Read Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks Online
Authors: Alan Coren
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Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks
CHOCOLATE AND CUCKOO CLOCKS
ALAN COREN (1938â2007) was a celebrated English humorist, writer and satirist who was also well known as a BBC radio and television personality. He was the editor of
Punch
magazine for nine years, and was described by the
Sunday Times
newspaper as âthe funniest man in Britain'.
GILES AND VICTORIA COREN are both writers, living in London.
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks
THE ESSENTIAL
ALAN
COREN
Edited by Giles Coren and Victoria Coren
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William St
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © The Estate of Alan Coren, 2008
Foreword and selection copyright © Giles Coren and Victoria Coren, 2008
Introductions copyright © Melvyn Bragg, Victoria Wood, Clive James,
A.A. Gill and Stephen Fry, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd., 2008
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2009
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Coren, Alan, 1938-2007.
Chocolate and cuckoo clocks : the essential Alan Coren /
Alan Coren ; editors Victoria Coren, Giles Coren.
ISBN: 9781921520655 (pbk.)
Ebook ISBN: 9781921834424 (pbk.)
English wit and humour. Great Britain--Social life
and customs--20th century--Humour.
Coren, Giles.
Coren, Victoria, 1972- .
828.91409
âSince both Switzerland's national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.'
ALAN COREN
Contents
Foreword
by Giles and Victoria Coren
SouthgateâSan FranciscoâFleet Street: 1960â1969
Introduction
by Melvyn Bragg
5. . . . that Fell on the House that Jack Built
6. Under the Influence of Literature
10. Mao, He's Making Eyes At Me!
âThe Funniest Writer In Britain Today': 1970â1979
Introduction
by Victoria Wood
12. Boom, What Makes My House Go Boom?
14. Ear, Believed Genuine Van Gogh, Hardly Used, What Offers?
16. Let Us Now Phone Famous Men
17. The Rime of the Ancient Film-maker
18. Good God, That's Never The Time, Is It?
20. Go Easy, Mr Beethoven, That Was Your Fifth!
21. Take the Wallpaper in the Left Hand and the Hammer in the Right . . .
22. Owing to Circumstances Beyond our Control 1984 has been Unavoidably Detained . . .
23. Foreword to
Golfing for Cats
: An Apology to the Bookseller
24. Baby Talk, Keep Talking Baby Talk
26. And Though They Do Their Best To Bring Me Aggravation . . .
30. The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World
Appendix: The Bulletins of Idi Amin
32. All O' De People, All De Time
Introduction
by Clive James
39. The Gospel According to St Durham
40. O Little Town of Cricklewood
42. For Fear of Finding Something Worse
46. True Snails Read (anag., 8, 6)
The Cricklewood Years: 1990â1999
Introduction
by A.A. Gill
51. Here We Go Round the Prickly Pear
54. Good God, That's Never The Time? (2)
57. Brightly Shone The Rain That Night
59. The Queen, My Lord, is Quite Herself, I Fear
60. The Green Hills of Cricklewood
63. Doom'd For a Certain Term to Walk the Night
66. The Leaving of Cricklewood
67. Lo, Yonder Waves the Fruitful Palm!
Introduction
by Stephen Fry
82. All Quiet On The Charity Front
83. Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well!
by Giles and Victoria Coren
Giles:
So who's going to write the introduction?
Victoria:
I thought we were doing it together.
G:
I don't know. I've never written with anyone else. He never wrote with anyone else.
V:
It's not that hard. One person types, the other one paces . . .
G:
And how do we refer to him? If it's a serious essay, making a case for his inclusion in the canon, he ought to be referred to as âCoren'. But that would be weird, coming from us.
V:
Well, we can't write âOur father'. That sounds like God. âDaddy?' We can't call him Daddy. That's just embarrassing.
G:
Maybe it would be better if someone else wrote it. If we do it, it looks like vanity publishing. Any old twonk can die and have his children bind up his writing and say it's great. Maybe we should ask an academic to do the introduction, to give it some gravitas.
V:
He'd like an academic. For a long time he thought he was going to be one, after all. He spent those two years at Yale and Berkeley on the Commonwealth Fellowship.
G:
And there was post-grad at Oxford before he went. And his First was a serious First. I think maybe even the top one in the year. He got the Violet Vaughan Morgan scholarship.
V:
I always confused that with his medal for ballroom dancing.
G:
No no, that was just called âthe junior bronze'.
V:
Do you think he'd have enjoyed being an academic?
G:
Probably, but I don't think his students would have enjoyed failing their exams because all they had at the end of term was a lot of jokes about Flaubert's haemorrhoids, and an ability to write parodies of Trollope as spoken by two dustmen from Croydon.
V:
He was brilliant, though. It's a rare man who can go on a panel game and work an argument about the exact dates of the Augustan period in English literature into the middle of a John Wayne impression.
G:
He was happier doing it in the middle of a John Wayne impression. Remember how he used the phrase â
homme
sérieux
', with a little flounce of the heel? He thought the very idea of a serious person was somehow preposterous.
V:
He could have made a wonderful tutor in the 1960s, when it was about infusing students with a love of literature, rather than the rigours of critical theory.
G:
But he had a short attention span. That's also why he never wrote a novel. He had ideas for novels, but they were always flashy ideas with a great first sentence. He could never quite be bothered to sit down and write them.
V:
Let's not get an academic to write the introduction. We've got serious people introducing each decade anyway.
G:
Serious like Victoria Wood, do you mean? Or serious like Stephen Fry?
V:
They're serious comedians. And Clive James is a heavyweight.
G:
And A.A. Gill spells his name with initials, which is the
sine qua non
of academia. That's better than being a Regius professor. T.S. Eliot, A.J.P. Taylor, F.R. Leavis, A.C. Bradley . . .
V:
P.T. Barnum.
G:
We still need someone for the 1960s.
V:
The four people doing the later decades have written âappreciations' of someone who was already quite established by then. They're brilliant pieces. But for the 60s, it would be nice to have someone who knew him really well personally, when he was young.
G:
Uncle Gus?
V:
I was thinking more of Melvyn Bragg. They were at Wadham together, they've been friends ever since â and if you asked most British people to name an academic, they'd probably say Melvyn Bragg anyway. Or Peter Ustinov.
G:
Melvyn is a big name. And he does carry intellectual weight. But he won't get the bums on seats at readings in Borehamwood and Elstree like Uncle Gus would.
V:
I'm asking Melvyn. And I think we should do the main introduction ourselves. So what shall we write in it?
G:
Well, if we were going to treat him as a serious writer, we'd start with the Saul Bellow stuff. The lower-middle-class Jewish home in Southgate. Osidge Primary. East Barnet Grammar. The inspirational English teacher, Ann Brooks, who encouraged him to join the library and start reading. Growing up in the war. The mother who was a hairdresser. The father who was a . . . what was Grandpa Sam exactly? A plumber?
V:
That's what they said. I think it's just that he had a spanner. He was an odd job man really. I also heard he was a debt collector.
G:
And I heard Great Grandpa Harry was a circus strongman, but I doubt it was true. Harry was born in Poland in 1885 and left in 1903 before the pogroms started. A smart man is what he was.
V:
Sam and Martha dreamed of Daddy being articled to a solicitor, didn't they? That's the other reason he loved Miss Brooks, because she went round to the house and persuaded them that he should apply to Oxford instead.
G:
God, a solicitor. He'd have been so miserable. And, of course, nepotism being what it is, we'd have ended up solicitors as well. And then we'd have been really miserable too.
