How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [61]
Depth of character is fine in a film such as Shadowlands, but it is emphatically not fine in Die Hard or Bond or Batman, which have endured precisely because, in an action film, lead characters have to be shallow. We don’t want to know why they never go out without a machinegun, just so long as they use it as often as possible.
Taking a cartoon character seriously is going to kill the golden goose in much the same way that the appeal of a real goose would be lost if you looked at the life it led, and the goslings it reared, before it was shot in the head and buried in gravy. And that’s why I am extremely alarmed to hear that after an eighty-year pause Winnie-the-Pooh is making a comeback. Yup. The people who manage the estate of the author A. A. Milne and the artist E. H. Shepard have allowed a publisher to commission a new book called Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, and while I’m sure it will sell jolly well and make lots of money, I fear that it will be impossible to rekindle the magic.
First of all, A. A. Milne – unlike most people who shorten their byline this way – was an exceptional writer: of that there can be no doubt. And while I don’t doubt for a moment that the new author, David Benedictus, is an exceptional writer as well, it would be impossible to expect that he’d get the tone exactly right. And a Pooh story that’s off by even 5 per cent may as well be Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
What makes Pooh engage even today – apart from the genius of the writing and the joy of the illustrations – is that the stories are so exquisitely simple. It was Eeyore’s birthday. Pooh felt he should have a present. Piglet – surely the most unpleasant character in fiction since Judas Iscariot – decided to get there first so he’d be credited with the idea. He fell over. The present exploded. He got his comeuppance. The end.
And there’s the second problem. It is hard nowadays to get away with something so elemental. We’d have to know why Eeyore was so miserable all the time, and inevitably that would lead us to his upbringing on a sink beach in Blackpool. Then we’d be invited to explore why Piglet is such a nasty piece of work. Perhaps it has something to do with his height. Maybe he’s bitter and nasty because he has SPS – short pig syndrome. Maybe there could be a lesson here, as there seems to be in all children’s literature, about the effects of bullying.
Speaking of which: Christopher Robin. Way, way too white. He’d have to be Somalian and the forest to which he escapes with his friends would have to be a park full of dog dirt in Hackney. I bet there are meetings going on today in which someone at the publisher is wondering whether Winnie-the-Pooh ought really to be a black bear called Winston-the-Pooh. Maybe the next book could be called Pooh: Dark Knight of Solace.
Pooh, Batman and Bond have endured because they were brilliant ideas. And what I wish is that the custodians of these good ideas would refrain from meddling. Where possible, stick to the original concept. And where it isn’t possible because, say, the author was everything and the author is dead, move on and come up with a new brilliant idea.
Sunday 18 January 2009
Get another round in, lads – we’ve got some pubs to save
Bad news from the tap room. It seems that in the past two years 3,382 pubs have closed, and so far this year they have been shutting at the rate of one every four hours.
Now I should make it plain from the outset that I dislike very much what is usually called the traditional pub. I hate the low beams, the horse brasses, the V-necked jumpers, the jovial back-slapping freemasonry of the regulars, the tankards, the unfunny hunting cartoons in the bogs, the peer pressure to drink a pint of Old Fuddlecome’s Bottom, the urine-spattered peanuts, the patterned carpets, the wheel-back chairs and the overpowering sense that absolutely everyone around you is there mainly because they hate their wife and children. I also hate theme pubs because the theme, no matter what it says on the door, is almost always ‘fighting