The play's the thing

I caught up with a terrific play about a surreal, brilliant and absurdist Scottish comedian last week. It’s called Chic Murray: A Funny Place for A Window, a three-hander, written and directed by Stuart Hepburn, with Dave Anderson, almost a clone of the Tall Droll, and Maureen Carr as the Small Doll, aka his wife Maidie. Chic Murray was 6’3” and Maidie 4’11”, and while they started off as a double act he went on to stardom and left her behind – or rather she left him after one too many of his three-day absences.

I met Chic once, in the BBC Club in Glasgow, and it’s fair to say his better days were gone but, nonetheless, it’s wondrous to commune with greatness, even if it is a little faded.

The performance of the play was filmed at the Oran Mor in Glasgow and it’s available on catch-up on the BBC iPlayer. Highly recommended. It’s replete with Chic’s jokes, and meanderings, including my favourite about the policeman who comes home from work, takes off his helmet and notices his wife in bed with three men. “Hello, hello, hello,” he says. To which she responds, “Are you no’ speaking to me?” It’s the way he told it. And Dave Anderson did.

Russian about

Boris Johnson’s government has suppressed the controversial report into Russian influence in British politics until after the election, presumably because they calculated that it was less embarrassing to be seen to cover it up than it was to publish it. So it must be pretty damaging.

I really didn’t get what all the furore over Russian meddling, alleged to help Trump win in 2016, was about. I mean, if you are daft enough to let a Russian troll bot convince you to change your vote you shouldn’t be allowed to cast it. And if I was a Russian leader (it could happen!) and wanted to create confusion and mayhem in British politics I’d leave well alone, having concluded that we’re doing the job well enough already.

The UK report, my mole in the Intelligence and Security Committee tells me, names nine prominent Russian oligarchs who have funnelled hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds into the Conservative Party. Election law, of course, makes it illegal for Johnny Foreigner to donate to UK parties, but if you’re a resident here, or you funnel it through a British company, easy peasy.

One of the nine is Evgeny Lebedev, son of a former KGB officer who became a billionaire (not entirely clear how), and gifted the London Evening Standard and The Independent to the lad. In April last year when Boris was Foreign Secretary he was pictured at Perugia’s San Francesco d’Assisi airport, without a security detail, looking like he had slept in his clothes, telling fellow passengers that he had had a heavy night.

It had been at the converted castle outside the city belonging to young Lebedev, who hosts riotous parties there for the rich and famous. Johnson has been there three of four times and has listed overnight stays in the Commons register of ministerial interests. But he has refused to answer questions about this jaunt.

I don’t know whether Lebedev has had a malign influence on British politics, but I must declare an interest, or name drop, because I’ve met him two or three times, but never in a castle in Perugia unfortunately. I’ve shaken his hand (no money was passed), and I must report that his palm is very clammy. Say no more.

Directory inquiries

I was there in the Sixties, but obviously I can’t remember it. Sexual intercourse began in 1963, according to the poet Philip Larkin, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban, And the Beatles first LP.” Shortly thereafter the pill arrived to allow women to do, without consequences, what men had been doing for millennia.

Prior to that there were all sorts of contraceptive practices, most of which failed, like the rhythm method (probably a band now) where you did something with a calendar, and various other practices involving thermometers, or lemons – the latter involving (and I’m not making this up) the use of a slice of the fruit as a diaphragm.

But until recently I hadn’t heard of the directory method. No, not pointing a partner to the erogenous parts, or away from them, but a big thick GPO one, taken on a date. Convent schools recommended it back then, apparently, not to read if the evening got dull, but to put on the bloke’s lap if it got to the lap and cuddle stage. I don’t know if this gave way to the Filofax, however.

Orwell that ends well?

Who'd have thunk it? There’s a Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Glasgow University and, no, I don’t know what this is either. But apparently they are creating a system for reading your daydreams. This is extremely bad news, not just for skivers, but for anyone who harbours malevolent thoughts about their partner, their boss or their workplace.

Can you imagine a future unfair dismissal tribunal where the worker claims that the evidence that got him or her sacked has been neurologically Photoshopped and that the workplace going up in flames has been imported from The Towering Inferno?

There’s also research going on to give Alexa, the virtual assistant, eyes so she won’t just listen and take down all your little aural indiscretions, like now, but there will be video evidence. This takes George Orwell’s thought crime to a new, stratospheric level.