Journalists From England

"I saw a picture of Prince William, HRH William, in the paper today. He's going bald. I reckon by the end of next year he will be bald and I'm glad about that. Because of his playboy prince status and that, it makes me feel insecure about my own looks."

"I've looked right through the Bible, start to finish, looking for the bit saying 'Jesus was the mind behind Ikea', then there's no evidence to suggest this at all."

"When my dad left, you know, I'd give my mum hell sometimes, but really she's the one that stayed, isn't she? Poor cow, she didn't need that kind of aggravation."

"[After pleasuring a gay man named Gary in a Soho toilet] My tendencies and inclinations towards women are very, very powerful."

"BNP Member: I am proud to be white, and I am proud to be British. Brand: But you should find other things to be proud of mate."

"BNP Member: Listen, you told us that you wanted to come up here to make a politically neutral documentary. Russell Brand: No, I can't be neutral mate it's too important, I'm not going to let you destroy my fucking planet!"

"[After a boxing match in which Brand punched his father hard enough for the older man to fall to his knees] Shall we go down the pub and chat up some birds? Do something we're both good at?"

"You know, the relationships we 'ave, everything sort of bubbles under the surface. No one ever says what they actually mean, do they? It's all a bit pappy and rubbish."

"Jack: A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one. Dishonest in a way which seems embarrassingly frank. Upright when creeping. And dignified when at his most stupid."

"His characters are stretched out, beyond naturalism. People question the parts he wrote for women, but they were idealised rather than misogynistic. His strength was that he was able to pick out human characteristics and stretch them to make intellectual points."

"Potter was in hospital for three months last summer and he has been into hospital seven times in the last 10 years. He doesn't like to talk about his illness, just as he doesn't like to talk about how really well he gets along with the BBC. "I think it is a remarkable organisation," he says, "but I don't think this should be said too often in public." Potter also loves the idea of [[w:Mary Whitehouse|Mrs [Mary] Whitehouse]]. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on the walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority. He likes Mr Ross McWhirter too. "The worst thing you can say in England is 'I'll get the law on you,' and here comes the man and he does it.""

"Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica's uncle, but rewritten by Jessica, both of whom, in the third episode, turn out to have been authored by a journalist called Jeff, who turns out himself, in the final scene, to have been the invented creature of a writer who is none other than 'Dennis Potter'."

"Philip Marlow: You're the girl in all those songs. De-dum. Nurse Mills: What songs? Philip Marlow: The songs, the songs, the bloody, bloody songs. Nurse Mills: I wish I knew what you were talking about. Philip Marlow: The songs you hear coming up the stair. Nurse Mills: Sorry? Philip Marlow: When you're a child, when you're supposed to be asleep. Those songs."

"Philip Marlow: Minute by minute we make the world. We make our own world."

"To me [...] the term "costume drama" means something totally pickled. It doesn't interest me in the slightest. What first seized my imagination was the myth of Casanova. Everyone's heard of it. But what does it mean? You hear about the office Casanova, the small-town Casanova, the shop-floor Casanova. He was what we describe as a libertine; but he was concerned with religion and sexual freedom, and these are things we have to address ourselves in now. The libertine is the last possible hero. Traditional heroes are too derisory for words; but the libertine as hero persists. Malice and envy lap their gentle bile around him, but he is the last hero. Of course, I read his memoirs, and I simply don't believe them. They're vain and egotistical, but they are about a man who is hunted by what he is hunting—and that is freedom, expressed in sexual terms."

"Jack: I once had a candidate who was deeply concerned about the moral issues raised by myxomatosis. 'Look mate,' I said, 'Rabbits, as far as I'm aware, haven't yet had the vote.' Mind you, I'm an animal lover, too, you know. I've always advocated that the party that introduced family allowances for dogs would sweep the country. And it'll come, it'll come."

"Nigel: Why the cheap jokes? Jack: Cheap? When I was a kid, we were made to stay away from school on Empire Days so we wouldn't have to wave one of those little Union Jacks. We were the richest country in the world then, or so I'm told, and my old man bow-legged from malnutrition. Us kids nearly died laughing."

"Jack: You'll have to compromise, smile, concern yourself with your public image, measure your words as carefully as possible... and turn yourself into a dutiful party hack! [chuckles] Never mind, Nigel, never mind."

"Nigel: I don't regard clever as a dirty word. Jack: Rule one, it's never clever to appear to be clever. Long words actually hurt people, you know that? Rule two, speak slowly and clearly as though to a group of malignant kids. Rule three, keep it short. Very short. Half-truths take less time than whole ones, old mate. Oh and I see you've let your locks sprout a bit. Get 'em cut, there's a good chap. Rolling stones gather no votes."

"Jack: (to camera) My office! (indicates mess) I'm sorry about all this, but we in the Labour Party link drabness with idealism, see. I'm a paid agent of the party, but whenever I need to know anything I have to ring up Conservative Central Office. It's a very plush place, that - carpets plucking at your bleeding ankles. You see, they link drabness with idealism, too."

