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  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.

  Aladdin, the tale of the younger son of a Chinese laundry woman and his love for the Emperor’s daughter, turns out to have an appropriately yuppie message for our times: all you have to do is rub a magic lamp (make the right deal, buy the clever futures) and you’ll get your heart’s desire of goods, services, and love. It also has one archetypally Freudian moment, when the virginal boy Aladdin (played by a virginally pretty girl in very short skirts) is being tempted by the wicked Abanazer to visit the Dark Cave, where all the Secret Treasure is stored. “Shall I go in, children?” this innocent yet desirable boy-girl juve lead winsomely asks of his/her prepubescent audience. “Nooo!” they bellow back, most pleadingly. But in she goes, into the Dark Cave of the Secret Treasure, and wise old heads in the audience nod knowingly.

  Mainly, however, the show consists of a series of quick-change acts designed to juggle the disparate interests of the audience: distract the kids, placate the mums, titillate the dads. Characters arrive by motorbike or fly past unsteadily on wires; a “Chinese” chorus line (a strange concept anyway, given the presumed prudery of that nation) flashes its satin knickers; a TV magician with no perceptible plot function pops up to do a series of tricks, then yields to Dooby Duck and His Friends, a collection of foot-high string-puppet animals who dance to disco music—an act somewhat lost on a grown-up stage. Nor should we forget the Chinese Policemen, fearsome enforcers of the Emperor’s commands. In this version, they are played by the Roly Polys, a variety act consisting of half a dozen fat ladies aged roughly between thirty and fifty, who pander to the idea that female corpulence is intrinsically risible. Naturally plumpish, they are padded and costumed into grossness, and, in one of the stranger bits of transnational transvestism, play the Chinese Policemen as Victorian bobbies. They sing and dance in an approximate way—no doubt part of their charm—and as their porky contribution to the wedding feast for Aladdin and his Princess the Roly Polys troop on to perform “Anything Goes.” In panto, truly it does.

  STILL, FOR GROTESQUE comedy with which to ring in the nineties the professional stage had to yield, and not for the first time, to the House of Commons. When MPTV began, newspapers ran features on “The MPs to Watch,” but none of them picked out the clown who was to enliven the New Year with a good old-fashioned upstaging extracurricular-sex court case. Ron Brown, Labour MP for Edinburgh Leith, is a forty-nine-year-old bouffant-haired left-winger ritually described as a “maverick”—that term which Parliamentary commentators reserve for those who are potty but interesting, loopy but semilovable, and seriously unfit for higher office. There are more such characters nowadays on the Labour benches than on the Conservative ones. Labour cherishes them for their colorfulness, their smack of nonconformity, their ability to discomfit, and their reminder that the Labour Party is, after all, a broad church. The Tories also cherish these loose cannons of the Opposition for their ability to embarrass their own leadership, for their regular and pungent proof that the whole Labour Party is deeply irresponsible.

  Ron Brown was elected to Parliament in 1979. Two years later, he was banned from the Commons for five days after calling a Tory MP a liar; more recently, he was banned again, after seizing the Mace during a debate and denting it. (His repair bill came to almost twelve hundred pounds.) When he was arrested in Glasgow while protesting against a visit to the city by Mrs. Thatcher, it apparently took the police some time to become convinced that he could possibly be an MP as he claimed. (Fine: fifty pounds.) But his two most tabloid-stirring exploits hitherto had been a mission to Colonel Qaddafi, in Libya, and an all-expenses-paid visit to the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan: photos of the MP posing beside a Soviet tank were muc
h enjoyed by the Tories, and caused him to be satirically known in the House for a while as Brown of Kandahar. Such trips were enthusiastically denounced at the time, though recent events have confirmed that the problem of finding friends in a changing political world isn’t confined to mavericks. In 1978, for instance, President Ceauşescu and his wife came on a state visit to Britain at a time when Romania was seen as the dissident in the Soviet bloc. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and Ceauşescu was awarded an honorary knighthood by the Queen. (This comparatively rare honor is given to much-favored nonnatives: recipients have included Bob Geldof, Ronald Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, and Magnus Magnusson, the Icelandic TV star.) But then, after Gorbachev, Romania changed its status from Plucky Bulwark Against Soviet Imperialism to Filthy Little Balkan Dictatorship. (It was always both, of course, but countries rarely attain a complex, dual labeling in the eyes of others.) And in the brief hiatus between Ceauşescu’s fall and his execution, the Queen managed to strip the Romanian leader of his embarrassing knighthood.

