On Being Pompous

George Bernard Shaw said rightly that no Englishman could open his mouth without making another Englishman hate him. As an Irishman, he could see from outside that the curious code of accents, mingled with class and education, as well as with region, was a potent form of wicked magic.

The British military and naval classes, into which I was born, were less sensitive about it than most because they lived their lives in strictly ordered hierarchies where there wasn’t much resentment. I think this was because of the shared danger and adversity, in which everyone had seen everyone else, scared, dirty and swearing, with the wraps off - and because so many people actually avoid responsibility. Who’d want to be an officer, the first to be blamed? It was cosier further down the list. This is a more common feeling than most people want to admit.

But by the late 1950s, even naval officers were beginning to disguise their cut-glass accents. They were all too redolent of a pre-1939 age which obviously wasn’t coming back, of ‘young masters’ and ‘my man’. It accelerated after that, thanks to TV, which gave other accents airtime and dethroned the old ones. In a way, I’m rather sorry about the accents, though not about the old class distinction – I share Nevil Shute’s loathing for the silly waste and snobbery it caused (very well described in a neat novel about the early years of World War Two, called ‘Landfall’, which I greatly recommend. Shute’s dislike of snobbery was one of the reasons he went off to live in Australia).

I get a thrill of recognition whenever I hear Celia Johnson, as the Captain’s wife in ‘In Which We Serve’. It’s almost as good a gateway into the imagination of the past as the sight and sound of a working express steam engine (not that I’d compare Miss Johnson to a locomotive).

But I digress. I never really understood how much my accent annoyed another people until I was in my late twenties, living and working for the first time in London, and heard my voice being mimicked, in an exaggerated lahdidah, as I went into a cinema in Swiss Cottage. I’m sure this wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was just the first time I had noticed it. I’d already unconsciously toned down my prep-school voice. But from that day on I toned it down still more. I noticed, a few years ago, that my brother, finding English public-school accents went down very well in the colonies, had actually become grander-sounding during his years in Washington, and though he would pronounce such words as ‘dynasty’ in the American manner (‘die-nesty’), he made no other concessions.

But in any case, there’s really no hope for me in the world of Estuary English and fake American. My voice (and my failure to disguise it further) immediately identifies me as privately educated. That is in itself a sin to many people. My use of formal grammar identifies me –accurately - as a believer in order, precedence and probably some sort of hierarchy. I think that’s what people mean when they describe me as ‘pompous’ a word they often can’t even spell. I think it’s what the crude caricature of me on ‘What the papers say’ was intended to suggest, plus a bit extra. These things are important. Czech exiles, returning from Britain after to the war to the new Communist Prague, were shocked to find that their precise grammar-school Czech was now considered too middle class, and that officials and political leaders were all speaking the Bohemian equivalent of Estuary, no doubt for fear they would sound ‘pompous’.

And I suspect it’s the near-instinctive recognition of an enemy, not by any means inaccurate, which gets the Twitter Mob going. Good heavens, they’re cross today, because I was on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme for a few minutes, talking about the Olympic Closing Ceremony. The item can be found here (introduced with a certain amount of anticipatory horror by Jim Naughtie).

The Twitter Mob, who always accuse me of never laughing or smiling, can’t actually have been listening because I open the item with a confession of having laughed quite a lot at the  Ceremony (or Cacophony), as I did. It was, unintentionally, quite funny. But they know from my voice that I have no sense of humour, so, for instance, they expended a lot of energy trying to analyse my remark that ‘Even if I’d been interested, I’d have been bored’ and my confession that ‘I gave up listening to pop music in 1970, and saw no reason to regret that’. These, while statements of fact, are also, er, jokes. I called it even more of a Moronic Inferno than the opening ceremony, and sought to point out that the closing ceremony was explicitly anti-religious. It gave a central place to the anti-religious song ‘Imagine’, getting children to sing it (doesn’t that rather fly in the face of the Dawkinsite rage against children being brought up *with* religious belief? Wouldn’t the same difficulty apply to bringing them up with an active unbelief?).

And it gave an even more central place to the singing of ‘Always look on the Bright Side of life’, which was an important part of the puerile anti-Christian film ‘Life of Brian’.  (Even more childishly, some people continue to deny that it was anti-Christian. Don’t bother.).

In case anyone didn’t get the message, this was accompanied by a chorus of Roman Soldiers (fresh from Golgotha?) and by a squadron of women dressed as nuns, speeding about the stage on roller blades. Well, I never, what a wheeze (I don’t think, actually, that many orders of nuns in this once-Protestant country were to be found wearing the elaborate winged coifs sported by these fake sisters, but what the heck, making a joke out of nuns has always been a key part of anti-religious agitprop, from the French Revolution onwards).

And so I shall continue to be pompous. It is my tragedy. By the way, although I don’t like the old Beatles numbers that were played at the closing ceremony (though I do quite like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, alas sung without much strength to it), the old songs have a certain power to them, and a memorability. It does seem to me that pop music since the 1960s has become utterly uninteresting by comparison. I think it’s because it’s now conventional, and has no power to shock, and also because it has already said all that it could possibly say. Listening to George Michael (which I’d never knowingly done before) was a form of torture. How can anyone enjoy this?  It also seemed to me as I watched it that the closing ceremony failed on its own terms. I thought the praise for it this morning was a bit faint.

But the Olympic frenzy still has a little life left in it. Most of the media have lost all detachment, and are still reporting it as if it were a sacred ceremony rather than an event.And also see the separate item on the man who was arrested for not smiling.

Take this closing sentence from a BBC news report, on the Today programme: ‘The warm memories the games have a while yet to glow’. This sort of thing was rightly mocked, 30 years or so ago, in sycophantic reports of royal visits. But, as always, the revolutionaries themselves are just as bad as those they’ve overthrown, once they’re firmly in power. The slobbering over Mr Blair’s ‘great’ conference speeches by supposedly independent journalists was worse than any Royal toadying. And so is this.