Now it has.

If you can hear an unfamiliar sound, it is probably John Major laughing his socks off.

As events are moving so quickly this week, let’s cross the road from the Palace of Westminster and visit Westminster School. The old pile is particularly relevant to Lib Dems at the moment because our leadership election is being conducted by two of its former pupils.

I suspect this tells us something unpalatable about the composition of our party and also about the success of state education in fostering social mobility. But those debates are for another day.

So if we have to be led by someone from Westminster School, let’s look at some other former pupils and see who else we could have.

Ruth Kelly and Tony Benn are obviously out, and Nigella Lawson’s family connections make her an unlikely leader too. But, as Asquith’s great granddaughter, Helena Bonham Carter has an impeccable Liberal pedigree.

Shane McGowan - lead singer of The Pogues and one of the less obvious former public school boys - would appeal to a certain sort of voter. But perhaps we would do better with the smoother approach of Flanders and Swann?

Lovers of the arts might want us to go for Martin Amis, John Gielgud or the great 17th-century composer Henry Purcell. And everybody has a soft spot for A. A. Milne. He would certainly be a safer bet than Kim Philby.

If we want to play safe and choose an established Liberal politician then we can choose between Lord John Russell, who was twice prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century, and Sir Charles Dilke. Dilke was the great hope of the radicals towards the end of that century, but his career foundered after a scandalous divorce case.

So, as a short-list, how about Helena Bonham Carter, A. A. Milne and Lord John Russell? I know which way I would vote.

Other possible Lib Dem leadership candidates

It seems that you have to have gone to Westminster School if you want to lead the Liberal Democrats. So let's try a different approach.

Wikipedia has a list of the school's former pupils. Therefore other possible candidates include:

• Louis Theroux
• Ruth Kelly
• Helena Bonham Carter
• Imogen Stubbs
• Nigella Lawson
• Shane McGowan
• Nigel Planer
• Martin Amis
• Tony Benn
• Flanders & Swann
• Kim Philby
• John Gielgud
• A.A. Milne
• Sir Charles Dilke
• Lord John Russell
• Henry Purcell
• John Locke

Now that's what I call a short-list!