Strictly personal

Frederic Raphael's monthly notebook
December 20, 1997

There must be authors who go to bookshops for readings without being confronted only with an uneasy manager and an audience who had expected someone else. I am not of their award-winning number. Hence I went glumly to Waterstone's on Guy Fawkes' Night (when will someone demonstrate against the celebration of the torture and execution of a brave and honourable man?) in order to take part in a post-Platonic dialogue with Ray Monk.

I scarcely expected a shop full of fans for the launch of the first dozen of the Great Philosophers series which we have been editing, especially as Manchester United were playing on television as usual. So imagine my amazement when we were told that all tickets had been allocated (only sophists sell tickets for philosophical occasions) and that people had been turned away.

In the present Age of Unreason, I was touched to find 120 citizens who were interested in abstract questions, who did not yell abuse and who had renounced a chance to celebrate a goal at the Stretford End in order to ask how far the Socratic Plato was a "mimetic" travesty of the real Socrates or whether Russell's judgement of Wittgenstein was a fair one. (It wasn't because Russell became shamefully jealous, even omitting his "German friend" entirely from his History of Western Philosophy.)

When I remarked afterwards to an old friend how gratifying it was that so many people had turned up, he reminded me that, after his properly acclaimed biographical work, Ray was a big draw. Fine.

u u u

dr monk is now deep into the second volume of his life of Russell, to which I was able to offer a foot-or little toe-note, as a result of meeting a doctor in Bangkok with whom I was at Cambridge. Paddy Dickson and his Siamese wife were once habitu?s of 5 Jordan's Yard, a louche and terminally decrepit house inestimably dear to the memories of now obsolete Bohemians. "Jordan's Yard" was the porous home of John Bricknell, a ballistics expert whose parties were generous but not all-embracing. Paddy remembered (he said) opening the door to an elderly gentleman who asserted that he had been given an oral invitation. Since Jordan's Yard was often the target of gate crashers of an amorous disposition, though rarely white-haired ones, Paddy denied him entry. It was at that moment, he says, that I stepped forward and said, "You can't say no to Bertrand Russell." (We called him "Bertie," of course, except to his face.) In he therefore came. What Russell did at the party, or what sense-data he collected, I cannot say; the chorus from the Ballet Rambert was present and I was eager "to unphilosophise" (one of) them. I fear that Ray may consider that my role in Russell's senile ?ducation sentimentale does not warrant a place in his second volume. My failure to figure in the pending index may not be of a place with Wittgenstein's omission from The History of Western Philosophy, but it's close...

u u u

dorothy parker once said that the two sweetest words in the English language were "cheque enclosed." I received two letters last week which, mutatis mutandis, carried that message. One of them was from a BBC clerk who appended his direct line, in case I had any queries, although he has been shrewd enough not to answer it. He proposed to pay me ?50 for the use of two minutes of obiter dicta from Quote... Unquote, a radio show in which I made one (apparently) unforgettable appearance. It seemed quite a reasonable offer, but should I really sell all my rights in anything in perpetuity for the price of a meal for two without wine? The other letter enclosed a cheque for roughly ?900 (not bad) and constituted my share (5.4 per cent or somewhere in that decimally-pointed area) of the gross sum paid by UK Gold to Granada TV for a drama series which I wrote when David Plowright was in charge. After the War consisted of ten episodes of an hour each (52 minutes plus ads): in other words, I was getting less than ?100 per episode. Now I am not a greedy man, nor a hungry one, luckily, but what do you make of the fact that, at the current rates of exchange, two minutes of audio cassette (in perpetuity) is worth half an hour of repeated television? What I make of it, and on good authority, is that both I and the actors have been thoroughly stitched up by the agencies-in my case the Writers' Guild of Great Britain-who were empowered to make agreements on behalf of all professional writers. They did not notice (nor have the wit to guess) that the opposition's lawyers (I didn't say shysters, but I will, if rung on my private line) might be less than candid about how the television moguls would sell their products (mine and the actors') at fire-sale prices to "new" companies in which they, the moguls, but not we, the creators, had an interest. As a result, an hour of After the War is, by my reckoning, costing UK Gold less than ?2,000. Consider the amount of advertising for which this allows space and then admire the Thatcherite legislators who, in order to spite the BBC, allowed all this finaigling to take place in the name of a free (rigged) market. Writers never stop complaining. I can't think why.