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Sir David Low “Colonel Blimp” (pre-WWII)

Doodles while watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp criterion extras.

“Gad, sir...!”

It was with these words that Colonel Blimp, Turkish-bath towel wrapped around expansive tummy, began nearly every one of his pronouncements in the 1930s-40s cartoons by David Low.

(The 1943 film based on them is well worth watching. Martin Scorsese was instrumental in its restoration.)

Blimp was, of course, a caricature of a certain kind of person with a certain state of mind. Here he is:

The moustache is out of period now - indeed, it was out of period then - but the state of mind is modern enough and so is the complexion, needing only a pineapple ring for garnish. As for the cartoons themselves, some are quite startlingly appropriate for our time as well as theirs...

“À la recherche du Blimps perdu” (cough *smartass* cough) was prompted by finally getting my hands on a copy of George MacDonald Fraser’s 2002 book “The Light’s On At Signpost; memoirs of the movies, among other matters”.

Fraser (d. 2008) is a writer whose fiction - and wartime memoir “Quartered Safe Out Here” - I hugely enjoy, and here he relates anecdotes about his screenwriting work in Hollywood and his cynicism-free encounters with various movie stars and industry bigwigs.

So far, so good.

However those “other matters” are all the things in the modern world that got up his nose, put a burr under his saddle, chafed his bum like a pair of sandpaper underpants... You get the picture. Things like political correctness, politicians, Cool Britannia (anyone remember that?), metric measurements, Europe, foreigners, loss of Empire, etc. etc.

(Also amusing, in a crooked way, are references to iniquities visited upon “the British taxpayer”, which are pretty rich - I use the word deliberately - from someone who avoided being one of them by a rapid change of residence after the “Flashman” money started flowing.)

The odd part is that a fair bit of it actually makes sense - except when, as he too often does, Fraser cranks the dials all the way up until their needles snap off. There are occasions when the mind’s less kind eye can see veins throbbing in the sweating scarlet forehead while froth drips from the chin...

Humour magazine “Punch” was making fun of this kind of thing back in the 1920s...

(Bright young spark to startled companion: ”Be careful, it’s very dangerous this side of the General. This is the arm he invariably sweeps the country free of Bolshies with at dinner.”)

It would be a splendid satire if it wasn’t sincerely meant, but it IS sincere, and produced reviews from the left-wing “Guardian”…

Flash goes to the movies

DJ Taylor on George MacDonald Fraser's happy memories of Hollywood, “The Light's On at Signpost”

DJ Taylor

Sat 15 Jun 2002 16.57 CEST

George MacDonald Fraser's garrulous memoir reposes in that category of literature known as "bestseller's vagary", the kind of book whose publication rests entirely on the distinction of the person writing it. In recent years this genre has produced a number of variant forms. HarperCollins, for example - MacDonald Fraser's sponsors, by coincidence - were once forced to bring out a work of political philosophy by the thriller writer Craig Thomas. The process even works by proxy, as when Alex Haley's publishers were leaned on to issue his wife's reflections on "marrying a best-seller".

Well, take it from me, the item under review would never have appeared between hard covers had it not been written by the author of The Flashman Papers, MacDonald Fraser's multi-volume chronicle of the later life of the villain of Tom Brown's Schooldays.

That's not to say that The Light's On at Signpost - an abstruse movie reference - is without a great deal of incidental interest. Now in his lateish 70s, MacDonald Fraser has clearly had quite a life: war service in Burma (the subject of his poignant memoir, Quartered Safe Out Here); newspaperman's career on the Glasgow Herald leading on to late 1960s reinvention as our premier historical novelist; and a parallel life as a Hollywood screenwriter.

While the world of books supplies a few of his celebrity walk-ons - Kingsley Amis, for instance, remarking of the young Martin: "I wish him well... [pause]. Not too well" - the big names are mostly drawn from the Burbank lots. A plump elderly man shuffles forward in praise of Flashman; he turns out to be Chaplin. Fellini (implausibly canvassed as director for an underwater sci-fi flick) has trouble with his burglar alarm. Schwarzenegger twits a maître d' on his restaurant's inadequate air-conditioning when he is asked to put on the obligatory jacket.

Like the "state of the nation" musings that wander side by side, the movie reminiscences are curiously diffuse. Occasional plums rise unexpectedly to break the surface of the bran.

What definitively establishes MacDonald Fraser's old-school credentials, oddly enough, is not the crustiness of his political and social opinions but the reverence offered up to the molten gods of Hollywood. Here in the age of Hello! and OK it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for movie actors, or to imagine that one would quail if caught up in their shadow. MacDonald Fraser, a veteran of the pre-war era when novelty of the cinema had not yet worn off, is endlessly charmed by the creaking old hams he comes across: the shaky transit of, say, an aged Gregory Peck across the restaurant foyer will always have him turning his head.

This huge and quite unfeigned respect extends even to the flesh-and-blood movie denizens of the modern age. Cubby Broccoli - MacDonald Fraser co-wrote Octopussy - is "an avuncular chairman" of script conferences. Even the stuntmen are somehow caught up in this paralysing glow of amity. For "sheer cold nerve and brilliance at their trade", BJ Worth and Rande Deluca "are in a class of their own".