  Ron Brown, as his recent legal entanglement disclosed, is a flouter of even more traditions than had been supposed. Over the last thirty years or so, it has become almost a Parliamentary rule that disgrace visits the two main parties in different ways. Tories are busted for sex, and Labourites are busted for graft. This doesn’t mean that Labour MPs are tight-buttoned spouses and Tories financially impeccable, but merely that they are discreet—or wily—in different areas of life. With Ron Brown, though, it was sex, and the erotic angle ensured that the imbroglio which came to court in Lewes, Sussex, became known as the Case of Nonna’s Knickers.

  For three years, Mr. Brown had his life well worked out. He kept his wife and his constituency in Scotland, his mistress and his Commons seat in England. Nonna Longden, the woman in the case, even managed to accompany him as his “secretary” on the visit to Colonel Qaddafi. There was the occasional hiccup—like a report in the tabloid press that Ron and Nonna had had sex in a shower within the precincts of the House of Commons—but nothing too unusual, nothing that wasn’t deniable. When the couple broke up, however, Mrs. Longden took a new lover—one Dermot Redmond, a carpet salesman in a tweed deerstalker—who happened to have a criminal record as a con man, and things got livelier. One day, Brown visited Nonna’s apartment near Hastings, and here versions of what ensued differ. According to the prosecution, the MP, in a state of inebriation and jealousy, went berserk, and smashed all the windows in the flat with a bottle of Liebfraumilch; when the quailing Nonna summoned Dermot the carpet salesman for assistance, the MP stole a tape recorder, two pairs of knickers, a photograph of Mrs. Longden, a gold bar brooch, and a pair of china earrings, then decamped. According to the defense. Mr. Brown was merely having a quiet drink with Mrs. Longden when the carpet salesman erupted into the household, and it was his jealous rage that caused all the damage to the apartment. Moreover, the MP had no intention of permanently depriving Nonna of her valuables; he had taken them merely as bargaining counters against the return of some “politically sensitive” tapes in her possession—over which, incidentally, she was trying to blackmail him for twenty thousand pounds. As for the two pairs of knickers, it was Mrs. Longden herself who, ironically, had wrapped them round the tape recorder, and that explained their presence in the MP’s pocket when he was arrested by police at the local railway station.

  The Case of Nonna’s Knickers enlivened the Crown Court at Lewes (and the surrounding Tory constituency) for a week. The bottle of Liebfraumilch, with a plume of grass waving from its neck, was displayed to the jury; so were the two pairs of knickers (one white and one black, for the record). Mrs. Ron Brown sat in court all week “silently supporting her husband”—or perhaps silently cursing his very name. Mr. Brown himself declined to take the witness stand, a decision from which nothing may be legally inferred but from which observers usually choose to infer plenty—in the present case, the probable view of the MP’s lawyers that if their client were allowed to get up on his hind legs he would make a spectacular ass of himself and be eaten alive by the prosecution. The jury was faced with two separate charges and two wildly differing accounts of reality. Sagely, it split the difference: the MP was found not guilty of theft but guilty of criminal damage. (Fine: £1,000. Compensation: £628. Contribution to prosecution costs: £2,500.) Judge John Gower, QC, said, “I’m almost afraid to mention the words ladies’ knickers, because they have assumed a significance out of all proportion to their rightful place in this case.” Mrs. Ron Brown said, “My marriage is as good today as twenty-seven years ago,” and declared herself unsurprised by her husband’s behavior, “knowing men and having lived with one for twenty-seven years.” Ron Brown himself, on being asked whether he was considering resignation, said, “No, why should I?”

