The Lady’s Last Stake, by William Hogarth. Licensed through Creative Commons.
About once a month between 1989 and 2008 I wrote and recorded short essays for National Public Radio–initially Performance Today, then Morning Edition, and finally, for a decade and a half, for Sunday Weekend Edition.
I’ve decided to bring that genre back. I’m going to publish a short essay every Sunday morning.
Most of them will be original; some (kind of like A Prairie Home Companion) will be pieces that aired previously, have been rescued from a file originally created on an IBM PCjr and have had 338 lines of weird formatting removed. (Seriously, how can an apostrophe be represented by seven keystrokes, including characters from Old Norse?) And if I can swing it, some will even come accompanied with audio clips, so once again people can recognize my voice and ask, “Aren’t you that British guy from public radio?”
Here’s one for the over-forty set, those who remember Alastair Cooke and the old Masterpiece Theatre pomp and circumstance. I used to do a lot of this kind of satire; when this one was broadcast I got a phone call from a listener complaining that she had started laughing so hard she drove off the road and nearly hit a tree. I find myself wondering: is this funny as text alone, or would you have to hear it aloud?
The most recent acquisition for the Masterpiece Theatre anthology series on PBS is A Fall of Peacocks, adapted from the novel by Dame Evelyn Pier-Support. It stars Richard Burton as the bottle of gin, Elizabeth Taylor as the disastrous blancmange, Margaret Thatcher as the war memorial, John Cleese as Big Ben, the Right Honorable Members of the House of Commons as the flock of sheep, their Lordships of the House of Lords as the living dead and Winston Churchill as the barrage balloon. Music is by three little old ladies.
As our story opens in Episode One, Henry has brutally murdered the Dukes of Cumberland, Westmoreland, Warwick, Smethwick and Chiswick, and now nobody stands between him and his ambition to open the batting for England. Felicity, who came home to discover her mother dressed up in the butler’s uniform, has left in search of the First World War. Gerald’s brain damage turns out to have a silver lining, as he can now become a stockbroker after all.
Episode Two. The plot thickens. The twins, Edgar and Laetitia, have reached that awkward stage, when they start…asking questions and…wearing each other’s underwear. Old Lord Flintlock has caused much merriment in his club by flogging the Postmaster General to within an inch of his life, and everyone has pretended not to notice when the King’s ear fell into his soup over luncheon. But who will inherit Sphincter Manor?
Episodes Three through Sixteen. Conversation over tea.
Episode Seventeen. Roger is beaned by Nicholas at the polo game. He loses his memory and becomes convinced he is Twiggy, thereby arousing the passion of the Duke of Greengage. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury drops by on his way to India, and is garrotted in the shrubbery. In Rome, meanwhile, the Emperor Lascivius makes his hedgehog a Congressman and banishes the entire imperial family to a small boarding school in Wales.
Episode Eighteen. The Headmaster spanks Lascivius Major, Jones Minor and Matron, and muses on the loss of the African colonies over an unusually large helping of spotted dick*. An unexploded bomb is discovered under the tea cosy, and is safely defused by Julia, who has picked up a thing or two while the boys were away at the front. When Tristram is called to Wuthering Farm to draw a tapeworm from old Mr Wurzel’s llama, Mrs Hall is irate at the thought of another fine dinner of pigs’ offal getting cold.
The series ends some time in November–a happy ending, all in all. The Indians get back India, Lord Sphincter gets back Sphincter Manor and the yokels get back their yokes. The war is won, the Empire is lost and nothing will ever be the same again, except the next series of Masterpiece Theatre. I’m Alastair Brookes.
This first aired on National Public Radio…uh…well…back in the day.
* As Bob Edwards explained in his outro, sounding more than a little incredulous, this is a steamed suet pudding with raisins, much beloved in English boarding schools.
