Morning:
14°c
In the Loop, the film extension of The Thick of It, isn't released for three weeks yet but it is already making waves. Alastair Campbell has professed to have been too bored by it to be offended. In fact, In the Loop is brilliantly funny, not so much because it's a devastating satire on how Britain got into bed with the US to go to war over a dodgy dossier, but because it's a genius exercise in advanced swearing.
The Campbell-like communications chief, Malcolm Tucker, vehemently played by Peter Capaldi, gets his way simply by verbally battering everybody down. At no point is there any physical violence but the linguistic pummelling just gets more and more ferocious as the film goes on.
It starts with Tucker furiously turning on his subordinate, Judy Malloy, when she dares to say that a certain matter falls within her "purview". "Where do you think you are, in some fucking Regency costume drama?" And on it goes from there, starting with a suggestion about putting a jaunty little bonnet on her purview and then ramming it. No, let's not.
In the Loop is state-of-the art profanity, the Sistine Chapel of swearing, one admirer has already said. In its way, it's just as stylised as the superfast dialogue of screwball comedies or the alexandrines of Racine - and, like them, it's a form of literature to cherish.
Robert Graves wrote the famous book about the subject, Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing, in 1929, drawing on his experiences in the army in the First World War. He thought there had been a decline in swearing and foul language since then and unless there was "a new shock to our national nervous system", swearing had an unpromising future. He could not have been more wrong.
Nor were the pessimists right who believed that, after the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover and the first four-letter words on TV, there was nowhere left for swearing to go. Quite the contrary. We live in a golden age of swearing. Witness that immortal volume from Viz, Roger's Profanisaurus. If only space allowed!
Rude words well wound up can still shock - but now we can choose to hear them, if we so desire, in a film funded by the BBC and the UK Film Council, given a judicious 15 certificate. These advances deserve to be celebrated.
Back in 1971, Philip Larkin caused a mild stir when he first published This Be The Verse, the little poem that begins with the great double entendre, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" Ten years later, it had become his Lake Isle of Innisfree: "I fully expect to hear it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before I die". We're still waiting, ever so hopefully. Until then, In the Loop hits the spot. Yes, by Jove.
Ted's letter to Nicholas
Among his usual twaddle, there is one absolutely remarkable letter to his son, Nicholas Hughes, to be found in the Letters of Ted Hughes.
Writing to him in 1986, he expounds very movingly on the inner child in us all. “Nicholas, don't you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child.”
We all develop an armour of secondary selves to protect this helpless child within, Hughes explains: “And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits … Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self … And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own.”
This astounding letter reads all the more poignantly after Nicholas's suicide this week — although, being reproduced from an undated carbon copy, there's no knowing whether or not he ever received or read it.
