Fissured tongue

Joan Rivers is at full wattage. The show is flying. Her capacity audience is sobbing with laughter. She has skewered Cher, Filipinos, Hillary Clinton. And then, abruptly, she switches tack. `It's good to laugh, though, isn't it? After Manhattan. After the World Trade Center. I mean, I was there. I saw it all. Three thousand people. Think about that. Three thousand widows.' Listening from the wings, I hear the silence fall; thud. `Each of whom got five million dollars. . . . ' There is a great yelp of disbelief, but yes, she's off again, into classic Rivers territory: straight for the jugular, going where no other comedian would dare. This is the London material for which she was denounced and boycotted on US network television. America hadn't actually seen it. Had they done so, they would have realised that laughing at the unspeakable is the only certain way of triumphing over it. It restores a sense of proportion without which it is impossible to respond rationally and wisely to an event on that scale. And, Lord knows, we need rationality and wisdom right now. Here at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket she is given a standing ovation. We have been, as my own Widow puts it, warming her up `in a bainmarie, because a single naked flame and she'd go up like a plastics factory'. Surgically enhanced though she might be, Joan is fragile, kind and as solicitous as any Jewish mother. As she comes off, she rasps hoarsely, `You boys eaten yet?' Backstage, the throng is surreal. The Donald Trumps appear to be employing a burly skinhead as a security guard, until his arrestingly beautiful eyes betray his real identity: Boy George. He tells me that he is about to rejoin the company of his (rather good) autobiographical musical, Taboo, playing Leigh Bowery. So the culture of celebrity has reached a point at which we now have the author onstage, in dialogue with his own dramatised self.

Liz Hurley's eyes are even more beautiful. Goodness, this week is turning out to be starry. `Hello,' she says. `Remember me?' Well, yes, actually; even though it's been more than a decade. We used to hang out in Will when first she started going out with Hugh; before he, or she, or Notting Hill had co-invented each other. They were like Viola and Sebastian then, it seemed to me; physically alike, more brother and sister than lovers. They laughed a lot. She was a pretty girl from Basingstoke, as tongue-in-cheek a Sloane Ranger as he was, but a good actress, fresh from playing Christabel Bielenberg. And just look at her now, all bothered and bewildered and bee-stung. I hope that things calm down for her. I wonder if she misses the old, young Elizabeth as much as I do. Tonight, we are doing the cabaret at a private dinner in Kensington. The guest list is galactic. Understand that, ordinarily speaking, our discretion is absolute. However, since the hostess, Barbara Amiel - Lady Black - is happy to disclose in print the doings and sayings at her own parties, I may record that the Brazilian ambassador came on later, and with some degree of circumspection. Had England managed to forgive his country? He missed our dodgiest joke. `Why is the World Cup like Bill Clinton? Both were given away by old Seaman.' The evening finishes with an impromptu karaoke session around the grand piano. Luckily, I'm lyric-perfect as Maria von Trapp, having occasionally compered the Sing-a-Long--a Sound of Music in Leicester Square. (There, the job had been to whip 'em up into booing the Baroness, wolfwhistling Christopher Plummer, and barking `Rolf! Rolf!' at the post boy. I also had to judge the fancy dress. I remember one nerd, clad in a buttercup-yellow Lycra body stocking. `What the hell have you come as?' `I'm Ray, A Drop of Golden Sun.') I say luckily, because tonight the piano is being played by Andrew Lloyd Webber. He's very chipper. After the success of Bombay Dreams, what'll it be? West Side Sari? GheeGhee? Currysell? Chitty Chitty Chitty Chitty ....?

The Brazilian ambassador would quake to see how many flags of St George still flutter as we head up across the Yorkshire Dales. The Wharfe Valley is open to tourists once more. The journey on to the moors from Skipton, past Bolton Abbey and Parceval Hall, is just breathtaking. Jubilee bunting dances brightly in little Grassington, whose enchanting arts festival is run by an elegant ex-Bluebell Girl called Bunty. This year, Bunty tells us, she has found work as an extra in the Women's Institute Calendar Girls movie, currently filming on location up here. Unlike its star, Julie Walters, she has refused to get 'em out for the boys. Madame Bluebell would not approve. Grassington, after the long curfew imposed by foot-and-mouth, goes berserk in welcome. Theakston's Old Peculier flows delicious and, with a thumping head, I drop in the following morning on an artist friend, slurping coffee and chatting as she paints in her studio. Nobody captures this stupefying landscape as well as Kitty North. The fells are obsessively painted and repainted in impasto 400 layers thick, so that the paint itself dries as solid, as fissured, as caverned as the limestone rocks beneath them.

' Sailor, come to de drum outa Babylon, for/ We is givin' it de massive up at Renishaw. . . . ' The week ends across the Pennines, at the Ribchester music festival. For William Walton's centenary, we are narrating Facade, with an embarrassingly accomplished band conducted by Adrian Partington. The music is delightful. About Dame Edith Sitwell's fiendishly difficult poetry, which we must chant rhythmically to it, I'm not so sure. Was she really an avant-garde Surrealist genius cruelly sidelined by inverted snobbery, or just a mad old bat spouting drivel down a tube? And then, in a thunderbolt of realisation, it comes to me. Decades before her time, Sitwell was the founding mother of GarageDub-House. `Man, me posse is Sir Osbert an' he givin' it rude/ An' then we got Sacheverell, de cool-named dude, But it's Willy turn me on, boy; he a Walton just like John-Boy/ Yo: Willy is me other brudder in de hood.' It's mizzling with rain. As I drift off to sleep in a vast Edwardian bedroom in the Canonry of Blackburn Cathedral, whose preceptor founded the festival, Walton's maddening rhythms caper through my head. `It is not So Solid or Vanilla,/ Ali G or dat Eminem chap,/ No, we all got to admit, well, it was really Edith Sitwell/ Who first put de C into "rap . . Respect, Dame Edith. Respect.

Kit Hesketh Harvey is lyricist in the cabaret duo Kit and the Widow.

Copyright Spectator Jul 6, 2002
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