HALFWAY through Snowdon And Margaret: Inside A Royal Marriage, (Channel Four) I thought my friend Magnus had slipped up. The second thing he always says to me, after "How are you?", is "Did you see who's just died?" This is an invaluable service, esp
ecially when you've been on holiday. It's the kind of additional cover you'd cheerfully pay to have inserted in your home insurance policy – a bit like a Heat-sponsored Neighbourhood Watch. Anyway, I thought Lord Snowdon had copped his whack and I'd missed it, so racy was this documentary about his love life inside, and especially outside, Kensington Palace.
Presumably all the stuff about his love children is well-known to those who follow such matters, but the breathless narration attempted to whip up a constitutional crisis before every ad break. At one point we were told that while HRH continued to enjoy a healthy sex life with Snowdon, she needed emotional intimacy as well. Doesn't every woman? The impression given was that Margaret was abnormal. Maybe royals are different. I didn't know that when dining with them you must finish eating as soon as they stop – a problem in Margaret's company because she wolfed everything down. Even so, this story was remarkable enough without it needing the tabloid treatment.
Snowdon, we were told, was driven to succeed in life because of being afflicted by polio as a boy and having his beautiful mother reject him as her "ugly son". These points were hammered home often, and when they started being used to explain his serial womanising as well, they sounded like pop psychology. Nevertheless, we can only speculate on the young Tony's reaction to finding himself travelling third-class on trains while a more favoured half-brother went second and the best boy enjoyed first – a compartment of his own, decked out with white linen sheets.
Success seemed to be his when the brilliant photographer got engaged to a princess, but Snowdon's friend Jocelyn Stevens immediately declared: "Never was there a more ill-fated assignment." According to other chums, Snowdon was "the meaning of the word 'charisma'". Another described his sexual appetite more bluntly: "If it moved, he'd have it." In the early days of his relationship with Margaret he had at least two other girlfriends on the go. Three weeks after the royal wedding, according to recent revelations, an illegitimate daughter was born.
Some people never got a whiff of the Swinging Sixties; Snowdon also enjoyed Frisky Fifties. His outre lifestyle could not be accommodated within a marriage and especially not a royal one, so he'd escape onto the roof of Ken House or down to his Sussex bolthole to dig out a lake. Margaret's own infidelities ended things. As this film spluttered its last, I felt sympathy for her, but also for Snowdon. Unlike Charles and Diana, these two both possessed great glamour and style, and in Snowdon's case the style extends to him not spilling the beans. He still denies all the rumours.
My abiding memory of the documentary will be the story of Margaret, suspicious of Snowdon's "lake", mustering the chauffeur for a surprise visit. Snowdon's skin was saved by flashing headlights on approach, after which the driver was ordered to "fill up the Aston". Hidden in the boot was the "tall, leggy, funny, naughty, divine and still is" daughter of the Marquis of Reading. I hope this doesn't sound too caddish, but you don't get royals like that now – or royal staff.
I was still thinking about that Aston, or Aston Martin as we in the lower orders must call the car, when from another boot, the tall, leggy, unfunny Jeremy Clarkson leered into shot. Top Gear (BBC 2) was back for a new series and the presenter had crawled through the rear of a customised jalopy during a road-test for alternatives to police vehicles. The test was non-serious (inevitably) and non-hilarious (always an absolute certainty).
I think I lost interest in cars shortly after I buried all my Corgi and Matchbox models, Aston Martin included, in the back garden and despite heroic digging by my mother they were lost for ever. This shouldn't prevent me from liking Top Gear since it's no longer to do with cars and is instead about the three frontmen, their personalities, their hair, their stone-washed denims, their contrived comedy, their contrived political incorrectness, and – new for this season – their weyhey-what-oil-crisis? joshing. I know you will find this strange, however, but I can't stand the programme.
Last week's guests were Justin Lee Collins and Alan Carr, two funny men rendered dull by Clarkson's questions, a style which might be called outcisive outerviewing. JLC didn't fare much better on Justin Lee Collins: 180, a one-off film following his attempts to become a darts pro. Collins' enthusiasm is normally infectious. He says darts is his favourite sport, and maybe that was the problem: he was too in awe of the players and their scene to send it up, even affectionately. Commentator Sid Waddell's ridiculous assertion – that the current darts world champ, whoever he is, was an "athlete" on a par with Pele and Jesse Owens – certainly needed challenging.
Last week was crying out for a proper comedian, one who wasn't trying too hard to be wacky, indeed one who predated the dreaded word. He arrived during British B Movies – Truly, Madly, Cheaply (BBC4) and his name was Frank Randle. The humble yet often heroic second feature deserved this retrospective but I could have happily watched a whole programme devoted to Randle, the Lancashire comedian whose films about the little guy thumbing his nose at the establishment did their bit for national morale during the Second World War.
Narrator Matthew Sweet described him as "a savage god, lord of misrule and idol of the cheap seats". He was subversive before that word was regularly applied to comedians – a crazed genius who threw his false teeth at the audience, shot out dressing-room windows with his Luger and bombed Blackpool from a plane with toilet rolls. Once he advertised for a chauffeur/bricklayer. He already had a chauffeur but on the driver's day off a blind drunk Randle would always smash into his front wall. Presumably Lord Snowdon's faithful retainer didn't apply.
The full article contains 1078 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
