What is the ill-mannered pig question? It is this: why are so many (famous) people now being imitated, on a worldwide basis, by ill-mannered pigs? Supplementaries run along the following lines: (a) "Do they know that this is happening?"; (b) "Is this possibly a service they pay for?"; and if (b), then (c): "How can I/you arrange for my/your telephone to be answered by an IMP thus ensuring that we are taken for persons of quality?"
What is this all about? It is partly about the ill-mannered pig who impersonated Norman Mailer when I telephoned him at Brown's Hotel during his spell in London promoting his messianic autobiography, The Gospel According to the Son, alternatively known as Jee-suss. As I am fronting (better than prioritising at least) a modest series about divinities, past and present, my producer incited me to make the call, even though cold-selling is not my forte. I was hoping to charm (ha!) Mailer into explaining to Channel 4 viewers what it felt like to be the late J Christ Esq.
It is any man or woman's right to repel incursions into his or her privacy, although those who come to town for publicity purposes can hardly expect privacy, a priori. In any case, hotels can always be instructed not to put calls through. So why did Norman decide to have his phone manned by a hungover porcine bouncer who failed to understand simple, courteous (not to say obsequious) English? For God's sake, all I wanted was to offer him (Him?) the chance to rise again next Easter, when our series will, I am told, be screened.
we watched the funeral, or most of it, on very early morning television in Santa Monica, where I was rewriting a movie. Since then the press has been garrulous with approval for the new Latin-style emotions of the British people. Whether or not the new Brits are as deeply moved by what happens in their own homes or their own streets is doubtful. Have Tony Blair's people ever been ruder, shovier or honkier? Has there ever been a time when giving your word meant less or loving your neighbour was a more demanding assignment? So, on what grounds has record-breaking flower-heaping been saluted as evidence of a change of national style?
The crucial moment was, of course, when Earl Spencer's speech was so widely applauded (in the streets outside the Abbey) before being, so to say, narrowly applauded within. The last time I remember applause at a funeral was at Judge Giovanni Falcone's after his murder by the Mafia. The clapping in Palermo both saluted his corpse and derided the government(s) whose long complicity with mafiosi was a scandal which no one had found the right moment to nail.
The British applause was, I suspect, not for Spencer's nerve, nor did it necessarily endorse the idea of a different kind of royal family. On the contrary, might it not have reproached the royals precisely for having become rather too much like the rest of us?
As Elton John would say, it seemed to me that the common(ers') reaction was more conservative than revolutionary. What it wanted to conserve was a certain idea of morality which the royal divorce, in particular, has scorned. Diana's eviction from the royal family ended the Windsors' apparent deference to middle-class propriety. Ever since the Abdication (i.e. time immemorial), those proprieties had been formally observed: at the very top at least, the family stayed together and prayed together. It has generally been held to be essential that people in high positions set an example; it avoids the need for the rest of us to follow it.
When Diana was isolated, humiliated and docked of her HRH, it was done under the rubric of modern morals, one clause of which is that if someone (in this case Charles) is unhappy, he has a right, or even a duty, to want out. But if the royals are to be allowed to practise the same freedoms as their subjects, why should they be paid (and deferred to) for being different?
In the psycho-babbling paperbacks, marital fidelity has, of course, long been devalued. At the time of the divorce, no one who wanted to avoid ridicule raised any objection to the princely bullshit which equated the pursuit of personal "happiness" with a man's inescapable obligation to break his pledged word. But, but... the nonconformist conscience may not be dead, merely embarrassed.
Maybe the applause for Spencer was not so much in support of his insolence as against the divorce which had been advertised as a New Age-style escape from a fraudulent marriage. (The bogus "honesty" of Charles and his chums has at times been quite unbearable to behold.)
Of course royal marriages have often, if not always, been loveless affairs, but neither Diana nor the British public knew enough history to be aware of that fact. The bouquets which clogged the royal gates were mourning not only for the princess but also for the traditional right of the British people to insist that their princes be hypocrites.
"Something is going to fall like rain," Auden once wrote, "and it won't be flowers." It was though; and no umbrella could protect the royals from being drenched.
