The French, eh? So near to us and yet so far away. Are they wild-eyed lefties keen on restaging the revolution? Or are they far-right loonies, heirs to the inconveniently large numbers of their forebears who rather welcomed events in 1940? The answer is, as I know from personal experience, they’re both.
In 1986, when I was 21, I travelled to Paris with my dad to attend a conference promoting European nuclear disarmament. Well, we tried to. At Dieppe customs we were detained, for the best part of a day, les douaniers having discovered such dangerously seditious publications as Protest and Survive, a pamphlet by the historian EP Thompson, in the boot of the family Renault.
The strutting men in uniforms, guns bristling, thought being in possession of such material pegged you as a potential terrorist. Their superiors initially agreed, and only after diplomatic pressure from London were the desperado Crampton duo, père et fils, allowed to enter France. Much of the literature we were carrying was confiscated.
The semi-fascist element among the French authorities was on high alert in 1986 because the previous year two agents of the French secret service had been convicted of manslaughter in New Zealand for blowing up Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, killing a photographer on board.
The ship had been trying to obstruct French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The French government initially denied involvement, then admitted it. The defence minister took the fall, yet it has since emerged President François Mitterrand gave the order.
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The equivalent in the UK would be the head of state, King Charles III, approving James Bond’s destruction of Greta Thunberg’s bicycle as a threat to national security. As I say, it is a country of extremes, France.
A few years ago, I inherited half of a holiday home in France from my parents. My brother didn’t want his half, so I set about buying him out. The bureaucracy was predictably formidable. Yet one obstacle I hadn’t foreseen was the lawyer informing me that because the house is close to agricultural land, my brother’s half would have to be formally offered for sale to the local commune before I could buy it. And if for some reason the commune fancied buying 50 per cent of my family’s private property (luckily, it didn’t), the law said I had no choice but to sell it to them.
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“Eh?” I said, gaping at Madame la Notaire. “But that’s communism!” “Mais oui, bien sur,” she answered smoothly, “but this is France.”
Indeed so. In most countries, if a man had begun a love affair with his future wife when he was 15 and she was 40, when she was his teacher, with a daughter in his class at school, and married to someone else, I don’t think that man could rise to the highest political office in the land. But in France …
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You’ve got to admire them in many ways. They want to preserve their 35-hour week, with two hours each day for lunch and another two hours later on for adultery, the infamous cinq à sept, and keep their generously early pensions, and their absurd farm subsidies, and their language frozen in time to exclude hated Americanisms, and as and when any of these traditions are remotely threatened, they dig up the streets and start throwing masonry at policemen. Or dumping tractor-loads of shit on the Champs Élysées.
Funny old place: chaos never far away, yet somehow, still utterly charming.
Bergerac could be a bloodbath
I’m thrilled that Bergerac, the Jersey-based crime classic popular in the Eighties, John Nettles’s baby blues flashing in the Channel Islands sunshine, is getting a reboot. Or “reimagining”, as TV execs say these days.
Filming begins this month. Bergerac, for the uninitiated, was an early example of the gentle, formulaic, nice-scenery, unlikely homicide hotspot TV whodunnit later exemplified by Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders (which Nettles also graced for many seasons), Vera and Death in Paradise. I can’t wait.
Neither, I suspect, can Jersey, which, in my unofficial league table of “Places You Wouldn’t Think Had Murder Rates Higher than South Central LA” has been lagging behind Oxford, Midsomer county, Northumberland and Saint Marie for decades.
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Did you see, by the way, that Midsomer Murders is now to be prefaced with trigger warnings about all the, well, murders, about to be depicted on screen? Not before time, I say! Blinking bloodbath, that show.
Corden scores an own goal
James Corden delayed the start of his West End play The Constituent to watch England’s penalty shootout on Saturday night. Setting up his iPad on stage, Corden narrated the spot-kick drama to a full house, complete with fist pumps, “come on Trent!” and so forth, then went off and came back in character.
Some people reckon this was an absolutely charming diversion, a quirky unifying experience, privilege to be there, well done Big Jim etc.
But I don’t much like Corden, for reasons I cannot readily explain, so I choose to view it as self-indulgent, performative, unprofessional, and inconsiderate of those theatregoers with trains to catch and babysitters to relieve.
Also, it doesn’t help much with suspension of disbelief does it, this kind of stunt? Why didn’t the house announce a 15-minute delay, so the audience could watch on their phones, and Corden could watch backstage?
