Making the Cat Laugh (24 page)

Neither of us, however, could get FM in our bathrooms, so we formed an instant bond and became the Bathroom Contingent, marching on behalf of Long Wave bathrooms throughout the land. Meanwhile I couldn’t help inwardly pondering the health consequences of repeatedly opening the fridge for the sake of good bits on
Pick of the Week
. John Birt’s BBC no doubt has many things on its conscience, but the potential for dealing bacteriological food-poisoning to a nation of
Guardian
readers has surely escaped its purview until now.

When we arrived at Broadcasting House, our reception – appropriately enough – was a bit fuzzy, and depended on
where you were standing. Suddenly mob-like once we stopped moving, we assembled outside the Langham Hotel and raised our educated voices against those unresponsive grey stone walls, waggling our balloons in an aggressive manner, until eventually a bloke in a suit (Phil Harding) came out to meet us and shoved through the crowd, filmed by BBC news. And that was it; the balloons were collected; we all drifted off to John Lewis for a bit of light shopping. According to reports in the Sunday papers, Mr Harding said, ‘I’m listening; I’m listening,’ but I didn’t hear him. Perhaps I was wearing the wrong shoes.

But what I will remember is the weird experience of waiting across the road for something to happen. Extra police materialized – making us feel more agitated, of course – and we started to grow restive. After all, if there was one thing guaranteed to make us livid, it was the feeling of being ignored by the BBC. I had a nasty moment, I can tell you, when it suddenly struck me that if a riot broke out I might go down in broadcasting history as a member of the Bathroom Two.

Since supermarket shopping is probably the most dismal, routine, mindless, time-wasting and wrist-slitting element in most people’s lives, it was at first glance rather baffling to discover that ITV was planning
Supermarket Sweep,
a weekday morning game show in which contestants are tested (and rewarded) on their ability to answer simple questions about products and then hurtle down the aisles, lobbing big cartons of washing-powder into overloaded trolleys amid whoops of excitement from a studio audience. ‘Oh heavenly doo-dahs, that the culture should be reduced to this,’ I sighed (in a vague, regretful kind of way): ‘Stop the world, I want to get off; to have seen what I have seen, see what I see.’ Admittedly shopping is
a skill (some people are certainly better at it than others), but as an intellectual test, you have to admit, it’s just one small step from asking people to spell their own name, or open their own front door and switch the light on.

The first
Supermarket Sweep
was shown yesterday, and yes, the above exchange did take place, no kidding. Of course, the programme’s proceedings bore no relation to supermarket shopping in the real nightmare, universal sense (which would have made it interesting): none of the trolleys were fixed so that they slewed violently sideways into the biscuits; no mad people blocked the aisles muttering over a basket of teabags and kitchen roll. The real skill in supermarket shopping is to get round (and out) without the banality of the experience reducing you to screams or blackouts. But none of this was reflected in
Supermarket Sweep,
which was the opposite of shopping anyway, because the strategy was to locate only the most expensive stuff, and eschew the bargains. How interesting, moreover, that the climactic ‘checkout’ section was cunningly edited for highlights, so we never found out whether the contestants were obliged to yawn and stare at the ceiling while a clueless overalled youth disappeared with their unmarked tin of beans, and then, once out of view, decided to forsake this humdrum life and catch a plane to Guatemala.

Politically, I get confused by programmes such as this. If the idea is to make uneducated people feel good about themselves, it churns up highly equivocal feelings of, on the one
hand, ‘Right on, give them a chance!’ and on the other, ‘Could we please go back to the eighteenth-century notion of improvement and start again?’ In the modern world, careless congratulatory talk has been taken literally, with appalling results. ‘You ought to be on the stage’ was a thoughtless cliché that led straight to karaoke; ‘You ought to be on the telly’ led to Jeremy Beadle; and ultimately, ‘You’re so good at shopping, you ought to go on
Mastermind’
led, in the very last tick-tock minutes of civilization, as the hourglass sands drained finally and softly away, to
Supermarket Sweep.
Personally, I reckon I know the ground-floor layout of John Lewis so intimately I could traverse it blindfold. But it’s odd to think there’s any intrinsic virtue in that. Rather the reverse, really: it’s the shameful sign of a misspent adulthood.

The additionally consoling thing for the
Supermarket Sweep
contestants, of course, is that they can beat the brainboxes in their own arena. Just think, if you put Eric Korn and Irene Thomas (the legendary
Round Britain Quiz
London team) in this grab-a-trolley-and-run situation, they would almost certainly be rubbish. Told to collect ‘Tuna and sweetcorn cottage cheese, a litre of bleach, and high-juice lemon squash,’ they would pause and frown, musing, putting two and two together, while the others bolted for the shelves in tracksuit and trainers, and performed heroic wheelies by the fridge. ‘Sweetcorn. Mm. Bleach. Lemons,’ says Irene Thomas with a happy quizzical overtone, indicating that she’s spotted the arcane link between these disparate items already. ‘Would
Der Rosenkavalier
help us here? Yes, I thought it would …’ Oh dear. And the answer he wanted was dog food. It just goes to show the limits of a classical education.