All the time one wants some red-faced desk-thumper to kick over a table or rearrange the star's profile with a soda siphon. But it never happens, and only Burt Lancaster shows even the faintest sign that things, or MacDonald Fraser's scripts, are not to his taste.

Meanwhile, amid the Hollywood out-takes, the occasional clashes of titanic egos and the entertaining glances at the fiction (the first Flashman, inevitably, was turned down by nearly every publisher in London) lurk a dozen or so teeth-gnashings from the pundit's armchair: stern and entirely predictable harangues on such subjects as law and order, New Labour and so on, of which it might charitably be said that they would form a highly amusing parody-substitute for the Daily Mail, were that organ not readily to hand. Unhappily, it seems fairly certain that this was not MacDonald Fraser's aim in writing them. My sympathies to the harassed publishing executive who had to wave them through.

…and the right-wing “Telegraph”…

Very trenchant

Hugh Massingberd reviews “The Light's on at Signpost” by George MacDonald Fraser. 12 May 2002 • 12:01am

IN Anthony Powell's Journals, the novelist describes the experience of sitting next to Margaret Thatcher at a dinner party: "She only likes talking of public affairs, which I never find easy to discuss in a serious manner." I found myself feeling similarly uncomfortable while George MacDonald Fraser - of whose Flashman novels I am an enormous fan - is giving us the benefit of his seemingly inexhaustible opinions on such matters as the European Union, the British Empire, Scots nationalism, capital and corporal punishment, immigration, political correctness, the inhumanity of the liberal establishment, and so, predictably, on, in this strange mixed bag of a book.

"I am ranting, no doubt about it," he observes at one stage. As his rage poured out, in 10 separate blasts entitled "Angry Old Man", I was put in mind of the scene in The Inimitable Jeeves when Bertie Wooster pauses at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park "to get an earful" of a "bearded egg" (in fact, Bingo Little disguised in "shrubbery") slipping it into the Idle Rich with breadth and vigour. "A great gift of expression these fellows have," observes Bingo's unknowing uncle, Lord Bittlesham. "Very trenchant."

Yet, like Wodehouse, Fraser is incapable of writing a dull sentence. Clinton, for example, is referred to as "the repulsive poltroon of Pennsylvania Avenue". The "apology industry" is summed up as "one of the most truly rotten manifestations of p c". Braveheart was "insulting, inaccurate and dishonest drivel" and "that God-awful dirge, 'Flower of Scotland' must be the most pathetic whine ever set to music". No country "can call itself civilised which does not have the death penalty for murder". Much of modern journalism is dismissed as "an indigestible stream of crap which no one wants to read".

In curious contrast, though, the other half of The Light's on at Signpost (the title alludes to the lap signal in the T T Race on the Isle of Man, where Fraser lives) is devoted to some entertaining, pleasant and almost excessively good-natured memoirs, under the generic title of "Shooting Script", of the author's adventures in the movies. He engagingly confesses that he is "incurably star struck and always will be. Who isn't?"

Having had eight out of his 18 screenplays filmed (a ratio that is well above average), including such hits as The Three Musketeers (1973) and the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), Fraser remains remarkably wide-eyed about the cinema. As a true Scot, he also admits to having revelled in the opportunities for travelling the world "courtesy of prodigal producers".

In between showering politicians with mud, Fraser coats even the supposedly "difficult" film stars with honey. For example, Rex Harrison, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen, Oliver Reed, Robert Shaw and Alan Badel, none of whom has had a universally favourable press in the past, all emerge with their reputations enhanced. A particularly convincing case is made for "Olly" Reed's underestimated skills as a master of the throwaway line.

Happily, though, Fraser retains a keen eye for the absurdities of this "crazy trade". On Superman, for instance, it was suggested that Marlon Brando might be seen coming in from a round of golf - on the Planet Krypton. When Fraser suggested a bizarre disguise for the hero in Octopussy, the producer Cubby Broccoli was outraged: "You want to put Bond in a gorilla suit?"

Right at the end of the book, we are confronted with a potted autobiography of this doctor's son who became a soldier and a newspaperman before concentrating on books and films. This is so tautly written that it makes one long to read a fuller version of Fraser's life story. Perhaps next time his obiter dicta could be siphoned off into a tabloid column where he could set out his stall as a sort of literate John Junor. (A newspaper editor so bigoted he was censured for it by the Press Council, which takes some doing. Comparing Fraser to him is IMO no compliment.)

….where BOTH suggested it reads like the rantings of that chap who’s always given a wide berth in any pub. When those two are in agreement, it’s time to (a) check if the moon’s turned blue and (b) wonder if they might be onto something.

This small excerpt, the second paragraph being especially close to my heart or at least stomach, is a particularly choice example of Fraser in full cry:

See what I mean about the potential for satire? ;->

That atmosphere Fraser claims wasn’t rendered hideous by garlic was instead thick with smoke from Capstans, Players, Woodbines, Silk-Cuts, Embassies and all the other cancer sticks without which my Dad (d. 1980) might have had another 20+ years with my Mum (d. 2007). This is Fraser winding up a description of a film-story conference:

I’ll stick with an allium-capsicum atmosphere, ta very much. AFAIK nobody has ever died of passive or indeed active garlic, and even superhot peppers haven’t caused any fatalities.

At least not yet...

#colonel blimp #george macdonald fraser #the light's on at signpost #ranting #grumpy old man