  Why should he? It’s well known that a drunk-driving conviction does not diminish a judge’s authority in the courts, though quite what degree of criminality is acceptable among those who construct and administer Britain’s laws has never been officially laid down. In the present instance, the wise heads who weigh such matters tended to agree—theoretically, at least—with Mr. Brown. Had he been convicted of theft, he would have had to resign, but conviction for the lesser offense of wielding a bottle of Liebfraumilch in such a way as to commit damage passionel did not in itself diminish an MP’s ability to represent his constituents and adorn his party. However, there is the manner as well as the matter of conviction to consider, and here Mr. Brown yet again did not behave in the accepted way. An MP emerging from court in his position is expected to say that the experience has been a deeply chastening one, that he has sworn off booze and mistresses for life and will humbly serve his constituents in whatever capacity they determine, be it only stamp licker and envelope sealer. Mr. Brown, however, was in triumphalist mood. What did he think of the verdict? “It’s a moral victory,” he bullishly declared. The gentlemen of Fleet Street, who had done well out of the story, presented the MP with a bottle of champagne. Mr. Brown shook it vigorously and showered the contents all over himself and Mrs. Brown. In this celebratory pose did the guilty MP bedeck the front pages next morning.

  You are allowed to be a maverick; you are allowed even to be a minor criminal. But as an MP you are not allowed to be a cringe-making clown and a relentless embarrassment. You are not expected to load the gun and press it into the opponent’s hands. Sir Anthony Meyer has just discovered this: having impudently challenged Mrs. Thatcher for the leadership, he has now been “deselected” (the current political euphemism for “sacked”) by his constituency party, and will be put out to grass at the next election. And, on the other side of the House, Mr. Brown finds that his local party has denounced him, Neil Kinnock is after his blood, and nobody wants to hear his pathetic plea that the celebratory champagne was, in fact, mere sparkling wine. His chances of representing Edinburgh Leith at the next election are officially estimated at zero. However, given the nature of notoriety, there will always be a place for Ron Brown. The Rector of Stiffkey, who in a famous prewar morals case was dispossessed of his benefice, ended his days exhibiting himself in a lion’s cage. (The resident lion, drawing on distant Roman memories, finally ate the Christian.) Mr. Brown might not have to go to such lengths as this; but he could do worse than start auditioning right now for the part of Mother Goose.

  March 1990

  Ron Brown was deselected by the Edinburgh Leith Labour Party. He fought the 1992 election there on an independent Labour ticket, without success. Mrs. Thatcher’s impermanence was less predictable.

  2

  Fake!

  We’re back in London again,” Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henri Cazalis in 1863, “the country of the fake Rubens paintings” The poet’s judgment doubtless indicates a wider Gallic prejudice of the time, but it’s no mere catty hyperbole. A casual tramp through the average stately home will take you past walls hung with pictures still confidently identified as being by Raphael, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and other masters. Were most of
them entered at auction, they would suffer the gentle torture of politely vilifying qualification—“school of,” “style of,” or the humiliating deletion of the painter’s Christian name to denote uncertainty. It’s not that the British are more naive or more aesthetically dim than other races; it’s simply that fakery follows wherever money leads (the Japanese taste for Impressionists and for the work of Bernard Buffet is doubtless inspiring contemporary forgers, while in Buenos Aires, for some reason, the favorite fakee is Guido Reni), and Britain has for many centuries run a financial surplus. Besides, an artist rarely produces at exactly the rate the market requires; spare capacity or spare cash is the usual condition. Sometimes this results in the artist breaking his back or his talent to accommodate the patron. Thus Canaletto was known to the Venetians as “the painter the English spoiled” (and it does seem unfair that for all his fecundity there is scarcely a Canaletto to be seen in his native city). More usually, the gap between creative output and market demand is met by a merry band of fakers. Gazing at the rows of bumped and blackened Old Masters that still adorn the Big House, with their crazy-paving glaze and shameless attribution, one is tempted to imagine the circumstances of these questionable purchases some two or more centuries ago. It makes a little Italian genre scene, a picturesque morality. The svelte young milord posts into town on the second leg of his Grand Tour, accompanied only by a wise old tutor and a bag of doubloons; he expresses ardent interest in the local artists, and perhaps the more famous ones from the larger cities; and before Milord has dusted off his hat the word has gone out to old Luigi round the corner to put a little extra age on that veritable masterpiece he bodged together the week before last.