In times of stress, I firmly believe, you must reach for the family Bible, close your eyes tight, allow the book to drop open, and stab the page forcefully with a compass point wielded in a random arc. The idea is not just that the violence of the act will make you feel better (although it does), but that fortune will somehow guide you to a relevant helpful passage, while at the same time miraculously preventing you from impaling your other hand to the desk.

Superstitious? Certainly, and especially the last bit. But I am sure I have seen evidence of its efficacy, if only in the movies. You know: gangsters staring agape in shock when the book falls open at ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ (Numbers xxxii, 23) just seconds before a curtained window is suddenly blown to smithereens a couple of feet behind them.

Anyway, spending a lot of time on my own, I sometimes devote the odd couple of hours to testing the theory of Bible-dropping, rather as if I were an infinite number of monkeys bent on disproving the notion of dramatic genius. The happy sound of ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ sometimes emanates from my flat all day long. Where other people might, as a matter of course, consult Patric Walker or the I Ching (or Spillikins) before applying for a job or taking a trip abroad, there are days when I scarcely plan a journey to the post box without first securing some random canonical go-ahead from Deuteronomy in the Authorized Version.

I don’t take it seriously, not really. But on the other hand I have had some pretty startling results. Take the other day. I had been experimenting in the kitchen again, had concocted a rather interesting Lentil and Pink Marshmallow Bolognese in a saucepan. Obviously I now required guidance: should I take a picture of it before slinging it in the bin? I shut my eyes, flipped open the Good Book, poked it with the bread knife, and what do you think it said? It said: ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ (Genesis iii, 13). Blimey. How spooky. I tried it
again. ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ And this time I got II Kings iv, 40: ‘There is death in the pot.’

Sometimes the messages are a bit mysterious. Once, when I had been drawing losers for hours – ‘Go up, thou bald head’ (?); ‘And they spoiled the Egyptians’ (?) – and wumping and slashing like an early agricultural machine in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
I suddenly got a rather grumpy-sounding ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’ (Proverbs xxvi, 11), which drew me up short for a minute. Some significance here, perhaps? Naturally, I decided to have another go. And this time I got ‘The dog is turned to his vomit
again’
(II Peter ii, 22). Weird, eh? But completely unfathomable, alas.

Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that I recently discovered a potential application for this unusual hobby of mine. Browsing in a religious bookshop one rainy afternoon, and flicking through Bibles (‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ met my gaze immediately, so I knew things were running to form), I discovered a rack of biblical posters. And much as I dislike slander in matters of taste, these posters were truly horrid – in the classical sense of making all your hair stick out like spines on a hedgehog. Who could be responsible for these ghastly things, I wondered. I could only suppose that the infinite number of monkeys had been up to their usual tricks.

Imagine, if you will, two large fluffy ducklings waddling away down a country lane at sunset, with underneath the legend ‘Can two walk together, except they be agreed?’ I mean, is this sick, or what? A pair of cute kids hold hands in a lush pasture, bathed in summer light, and one holds out a daisy-chain to the other. ‘God loveth a cheerful giver,’ it says. Two tiger cubs embrace roughly, evidently mindful of the injunction of ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ I ask you, what a paltry use of the imagination. I nearly produced some new vomit to come back to later on.

But on the other hand, I did rush home with a whole new sense of purpose. My idea was simple: take this ghastly notion to its natural bathetic extreme. A man could be shown reprimanding a cat that has unaccountably stalked out of the room halfway through the
EastEnders
omnibus: ‘What,’ he says, in a speech bubble, ‘could ye not watch with me one hour?’ Good, eh? A woman, evidently frazzled from shopping, could be shown consulting a list in a dusty foreign market, and looking jolly peeved. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ could be written underneath.

I hope my posters will give pleasure somewhere. Meanwhile I shall cheerfully continue with my Bible-bashing. I got ‘We have as it were brought forth wind’ the other day (Isaiah xxvi, 18), and I can’t say it hasn’t given me lots to think about. An acquaintance has gently suggested to me that any big book – telephone directory, Argos Catalogue – will work equally well for my purposes, but I suspect this is a fallacy. Faced with a dilemma, surely nobody wants to know that the answer is an automatic pet-feeder at £12.99, or ‘Mr H. MacGuire, 26 Fulwell Gardens, W6’. Unless of course (by some remote probability) you are Mrs MacGuire, suffering from amnesia. Or you have suddenly acquired an infinite number of monkeys, all demanding meals at funny intervals.