"Nigel Barton (On TV): I feel I don't belong here, that's my trouble. Interviewer (on TV): Well, where do you belong? At home? Harry Barton: Of course! Nigel Barton (on TV): No, I'm afraid I don't. Now it hurts to say this, of course, but it's the truth. Back at home, in the village, in the workingmen's club, with people I went to school with, I'm so much on the defensive, you see. They suspect me of making qualitative judgments about their environment, you understand, but it's not that I wish to do so. Yet I even find my own father looking at me oddly some times, waiting to pounce on some remark, some expression in my face, watching me like a hawk. I don't feel at home in either place. I don't belong. It's a tightrope between two different worlds, and I'm walking it. Harry Barton: You're a bloody liar, Nigel!"

"Miss Tillings: Stand up, Nigel Barton! Well, Nigel, do you know anything about this? I can't believe it was you! Nigel Barton: No, Miss! Miss Tillings: Then what do you know about it? Nigel Barton: I think - I think I might have had the daffodil, Miss— Miss Tillings: You might have had it? What do you mean, boy? Speak up! Nigel Barton: The stem was all broke and somebody gave it to me, Miss. Miss Tillings: Who gave it to you? Nigel Barton: Ooh, I don't like to say, Miss. Miss Tillings: You better had, Barton, and quick about it. Nigel Barton: Georgie Pringle, Miss."

"Georgie Pringle: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity."

"Harry Barton: Clever sod, aren't you? I expect they think the sun shines out of you down at Oxford. Nigel Barton. Up. Harry Barton: What? Nigel Barton. Up, dad. Up. Harry Barton: Aye, and up you, too! Nigel Barton: Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there. Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?"

"Nigel Barton: Eh dad, why do you always walk in the middle of the road? Harry Barton: I don't know. Nigel Barton: What do you think the pavement's for? Harry Barton: Dogs to poop in, by the looks of things!"

"The blossom is out in full now, it’s plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous."

"My only regret is to die four pages too soon."

"As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do...) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse."

"You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent, even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke."

"By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party."

"A cultured aromatist."

"Often in this our life do we begin by cursing men and end by loving them. A sense of the common fallibility of all flesh makes us kin. No man is lovable who is invincible."

"Dear, lovely game of cricket that can stir us so profoundly, that can lift up our hearts and break them."

"For the game is everlasting only insofar as we keep returning to it for delights put into it by countless boys of all ages."

"His books are full of humour: rich comedy, sometimes almost slapstick, and yet he keeps us hovering between tears and laughter. For always he is conscious, and makes us conscious, of the fragility of happiness, of the passing of time. He loved the good moments all the more avidly because he knew they were fleeting."

"He has made a contribution to cricket which no one can ever duplicate. It may be true that cricket was always an art, but no one until Neville Cardus presented it as an art with all an artist's perception."

"It is the only one in existence that might conceivably have been composed by God."

"Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water."

"His descriptions of cricket gave it a pulse but, more significantly, chimed with the post-war mood for something romantic, something dreamy, something purely for fun. He spoke to a generation which already felt old, and his tender approach to cricket, as well as his empathy for it, gave whoever read him a feeling for matches they'd never seen, players they barely knew and even places – backwater towns and major cities alike – they couldn't visit."

"A great composition to me is ... an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence."

"Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies' hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed."

"If a German or an Austrian, a Greek or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities."

"Erratum. In my article on the price of milk, "Horses" should have read "Cows" throughout. (Sideways through Borneo, p 202)"

"SIXTY HORSES WEDGED IN CHIMNEY The story to fit this sensational headline has not turned up yet. (Frayn, The Best of Beachcomber, p 173)"

"If I don't marry her, I won't marry anyone - at least, hardly anyone. (Captain Foulenough: Frayn, The Best of Beachcomber, p 100)"

"Money talks, and we are always listening. (Dr. Smart-Allick, in Frayn, The Best of Beachcomber, p 199)"

"Justice must not only be seen to be done. It must be seen to be believed."

"TAILPIECE. One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife's ear. (Frayn, The Best of Beachcomber, p 57)"

"HEROISM UNDER TORTURE. It is being said of a certain poet that though he tortures the English language, he has never yet succeeded in forcing it to reveal his meaning. (Frayn, The Best of Beachcomber, p 113)"

"The court had to be cleared owing to the roars of ribald laughter which greeted the appearance in the witness-box of the twelve red bearded dwarfs all in a heap. Their names were read out amid growing uproar. The names appeared to be: Sophus Barkayo-Tong, Amaninter Axling, Farjole Merrybody, Guttergorm Guttergormpton, Badly Oronparser, Churm Rincewind, Cleveland Zackhouse, Molonay Tubilderborst, Edeledel Edel, Scorpion de Rooftrouser, Listenis Youghaupt, Frums Gillygottle."